Ragg It

Howard Zinn

A People's History Of The United States:
"The terror was very real among the Indians, but in time they came to meditate upon its foundations. They drew three lessons from the Pequot War: (1) that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; (2) that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and (3) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart."

"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices.
...
To recall this is to remind people of what the Establishment would like them to forget-the enormous capacity of apparently helpless people to resist, of apparently contented people to demand change. To uncover such history is to find a powerful human impulse to assert one's humanity. It is to hold out, even in times of deep pessimism, the possibility of surprise.
...
The threat of unemployment, always inside the homes of the poor, has spread to white-collar workers, professionals. A college education is no longer a guarantee against joblessness', and a system that cannot offer a future to the young coming out of school is in deep trouble. If it happens only to the children of the poor, the problem is manageable; there are the jails. If it happens to the children of the middle class, things may get out of hand. The poor are accustomed to being squeezed and always short of money, but in recent years the middle classes, too, have begun to feel the press of high prices, high taxes."

"The society's levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state-the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. We would need-by a coordinated effort of local groups all over the country-to reconstruct the economy for both efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most. We would start on our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplaces. Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the work force-children, old people, "handicapped" people. Society could use the enormous energy now idle, the skills and talents now unused. Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to be taken out of the money system and be available-free-to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation.
The great problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires, which in the past have been used by the state in times of war, but also by social movements that gave hints of how people might behave in different conditions. Decisions would be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods-a network of cooperatives, in communication with one another, a neighborly socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh dictatorships that have taken the name "socialist."
People in time, in friendly communities, might create a new, diversified, nonviolent culture, in which all forms of personal and group expression would be possible. Men and women, black and white, old and young, could then cherish their differences as positive attributes, not as reasons for domination. New values of cooperation and freedom might then show up in the relations of people, the upbringing of children."

"Antimilitarist feeling expressed itself also in resistance to the draft. When President Jimmy Carter, responding to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, called for the registration of young men for a military draft, more than 800,000 men (10 percent) failed to register. One mother wrote to the New York Time:
To the Editor: Thirty-six years ago I stood in front of the crematorium. The ugliest force in the world had promised itself that I should be removed from the cycle of life-that I should never know the pleasure of giving life. With great guns and great hatred, this force thought itself the equal of the force of lift.
I survived the great guns, and with every smile of my son, they grow smaller. It is not for me, sir, to offer my son's blood as lubricant for the next generation of guns. I remove myself and my own from the cycle of death.
Isabella Leitner"

"Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist, relates (Partial Justice) a case which, with changes in details, could be multiplied thousands of rimes. He had just interviewed seventeen Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to register for the draft during the Vietnam war, and all had received two-year sentences. He came to a young black man who had notified his draft board he could not in conscience cooperate with the draft because he was repelled by the violence of the Vietnam war. He received a five-year sentence. Gaylin writes: "Hank's was the first five-year sentence I had encountered. He was also the first black man." There were additional factors:
"How was your hair then?" I asked.
"Afro."
"And what were you wearing?"
"A dashiki."
"Don't you think that might have affected your sentence?"
"Of course."
"Was it worth a year or two of your life?" I asked.
"That's all of my life," he said, looking at me with a combination of dismay and confusion. "Man, don't you know! That's what it's all about! Am I free to have my style, am I free to have my hair, am I free to have my skin?"
"Of course," I said. "You're right."
"

"Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography, From the Land of the Spotted Eagle, wrote:
True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?
I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting- the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization..."

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

"I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point -- that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us -- of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality -- are human beings and should cherish one another."
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2728/graduation_day_with_howard_zinn

http://howardzinn.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

NASA's Alien Anomalies caught on film - A compilation of stunning UFO footage from NASA's archives

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlLN_Jcg1pc

Olaf Breuning

http://web.mac.com/olafbreuning/photos/Photos.html#grid

http://web.mac.com/olafbreuning/works/works.html

Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPeWwvsnaaQ
http://www.junji.org/saveyourself/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf0E9llkZIU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guaiDZdsDjI
http://www.hi.mce.uec.ac.jp/inami-lab/local/siggraph2005/Shaking_the_world.pdf

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=10358131

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_Vestibular_Stimulation

Junji Watanabe

Saccade:
http://www.junji.org/saccade/

Save Yourself!!!:
http://www.junji.org/saveyourself/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPeWwvsnaaQ

Touch the Invisibles:
http://www.junji.org/invisibles/index.html

http://www.junji.org/

Moongoose

RGBy:
http://mongoose.proto-type.jp/products/rgby/

Type Time:
http://mongoose.proto-type.jp/products/typetime/

Bright Blind:
http://mongoose.proto-type.jp/products/brightblind/

http://mongoose.proto-type.jp/about/

Kenneth A. Huff

http://www.kennethahuff.com/Works/Work.php?w=2004.10b&g=Time&v=excerpt1

http://www.kennethahuff.com/Works/Work.php?w=2004.9a&g=Time&v=excerpt1

http://www.kennethahuff.com/Works/WorkGroupThumbnails.php?g=Prints

http://www.kennethahuff.com/

Leonardo da Vinci

Ultima Cena:
http://www.haltadefinizione.com/magnifier.jsp?idopera=1

William K. Black

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ4JXW_ErXQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOA1RpK7ttg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMDLx_-f1L4
Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_K._Black

John Steinbeck

From "The Grapes of Wrath":
"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."
"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck

13 Lakes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKwhBk4d7M0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXhb9SAap0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=offsnpJ7Gwo

Ten Skies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aIrfuptR6c

Utopia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT4xyD2-5zA

Segobi:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8im2__5kkko

Landscape Suicide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jblQHNK6Xus

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs34/int_peranson_benning.html

I have an interest in exploring space-time relationships through film. There's real time, and there's how we perceive time. Time affects the way we perceive place. That's where I get this idea of “looking and listening”. In my films, I'm very aware of recording place over time, and the way that makes you understand place. Once you've been watching something for a while, you become aware of it differently. I could show you a photograph of the place, but that doesn't convince you, it's not the same as seeing it in time. I'm very interested, now, in how much time is necessary to understand place.
...
Consideration of audience is not a part of it because, to me, the interest shouldn't be determined by audiences – it should be by myself, to understand the concept and then the audience can work out how they interact with it. My films ask you to look around the frame, and at the frame, and have a different experience to the one you're probably used to from TV or Hollywood. If we see things being signposted all the time…we become lazy, we become dominated by the filmmaker instead of having room to move.
I'm interested in the spatialisation of time. And the temporalisation of space! (laughs).
If we come to expect that every few seconds we're going to be signposted to another piece of space, then we're not going to be able to read longer images.
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/33/james_benning.html

http://www.canyoncinema.com/B/Benning.html

http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/benningfull.html

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/online_features/tortured_landscapes.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Benning_(film_director)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTHEsPOzzYo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTHEsPOzzYo