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.

Video Spotlight: Murmuration

Murmuration: /merr'meuh ray"sheuhn/ n.
1. The act or instance of murmuring; a murmur.
2. The collective noun for a group of starlings: a flock.


Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

The video is by Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith -- a pure accident witnessed (and caught on film) as the women canoed across the River Shannon in Ireland. 

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.

Video Spotlight: Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain

I love music. (If you somehow missed that about me, we've obviously never met.) And I'm enraptured by the capacities of the human voice. AND, the human brain baffles me.

Also, Bobby McFerrin is really, really cool and you can't convince me otherwise.


There's a GREAT comment about this video on YouTube.   It reads, (from 1987GTD) "People always laugh when they are suddenly aware of their awesomeness." Right? Right?!

If you want to read more 'technical' comments focusing on the way that McFerrin is highlighting the power of the human brain as it relates to the pentatonic scale, you can read some of the comments at TED.

And if you can't live without a little more McFerrin fabulousness, go listen to this AMAZING collaboration he does with -- tada! -- his audience.  They do a juxtaposition of Bach's Prelude No. 1 and Charles Gounod's Ave Maria.  (Tells you a thing or two about the knowledge set McFerrin's audience brings with them.)  Plus, for vocalist geeks (like me) he gets in a few laugh-out-loud singer jokes!  (On an only barely related note, my favorite music joke of all time is the following:  "You all know what syncopation is, right?!  It's irregular movement between bars!"  And all the credit on that one goes to Doc. Shearer, my teacher and music magician for four years in college.)

Video Spotlight: Lead with Love

Lead with Love is a 35-minute documentary film created to support parents and families struggling with the news that a child is lesbian, gay, or bisexual.  It includes interviews with real families, answers to several commonly asked questions, and suggested action steps for parents working to deal with their emotions after hearing the news that their child does not identify as straight.  The film also includes interviews with psychologists, teachers, and religious clergy.

The film is not perfect, but offers a much needed resource for familes.  It is definitely worth watching, supporting, and spreading to others who may gain from its message of support.  In addition, the film is VERY new (like, it just come out this week), so spreading the word is a much needed action.

This is the 2.5 minute trailer, but you can watch the entire video for FREE here.  Go watch it!

Video Spotlight: Rachel Maddow’s take on women candidates versus women’s rights

It’s feeling about time that I get back to my “Video Spotlight” roots, as it were.  Usually I post up short three or four minute videos.  Not today.  Today I’m asking you to take 13 minutes to listen to this BRILLIANT segment from this past Thursday’s The Rachel Maddow Show.  Rachel discusses the rise of women candidates in the GOP and the logical analysis that women candidates can have an influence on women’s votes.  She also explains that women (brace yourself) might not vote based on chromosomes, but rather on issues.  Shocking, right?!  Just as the number of women candidates in the GOP rises, so too rises that number of right-wingers, including women, who take the previously extreme view that abortion should be banned for ALL people, including victims of rape and incest.  So, will women citizens vote for women candidates who propose greater and greater limits to women and girls’ reproductive rights?  Hard to say.  I hope not.  They surely won’t have my vote.

In addition, the segment features a discussion with the wonderful Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University, who shares this gem:

"There is no place in the world and no time in history where restricting women's reproductive rights makes a people or a nation more free or more equal.  These extreme positions on abortion are without any question a war on American girls and women, and the fact that there are women who are both complicit and participatory in it is really neither surprising nor unprecedented.  It has always been true and it is incredibly important that we recognize that, despite the fact that we can be very proud of these women as women and as politicians, that the question is: how do women as citizens fair on the other side of them either being elected or not elected?"

Check it out:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And, if you need a little laugh/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you humor/sorrow in your life, you can give this little “Rachel Maddow is a lesbian vampire” segment from yesterday’s show a watch too.  Wow.

Video Spotlight: "Bad" music video

This video was filmed and produced at the school where I teach, features Damian, our assistant principal, as Michael Jackson and members of our faculty, staff, and student body as the other dancers, singers, and actors.  The video was shared with the entire student body (K-12) yesterday during one of our regular school-wide gatherings. Who's bad?!



If you're like to see the video with an inset of the original MJ video, you can watch that here.

Video Spotlight: Dessa's "Dixon's Girl"

Life's busy, but I wanted to highlight that Dessa Darling, an Minneapolis-based author, spoken word artist, and emcee that I really dig just dropped her first full length album -- A Badly Broken Code (which you can get more info about, download a free track off of, and/or buy here). Dessa's a member of the Doomtree Hip-Hop Collective and is also a founding member of The Boy Sopranos, an a cappella group. And she teaches composition, songwriting, and hip-hop at the college level. (Awesome, right?!)

I love the strong voice and raw talent she brings to her music. Swing by her MySpace page to hear a great sampling of her work, and below is the first video single, Dixon's Girl, from her album:


Being a woman in music, especially in hip-hop is not easy. Dessa wrote up a little essay at the turn of the year about her experience being a woman in hip-hop. Here it is:

My membership in Doomtree has been the largest single factor in my career as a hip hop artist. I make music with with smart, funny, good-hearted guys who aren’t particularly concerned with the fact that I’m a woman. So my gender hasn’t played a very large role in my process of making music. My gender has, however, affected the presentation of that music.

The fact that I’m female seems to be more interesting to listeners and critics than it is to the people I work with. And I think I understand why. Women are rare in hip hop and novelty is interesting. My private fear, as a person who hopes to have a sustainable career as an artist, is that people might become interested in me for the wrong reasons. Youth is brief and beauty is fleeting, and I don’t want to tether my reputation to variables that are so temporary–and that are completely distinct from my art and from my character. The challenge for me has been to find a way to work as a rapper without diminishing my gender (in effort to fit into a pretty masculine environment) or exalting it (for some easy coverage). It’s a surprisingly fine line, and honestly I’ve made missteps on either side of it.

