Life needs change.

 CONSPIRACY THEORY #20050225
i’m waiting for the day that mina will snap and yell. i’m really hoping it’ll happen soon. see, japanese people here in this building are still seen by people of other cultures as complacent and easy-going. well, this morning while i was at the gym and chillin’ with uncle spenny and mitchell, t-rex was making unnecessary amounts of noise… a bit more than usual. apparently it sounded like he was lifting furniture and dropping it. so she had no choice but to wake up. added to that, someone had propped open the kitchen door, i usually do that during the day because sometimes it gets really stuffy in the flat and i want some air circulation, or if i’m doing laundry. anyhow, even when i got home and was taking my shower (which now, the shower head is broken) i could hear t-rex banging around and talking REALLY loudly. sigh. so now i’m telling her to just pretend to snap so that other people will be really shocked because she’s acting out-of-character. then t-rex might think that he’s gone too far with this noise and he’ll stop. yeah right!

mitchell is a sports injury dude that helps people with rehab. you really don’t need any qualifications in order to be a personal trainer or anything. he was working 9-9 in london in sales and decided that at 30 he wanted out. so now he does what he’s good at and what he loves. he’s been doing this for 3 years now.

he and spenny started talking about artists and musicians. they seem to think that artists in general are somewhat socially inadept because they’re so focussed on what they’re doing. that they channel all their communicative skills into their creations and seem sheltered. hmm… weird.

Without Sanctuary by James Allen. it’s a tought-provoking book and i’m dumb-founded. it is collection of damning photographs and postcards of lynchings that took place in the states from the late 1800s to as late as 1961. i’ve decided to work with a difficult topic for my poco course. i was originally going to work on the ainu of japan. but to be brutally honest, there’d be nothing here, i don’t know where the ‘art’ part would enter into it, and i HATE reading japanese names and things in english. it’s taxing and then when i see the translation, start thinking about what the characters are for those words.

anyhow, so i read a book review about this a long time ago in the toronto star. it piqued my interest then, but like a lot of things that i was ‘interested’ in, i forgot about it. well, since my presentation was on the harlem renaissance i was noodling on-line for stuff and i came across the (in)famous song ‘strange fruit’ which led me to this book.

i STILL don’t really understand postcolonialism, but i figured this would smack of internal colonialism. Canada is equally as guilty in their treatment of first nations people, but again, limited to what’s available in the library, and i was quite shocked that this book was there, i chose this topic. there’s a lot of museums in the ‘west’ that have hundreds of artefacts and photos that are not as graphic, but equally as damning. i’m somehow going to parallel the book and the museums to show how as much as they’d like to hide them, they’re a part of history regardless of whose narrative we’re following.

lynchings were spectacles. people would sell seats, if you paid more, you could take a shot at the victim. these photographs and postcards were taken and sent as souvenirs. this wasn’t just a white on black crime, it happened to whites, mexicans, asians and native peoples, men and women. there was even ‘black on black’ violence. the only difference was that the most sensationalized and the most violent were the lynchings of black men. people would take pieces of the victim’s clothes, body parts almost like relics that were so venerated by the medieval europeans. forgive me if i insulted any christian with this analogy. as many of those that wrote essays in the foreword wrote, that what’s most disturbing isn’t the violence done to the person, but the crowds that are shown in pictures. people are grinning, clamouring to get into the shot… and some of them show HUGE crowds of people. employers would let their employees out early, parents would write notes to teachers excusing little jimmy’s absence from class because he was at the lynching, newspapers would sometimes publicize time and place. after a while these killings were so commonplace that they merited a little notice in the papers like the weather. what’s even scarier is the things that some people wrote on the postcards.
“warning. the answer of the anglo-saxon race to black brutes who would attack the womanhood of the north.” or “this is the barbecue we had last night. my picture is the the left with a cross over it. your son, joe.” and on the reverse are charred corpses hanging from trees.

admittedly these are extremely disturbing, but so are any other photos of genocide, and brutality. what do we do with them? we can’t just hide them or get rid of them. they were taken for a reason, and like the objects hidden away in archives of museums, they should be exposed for what they are. where am i going with this? i have no clue. but i feel that it’s an obligation for me to write a good paper.

agent orange

posted by: conspiracytheorist at 05:50 | link | comments (2) |

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