links for 2010-11-05

"Do you agree at all with the reviews which have been highly critical and said your work was somewhat cheapened by Tyler Perry?

I haven't seen those people in 20 years. I don't know who those people are, they don't know me. I don't know who those people are. It cheapened, darling my work used to be for free. I used to do these poems by myself with a drummer or a tamboura player, or with a piano player, any kind of music player I could get. We would do it outside on a corner, and we would make art in the street, and people would throw things at us like coins. One time I had a group I was with called The Mushara Brothers and they gave me a tambourine, and I used to hop around with a tambourine to get our change for the night. One night we made $2.57 that's all we made, and we had to divide it between the three of us."

You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, those you thought you had cowed and defeated are still here.
Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

Weaver said that a picture that she took with her pastor in blackface dressed as Aunt Jemima was just Halloween fun and doesn’t understand why the photo is offensive.
However, some of her colleagues in the state Legislature said it is not just the picture that's wrong, but the comment she made about it.

"Dowser: In your former life, you were a successful producer who worked with directors like Ron Howard and Steven Soderbergh. You won two Chicago/Midwest Emmys for your work in public television. But you turned your back on it to start Free Spirit Media.
McCarter: Throughout my experience in professional media production I met lots of amazing, creative people, but they were something of an elite. Many of the crews I worked on were mostly white men and the stories were for a wealthy audience. I felt profoundly that media production could be more democratic, given the opportunities with new technology."