Chris Fiset’s Recent Comments

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  will Grist host a forum to discuss this further?

  This is a profound interview:  understated, precise, and devastating.  Apollo Alliance connects green jobs with disenfranchised communities in its vision, but where does that vision get articulated in living terms, from the point of view of individuals who experience the reality of environmental injustice first hand? Right here.  Grist couldn't get more relevant than this.  Now what about hosting an online forum for the kind of collaborative talking through of these painful realities that Khaleaph Luis points to as the first step towards expanding public awareness to prepare for effective transformative action?On An interview with activists at the Prison Moratorium Project posted 4 years, 4 months ago 6 Responses

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  Amy Goodman, Ray Leon & Van Jones spell it out

  Check out Amy Goodman's interview with Ray Leon, (Office of Latino Issues Forum in the San Joaquin Valley) for a 3-D view of environmental injustice in its systemic proportions -- & Amy's interview with Van Jones, who explains what the Apollo Alliance is doing about it:

  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/16/1536237On Facts and figures on air quality and Latino health in the U.S. posted 4 years, 4 months ago 1 Response

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  MTV vs. Koyaanisquatsi -- set to hip-hop

  Here's some open questions in response to Bill's thoughtful essay...

  William Irwin Thompson has written that with the advent of the internet, Joyce's "Here comes everybody" is now happening.  Thompson also suggests that the age of the solo genius artist has given way to creative collaboration, and that this is where meaning is most relevant.  Maybe the question is not if there will be relevant art, but what specific forms it must now take to break through all the noise that now clogs the electronic noosphere.

  Robinson Jeffers, Terence McKenna and others suggest that with the advent of technology and the acceleration of events, we have collectively become the leading art event par excellence, in all the freakishness of current events.  How does the imagination speak to this?  More specifically, how does the collective speak to itself beyond the noise of media or pre-fab ideology?  

  Does the acceleration of current events, along with all the variables that we now confront, preclude the stable environment needed to engage in traditional forms of art as we have in the past?  

  Would relevant art consist in something like harnessing the internet to allow the collective communication with a simultaneity that we currently find in multi-player videogames?  Could that technology get transferred to serious contemporary questions that require a form of collective thinking we cannot yet imagine?  Or are we just confined to collectively enacting ourselves in "artful" relation to each other without a truly relevant means of imaginative reflection?

  Thompson also suggests that the music video is the designated art form of our time, but that MTV of course commercialized it from the get go.  Thompson suggests that we re-envision the music video along the lines of the Koyaanisqatsi triology, but take it to another level or two, to explore systems in nature from the cell to the galaxy, and recapitulating the scale of history in sweeping electronic sound, which might jump-start the imagination of the masses enough to make a difference.  

  Ken Wilber echo's Thompson in this regard when he suggests that "The Matrix" trilogy is the leading myth of our time.  In the recently issued "Ultimate Matrix Collection" boxed DVD set, Wilber and Cornel West offer six hours of running commentary on the trilogy, hauling it back out from the trash can delivered to it by so many movie critics to suggest there is much more to be found than meets the eye.  So here we've got the Wachowski's exhausting technology in every conceivable way to portray the vitality of the human imagination, and then collaborating with Wilber and West to create dyanmic commentary on that whole trippy mess.  Maybe this is one example of how art can come up to batt in a very heavy  time as our own.

  Finally, Cornel West, in "Democracy Matters," reminds us that hip-hop has become a global phenomenon by which unseen voices can be heard.  Maybe much of the relevant art in our time is to be found among certain conscious voices in this regard, among them Gift of Gab, DJ Spooky, Blue Scholars, etc.  Hip-Hop as opera, perhaps?  Where do white folks look for art these days, and is perhaps our uninspected racism (of which I have plenty) in part informing this question about relevant art?  Van Jones with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights insists in a recent article in "Yes!" Magazine that our "new environmentalism actually could lead to what I call 'eco-apartheid.'  Under 'eco-apartheid,' you would have an affluent place like Marin Country, CA, with cooler, solar everything -- bio this and organic that -- while nearby Oakland would still be struggling to get the last century's toxic jobs and polluting industries."

  Van insists that environmentalism, to be truly meaningful, must not be another suburban-minded replay of covert racism as we have known it and enacted it, as art or otherwise.On What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art posted 4 years, 4 months ago 8 Responses