“Washington claims that delivering weapons to Bahrain is crucial for providing security in the region. Bahrain is situated on a strategic island in the Persian Gulf opposite Iran. For more than 60 years it has served as the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters.”

Continue to new source with video: US restarts Bahrain arms sales amid rights anxiety -RT News. Published: 12 May, 2012, 13:34.

Video showing clips from Dec 30th (2011) street protest in Bahrain.

Al Jazeera also had some reporting of the anniversary of the protests in February, earlier this year:

Bahrain protests grow ahead of anniversary
Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Feb 3, 2012

“I meet some friends at the exhibit just as the fair is winding down. The collection was memorable, but not labeled; [...] We sit at a low table covered with photographs from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; they include themes from “chillin drunk at the base” to “burnt haji corpse on a slab, thumbs up!” photos. [x] tells us that this piece is called “At Ease” and it’s by Lucas Michael, using photos from a now-defunct military website where the enlisted posted all kinds of images from their travails. A small stack of CDs in sleeves offers the audience a thirdhand souvenir, and invites them to distribute the images. It’s a sobering coda to the bookfair, and we take discs to do our bit.- brechett Art of Olive Green

We open this email by reflecting on viKult’s Discrete Power exhibition at the NYC Anarchist Book Fair 2011, just 5 months before the occupation on Wall Street -which kept us occupied for several months more, all the while thinking about power in various public form. Since then new memes about power have begun to resurface… dual power, counter institutions, etc. From discrete to parallel, how many more ways can we configure power?

This year we re-emerged to present 2 Chinese couplings, and 3 english pictograms (1 antinomy + 2 variations of an often confusing communist campaign referring to one-hundred schools of thought)… With these coupling and phrases, we invite everyone to try to imagine these the other side of everything, how ever complimentary, contradictory, or arbitrary it maybe…

Finally, the summer brings a call to take the square in Berlin, so off we go again to see what this all means…. Was braucht die Kunst in Berlin? …The Berlin Biennale 7… a petting zoo for political art animals? Documenta 13/…Commoning in Kassel? …We’ll be reporting from there in June, keep in touch.

vizKult.org

“Turns out the parks are better stocked than the aisles of Trader Joe’s. Chaves’s favorite park bounty includes stinging nettles (he cooks these iron-rich leaves up like spinach), dandelion greens, mulberries, morel and maitake mushrooms (he once found 30 pounds of maitakes around a tree in Prospect Park), crabapples (he substitutes them for pectin when making jam), and hickory and hazelnuts.” – A Prospect Park forager eats better than most New Yorkers, Well And Good NYC April 7, 2010

Zaac Chaves will be speaking about about foraging this weekend at the Brooklyn Food Conference in NY. The description to his workshop specifically mentions that he will focus on evasive and disruptive plants in order to show how humans (not chemicals) can aid in the balance of the earth’s ecology. Speaking of nettles, I had my first nettle soup a couple of weeks ago prepared by a good friend.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Brooklyn Food Conference*
Brooklyn Tech High School
29 Fort Greene Place Brooklyn
New York 11217

Workshop #2
12:30PM-1:45PM

Foraging for Empathy (Room 5E4)
w/ Zaac Chavis
ALSO NOTE…

Sunday May 13th,
A second day of programming is being organized by the NYCGA/Occupy Wall Street Animal Issues Working Group , a schedule of the sunday programming can be found on their website: http://animalissues.nycga.net/brooklyn-food-conference-proposed-workshops/

NYCGA Animal Issue Working group page:
http://www.nycga.net/groups/animal-issues/

"Get Ready for Change" German Pirate Party vote during their party convention in Neumuenster, northern Germany, Saturday, April 28, 2012. Photo: Clemens Bilan / dapd

It’s quite simple, but I never thought of it like that before. The pirate is basically the direct action arm of the Commons. They liberate items in corporate enclosures and share it with the people. They do not profit from it, they just simply ask that you inturn do the same and ‘seed it‘. It is up to the public to manage it and safe guard it from further enclosures. Currently, it should be noted, that in capitalist countries where “intellectual property” is guarded by the law, the pirates practice is still illegal.

