molly crabapple
i see her all over…
started taking her in here: Artist/Writer – XOXO Festival (2013)
poverty stifles art…
13 min – a decade of practice honed my talent, but cash let me express it, to pretend otherwise is to spit in the face of every single broke genius.. it’s to say – hey i just got here because i’m better than you
artists cannot live on clicks, likes and reblogs
radical econ ness.. a nother way.. revolution of everyday life
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2014 – media evolution opening keynote
my roots are scribbling.. to see the world or to see myself
2011 – occupy wall street happened outside my window – the media had a narrative they wanted to push – ie: these people are violent disengaged losers… but i saw with my own eyes that this wasn’t true… since then i’ve drawn countless protests… refugee/labor camps… prisons riots.. i’ve tried to capture people’s humanity
last summer i drew guantánamo bay – the most american place in the world – which is what makes it so shameful.. it’s like kafka in the caribbean.. 153 men indefinitely detained.. there for no reason, outside the barbed wired you have a mcdonald’s and a gift shop
8 min – oppositional defiant disorder – inability to listen to rules
dis order ness, bureaucracy ness
drawing gave me permission to look
women are looked at.. art gave me the permission to look back
12 min – i always wanted to use my art to distill the true line from the twitpics
drawing is essentially disruptive.. you’re producing when you’re expected to consume
13 min – for all i love drawing i often ask myself – what on earth is the point
choice ness
we’re often told we’re living in a panopticon – but that’s not always true.. the state watches us .. but we also watch the state and each other… a panopticon with a 1000 points of view… when an event is in the news.. all of twitter is a giant eyeball.. a multi eye panopticon
16 min – ferguson… the network enabled the people of ferguson to speak to the world
19 min – images, even the finest ones.. can be torn from their context/meaning.. and even if the meaning of the image is true.. the sheer glut of imagery and words that we have can drown it out in noise and data and screaming..
20 min – i sometimes wonder if humans are meant to see all this suffering everywhere and be totally unable to help
twitter/facebook – live on our engagement
being distracted and superficial and vaguely traumatized.. is actually great business for platforms.. that are using us as commodities.. but it’s not a great plan for human beings..
network is corrective to so many things… marginalized voices… we can actually hear them (people) not just the voices of pr flacks that are hired to represent the head bashers..
network has given so many people ability to see so much and shout back and be heard..
i love the internet.. we were not better people before the internet.. online life is not inherently false.. the real world, the meet space, is not inherently true
we should never regret that it’s there… no more than we should wish that writing should go away.. before literacy – memory (was supreme) – once you can write things down not so important
we are nodes of the network .. but not its essence.. burn out is real… we will always lose if we attempt to match the internets pace..
we need all of it.. but we also need the singular and the one..
when you create something slow… by drawing carefully.. you can get out of your head
24 min – art disciplined me.. it made me stop circling in my brain.. it took me out of myself.. when i drew i wasn’t myself
online life is real life.. meet space is real as well.. we need tools that tear us from the compulsive addiction of the screen.. there is no undo key for physical life
33 min – (in the age of photos everywhere) – art makes it slow.. saying .. this is important
thinking of the keri bubble font – for words that matter
35 min – the state locks people in cages.. to say remember – even though the american govt wants you to forget – the net is not all seeing… a sketchpad can go places that cameras cannot look
in guantánamo prisoners are non-people – we wouldn’t know of if it weren’t for chelsea
38 min – art is the discipline of seeing.. to draw is to discard visual stereotypes.. before you even worry about the marks you make – you train yourself in observation… when you draw – look hard..
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broken windows:
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Borders never look so ridiculous, or so cruel, as when you can see one from above. People living or dying according to a line in the dirt
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/593076469959655425
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Molly (at 3 min) in turkey with karam foundation:
Zeitouna Summer 2014, Reyhanli, Turkey
– – –
she is now in turkey (april 2015) with karma foundation:
http://karamfoundation.org/projects/camp-zeitouna/
ZEITOUNA is a creative therapy and physical wellness program designed to inspire and heal the youngest victims of the Syrian humanitarian crisis: the children.
With over 3 million refugees and 8 million internally displaced, Syria is the largest humanitarian crisis of our lifetime. While the brutal living conditions of displacement severely affect all Syrians, the youth bear the most trauma of war: lost homes, security, communities, educations. These factors threaten to culminate in lost futures of an entire generation.
Karam Foundation’s Innovative Education programs counters these traumatic factors by instilling a love of creativity and athletic sports, caring for the youths’ physical and mental wellbeing, restoring confidence by building trusting bonds between mentor and child, exposing youth to advanced technology, and developing leadership skills for the future.
Zeitouna is based on three simple concepts:
- every child deserves to play
- every child deserves a mentor
- every child deserves to be inspired.
[..]
Zeitouna will support our host school, the Jeel School, by providing long-term investment items for the school that will extend our mission long after we leave.
let kids know they have not been forgotten.. every child deserves to play
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june 2015 –
Locking up immigrants for profit
via
http://fusion.net/video/140518/molly-crabapple-locking-up-immigrants-for-profit/
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july 2015
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My website is banned in Saudi Arabia http://t.co/2rfEpQOQXX
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/619368373508509696
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“From the rubble we will rise again”- life in Aleppo, written by Marwan Hisham, art by me vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/i… pic.twitter.com/fwELUjYH85
Childhood has become an irrelevant stage that young locals skip over.
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Buildings at firing range are still inhabited by civilians.
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The Syrian air force has a habit of following their first barrel bomb with a second. People say this is to kill first responders. (The government still denies that it uses barrel bombs.)
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According to Amnesty International, barrel bombs killed more than 3,000 civilians in Aleppo governorate last year. Local activists recorded at least 70 to 75 barrel-bomb attacks in Aleppo city this spring alone. But not everyone thinks this is a bad thing.
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“From under the rubble, we are going to rise again.”
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Bryan on Molly’s drawing blood:
. @eji_org founder and Just Mercy author Bryan Stevenson with kind words on Drawing Blood http://t.co/EkB8fFEH9C
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/645237704121319425
[recommended to library]
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find/follow Molly:
http://mollycrabapple.com/
The BBC reported that artists were using Crabapple’s apartment as an “impromptu salon” for the Occupy movement. “I started doing protest posters,” Crabapple recalled. “And in doing these, I found my voice.” Author Matt Taibbi called Crabapple “Occupy’s greatest artist”, noting the use of the “vampire squid” theme in her Occupy artwork. Crabapple, a fan of Taibbi’s writing, had read his 2009 Rolling Stone article, “The Great American Bubble Machine”. In the article, Taibbi referred to Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” When Crabapple used Taibbi’s metaphor as a stencil depicting a vampire squid and released it for anyone to use, it went viral throughout the Occupy movement.
occupy ness
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oct 2015 – on solitary et al by Molly:
http://www.vice.com/read/unauthorized-group-activity-0000772-v22n10
According to James E. Robertson, a professor of corrections at Minnesota State University, “Retaliation is deeply engrained in the correctional office subculture; it may well be in the normative response when an inmate files a grievance.” The inmates and their lawyers said guards punished those who filed grievances by slapping them with misconduct charges. In Pennsylvania, a prison has 15 business days to respond to a grievance, but a misconduct charge against an inmate nets an immediate punishment—often a stay in the hole.
[..]
His lawsuit also named state corrections secretary Jeffrey Beard, deputy secretary Michael Klopotoski, and the district attorney herself, Jackie Musto Carroll. All of them had failed to protect him from abuse, he said, despite his countless letters and grievances. In fact, calling attention to the abuse had been taken as an invitation for more of it.
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The men, who called themselves the Dallas Six, would try to remain committed to bringing their prison’s abusive conditions to light, even in the face of being confined there longer.
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My method has been to draw on any source that would help me grow, because what grows continuously can never die,” Jacobs wrote to me. “This principle can be applied to prison, relationships, oneself, or nature. They can pour poison on my rose petals or cut my stem. But my roots are hidden in a place just for me.”
imprisoned since 15 – self taught to read.. became lawyer
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According to Keys, the cell extraction on April 29, 2010, was not even the worst one he’d endured. Cell extractions were part of the routine in most RHUs, seen by some as a way of beating prisoners under the guise of standard operating procedure.
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Our trial is important because it expresses a dark side of America that the general public thinks only happens in military detainee camps,” he wrote in The Price Men Pay.
whoa.
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nov 2015
fiction of borders
https://www.vice.com/read/the-paris-attacks-refugees-and-the-fiction-of-borders-119
Citizenship is our most loaded form of fiction.
Our nationalities are invented, nothing but marks on a page, but they can determine who is free and who is not. Or who dies and who gets to live.
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Refugees are often described as fleeing IS. Many Syrians are, but the many others have more complicated reasons. They are fleeing from all sides of the war, from airstrikes, barrel bombs, arrests, conscription into Assad’s army, religious persecution, kidnapping, or “just” poverty, homelessness, and despair. Welcoming these people to countries where they can build lives should not be a debate, it should be regarded as a basic form or humanity.
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The West cannot stop refugees from seeking safety. It cannot stop migrants from trying for a decent life. This is impossible because borders are lies—words travel across them effortlessly, but people can cross them too, and will, even if they know they might not live to see the other side. Even if we could turn borders into actual walls, the way some ridiculous politicians want, it would not have stopped the European citizens from committing murder in Paris.
In the aftermath of a mass murder, it’s natural to want to do “something.” That something could be lying to ourselves that Syrians are carriers of a terrorism virus, not humans like us, forced by war to risk their lives for safety. It could mean more security, more closed minds and borders. It could mean shrinking our world down, putting up barriers for some false sense of security. It could mean giving IS exactly what they want.
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drawing blood release (wish i had it in my hands):
http://thegreatdiscontent.com/interview/molly-crabapple-drawing-blood?
Hey guys it’s my NY Times book review for Drawing Blood. In print this Sunday https://t.co/To1bCYB2vP
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/671749614387781633
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huffpost live dec 3
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/molly-crabapple-drawing-blood/564a439a99ec6dc2860005d2
tapping into this stream of muses of existence…
the class of 2011 – journalism from occupy
on blm – thinking – my god we can learn so much from you
a horrifying discourse that is happening in public in america
we don’t hear syrians talking about the syrian war
when the world is this noisy/distracting it’s more important than ever to hear your voice and to make it sharp…
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dec 2015-book review by the daily beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/05/the-sexiest-memoir-of-the-year.html
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on her new memoir, beauty in art and why childhood sucks:
http://www.papermag.com/molly-crabapple-drawing-blood-1498619152.html
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npr audio interview:
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/09/459091995/in-drawing-blood-a-life-of-art-and-action
oh no Molly.. not survive.. and then free..
let’s do this first: free art-ists.
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Best thing ever? I sent an incarcerated friend the Drawing Blood manuscript. He bound it into a hardcover, and it’s getting passed around
Drawing Blood circulating as a hand bound samizdat in a federal prison basically makes my life
samizdat: the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially formerly in the communist countries of eastern Europe.
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jan 2016
I love this piece by @lukashermsmeier about my book and the community that came out of occupy https://t.co/WkXS2amxNI
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/683328511734628352
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jan 2016 – msnbc interview:
http://www.msnbc.com/so-popular/watch/molly-crabapple-on-her-memoir–drawing-blood–598521411924
no one is just the object and no one is just the subject
every one should have to do the parts that seem silent/voiceless
art bypasses a lot of defenses that people have… i think because you can see people’s hand in it..
i also think art has the capacity to woo/seduce.. i think you want this..
and visuals can break down grim/complicated things so people can understand easily
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d r a w i n g blood
4
learning that art can’t save you from pain, but the discipline of hard work can drag you through it. my pen became my life preserver.
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i had a child’s monomania and for artists that’s the most important thing
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mi padre – … tell me how the worker added value with his labor, and the capitalist made money only by paying the worker less than the value he added. he taught me to see each object as the culmination of a whole chain of such anonymous, exploited efforts.
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on loathing childhood: it wasn’t just my childhood i hated. it was the concept of childhood itself. being a child meant having no control over my life. i bristled every time i had to ask permission to go to the bathroom during class – or to take and aspirin during school when i had cramps.
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what the guidance counselor didn’t want to remember is that childhood is helplessness. schools have a kind of power over their students that most american adults will never experience until they enter a hospital, an old age home, an institutions, or a prison.
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drawing is always a disruptive act. you produce when you’re expected to consume. when you draw, you are performing quietly, inviting strangers to engage you. i often used my sketchbook as a *talisman.
*an object, typically an inscribed ring or stone, that is thought to have magic powers and to bring good luck.
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george like to call it ‘ a little socialist utopia disguised as a bookshop.’ yet, unlike most utopian experiments, it has survived.
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this new place focused my eyes as never before. existing as a pure observer this way, i realized dimly, was yet another thing setting me apart from those who lived here – raw0nerved perceptiveness is unattainable in everyday life – but i loved it. far from home, i never wanted to leave.
