Short Film on Hmong Refugee Experience: Experience & Memory

A lovely short film by Kao Kalia Yang, writer, and John O’Brien, filmmaker. Kao, a Hmong refugee immigrant to the United States. She reflects specifically on the limits of experience and memory, place, and home. Is her homeland Laos, or the refugee camp where she was born? Or the place where she lives now?

Truly lovely. I hope to hear more from both of them, now that I’m slowly getting settled in the Twin Cities.

The Place Where We Were Born from John OBRIEN on Vimeo.

MAY DAY!

My May Day celebratory post apparently never made it up to the blog. So here it is, half a month late.

The best day of the entire year. From Peter Linebaugh’s famous article on May Day, “The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day,”:

Nationally, May First 1886 was important because a couple of years earlier the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, “RESOLVED… that eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor, from and after May 1, 1886.

On 4 May 1886 several thousand people gathered near Haymarket Square to hear what August Spies, a newspaperman, had to say about the shootings at the McCormick works. Albert Parsons, a typographer and labor leader spoke net. Later, at his trial, he said, “What is Socialism or Anarchism? Briefly stated it is the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of production and the right of the producers to their product.” He was followed by “Good-Natured Sam” Fielden who as a child had worked in the textile factories of Lancashire, England. He was a Methodist preacher and labor organizer. He got done speaking at 10:30 PM. At that time 176 policemen charged the crowd that had dwindled to about 200. An unknown hand threw a stick of dynamite, the first time that Alfred Nobel’s invention was used in class battle.

All hell broke lose, many were killed, and the rest is history.

“Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards,” was the Sheriff’s dictum. It was followed religiously across the country. Newspaper screamed for blood, homes were ransacked, and suspects were subjected to the “third degree.” Eight men were railroaded in Chicago at a farcical trial. Four men hanged on “Black Friday,” 11 November 1887.

“There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today,” said Spies before he choked.

INDEED.

The Survivors Are No Longer Surviving In Burma

As predicted, survivors of Cyclone Nargis, which ravaged lower Burma on May 2 and 3, are no longer surviving.

Not only in the worst-hit delta areas but also in places close to Rangoon people are suffering from illnesses brought on by dirty water, lack of food and exposure to the elements.

From Rule of Lords. Go, read more here: “Preventable Deaths, Global Consequences“

False Memory Animation

BoingBoing caught this a few days ago, and now its being picked up by the brain blogs. The boingers thought that the animation was cool (it is), but much more interesting to me (and the brain bloggers) is the way in which it quite concretely and effectively communicates the way in which false memories work. We all have them. Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful autobiography starts with his realization that a memory he’s told for years is in fact, wrong.

RIP, Roxanna Brown

Roxanna Brown, director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum in Thailand, and a person who, along with two or three others, is supposed to have ‘created the field of Southeast Asian Ceramics,’ has died in strange circumstances in the custody of Federal US agents.

She had been indicted on one count of wire fraud, in which she was alleged to have allowed others to use her electronic signature on faked appraisal forms, which inflated the values of pieces that were being sent to US museums from Ban Chiang, one of the most important archaeological sites in mainland Southeast Asia.

Her family immediately and aggressively began to turn the tables on the officials: they pointed out that Brown had been so ill, with something resembling the flu, that her initial court appearance had been postponed.

An autopsy was performed by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday. Results were not immediately available but her brother, Fred Brown, of Chicago, told The Associated Press she appeared to have had a heart attack.

Mr Brown said his sister maintained she was innocent, and he blamed the stress of her arrest for her death.

“She wasn’t in good health to begin with, but they definitely brought on the heart attack,” he said. [link]

There’s a lot more that’s been being written on the academic lists for regional studies, and undoubtedly much much more in the coming days.

My deep condolences to Ms. Brown’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers.

Democracy Now! has a brief headline mention of Ms. Brown’s passing as well.

Really, right?

via, via

Update on Burma-Related Postings

The BBC on the vast numbers of people currently endangered by the cyclone, and possibly more importantly, the junta’s evil lack of response to it.

lots more after the jump….

David Brooks Knows Nothing About Buddhism

So says this person over at Tower of Dabble, responding to an atrocious little piece of crepulence from Mr. Brooks, published over at the New York Times. The piece is called “The Neural Buddhists,” but appears to be a very poorly considered rant against the ongoing materialism of scientists. I’m not exactly certain what Mr. Brooks proposes scientists replace their commitments to materialism, empiricism, and confirmation with, but I am certain he has some similarly obnoxious theory about it.

He mentions Buddhism twice but I have no idea why. My guess is that he knows as little about Buddhism as he does about evolution or neuroscience. I think maybe he read a page of the Dancing Wu Li Masters while investigating California latte sippers in 1987 and he thinks he now understands Buddhism.

…

I have again wasted a lot of words saying what could be said in very few:

I’ll let you go see what the short version is for yourself. Tower of Dabble’s summary caught my eye for two reasons: first, she or he does an excellent job of showing how Brooks’ use of Dawkins’ scientific work, The Selfish Gene, completely misses the point and project of that work, and that he appears to be using Buddhism as some sort of slam at scientific atheists. Are all Buddhists scientific materialists? I have misunderstood everything, apparently.

Just After Achieving Enlightenment, The Buddha Found A Quarter

I needed a laugh. This did the trick:

Graphic Novel About Cambodian Acid Attacks

I haven’t read more than the first few pages, but this is a very cool-looking project. From Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

Tom sez, “Our Stanford Creative Writing class wrote and illustrated a 224 page Graphic Novel this past quarter, and now it’s up on the web. The story concerns the phenomenon of acid attacks in Cambodia, especially against women. We made the Graphic Novel in 6 weeks, with a collaboration among 17 students in creative writing, art, and design.”

A very very neat idea. Here’s page 8, which I like as a natural (and correct-sounding, to me) reverse-anthropology of foreigners in Cambodia:

Go to the website to read the entire thing, free, online. [link]

UPDATE: I’ve read the entire thing, now, and really, really, want to encourage everyone to take a good read - I found it to be deeply affecting.