So, how to make this legal? How to find a system that will be based on community trust, mutual aid, and reciprocity that would allow the sharing of knowledge and culture within a community? In a recent article Aljazeera’s Michael Bowens suggest the next step is the forming of a new coalition of sorts between commoners, pirates, and others like the green party, citing Germany as the place where this coalition is evolving:

However, a third moment in the evolution of a new social movement and culture is always inevitable. It is the moment when of discovery: in order to ensure their survival and development, political power is vital. It’s not enough to create new institutions on the margins of society; more effective defence mechanisms against the constant attacks of the dominant powers are a vital necessity. - A German Pirate Party could bring a European coalition by Michael Bowens

I guess vying for political power to eventually legalize the releasing of knowledge and cultural commons is one way to get things done, and for a society that sees politics as the center of social organization, this makes sense. But for others it is perhaps the opposite, the withdraw from politics and a move back to the idea of community and individual responsibility. No political proxies. That’s at least the another tactic that isn’t discussed in this article.

Going down the list of organizations that according to Michael Bowen are forming a part of this new ‘coalition of the commons.’ I find it refreshing that he recognizes the thread of the commons within each group: pirates for intellectual & cultural commons, the green party for environmental commons, labor and social justice groups for an freedoms/labor commons. The final and fourth player in this coalition for Bowen is the Social Liberal parties, this again backs up my argument that this politically centric tactic that I’d hope we could do with out, but I guess some people still think we are still dependent on lobbyist,  liberals entrepreneurs, together with a dash of technocrats and bureaucrats to test and check things off.

Read the full article on Aljazeera:
A German Pirate Party could bring a European coalition by Michael Bowens April 19, 2012.
[Last retrieved April 30, 2012]

Image above from:
Pirate party makes a raid on German politics by Juergen Baetz/Associated Press April 28. 2012
[Last retrieved April 30, 2012]

Back in October 2011, about 20 days into the the occupation down on Wall Street, The Arts & Culture working group and Loft in The Red Zone of the NYC General Assembly held a pop-up exhibition called “No Comment” in the heart of Wall Street. This is a video shot by Kristyan Geyr, an artist who flew over from Berlin to capture the moment. I link to this video because it gives more emotional space to the interviewees, a space where different emotions can surface without having to compete with the noise and visuals around them. People start to be real again, breaking the cartoon-like distortion that tv news clips have on the occupiers.

PostScript:
I found this link to the still images of occupiers taken by Kristyan Geyr during this period.. See anyone familiar?

front cover: Truama 1-11: Stories About the Copenhagen Free University and the surrounding society in the last ten years

“In 2010 the Heise and Jakobsen received a letter from the Ministry of Science noting them that if they ever wanted to conduct educational activities under name the Copenhagen Free University it would be breach a new law outlawing self-organised universities.”

Rare little booklets containing intimate stories like these are usually very valuable. This one Trauma 1-11  about the Copenhagen Free University looks particularly interesting especially with the word trauma in the title, and not bad for $2 from Half Letter Press. I am assuming there are some personal perspectives in here that might help balance the hear-say about the Copenhagen Free University. Actually, I don’t know many people who even speak about this University, besides what I read online. The last time I had a chance to read stories from the inside of a progressive art school was when I was reading Kunst Lehren/Teaching Art from the Stadschile Frankfurt/Main in 2008. During this time there was a whole explosion in discussions, panels, presentations, etc re-examining Art Academies. Which now, looking back at that moment, there was much talk but very little action, most people involved actually clung to their pay-per-knowledge colleges and universities, and now it is business as usual, even the more radical artists are teaching at the most expensive MFA programs to make matters worse. Since then Universities have realized that radical art teachers, once a nuisance to deal with, can actually increase enrollment $$, and as desperate as they are to stay afloat in NYC, they are really only radical in theory.

Anyhow, it’s summer vacation now for all students in America. Time to think about the student loans and the reality of the economy. I hope that the Fall brings some new ideas to the never ending want of a free university system, with MFAs in NYC averaging about $65,oooUSD, we’re along way from that reality. Occupy Student Debt Campaign, anyone?

——

Post Script: Anyone heard about a similar Free University of New York, held in a 14th Street loft in the East Village (1965) ? According to this personal account from Roy Licker (scroll to bottom for FUNY), it lasted only a couple of years, citing hidden Marxist motives from a very controlling management team among other things,  I’m still looking for some intimate accounts, like these.