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told – we tend to focus on commissioning intelligent art…. so to ny library.. oscar wilde…borrowed book.. kept renewing it for months, until its theses had stained my brain……the book showed me another way. art and action could infuse each other. a painting didn’t have to hang in a gallery, dead as a pinned butterfly. it could exist in spaces where people cared, as a mural, a state set, a protest placard. art could be gorgeous, engaged and political, working defiant magic on the world.
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i worked with mute discipline, with stubbornness rather than pleasure. i wouldn’t be happy, but work made may brain stop.
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america still believes that if you work hard enough you’ll achieve your dreams. go to college. get a job. put in the hours. the invisible hand will reward you with a home and enough money to take your kids to disneyland. it’s a soothing lie. …….
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but for my friends and me fighting our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society’s norms. it might have involved fucking rich dudes you met on seeking arrangements. it might have involved selling hallucinogen-laced chocolates, or shucking your clothes for gwcs.
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artists are not supposed to care about commerce. the lies told to artists mirror the lies told to women: be good enough, be pretty enough, and ….. but make the first move, seize your destiny, and you’re a whore.
naked-girl money was my escape hatch. w/o it, i’d never have been able to do the work that got me noticed. i’d never have had the materials, the space, or the time…
luxury ness.. imagine that for 7 bill of us..
we can.
let’s do this first: free art-ists.
a nother way
can’t find it now.. but somewhere she said something like – i’d rather sell my body than my art
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talent is essential, but cash buys the opportunity for that talent to be discovered. to pretend otherwise is to spit in the face of every broke genius. i am good, but it was never just about just being good. it was about getting noticed.
maybe there’s a nother way (short).. via eudaimoniative surplus.. that the world craves..
not spitting in any faces.. suggesting.. a legit nother way..
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the internet removes all context. we were all the same content soup.
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i drew lines on top of lines. they looked like scribbles, but behind them i could see a world emerge…. i found that the pen had become an extension of my hand. drawing was as addictive as drugs, as natural as breath.
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despite our ambition, we had almost no entree to the ny art scene. there, art was a hobby for trust fund kids… in ny, money was the silent grist for the creation of art. to talk about such things was to cheapen oneself as an artist. but the system was there, subtle and undeniable as a wall.
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(when obama’s win announced) – we dance in ny because we believed we’d shucked the nightmare costume that americans had been forced to wear for the last eight years. the wars, the secret prisons the torture, the spying, the hurricane that destroyed new orleans – even the constant, humiliating public idiocy of us leaders. we’d proved those were anomalies. beneath it all, we were good. …. of course , redemption doesn’t come from politicians. but not all of us knew that yet.
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class obsessed us both – as did the worlds of art and sex, where class could be transgressed.
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these parties, in her greenwich village townhouse, were legend…. she considered the events her form of art, ……in reality they were the work of a huge staff of cleaners, costumers, caterers, art directors, and performers. my friends who planned the party were gods of nightlife….having performed for everyone from madonna to simon cowell, yet they were not allowed to take a whit of credit for the event; in the heiress’s world, they were merely the help.
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the govt bailed out wall street, but money stayed pooled at the top. rather than an elusive ideal, eternal prosperity turned out to be a lie and the houses people thought would secure their futures became instead chains around their necks. those who wrecked the economy rewarded themselves with bonuses.
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the style i’d honed at the box became popular, but all i did was reproduce my old work. the box had cut me till i became razor sharp. i was not swaddled in the cotton wool of my own success. my hands moved w confidence, creating book covers and ads. they were well done. they were fine. they were nothing news.. the money was good. i told myself i didn’t care.
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we were caught in a vicious circle, never having enough cash to do the major work that would prove that we deserved to get the cash to do major work…
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artists are the fanciest of the fancy. we’re presumed to exist in a rarified space requiring silence and deep thought. because of this, the world often ignores the physical reality of what we do in favor of the ideas that animate it. the work of artists often involves skilled and demanding manual labor. yet we’re often treated more like sophisticated pets than like true workers.
this has its privileges. unlike the builders working alongside us, melissa and i were allowed to smoke and drink. we came in whenever we wanted. we needed no foreman, no management, and no discipline.
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but art is labor, and labor is art, and both have a claim on the sublime. the construction workers and melissa and i were all skilled craftspeople. they build the walls. then, as they watched, i scrubbed pigment into their walls until pictures emerged. we all had dirty nails and aching backs. as an artist, i got credit for my work, – even the starts melissa actually gilded. the construction workers got nothing but pay. the were a team, unnamed, lost to history. but we all built that rich kids’ paradise together. ……..an artist’s signature, ,by people whose talent is seldom acknowledged….. i draw sharpie portraits of the construction guys…. i lacquered them into the tile… those construction worker would never get past the doormen once the club opened. but in my pictures they partied forever. they were the room’s first vips.
229
i was working on a grand scale, but what did the work mean? when i was seventeen and drawing a t shakespeare and co, art felt closer than my skin. i’d cared about things beyond professional advancement. i used to think my pen could fight me into a new world.
but for the past few years, i’d let that part of me die. what had started as a scramble to scrape together enough resources to i could afford to draw had become an obsession with the resources themselves. i was twenty seven, three years older than laurie, i’d spent years – wasted years? – doing work for cash instead of desire. after ignoring the deepest parts of myself for so long, i wondered if i could even find them.
a nother way. for all of us.
we can.
we can’t not.
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how many times can i put this mask on before i have no face left?
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from tahrir to madison, prtestors were watching each other, finding common cause.
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the protest encampments spreading across the world were preceded by, and sometimes inspired by, massive leaks of secret govt documents.
2010 – …collateral murder.. footage… soldiers from a country that believes its military consists exclusively of heroes….. assange.. fled to london.. manning..locked in an outdoor cage in the kuwaiti desert.
back in ny i kept drawing my foofy burlesque girls for t shirts, books, and magazines. but on the internet i kept following the worldwide political upheaval.
i love my artist friends, but the life we led no longer seemed relevant
238
i hated myself. i wanted to do violence to y cliches..
week in hell, my first real art project, was born of this discontent. the idea was simple: i’d lock myself in a hotel room, cover it with paper, and draw until i broke. it wasn’t about hell – except perhaps the hell inside my head. it was about being left alone, with nothing to do but draw, nothing to look at but the lines that poured from my fingers.
some people thought crowdfunding was begging, but i considered it a way for disobedient artists like me to compete with those who had galleries, grant money, and trust funds. … in 2 weeks.. 25 000
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the hotel room – it was a cloister of expensive silence..
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because she was in porn, she was used to the world underestimating her intellect.
