Video Spotlight: Garden of Your Mind

It's a weird time in my life.  I'm what I've been calling "in between."  Everything is in transition.  Nothing is particularly steadfast or certain.  I have no job.  I have no permanent home. (And with those things come no income, no health insurance, no financial security -- no fun things like that.)  Making decisions has never been my strength and figuring out what to do with my life -- or even just the next step -- is daunting.  It's easy to wish and dream.  But hard to make a real life.  So, some days are hard.

Yesterday PBS Digital Studios posted their very first video to YouTube.  It's called "Mister Rogers Remixed | Garden of Your Mind," it was created by the very talented melodysheep (aka John Boswell), and it's brilliant.  (I like melodysheep's video "We Are Stardust" too.  It says, "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded.  You are all stardust.")

When I was a child I, like many others, was an avid Mister Rogers watcher.  I vividly remember going to the crayon factory and visiting the Neighbourhood of Make-Believe and feeling safe.  Mister Rogers was a trusted friend.  (And I had lace-up "sneakers" just like his.)  So, it seems oddly appropriate that as an adult Mister Rogers still brings me comfort.  I watch this video and feel a sense of hope and of possibility.  And I'm reminded that it's okay to be me.  Sure, that makes me cheesy or sentimental or both, but I'm happy to give thanks to a guy who was in my life as a child and is still in my life as an adult.  What a legacy he built for an entire generation.

Anyway, check out melodysheep's remix:


And, if you ever need a pick me up, a handful of Mister Rogers' episodes are free to watch on PBS.

Video Spotlight: How to be alone

The video "How to Be Alone" has been out for more than a year, but I like it and now just seems a good time to be reminded of the potential power and value of spending quality time with one's self. The holidays can often be a hectic time and a time with high expectations to see everyone and be "other minded." I value balancing that focus on others with making time for one's self.

Also, I just really enjoy spending time alone.



The poem, music, and performance are by Tanya Davis, and the film's animation, photography, and editing were done by Andrea Dorman.

I wish you pleasant time alone.

Tidbits from the world on gender inequality

Sometimes being a woman sucks. And I’m not talking about biology. I’m talking about sociology.

I’m talking about having to include in my thinking about what clothes to wear my willingness to endure catcalling and street harassment because of someone else’s decision to “comment” on my appearance. I’m talking about grown-ass people telling me that they feel sorry for me because I’m 30 and single, even when I don’t feel sorry for myself (and while simultaneously congratulating my 30 and single male friends for successfully remaining “unchained”). I’m talking about my sister having to file for disability leave when her “disability” is having become a mother.

Like I said, sometimes being a woman sucks. In that vein, I’ve run across a whole bunch of engaging, informative, depressing, and refreshing gender-related stuff as of late that I thought I’d share. Check it:

The female body
The female body is constantly under attack. We’re supposed to be young and skinny (aka scrawny) but also perky and curvaceous. It’s exhausting (whether you’re trying to abide or trying to resist). But, there are some folks trying to fight back.

• The folks over at My Body Gallery have created a user generated space where women can send in images of what real women – themselves – look like. The site is not without problematic elements, however. (I, for example, see little reason to categorize my body shape as an apple, pear, banana, or hourglass or to list my height, weight, and clothing sizes. Plus, they unfortunately have an advertising problem. All the ads I've seen are for things like Victoria's Secret and shapewear. Boo!) But I appreciate the site owners’ intention. It will be interesting to see how the site grows or is used over time.
• A friend recently created the website Evolve the Aesthetic (ETA) with the intention of engaging women in the reclamation of their own beauty and encouraging the capacity of women to define for themselves the concept of beauty. The project's objective is to shift cultural ideals of beauty increasingly towards how women really look in their amazingly diverse manifestations of beauty. I expect that exciting, innovative stuff will be coming out of ETA, so keep your eyes on it.
• Ovens, an illustrator (who authors the webcomic Effort Comics) offered this gem of a tutorial on how to draw boobs and ladybits in general. Based on the representations of women we see everywhere – be it comics, advertising, video games, etc. – a whole world of folks could benefit from her instruction.
• I watched this hard-hitting documentary last week called "America the Beautiful." It originally came out in 2007, but does a really heart-wrenching job at asking the question “Is America obsessed with beauty?” And it begs a response to “Who benefits when young girls and women feel ugly?” You can watch the movie in its entirety on Hulu (with an account), through this Love Isn’t Enough blog post (where you just have to enter your birth date), or right here.  

Health care
Women’s health care has been all over the news as of late. Here’s a few things to ponder:

• Did you see Stephen Colbert's response to the Department of Health and Human Services's new policy that insurance companies must cover women’s birth control and preventative health care services (HPV vaccines, STI testing, etc.) without a co-pay? The Colbert Nation-provided tag reads: “Free birth control will wipe out the American race and instantly turn daughters into wanton harlots with insatiable sexual appetites.” I laughed. A lot.
  

  The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
  Women's Health-Nazi Plan
  www.colbertnation.com
  Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

  (And if are looking for an additional reason to laugh, Colbert also offered a hysterical response to Summer’s Eve’s ridiculous (and racist) new ad campaign.) 



Click to embiggen.
(Yes, I know that is not a
real word, but I like it.)

• There has also been word that women's health care costs are expensive. (Shocking, right?!) Looking at just the services that would be provided under the new legislation, here’s what we’ve got.  This fabulous info graph is courtesy of the folks at Good. What gets me about all this political arguing is that men’s health care (to the best of my knowledge) is covered by insurance companies by default while women’s health care has always been an “add on,” considered non-essential. 51% of the population has non-essential health needs. Awesome.

Economics and educational attainment

• Some utterly depressed pay gap statistics were recently reported by the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce in their report “The College Payoff: Education, Opportunity, Lifetime Earnings” (pdf).  Here’s one of the key charts of findings.

  

  Click to embiggen.

  And in case you’re worried that you misread the notes in red (or they're just too small to read), here’s what they say:  “Women have to have a Ph.D. to make as much as men with a B.A.” and “Men with some college but no degree earn about the same as women with a Bachelor’s degree.”  That makes me feel GREAT as I work to finish my Master’s. But, as you can guess, women aren’t the only one’s losing out. People of color, too, aren’t earning as much as their white peers. The study introduction summarizes things pretty well, saying:  “The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men. On average, women who work full-time, full-year earn 25 percent less than men, even at similar education levels. At all levels of educational attainment, African Americans and Latinos earn less than Whites.”

Video Spotlight: Gabriel Anaya

Last weekend I spent my Saturday night at a fundraising event hosted by the school where I teach. The purpose of the evening was to raise money for our scholarship fund. 17% of our student population (1 in 6 students) receives financial aid to attend our school and the average award is $17,000. The goal of the evening was to raise ½ million dollars for our scholarship fund through a combination of ticket sales, raffle tickets, silent auction, live auction, and outright donation. I was able to attend the event because the parents of one of my students offered to buy my ticket. Events like this are a huge mixed bag for me. I often find it incredibly uncomfortable being around so much affluence (mostly because of the casual way the upper class are able to talk about and spend large amounts of money in a way so intensively different from my own experiences), and yet these events can also feel inspirational to me when I see others’ willingness to so generously share what they have. (Yes, there are often intense politics involved with such charity/generosity, but I also have to be thankful for what can be done with that money rather than focus too intensely on the other aspects that are much harder for me to deal with.)

During the evening, Gabriel Anaya, a graduating senior, shared a video he had made for the event. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Gabriel in a limited way this school year. His high school science course “Global Local Connections” (GLC) has spent some time working collaboratively with my kindergarten students. (We did a whole bunch of planting together and last week harvested arugula from our school’s hoop houses and made arugula butter and pizza.) Gabriel seems a genuinely kind-natured guy, somewhat soft spoken (at least with me and my students), but pretty aware of who he is. During one the days the GLC students were in my room, Gabriel asked if he could shoot some video of what was going on. During the scholarship event, I saw the faces of my students and the faces of many other students in our school community reflected back to me and to a room of several hundred other adults. And I cried.