Geographies of Anarchy, panelist:Stephanie Wakefield, Steven Duncombe, Alberto Toscano

I keep thinking back on the summer leading up to Occupy Wall Street events. First, A Line In Nature, the foraging reading group that was meeting up to discuss, lastly, rituals in nature, with the idea that we would possibly do some camping in urban parks  not necessarily as a direct way of confront capitalism in the manner in which OWS has attempted, but to rediscover life in an urban environment, maybe as an alternative to the architecture of capitalism. It would be an action to call upon a history that has been forgotten, or a future that is begging to become a reality.

Secondly, I keep thinking back to “The Anarchist Turn“, a forum held at the New School that spring. More specifically I kept thinking about one particular panel called “The Geographies of Anarchy”. On this panel, moderated by Chiara Bottici was the views of Stephanie Wakefield, Steven Duncombe, Alberto Toscano. I have notes that I can dig up later, but for now I found the video archive for that forum online at the website for Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. I was mostly interested in the attempt to define the space of Anarchy in relation to the occupation; how does it exist symbolically/politically, or otherwise?  How does this affect or is affected by the literal anarchistic gesture in physical space, in terms of the space of direct action, and other physical forms in which it may exist? and finally how does the space of anarchy exist within ourselves, in our own imagination and interpretations, and dreams?

In any case there are other videos from The Anarchist Turn if “Geographies of Anarchy” is not your thing.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy by Karinavan Schaardenburg/Flickr

Correct me if I am wrong, but when a project is proposed to the Open Source community, people in the community should work positively to improve the project. Why then when the hyped Facebook rival Diaspora releases it’s source the community turns hateful and vicious? Then suddenly Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old co-founder of Diaspora commits suicide. Who are these haters, trolls? Are they hired corporate thugs or just idiots who don’t know what contributing to the open source community might mean? Maybe I’m naive, I don’t work in the “official” open source community, but I stand behind any initiative that is open, collaborative and that benefits the public.

Read the Gawker article:
Why Did This 22-Year-Old Entrepreneur Commit Suicide? by Adrian Chen

Samples of ocher were collected in large abalone shells, where the first known paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula.

In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: October 13, 2011
New York Times

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint.

read more at NYTimes.com

Iraq's West Qurna Oil Field

Just some notes:

• ExxonMobile’s (US)  wikipedia page mentions nothing about it’s contract to develop in Iraq’s West Qurna oil field. Considering this it the second largest oil field in the world after Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar oil field.

• This TIME article headline is at first mislead in that appears that U.S. is shut out of Iraq oil auctions?? When later it mentions that ExxonMobile took 80% stake West Qurna Phase 1. Shut Out as Iraq Auctions Its Oil Fields by Vivienne Walt Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009. It makes me want to research the oil contracts awarded to U.S. Oil companies since the invasion.

• U.S.’s 2nd largest oil company, Chevron was already exploring oil in Iraq‘s Majnoon Oil Fields under the oil exploration contract awarded to Frances Total and Chevron in 2007.

• Finally, where is ConocoPhillips, U.S.’s 3rd largest  oil company?  A little research shows in 2004 Lukoil and ConocoPhillips had formed a strategic alliance in 2004, with ConocoPhillips owning 20% of Lukoil’s shares. In 2007 Lukoil promised ConocoPhillips a share of the West Qurna Oil fields. Lukoil, with ConocoPhillips’s shares at  won the bid in 2009.  So maybe the Time article shouldn’t say U.S.  was “shut-out”completely, as oil contracts in Iraq, despite UN sanctions, are full of holes.

• If you look at the list of largest oil reserves, Libya comes right after Iraq, if you take out the unclean sands oil of Canada and Venezuela. It’s also might seem easier to destabilize under a false premise: WMD (Iraq), a rebel uprising (Libya)?

• Kuwait’s national lines were carved out of Iraq by the British after WWI. Hello BP!

• Kuwait is sandwiched between Iraq and Libya in terms of oil reserve. To no surprise, when Iraq attempted to reclaim Kuwait as the 19th province of Iraq, it only took 5 day for the U.S. forces to intervene. More info Gulf War wikipedia

[photo above of Iraq's West Qurna Oil Field from article "Iraq's West Qurna 1 Reaches Production Milestone" - arabianoilandgas.com]