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i’d beaten a treacherous system, but the system was still broken, and my hold was precarious at best.
i also drew a poster of a vampire squid – the journalist matt taibbi‘s metaphor for rapacious banks – that was bold enough to work as a protest sign, and put it online. it was downloaded all over the country…because i wasn’t close to the organizers, occupy seemed to me a miracle of decentralized protest – something enabled both by the internet and the occupier’s constant presence in an outdoor public space…
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the media was cruel enough to label her the voice of her generation. her generation didn’t think any one person should be its voice.
redefine decision making.. disengage from consensus.. et al
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256-7
on the police brutality to protestors/journalists.. we were not traditional or objective journalists. at marches, we participated as much as we covered. after beatings and arrests, after long nights, waiting outside police plaza or our friends to get out of jail, we had little faith in any authority. but occupy gave us an urgency to see clearly and write sharply. the group of writers that came together at zucotti is still friends today.
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i wanted to draw it all. i wanted to show myself there was still a reason to draw. we live in the most image-saturated age in history, and a thousand cell phone pics mark the occasion whenever a cop cracks a protester’s skull, but i wanted to prove that artists had a reason to leave the studio – to show that illustration had something to say…….
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an artist can engage with politics as a documentarian or propagandist, but at that moment, i was just a searching human, trying to figure out where i stood.
262
during 2008 election..volunteered.. obama won, but the ideals we ascribed to him had lost all the same…..no matter what fine sentiments a politician expressed, the machine remained the same.
occupy rejected the idea of leaders. this was in some ways a response to the way obama had failed us. any leader could become co-opted, we thought, int o a smiling symbol of what we despised. so occupy chucked the whole notion of rallying around an individual; all we could count on was that we had each other’s backs.
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even…. jon steward.. when its reporters came to zuccotti the focused on the same white guys in dreads and tie-dye. we were beyond the pantomime of party politics, so we were lost to them.
tried suits… but respectability politics doesn’t work. suits or not suits, the cops kept beating the protesters. when the game is rigged, you can’t win by following the rules..
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ows taught some middle-class white people what poor people and people of color already know: the law is a hostile and arbitrary thing. speak too loudly, stand i the wrong place, and you can end up on the wrong side of it.
oh my to the stuff on guantánamo. .. he no longer drew.
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during shell game – fred and i worked all day, but we bracketed those days with each other…
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the more difficult the place i traveled to, the more i could put my own mind on hold. i loved seeing geopolitics up close, the human maneuvers that lay behind the pious lies of those in charge.
if the world were just, he would have been writing my article instead of me. but i was born in ny and he in rural pakistan. globalism has less leeway for a poor country’s brilliant sons..
oh my. Molly.
grazie mio caro
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@mollycrabapple
I wrote about our lurid, sadomasochistic depressing and terrible election theguardian.com/culture/2016/j… pic.twitter.com/gxOmbZRptB
Trump’s formula is old and simple: economic help for members of the in-group; violence (metaphorical or actual) for those outside
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When people are afraid, they cling to authority, and Trump is only too happy to provide.
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Maybe the leaks just show dirty politics as usual, but we’re living at a moment when huge sections of society want to throw a molotov at the status quo. They don’t want the same lesser-of-two-evils bargain.
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While this makes her a victim of sexism, I care more about the victims of her policies, such as Berta Cáceres, the Honduran environmental activist murdered in March, most likely by the military dictatorship that Clinton supported.
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Real politics belong in the streets.
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@eji_org
Today we released our new video exploring America’s brutal history of lynching and racial terror. Watch it here: youtube.com/watch?v=aS61QF…
narrated by Bryan; art by Molly..
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@mollycrabapple
Two years ago, I confronted Trump in Dubai about his exploitation of labor. Never could have imagined vice.com/read/i-confron…
At this type of party, I always tell myself I won’t eat the food. Journalists are either shills or situational sociopaths. When you cover the powerful, they serve great canapés. The powerful can seem so nice. Your lizard brain tells you to be nice back. But to be nice is to sell out those workers sweating it out for $200 a month.
I swipe a flute of orange juice.
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The floor opens to questions.
I stand up.
“Mr. Trump,” I ask, “the workers who build your villas make less than $200 a month. Are you satisfied?”
The room gasps, then goes silent. The security tenses towards me. In two hours I am scheduled to interview Ahmed Mansoor, who spent eight months in jail for signing a pro-democracy petition. I think about Nick McGeehan, a researcher from Human Rights Watch who was deported a few months ago for investigating the same migrant issues I am.
I think about the web of professional coercion that keeps journalists in the US from asking real questions at press conferences. I wonder if the rules in Dubai are the same.
Trump says nothing.
“That’s not an appropriate question,” the publicist barks.
When the next journalist says, “Dubai is synonymous with the big, bold, and beautiful,” the room un-tenses. “Is that where your affinity comes from?” the journalist asks.
“I think Dubai has a tremendous future,” Trump replies.
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It thrills the soul to confront powerful bastards, but does that alone change anything?
we can’t wait.. and we can’t not
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A waitress offers macaroons. You shouldn’t eat these treats any more than you should eat fairy food. If you eat them, you might get your loyalties so mixed up that one day you’re sitting at a press conference asking Donald Trump about “the highest levels of luxury” like you believe it.
If you get too comfy in rich-people land, in New York or Dubai, you might stay here and belong to them.
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razia iqbal (@raziaiqbal) tweeted at 3:25 AM – 26 Dec 2016 :
1/2 look at images #syria @mollycrabapple based on photos taken @marwanhishampen they both spoke @BBCNewshour more pix to come + link. https://t.co/4nlQ2aiBN6 (http://twitter.com/raziaiqbal/status/813329794641395712?s=17)
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Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 6:45 AM – 26 Dec 2016 :
I’m going to be spending the next month in South India, with talks at Chennai Literary Festival and maybe in Bangalore. (http://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/813380110606811136?s=17)
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In love with @mollycrabapple’s designs at the @PENamerican #WritersResist rally https://t.co/o2GXOdYjYM
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/Madison_Koenig/status/820708337432018944
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Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) tweeted at 6:35 AM – 20 Jan 2017 :
Trump’s here. We have four years to write a better story by @mollycrabapple https://t.co/nEIMGIJamG(http://twitter.com/MazMHussain/status/822437452422008832?s=17)
In 2016’s hall of corpses, the most loudly mourned might be that of the Liberal Political Consensus.
perhaps to our benefit
public consensus always oppresses someone
a nother way
this election is a verdict on the status quo
aka.. huge wake up call… huge opp for a do over..sans politics as we know/practice it
*politicians must offer more radical dreams.
if by *politicians.. you mean all of us…ok
if not.., then replace w … 7 bn plus must offer radical dreams… ie: indigenous us.. listen to daily whimsical/wild hearts
the man couldn’t do it without the infrastructure bequeathed to him by past administrations
you want real resistance, look to the people who fought, and are still fighting, this infrastructure
in a chaotic world, many people want two things – identity and Daddy.
rather.. a and a
so let’s model that.. let’s just see..
