Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Christian Hosoi and Steve Caballero
at Love & Guts SF/Thrasher Magazine 30th Anniversary.
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Anaïs Nin
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A Change Is Gonna Come | Sam Cooke
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever since
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die
Cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
The eyes of Marines before, during & after Afghanistan. Photographed by Dutch photographer Claire Felicie.
Happy Bday Angela!
Activist, Scholar, Writer, Professor and FBI’s most wanted
When Angela Davis strode on the political stage with her fist raised high and her iconic Afro standing higher, people noticed. She is a rebel and a revolutionary, a bookish philosopher who has lived out her theories with action and purpose.
Smart, stylish, eloquent and fearless, Davis never lets her style get in the way of the substance. Her life’s work has been built around issues of race, community and the criminal justice system. In the 70s, she was involved with The Black Panthers, but much of her energy was focused on what she termed the Prison-Industrial Complex, the systematic privatization of prisons as profit-making machines. This means the more people in prison, the more lucrative the business. Hence, the absurd increase in men (mostly poor, young, black) sent to U.S prisons in the last two decades.
Davis herself was on the run from the law in the 70s, following the murder of a California judge. Innocent, she went into hiding, which sparked a nationwide search and worldwide media attention, propelling her to the FBI’s most wanted list. Two months later, she was arrested in a motel in midtown Manhattan. Despite pressure from famous rightwing fear-mongers – Richard Nixon (who branded Davis a “terrorist”), the then California governor Ronald Reagan and rat-bag FBI director J Edgar Hoover – Davis became an international cause celebre. A global campaign called for her release and Aretha Franklin offered to post quarter of a million dollars in bail. She was acquitted in the end.
Angela Davis inspired people all over the world, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who recorded their song “Angela” on their 1972 album, Some Time in New York City. The Rolling Stones also wrote about Davis, recording the song “Sweet Black Angel” on their 1972 album, Exile on Main Street.
Davis is now a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university’s Feminist Studies Department. She is also the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working against the Prison-Industrial Complex.
Crazy Wisdom
Allen Ginsberg made him his guru. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about him. It was 1970 and he was the first Tibetan lama most Americans had ever seen. Yet he openly drank, and bedded his students. Was this how an enlightened teacher should behave? Crazy Wisdom tells the story of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche the brilliant “bad boy of Buddhism” with exclusive never-before-seen archival material and commentary from Ram Dass, Pema Chödrön and others of his circle.
“Being in his presence was like being suddenly aware of an oncoming truck: it put every cell in your brain SMACK! into the present moment. And in that moment you could be outraged, moved to tears or intellectually inspired… or all at once.” - filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas
Photogramme : “La noire de…” (Ousmane Sembene, 1966) (by fannypouic)
Thérèse Mbissine Diop, dans le rôle de Diouana
www.arhv.lhivic.org/index.php/2008/02/05/623-compte-rendu…
In his pioneering 1966 film, Black Girl, the great Senegalese author and director, Ousmane Sembene, explores the complex dynamics of the immediate post-colonial period through the simple, devastating story of a Senegalese servant, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), and her relationship to the unnamed French couple (Anne Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine) who employ her. Sembene reverses the Eurocentric convention where the French characters are those who are individualized and the colonized represent their group.
“A powerful film, it deals with one of the most common themes in African cinema: the after-effects of colonialism and racism. But it also deals with another common trope in African cinema: characters who wish to move from Africa to either Europe or America in order to start a better life only to have their dreams shattered.” -youtube commenter
Todas las flores del desierto están cerca de la luz.
Todas las mujeres bellas son las que yo he visto, las que andan por la calle con abrigos largos y minifaldas, las que huelen a limpio y sonríen cuando las miran. Sin medidas perfectas, sin tacones de vértigo. Las mujeres más bellas esperan el autobús de mi barrio o se compran bolsos en tiendas de saldo. Se pintan los ojos como les gusta y los labios de carmín de chino.
Las flores del desierto son las mujeres que tienen sonrisas en los ojos, que te acarician las manos cuando estás triste, que pierden las llaves al fondo del abrigo, las que cenan pizza en grupos de amigos y lloran sólo con unos pocos, las que se lavan el pelo y lo secan al viento.
Las bellezas reales son las que toman cerveza y no miden cuántas patatas han comido, las que se sientan en bancos del parque con bolsas de pipas, las que acarician con ternura a los perros que se acercan a olerlas. Las preciosas damas de chándal de domingo. Las que huelen a mora y a caramelos de regaliz.
Las mujeres hermosas no salen en revistas, las ojean en el médico, y esperan al novio, ilusionadas, con vestidos de fresas. Y se ríen libres de los chistes de la tele, y se tragan el fútbol a cambio de un beso.
Las mujeres normales derrochan belleza, no glamour, desgastan las sonrisas mirando a los ojos, y cruzan las piernas y arquean la espalda. Salen en las fotos rodeadas de gente sin retoques, riéndose a carcajadas, abrazando a los suyos con la felicidad embotellada de los grandes grupos.
Las mujeres normales son las auténticas bellezas, sin gomas ni lápices. Las flores del desierto son las que están a tu lado. Las que te aman y las que amamos. Sólo hay que saber mirar más allá del tipazo, de los ojazos, de las piernas torneadas, de los pechos de vértigo. Efímeros adornos, vestigios del tiempo, enemigos de la forma y enemigos del alma. Vértigo de divas y llanto de princesas.
La verdadera belleza está en las arrugas de la felicidad…
-Mario Vargas Llosa (Vargas Llosa posa junto a su esposa, Patricia Llosa)
Chinese New Year
Checking Chinese Zodiacs with my family
Mom - Dragon: energetic, fearless, warm-hearted, and charismatic
Dad - Ox: patient, kind, stubborn, and conservative
Zodiac Sign Compatibility
Dad - Ox: AVOID THE DRAGON!
Hypatia
Regarded as the first woman astronomer, Hypatia was also an accomplished mathematician, an inventor, and a philosopher of Plato and Aristotle, She lived during the late 4th, early 5th centuries—a time of great change.
”Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”