The other primary challenge is probably even better known to actresses than to rappers. It involves trying to understand the motivations of men who profess to be interested in professional collaboration. To be totally frank, I’m a little nervous that this paragraph will come off as whiny–but it’s an honest account of my experience, so here goes:

As an artist, it’s marvelously exciting when someone you admire offers you a professional opportunity–it’s one of the best feelings in this line of work. As a single, female artist in her late twenties, one of the worst feelings you can have is when you realize that someone has offered you a professional opportunity because he’s hoping for a romantic encounter. The artist part of you feels disappointed because the proposed collaboration was not motivated by a respect for your art. The female part of you feels insulted for being deceived. The human part of you feels embarrassed for having hoped…and then been duped. Repeat this experience at a regular interval, year after year, and it’s hard not to feel a little jaded about the way that people work.

But all said and done…I love being a woman. And I love being an artist. And I’m privileged to live in a culture that allows me to be both in almost any manner that I please. The challenges are offset by the genuine responses that I get from listeners, and by the thrill I get working with the other artists in Doomtree.

Give her a listen. It's good stuff. Promise.

Video Spotlight: 12 Days of Christmas

This post's goin' up because we all need a little light-hearted fabulousness once in a while. (Also, it's 12 days before Christmas.)

In case you didn't know, I have a warm fuzzy place in my heart for men's a capella groups. (Seriously, you have no idea.) These guys, Straight No Chaser, got their start at Indiana University back in 1996, took a 10 year hiatus after graduation, and then reached near immediate success when video from performances 10 years prior hit YouTube in 2006. Huge viral success. And then a major label record deal (with Atlantic). Kinda crazy. (Actually, a version of the song in this video is what caught the ears of the world.) Also, you may have heard them recently singing a holiday special/membership drive on PBS.


And if I'm gonna promo a capella, let's do it right. First, three of my favorite a capella groups: King's Singers, The Manhattan Transfer, and Toxic Audio. Second, (and this is for all you lovely Bostonians) check out Emerson's WERS 88.9FM program All A Capella every Saturday and Sunday afternoon from 2-5pm. (How many afternoons did BLP and I listen to that show while doin' crap around the house?... Many.)

(Plus, for "A Little Christmas Music" (quite literally) bonus, listen to/watch the King's Singers, Julie Andrews and John Denver together.)

Video Spotlight: The Republican Hater's Ball

I kind of love Jay Smooth. For reals.


And, if you wanna see more, check one of Jay's greatest: How to Tell People They Sound Racist.

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: Feist on Sesame Street

'Kay, y'all, let's go light-hearted for a bit. Can you count to 4? Me too. So can Feist. On Sesame Street. Enough said.

Video Spotlight: "My Address: A Look at Gay Youth Homelessness"

As summer is finally beginning to dawn, many LGBTQ indviduals and their allies from around the country, and around the world, will come together in Pride events to publicly celebrate and honor who they are as a community and their continuing struggles in seeking justice and equality, rights often denied by a larger society that holds to heteronormativity as if persons of other identifications are fictitious and scary (they aren't, on either account). (And note: when I say "society" that means WE need to take responsibility. Society is made of individuals – aka YOU & ME – who discriminate or are willing to blindly allow discrimination. Our individual actions contribute to societal norms. Don't be passive.) As my tiny contribution to bringing awareness and a more concrete understanding to LGBTQ struggles, I wanted to share this video, produced over a year ago by the lovely folks at OurChart.com. This is the second of a five episode series narrated by Katherine Moennig exploring homelessness among gay youth. To see the rest of the web series, you can visit OurChart.com, or to read the report put out by The National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce on which much of the cited statistics are based, you can go here. Peace.

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

Video Spotlight: Roe v. Wade 35th Anniversary

March is Women's History Month, so as a little shout-out to my fellow sisters, I wanted to post up a video tied to a relevant women's issue (so many to choose between). (And, really, women's issues are everybody's issues. Just as a reminder.) So, I'm posting a video that just came out in January celebrating the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which was decided in January of 1973 (NOT all that long ago, really). With all the political talk intent on overturning Roe v. Wade today, it should be apparent the controversy and relevance this issue still holds. Put together by Naral Pro-Choice America this video speaks to the complexity of real women's lives. Women's decisions concerning choice are anything but simple and emotionless, and the video does a nice job of placing that complicated reality in the social, historical context of our world. As a woman, I want to know that my actions, my body, and my reproductive rights are MY choice, not the decision of lawmakers who know nothing about my life, my journey, or my needs. It is my responsibility to protect that right for myself, my friends, and my loved ones.

(And if you're interested in Faith Pennick's film, which is mentioned in the video, go here.)

Video Spotlight: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Yesterday I went to the UMMA (United Muslims Moving Ahead) & IMAN (Inter-City Muslim Activist Networks)'s "CommUNITY Cafe" show in honor of Black History Month. It was off the chain. (Can a goofy white girl like me even say that and not sound stupid?) They had Amir Sulaiman (a Chi-town, 2 time Def Poet), Three Generations (with Maimounna & Nataska Youssef -- Maimounna was featured in "Don't Feel Right" on The Roots' last album), a whole crew of local Hip-Hop DJs, MCs, beat boys, and music makers, and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a Chi-town born and raised group of street jazz musicians who crash through boundaries of genre definitions grafting this crazy soul, funk, hip-hop, marching band, classical infused jazz music that you can't help by move to. (And they just got off tour with Mos Def. Yeah...) They're good. So, I've gotta show some Chi-town love. Check it.

And if you want a little more history/context for the group, you can watch the short vid The New York Times did on 'em in 2006.