On the page, and in the streets, we must *write a better story.
**We have four years.
*be a better story
**we have now
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no borders – Greece’s Anarchists Are Taking Better Care of Refugees Than the Government
ypopto_mousi (@ypopto_mousi) tweeted at 2:22 AM – 10 Mar 2017 :
Great piece by @mollycrabapple https://t.co/R7C0EzcEti (http://twitter.com/ypopto_mousi/status/840130741417603073?s=17)
The hotspots were never meant to be places where people lived. …
The refugees kept coming, but now, they couldn’t leave. The camp’s population spiraled dangerously upward, and the new restrictions created a market for smugglers. It’s between $800 and $1,200 for a fake ID that lets you board a ferry. Getting onto a plane requires even more—about $7,500, part of a smuggling “package” that includes a passport and accommodations once the plane has landed.
[..]
Refugees spoke about the lines, the bureaucracy, the endless waits to speak to asylum services that kept telling them to come back
[..]
th the Greek government and major international NGOs have received hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with a crisis due in no small part to the EU’s border closures. But a great deal of this money isn’t reaching those for whom it’s supposedly meant; much of it hasn’t even been spent. In January, the German newspaper DW found that mismanagement, indifference, and lack of coordination kept refugees in snow-covered tents, while the Greek government, the EU, and NGOs traded blame for the failures
[..]
With their living conditions entirely determined by others, the refugees’ helplessness is exacerbated by the long, uncertain wait to learn their fate.
[..]
Frustration turned people against one another. On May 13, Samos’s hotspot broke into a vicious ethnic riot. Pakistanis blamed the aggression of some Algerians. Arabs blamed the drunkenness of some Pakistanis. But the clear culprit was the camp itself.
[..]
Despite the EU planning on relocating up to 160,000 refugees from Greece and Italy over the course of two years, in the past year only 8,162 refugees were relocated, 6,212 of whom were from Greece. In November, Perrin told me, “There is no plan from the government to accommodate people and to increase reception capacity in the mainland in order to take them more quickly.” At this rate, it will take about a decade for the remaining refugees to legally leave Greece.
[..]
Most refugees who’ve managed to get off the islands come to Athens. Of those, a fair number pass through Exarcheia, where leftists have established a network of squats to house them, which provide a standard of living and autonomy far beyond that available in government camps
[..]
Imagine a neighborhood run by anarchists. It radiates from Exarcheia Square, an intersection of three streets, where trees hang the banner: until every animal cage is empty. until every prison cell has been destroyed. K-VOX, an anarchist bar, keeps watch from one corner. The neighborhood boasts an old, rich network of squats, leftist social centers, communal gardens, and solidarity kitchens—and K-VOX is one of these pillars.
[..]
Walk past the cigarette stall that sells Greek translations of Angela Davis, onto the winding, graffiti convulsed streets. They are fractal in their complexity.
[..]
“Welcome to the Greece of Crisis, the Greece of Poverty, and the Greece of Solidarity,” reads one headline in Bidoun Watan ( Without Nation), an anarchist, Arabic-language newspaper I picked up at a refugee squat. This sums up the situation well.
Greece is a desperately poor country, wracked by unemployment, and Greek citizens have treated refugees with an extraordinary kindness.
[..]
“The policy of the Greek government is to hide people, to make them invisible,” Lomani said. As an alternative, the initiative opened 12 squats in Athens in early 2016, housing 1,900 refugees. Since refugees were trapped in Greece, they ought to live someplace they could “have the opportunity to restart their lives.”
[..]
Their feelings toward the promises of EU bureaucrats could be summed up in the tattoo on one resident’s foot: people’s words are equal to my old slipper.
[..]
the smuggler gave him an ID and took him to the airport. There, people’s chances come down to the whiteness of their skin, the niceness of their clothes, and their confidence with the demeaning rituals of modern air travel.
[..]
While this vision is true, it is also selective, and it imposes its own cruelties. It segments people into categories: “good” refugees (generally Syrian) and “bad” economic migrants (everyone else). Following this logic, refugees have the right to governmental support in the wealthy countries of Northern Europe, while economic migrants are left in detention centers until they are deported back to Turkey. This distinction seems clear when you’re in an office in Brussels, but stand a bit closer, and the neat lines blur.
[..]
These complexities disappear once you slot people into a hierarchy that pits citizens from one country against those of another.
[..]
In the months after I visited Khrayba, Germany would announce that it would stop accepting refugees who had arrived from Greece, and the EU would announce that it intended to speed up the process of deportations to Turkey, an attempt to save the EU-Turkey deal, which Turkey was constantly threatening to dissolve. Greece would announce its intention to remove as many people as possible from the camps across the nation and place them instead in upgraded facilities, though as this article went to press, there were still thousands of refugees confined to the island camps. Brutalized by the winter cold, and their indefinite waits, refugees would once again hunger-strike in Samos.
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Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 5:45 AM – 6 Jun 2017 :
“Hidden Fighters: Remembering America’s Black Antifascist Vanguard” my latest for @thebafflermag https://t.co/JLP4eTQukP (http://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/872056782700503040?s=17)
If black Americans recognized the dangers of Fascism abroad early, it was because they knew it all too well in its American guise.
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on puerto rico
Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 10:13 PM on Sat, Sep 23, 2017:
No electricity for 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico for four to six months. Climate change disaster exarbated by colonialist bullshit
(https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/911805808463183872?s=03)
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on puerto rico
Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) tweeted at 6:08 AM – 23 Oct 2017 :
#PuertoRicoRelief story is both failure of nation & resilience of people. That’s why artists find it @mollycrabapple https://t.co/tMndVFf5EFhttps://t.co/zECUpq8SRQ (http://twitter.com/rafaelshimunov/status/922434654443048960?s=17)
Days now revolved around the maintenance of life. Wake up with the sunrise, the insect bites, the stultifying heat. Fetch and purify buckets of water. Make coffee, if you have coffee, on a sterno. Wash clothing in a bucket, shower in a bucket, scrub dishes in a bucket. Clean out your hurricane-wrecked house. Clear the downed trees with a machete. Cook on a fire. Sleep at nine, because there is no light. Don’t get sick — the hospitals are hazardous because there are too many bodies rotting in the morgue. Don’t tell yourself it will get better anytime soon.
