DuVernay’s Documentary “13th” Needs To Be Seen

Ava DuVernay’s Academy-nominated documentary 13th exposes the intrinsic flaw of America’s 13th Amendment. DuVernay's Documentary "13th" Needs To Be SeenNeither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

While abolishing slavery is well and good – how did it ever happen in the first place?! – the amendment allows for the practice to continue through the penal system, a system that systematically incarcerates black males in America, a population that, only 4% of the overall population, accounts for 40% of prisoners. Black ManDuVernay outlines America’s dismal history of discrimination and servitude, citing Jim Crow laws as well as the systematic targeting of black leaders such as Angela Davis and Black Panther Fred Hampton.DuVernay's Documentary "13th" Needs To Be SeenPresidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton are all indicted for the role in the morass as well as So-Called President Trump. Most insidious of all is the monetization of the mass incarcerations – corporations such as WalMart and Time Warner directly profiting from these policies – as well as the understanding that another iteration of the racist laws awaits us all. DuVernay's Documentary "13th" Needs To Be SeenDuVernay’s film needs to be seen. Okay, so what are you doing? Watch it now!Institution is not a building but a method

Ice Friday: Ian McGuire’s “The North Water”

Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg moves at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe. Sumner feel, as he watches, that he is seeing something he shouldn’t rightly see, that he is being made an unwilling party to a horrifying but elemental truth telling. As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind.

Post-Pop Idol, Vulvana, reflects on “Manitou Island”

Shortly after the burial ceremonies, Vulvana interviewed with Entertain Me Magazine: Our technological society offers nothing but self-denial and self-annihilation. Under the leadership of Gerbi Norberg, his mother Norma Butler-Norberg, the medicine man Asawasanay and the village elder Pamequonaishcung, these people have decided to forge their own course. They are returning to the essence of life, the earth itself. They are redefining human progress. They’re throwing away technology, building a society where the family and community are not just political promises.This is a land to which the forgotten people can go, you know, what Victor Hugo called the miserable of the earth, the dispossessed. This is their land. This is where they belong.