When the video ended, Gabriel, who was on stage, was given a standing ovation. It brought him to tears as well. He talked about the power of education to realize your own potential, and he spoke about how his experiences as a high school student have made him believe that he has something of value to offer the world.

I talked to Gabriel this week when he was again visiting my classroom. My partner teacher and I asked if he’d be willing to share a copy of his video with us, so that we, in turn, could pass it on to our classroom’s entire parent body. He generously agreed. His video is below.

I teach because I believe in the power of education to change lives and make them better. Education is about connection and passion and compassion. And Gabriel helped me remember that sometimes we get it right. As the end of the school year approaches, I’m sending love and peace out into the universe on his behalf and on behalf of all the others working to realize their potential in the world.


If you’d like to see a few of Gabriel’s other videos, you can find them here: “ICE,” “Homecoming,” and "Marwen Made 'Em.”  You can also visit his YouTube channel.

Video Spotlight: La Preuve Par 4

Check it.  This is the French dance crew La Preuve Par 4 at the 2010 Juste Debout, an international street dance festival in France.  It's sick!



Giving credit where credit is due: 
The men and women behind the masks are Marion Motin (Quality Street and Swagger crews), Julie Moreau (Swagger crew), Nicolas Medea (R.A.F. crew), and Marvin Gofin (R.A.F. crew).  Gofin choreographed and the music was composed and remixed by soFly.

Interested in checkin' coverage of other urban dance events worldwide?  YAKfilms has got you covered.

Maps as provocateurs of social discourse (aka - Maps are AWESOME!)

It’s been buzzing around the internet the last little while, but have you seen the work of Bill Rankin?  He’s a historian and cartographer, and the curator/developer/mastermind behind Radical Cartography.

He does all sorts of map-making that intentionally pushes the boundaries of how folks think about maps as information organizers, transmitters, and social tools.  For example, his 2005 map called "Suicide" shows the difference in rates of suicide by white men and white women geographically in the U.S. (you might be surprised), and his 2006 map "U.S. Economic Empire" shows the percent of nations' GDP that was exported to the U.S. in 2003.

But what seems to have gained the most attention recently are his 2009 "Chicago Boundaries" maps, one which maps race/ethnicity in the city limits and the other which maps income in the same area.  Here's what he says:

“Any city-dweller knows that most neighborhoods don't have stark boundaries. Yet on maps, neighborhoods are almost always drawn as perfectly bounded areas, miniature territorial states of ethnicity or class. This is especially true for Chicago, where the delimitation of Chicago's official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School of urban sociology. And maps showing perfectly homogeneous neighborhoods are still published today, in both popular and academic contexts alike.

My alternative is to use dot mapping to show three kinds of urban transitions. First, there are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries — such as between Lawndale and the Little Village, or Austin and Oak Park — and Chicago has more of these stark borders than most cities in the world. But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult — in a good way.”

Long and short, he used city-block level data from the 2000 U.S. Census (rather than 'neighborhood' data) to map race/ethnicity (using the categories stipulated in the Census).  Every color-coded dot represents 25 people.  A pink dot represents 25 White people.  A blue dot reps 25 Black people.  Asians are shown in green, Hispanics (again, the language of the Census) are in orange, and "Others" are in gray.  The result:  whatever people might suggest to the contrary, segregation very much continues to exist in Chicago my friends.  (In case you had any doubt.) 

But the visual is stunning – both for showing levels of racial integration (or its lack) and population density.

Running with Rankin's idea, Eric Fischer used the same technique to map over 100 U.S. cities.  (And he just posted up the results less than a month ago.)  The results are amazing to look at, in addition to being amazingly informative.  Plus, being on Flickr, the images have numerous tags to help readers identify neighborhoods, landmarks, and so forth.  And, as readers look through, some are also commenting on the many ways history impacts population divisions -- such as the effects of redlining in Detroit and the geographic boundary of the Pima Maricopa Indian Reservation just east of Phoenix.