Against these difficulties, Luis and Christine began to carry out their plans for a comedor social.
Like many activists, Luis and Christine saw in Maria the potential for change. “Hurricane Maria is an opportunity to see the power is in ourselves and not America,” Christine told me. “This is a great educational experience for us, to prove to ourselves we’re actually capable of rebuilding. That’s in complete dichotomy of generations on generations believing we needed another country to survive.”
It came from the community itself
For a long time, we told ourselves we were lazy, because that’s the story we’ve been told,” she said. “That we’re not capable of building or managing the country. If you tell yourself that, you’ll start like it acting it is true. This moment when, literally, the lights go off, is a great opportunity for us to ask ourselves what stories we are telling ourselves, and what stories we want to tell.
2 convos .. as the day..
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Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 6:01 AM – 18 Nov 2017 :
Puerto Ricans are invoking their rebel history as they rebuild their country https://t.co/urCsbmUSla (http://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/931869860103155714?s=17)
Puerto Rico is also a captive market for US products. The island has more Walmart stores per square mile than any place on earth; its concrete suburbs are packed with fast food outlets and strip malls. Pharmaceuticals and hedge fund debt have replaced coffee, tobacco, and cane.
Natural disasters have a way of clarifying things. They sweep away once-sturdy delusions, to reveal old treasures and scars.
Many Puerto Ricans told me that they believe the poor response from the federal government and the slow pace of the recovery are deliberate, part of a strategy to depopulate the island, so that it can be remade as a luxury hotel-filled playground for the rich. More than 139,000 Puerto Ricans have arrived in Florida since Maria—so many that Orange County is considering making a displaced persons’ camp near the airport to house them. And many of the people I spoke to while in Puerto Rico had plans to leave.
While San Juan and a few other cities are starting to recover, the countryside is not. It is now estimated that as many as nine hundred people may have died as a result of the hurricane. The federal government is offering Puerto Rico an aid package that contains over $4 billion of loans, while local officials of both major parties demonstrate egregious corruption, incompetence, and sloth. A viral video showed alleged FEMA officials partying at a hotel bar, while a much-shared post by an aid worker accused Unidos—the charity run by Puerto Rico’s first lady, which received millions of dollars from celebrities—of hoarding donations in the convention center and then distributing them to municipalities they hoped would support the incumbent governor in the next election.
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Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 11:13 PM on Wed, Dec 06, 2017:
I’m a Jew and a small woman and I walked all around East Jerusalem (not to mention Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus and Gaza) alone and unbothered. What a lying coward you are Ben https://t.co/odz51oll61
(https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/938652680561594370?s=03)
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“We stand atop his house, carefully avoiding the nails and beams that are the remnants of what had once been his rooftop shed. He tells me that, nearly two months after Maria, the taps in Paloma Abajo are still dry.” #PuertoRico https://t.co/iIiYKAS09R https://t.co/r1MjSyie6P
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/943613372053979138
In 1921, he graduated valedictorian of his class at Harvard. In the years that came after, he advocated for armed insurrection against U.S. colonialism and spent twenty-six years in prison, where the U.S. (allegedly) experimented on him with radiation. They only let him out to die of the cancer this radiation caused.
He points to ruined houses, the tarps thrown over missing roofs, and tells me about the people who climb the many steps into the mountains to get water from a well each day because, nearly two months after Maria, the taps in Paloma Abajo are still dry. But, he tells me, the people in the barrio are helping each other live.
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Peter Tinti (@petertinti) tweeted at 9:00 PM – 29 Mar 2018 :
Wonderful stuff here from @mollycrabapple in @thebafflermag. Do yourself a favor and give it a read. “Hidden Fighters: Remembering America’s black antifascist vanguard,” https://t.co/iYg133OGoGhttps://t.co/NCGuDQMTl7 (http://twitter.com/petertinti/status/979553860518924289?s=17)
Lorraine Hansberry: my mother attacking the Pope blessing the Italian troops going off to slay the Ethiopians..t
On June 30, 1936, emperor Haile Selassie stood before the League of Nations and begged its member nations to end their appeasement of Fascism. “Today it is us,” he supposedly said as he left the podium. “Tomorrow it will be you.” Eighteen days later, Fascist generals launched a revolt against the elected government of Spain.
If black Americans recognized the dangers of Fascism abroad early, it was because they knew it all too well in its American guise. They saw Mussolini’s Blackshirts reflected in the white hoods of the Klan, and Hitler’s Jew-baiting mirrored by the systematic violence of Jim Crow. While much of the world slept, they fought Fascists in the streets of Jersey City, in the Ethiopian sky, and in the dirt of the Jarama Valley.
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Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 5:55 AM – 12 Apr 2018 :
Blue room in Santurce surrounded with the geniuses from @AgitArte https://t.co/4yysrezkq7 (http://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/984399551908995073?s=17)
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William Eichler (@EichlerEssays) tweeted at 6:55 AM – 12 Apr 2018 :
“Yes, we started with Afrin. We have to continue. We have to focus on great plans without caring about those trying to stop us… We have to think like the Seljuks, like the Ottomans…”
https://t.co/IRspvXcM6u via @nybooks (http://twitter.com/EichlerEssays/status/984414819662159876?s=17)
article by molly on afrin syria:
“The biggest calamity is that no one intervenes,” she told me. “Where is Unicef? Where is the public opinion? We are human beings and must have our human rights.” This has been the most ubiquitous and, apparently, the most futile refrain of the war in Syria…t
How did it get this way? Ethnic prejudice, even racism, was always there. Some Syrian Arabs smeared Kurds as stupid, stubborn, and irreligious, or as dangerous separatists—and government policy reinforced such prejudices. Until 2011, about 10 percent of Syrian Kurds did not have citizenship. The regime surveilled their celebrations and suppressed their political activity; on one occasion, in 2004, at least thirty people were shot by members of the state security forces during demonstrations in Qamishli. Many Kurds returned the antipathy of their Arab neighbors.
But it took geopolitics to turn this bigotry into military conflict. All the main protagonists in the Syrian war have received some degree of external support. t.. The Syrian regime is propped up by Russia and Iran; the PYD has had extensive assistance from the Americans, and occasional help from Russia.
Over three million Syrian refugees now live in Turkey, under growing government restrictions, and escalating racism from their Turkish neighbors.
