"State of Incarceration"

Here's a short video I edited out of three nights worth of JD Matta's filming the Los Angeles Poverty Department's State of Incarceration (an examination of the personal and social costs of incarceration) @ Highways Performance Space.

Los Angeles Poverty Department's "State of Incarceration" @ Highways (2011) from Highways Performance Space on Vimeo.

Each performance of State of Incarceration is an experiment in which the performers, the audience, and the performance material are inserted into a restrictive prison architecture that replicates the over-crowded California State Prisons, where gymnasiums and cafeterias have been turned into dormitories housing 3 and 4 hundred prisoners. The performance space is filled wall-to-wall with 60 bunk-beds, the same model used in the prison system. The US Supreme Court is at present deliberating whether these conditions prevalent in the California State Prisons constitute cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Constitution.

In State of Incarceration, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) artists articulate the mental and physical challenges of incarceration and the resources needed to endure and recover from it. When released from state penitentiaries with $200 gate money, parolees are directed to Skid Row with the largest concentration of low cost housing in LA County. 33% of parolees released to the Los Angeles area settle in the 52 square block neighborhood of Skid Row.

Wreckin'

In anticipation of Dr. Dre's highly anticipated performance @ tonight's Grammy's & the supposedly forthcoming Detox, a 12-yr. in the making follow-up to his 2 highly influential gangsta-rap solos of the 1990s (1992's The Chronic & 1999's 2001), here's a bit of forgotten history.  Leading up to and briefly overlapping with the birth of N.W.A. Dre was the resident DJ for the World Class Wreckin' Cru.  Today we equate rap & particularly Dre with the violently sexist, homophobic thug mentality, but the true roots of the genre were in the disco//house club scene, an ecstatic queer explosion of fashion, music, and dance.

 

UPDATE (3/19/2011) :

While the performance itself left much to be desired, this video for the lead single from the new album is self-mythology done right.  Eschewing the distracting sci-fi window dressing & the fact that, actually, the doctor has far from disappeared for the last ten years, it makes clear how deep and complex the idea of "brotherhood" runs in the hip-hop community.

State of the Arts

I wouldn't pretend that the world (and our country in particular) doesn't have bigger problems...but...really?

 - A job-killing plan for arts and culture 

- Artist Could Face 15 Years In Prison For Recording His Own Arrest

 

Free! Theater

 

I have great doubts about the essential effectiveness of political theater meant to to be staged for a static audience - even more so when the lines between purpose and aesthetic are explicitly marked.  But the case of the Belarus Free Theater, who have been getting a lot of publicity & support for their current U.S. tour, exhibits the possibilities in the greater power of artistic expression as a cause towards social justice.  When they came to Los Angeles in 2009, the work's purpose DID trump its aesthetics, but both felt like they were (nobly) striving to inform the other.

Flag Burning

RIP....

TURU SATANA, 1938-2011

----- Listening to the Crack of Doom on the Hydrogen Juxebox .........

image by P. Kennelly

Theosophy

image by P. Kennelly

Tammy Faye

drawing by P. Kennelly

 Mascara stroked tears roil
Alabaster Madonna statues
In miniature

Her head bowed
Clasped hands
Requiring
Support

Choir boy eyes reflected
In the light
Of the stacked candles
Recalling
The flickering televised halo

And the millions
Waiting with faith
For a sign of God

Eyelids dropping into the fog below
Going back to a time
Of electronic hope
Unscorched by radiation

The Hills

 

 

The Artful Dodger

image by P. Kennelly