Go check it out.  It’ll give you something to think about.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love maps?!

UPDATE (November 2010):  It recently came to my attention that Bill Rankin is the downstairs housemate of my good friend and old roomie Sarita.  Imagine that.  Small world, eh?! - November 2010

UPDATE (July 29, 2011):  Bill Rankin recently posted a short (5 minute) video explaining his map of Chicago.  It's super interesting and totally worth watching.  Here it is:

Wordle-ing my thesis...

I'm feeling stressed today.

In my procrastination efforts I wandered over to Wordle. (Have you been there? It's fun.) On the Wordle home page it explains that:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle is the brain child of Jonathan Feinberg, a software engineer at IBM Research, and I can't figure out how old the site/software is. But, I've been seeing these 'word clouds' reappearing throughout different venues of my life lately -- blog signatures, school event advertisements, wedding invitations -- and I realized by accident that they were all being created here.

So, I thought I'd give it a whirl myself and see what came of it. I inserted the text from the most current four page summary of my thesis work. Then I limited the word-count to 50 (rather than the standard 150), removed all author names, and changed my colors to black and white (my research is about ideologies of race after all). And after a bit of fiddlin', voilà!

In all reality, I'm finding it helpful to have this visual tool. It's helping me see the language I am using most frequently and how those words correlate with themes and my areas of interest. I was surprised, for example, that 'social' is my most frequently used word. I would have thought it might have been 'race,' or 'white,' or 'privilege,' but it's helpful for me to see how really these are all relational terms in a social world. I could go on, but you get the point. What a helpful (and intellectually and aesthetically pleasing) software.

And now back to work...

Too Big for My Skin

Just wanted to bring a little attention to this spoken-word piece by Minneapolis based artist Desdamona. The beauty of women is deep and more than can be fit in any little box.


Desdamona says "Too Big for My Skin is not just a poem. It's a mind state. ... It's about positive body image, acceptance and strength. It's about finding your voice and speaking."

Video Spotlight: Yellow Sticky Notes

Take 2,300 sticky notes, a black pen, and some serious animation/filmmaking talent and what to you get? This vid. British Columbia based artist Jeff Chiba Stearns reflects on the past nine years of his life's journey using the compounded piles of his TO DO lists to get him started. In this heartfelt short film, with music by Genevieve Vincent, Stearns touches on the joy and despair of life, the universal and the personal, the local and the global, the funny and the destructive. It's a touching reminder of the power of reflection.

Video Spotlight: Op Talk

Rives is one of my favorite spoken word poets. I think it's because he reminds me to feel good about happy things rather than just shitty about bad ones (though I reserve time and space for that cause as well). April is National Poetry Month (and National Dance Month and National Puppetry Month... I am undecided about how I might yet best honor those great occasions. If you see me dancing down the street having pulled the Old Lady and Leo the Lion from my closet, you'll know why – and everyone will think I am crazy. Sounds fun.) So, share poetry we will. And this one's to those of us lucky enough, amidst the crap life can set in our path, to have siblings that make life better than it would have been otherwise.



And because I can't leave you with just one great Rives' performance, here are two of my other favorites: Kite and Sign Language.

Video Spotlight: Barbie & Ken 101

Let's round out the month with a shout out to spoken word with a side dish of feminism.

I think Rafael Casal is the shit. His flow is sick, and his message critical. (And there I go again cross-breeding two language sets that are too often kept in separate corners.) Rafael's a talented young voice that gives thoughtful, heart-felt attention to very real issues through the fresh eyes of a generation seeking their (our) way in a mixed up world. He just came out with a hip-hop/rap LP – "As Good As Your Word" – at the end of January. And if you want to read "Barbie & Ken 101" in its final form (the piece was only about a week old in the vid) go here.



UPDATE: I recently read a short chapter written by Rafael entitled "Teaching Poetry Workshop" in Handbook of Social Justice in Education (2008) edited by Bill Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall. Good read. -- 8/2009