The theft of houses is a cruel and universally practiced tactic of the Syrian war; dispossessing people and condemning them to homelessness is as effective a way of eradicating a population as bombing it..t
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Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 5:26 AM on Thu, Apr 26, 2018:
“Julia de Burgos: Puerto Rico’s Greatest Poet”, a piece I’ve been working on for months, is finally out in @nybooks https://t.co/bqHXuNQlay
(https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/989465651990417408?s=03)Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) tweeted at 5:44 AM – 27 Apr 2018 :
“De Burgos was born into a family so poor that disease and malnutrition killed six of her siblings… Julia’s country childhood gave her two things: an affinity for Communism and a connection to Nature, which became her chief muse.” https://t.co/ER9I3uUiww (http://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/989832599592931329?s=17)
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brothers of the gun
(wait list at library – thanks library)
Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) tweeted at 6:30 AM – 9 May 2018 :
So glad to finally add this to my book collection. Amazing book! Thanks @MollyCrabapple and @MarwanHishamPen https://t.co/kqgYZ6a8JK(http://twitter.com/OzKaterji/status/994192903135268864?s=17)
Democracy Now! (@democracynow) tweeted at 6:05 AM – 10 May 2018 :
Then—Artist and author @mollycrabapple and Syrian journalist @marwanhishampen discuss their new illustrated memoir “Brothers of the Gun, A Memoir of the Syrian War.” Tune in 8-9AM ET: https://t.co/Xup8cdtnFBhttps://t.co/xCvB5cbXiW (http://twitter.com/democracynow/status/994548945106948096?s=17)
(haven’t listened to this yet)
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molly and @djrupture on team human
douglas rushkoff (@rushkoff) tweeted at 6:49 AM on Wed, Aug 29, 2018:
“What is an individual voice nowadays when we are amplified and scattered digitally? We are obliterated. We too are products being traded.” @djrupture appearing with @mollycrabapple on the 100th episode of @teamhumanshow
https://t.co/Alr01ch5H4
(https://twitter.com/rushkoff/status/1034785127413497856?s=03)
molly starts at 12 min
12 min – play video of money bail and kalief
money bail and kalief
14 min – d: the retrieval of hand painting
15 min – m: using my sketch book like a camera for a photojournalist.. and not as threatening to others (as a camera).. so get to go lots of places.. it’s like a lock pick
16 min – m: for a while – ‘photography is real .. art is slow’.. but art has been coming back
18 min – m: when photography is so utterly ubiquitous.. drawing is still something rare
d: almost like you’re teaching us how to see .. how to look
19 min – m: when you draw something you have to look/stare at it.. your human eye has to look.. that’s how you translate something.. from 3d to flat sheet of paper.. that holds for other people too.. to look carefully
20 min – m: photojournalists are most likely to get shot in head..
21 min – d: you’re interrupting a news process that has become ubiquitous
m: i know why i draw.. it’s my thing.. it’s probably like huffing glue.. but why is it important to draw.. am i doing a bad version of something tech can do better.. and then i came to conclusion.. no.. there was an interruption/value that a human .. was reproducing their own reality
22 min – m: (fidelity of situation) a balance between constraints of situation.. ie: guatanamo bay.. photographers couldn’t capture.. failed form of censorship.. but while working there.. hauled around by .. and ie: fast.. and faces censored.. when i draw in my studio it’s a diff thing.. ie: gaza
guantanamo.. gaza..
25 min – m: evil looking rebar.. and w hand tools straightening it.. i wanted to get that: these people so defiant that they’re reshaping the rebar
26 min – m: back in the day.. naked model and dancer.. got to be the coolest people.. i wanted something that paid tribute to my friends.. ie: highering underground performers to model how they want to be (seen).. not too often your pet project keeps going 12 yrs later
28 min – m: on young people finding space/community of people
29 min – m: got the clearance at guantanamo because artists are underestimated
30 min – m: g bay is one of most evil/famous institutions .. inability to be good comes up against proclivity to be nice.. they force feed people who are locked up forever.. but let them choose the flavor
32 min – m: (on going to g bay w potential of getting ptsd or whatever) i got my training in the sex industry.. i was never a delicate flower.. perhaps a better training than getting a masters in creative writing..
35 min – m: i remember when i first saw stuff from raqqa.. everything had been via isis propaganda.. and he was intent on seeing stuff you weren’t supposed to see ie: kids digging thru trash, or bread lines, or messed up wounded fighter, or isis traffic stop checking out chics.. we wanted to do images that were against the cliches of wars.. and i remember seeing the first one and thinking.. this is what i’m not supposed to see.. this is seeing across borders..
36 min – d: seeing you as sketch artist (who begin the justice) for – not the individual – but for the oppression.. for the mass
m: i don’t know what kind of justice art can do.. i’ve hard arguments about this.. at first i was very cynical about it ie: art is not to be taken in front of international criminal court.. but then someone reminded me (this turkish writer).. she said.. you’re right.. not taken in front of internat court.. but what artists/poets/writers/satirists really have.. they have the ability to fashion how the future perceives the past.. they have the ability to shape what the memory of what someone will be..
37 min – m: that’s why poets were feared in various cultures.. because a poet.. doesn’t have an army.. he can’t kill you usually.. he can’t hurt you like that.. but you know what a poet can do.. a poet can say something about you that is so damn catchy that 50 or 1000 yrs after your death people won’t remember anything about you except what a fu you were.. that is what a poet can do
m: the problem is we have all realized that reality is a collective hallucination.. not just our friends/buddies.. everyone.. it turns out that actually.. maybe the lack of agreement on reality wasn’t a good thing all along and maybe we fashion nightmares when we do that
38 min – m: (on witnessing/channeling these things .. do you get into overload) yeah i do .. of course..
