It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

This week is just a collection of random things discovered while keeping the eyes peeled and ears pricked for inspiration and edification.

With the recent release of the film "I Am Not Your Negro" there seems to be a revival for all things James Baldwin, for which I am grateful. He's one of those intellectual and moral titans who for me, once discovered, inflamed such a great desire to dive in and swim deep to learn all I could about him. It has yielded bounties of pearls. Besides being one of America's great writers, his oratory skills place him in the pantheon of the finest to ever come out of this country. He speaks as powerfully in defense of the underclass, the marginalized and the dispossessed, and as a gay black man at a time when that brought invectives of compounded hate, than anybody to ever stand at a podium. He is a powerhouse that must be witnessed. I can stay up all night listening to the grandeur of his eloquent and incisive oration.

One thing I love about being alive today is that there is access to so much online. All you need is to posses an interest and curiosity, and you're off and running. And though I'm intimately aware of, and concerned about, the Deep State's ability to surveil each and every one of us, I could care less if they can see that I study great revolutionary minds. Comedian/host of Redacted Tonight Lee Camp's solution to this is to completely confuse them by thinking of the most zany unrelated things and doing a string of searches in that way. I like his idea and should probably practice it more. Overall though, I'm not really concerned about stuff like that (I'm much more concerned about the alarming development outlined in Steven D's essay "You Tube Censorship of Progressive & Independent Media..."). The day we're afraid to stand by our convictions is the day we begin to perish.

And for that, the Recommended clips offered by YouTube, if you've sunk your teeth a bit into a subject, will sometimes yield some really good offerings. Such was the case this weekend.

What set me off was a six minute clip of Cornel West interviewed at the Harvard Divinity School speaking about the legacy of Baldwin, who though a successful writer faced a lot of criticism for his searing, unabashed truth-telling.

Cornel West, asked about what students today hear in Baldwin:

"They're hearing someone who refused to allow his fire to be dampened by overwhelming bleakness and darkness. And that's a beautiful thing.

You know and I know, if the only American citizens who could vote were under 30, my dear brother Bernie Sanders would be in the White House, rather than the neo-fascist Trump. That's a sign of hope.

That's a sign of deep hope."

And contained in that Cornel West interview was a short clip of a Baldwin film of which I hadn't heard. I went and looked that up, and man, what an amazing film that turned out to be. A film crew followed him in 1981 back to the South and around to the sites of the Civil Rights movement of which he was a part. It's wonderfully interspersed with powerful, moving jazz/blues/soul/funk/gospel segments and vivid scenery of the sites and sounds of the places juxtaposed against their past.

James Baldwin "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"

James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham, and Atlanta, to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, with Chinua Achebe, and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post–Civil Rights America—wondering “what happened to the children” and those “who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.”

It's great to be able to come home after day out and sink into a subject and get lost in the offerings. There's so much great stuff from which to be edified and inspired.

While we were out and about this weekend, we had a delightful surprise when we made a spontaneous decision to stop in at the Queens Museum of Art. There, we learned that one of the exhibitions, "Commonwealth: Water For All", is a collaboration between two radical activist factions with which we are familiar, Interference Archive and Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. Our little radical, Occupy-derived chroniclers and artists being featured as part of the official offerings of a big museum? Very cool.

...From wars over water that have taken place throughout Latin America for the past two decades, to the recent privatization of public water in American cities like Flint and Detroit, the effects of fragmented and shortsighted perspectives on water management are stark.

Highlighting the urgency of this issue, two recently acquired portfolios of prints developed by the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, We Are the Storm (2015) and Wellspring (2016), are presented with a selection of materials developed for the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Additionally, a poster production project will run concurrently with the exhibition, with designs addressing related issues printed in editions of 500 on the Museum’s Risograph machine, and available for free to visitors, with a new poster unveiled every two weeks. Social movements have a history of using and altering developing technology to rejuvenate traditional methods of cultural production and communication tools and artists in solidarity with Standing Rock are using traditional printmaking techniques to create iconic imagery which the movement picked up, distributed through social media, and re-deployed not only as online icons and avatars, but also as posters, banners, and t-shirts.

It was pleasing to be reminded of how much the museum, since its refurbishing a few years ago, has re-emerged as a socially conscience hall reflecting the deeply diverse, multicultural communities here.

And finally, there was yet another reminder, in our local neighborhood this time, of how much the merciless grinder of monopolistic capitalism holds workers hostage. We ran into a clangorous strike of cowbells, horns and picket signs a few doors down from an Indian restaurant patronize of union workers for Spectrum Cable, another of these corporate conglomerate mergers, who have been working without a contract for three years. One of the strikers there told us that the company is deducting wages or pension from workers who get repeat calls from customers about service problems, which the workers say is a result of faulty equipment they're being asked to install.

It's the same fraud of "austerity" that cowed American workers everywhere are being forced to swallow by "belt-tightening" corporations: take pension cuts and/or raises in the costs of health insurance, while the CEO takes home $89 million. Eighty-fucking-Nine MILLION!

It's amazing to me that there still isn't widespread, full scale revolution against this insanity.

So, what's going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

Reading/Browsing List:
Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions"
Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine"
"The Wikileaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire" (introduction by Julian Assange)
Woody Guthrie "House of Hearth"

Moroccan Chick Pea Soup

Caramelize one diced onion in olive oil, then add a chopped celery stalks, two chopped carrots and some grated lemon rind.

Add cooked chick peas and chopped ginger. Then add the following spices in descending order of quantity, coriander, brown chili powder, turmeric and hot red chili pepper powder. Add some chopped garlic and a little olive oil.

Add tomato puree. Bring to a boil. Then add sliced mushrooms and fresh spinach.

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass
shards of cinnamon bark
a few cardamom pods
a few black peppercorns
A few cloves
fresh chopped ginger