d: do you sit in the dark and weep.. or have tea and cookies.. what do you do to.. there’s residue for sure
m: i just gotta say though.. i do this voluntarily .. right.. i think the people everyone should worry about are the people it’s just their lives and they’re just stuck there because they have shitty passports.. or because their country has been destroyed.. not someone who quite voluntarily goes in and does a little work for a few days/weeks..t
39 min – m: but i think that’s what’s happening.. it used to be that you were only exposed to a certain amount of the world’s suffering.. whereas now.. it’s possible .. if you wanted to.. to be exposed to all the world’s suffering.. all of it.. all at once.. not only more than you can do anything about.. that’s a given.. but more than you can even feel anything .. this is leading to a lot of interesting and troubling re alignments.. 1\ a lot of people have just decided i can’t feel bad about all of this.. so .. i don’t care.. not gonna feel 2\ bizarre what about ism and shaming ie: 8 terrorist attacks you weren’t thinking about when you were looking at the terrorist attack in paris.. gets you to this classic buddhist stance.. that existence is suffering.. that is a fundamental restructuring of how we see the world that’s happening w sm and internet and 24 mn stories/second news
41 min – m: i don’t feel hopeful about the world.. but i feel hopeful about people.. individual people.. a profound respect for people
43 min – m: i always thought if i taught at an art school (that gets you 200 000 debt) i’d be complicit to enslaving people to this debt.. and i thought.. if i had something to teach.. i’d rather just hang out w someone..t
46 min – m: (on borders) this is what worries me.. a lot of people are going to have to move (climate change).. if world doesn’t figure out a way to get people human rights that is not dependent on a piece a paper according to where they were born.. the type of fascism that emerges out of all of those people having to inevitably move vs the current border regime.. is going to be a type of fascism that.. gives me chills.. the horrors unleashed from that.. so to me.. thinking of ways to org beyond the nation state.. it’s not just a cool idea.. it’s actually something we fundamentally have to deal with
47 min – m: we’ve never had pure states.. we’ve never had places where one type of people lived.. that’s just a fiction.. fear isn’t even rooted in a real past
jace starts at 52 min
1:24 – j: i wouldn’t still be here.. if it wasn’t deeply interesting in the moment
1:25 – d: someone’s alive w me right now
j: yeah.. the shared temporality of radio is an alive magic too
molly & jace starts at 1:27
1:28 – m: asking jace about what he said about being anti nostalgia
1:29 – j: often .. a hierarchy thing.. disregards all the stranger effervescence of the present..
m: all the cities becoming more and more unlike the cities and more an more like each other
1:31 – m: the left has not talked about why beauty is important.. they’ve discounted that and let the right use this nostalgia for the beauty to advance that fascism
1:35 – m: it’s all about sterility.. the thing the neoliberal city is scared of at the core.. not the peripheral.. at the peripheral everything can rot.. garbage delivery, paving.. but at the core.. they don’t want a lack of control.. and they want everything to be monetized.. t
in instanbul.. whatever anybody else says about turkey.. the existence of this city where spoiled cats are not being abused.. (fed tourists steak for no labor).. it’s not like they’re neglected abused cats.. they’re free cats.. this would never be allow in an american city.. because it’s out of the control of money.. wild.. someone might sue
1:37 – d: because they’re only using one metric to measure the success of anything.. gdp.. end up out marketing each other.. such a difficult metric to live by
isn’t any metric.. difficult (inhumane).. for team human
1:38 – d: digital.. because it’s so quantized.. it marries itself so well to the values of neoliberalism in ways i don’t think anyone imagined.. we thought it was going to be the reverse.. but it’s ended up working so well in service to that.. that’s why both of your work.. by bringing the human hand back into it.. kind of forces a re evaluation of that
not until we let go of measuring things
j: not just human hand.. but this interdisciplinary.. this sort of like
1:39 – m: on eclectism.. and working from so many diff cultures w/o stripping them of what they are.. that’s the problem w collectivism.. eventually ends up becoming a high end new age (?).. where all the religions of the world are reduced to love each other.. that all of what makes things themselves is taken out in this sort of flattening mish mash.. and i just want to say an appreciation of your music.. making things blend while keeping what they are..t
1:45 – m: architecture is a really weird art form.. because every other art form.. it doesn’t inflict itself on you.. if don’t like a book – close it.. don’t like a painting – don’t go into gallery.. but architecture you’re kind of forced to deal w it.. t
1:46 – m: like in ny and some other cities.. no one is building stuff except for the ultra rich.. any communities who are not millionaires have no place in the neolib city.. except those you can suck 5 months rent out of and then they have to go broke.. t
evicted et al
building is all for those w money.. ie: pr building own homes.. beautiful..colorful.. senses pleased by them.. made to human tastes.. if in states.. people would think poor people not worthy enough to live in them.. ie: why are you trying to be happy
1:49 – j: there’s this weird interaction of architecture and urbanism.. i‘m interested in diff ways to visualize white collar crime.. because it’s so visual and increasingly the vision of what the city is becoming.. what it looks like..t
1:50 – m: and the people who have to launder the profits from their white collar crime from somewhere in the world by buying lots of apts that they keep empty.. just to park their money in.. which is part of why we have a housing crisis.. we can’t afford to live there
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Nesta (@NestaMAZING) tweeted at 11:51 PM – 7 Oct 2018 :
“a large crowd watched incredulously as human skeletons with submachine guns strapped around their necks crawled [out] one by one… The look in their leaden eyes assured the crowd that they would not hesitate to fire.”
A long but fascinating read. Do it. https://t.co/1hvklqZMr1 (http://twitter.com/NestaMAZING/status/1049175378047070208?s=17)What does Hereness mean in our age of mass migration? An attempt, I believe, to find the self in exile, to square homeland with the freedom to leave.
Did their defiance taste like home?..t
I like to think that, later that night, Sam and his comrades sawed through the bars of the trio’s jail cell window. They would have shimmied out, the couple perhaps pausing for a kiss amid the frigid stillness of the forest, and then going on, past a border blurred by snow fall, going wherever they wanted to go.
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Recommend this one with all my heart https://t.co/PUPaJyj3el
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/1051657228917325825
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7 min video (via AOC, Molly, Naomi..)
What if we actually pulled off a #GreenNewDeal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated and co-written by Rep. @AOC and illustrated by @mollycrabapple. https://t.co/zAMLAizbN7https://t.co/PywCR0jPUl
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/theintercept/status/1118517713322823682we can be whatever we have the courage to see
let’s go deeper than green new deal.. as it could be..
isolation.. depression.. et al.. deeper than fb/sm
today.. we have the means to go deep enough
It is vital that we imagine better realities for ourselves
Fantastic work by @aoc and my friends @mollycrabapple @KimBoekbinder and @battsignal https://t.co/yoo5xBvWT0
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/claytoncubitt/status/1118535523717398528
yes fantastic.. but there’s a nother way
imagine deeper than ie: green deal
let’s be that courageous
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molly‘s art for the marshall project.. incarceration & deliberate disorientation
Celia Ouellette (@ouellette_celia) tweeted at 4:09 AM – 3 Mar 2020 :
The Zo by @MarshallProj perfectly captures the confusing and constant deliberate disorientation faced by the incarcerated. Amazing work @mollycrabapple and @BKBMG! https://t.co/SZJN4P2HD8 (http://twitter.com/ouellette_celia/status/1234798166983282689?s=17)
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your debt – 6 min video via astra and molly
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Out Monday – my @thenation cover story on how the @NYTWA cabbies saved themselves from debt peonage. This is one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever done. https://t.co/O8LS5EPIKJ
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/1469820973230792708
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be you. 