Wednesday, June 29, 2005

This is what I have to say.

The sewers are veins with shit for blood,
and the city only ever inhales.
Trucks fly on fourlane superarteries
delivering loads of Doritos to gaping mouths.
rotting concrete, glass cages with cash registers.
Welcome to the Kingdom of Us,
where we could have made anything,
could have been humans on earth
but were too cheap.
Decided we were content with cheap plastic,
metaphysics,
and gutters.
summon the charcoal and chimneys,
summon the gas stoves and microwaves.
we will eat tonight, don’t worry about that,
keep shopping.
keep shooting.
And someday, we’ll move out to the suburbs, dear.

-
my fluid seeks sewers to feed myself, my city, but these foundational beams of rotting streets destroyed my undercarriage,

the highways pulse with commodities

my house rests between skyscrapers

I can look through my windows to my attorney.

his aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?

city is the possession, the men in it middlemanaging, cubicles.

You have to consume real estate to be human, distance, square footed, in which a beloved kitchenette is heaven, for example.
-

My sewers, my blood, I felt my city around upon me rumbling down upon the long high superways,
I felt my mouths crying for Doritos,
And we exhaled into overbrimming cash registers
that can now buy anything,
can only buy us, reaming our foodstamps over again
Welcome to my house, gridded and grey,
where we could have had a future, we could have been here before,
but we were too cheap.
Give me your kitsch! your scams! your hungry!
Don’t worry, inhale, your fiery riots will wait for tomorrow.
we are an island of torment in a sea of white picket topped waved American Dream.
-
The city was there as I was there
flowing inside the shreds of newsprint
soaked in the sludge
of all our industrial and self secretions.
there, my bottom half rubberized, my shirt covered in shit
that steeped down from fifty stories of city.

Some shitleak under 16th street
years of someone’s acid vomit
corroding the pipes.
Leaking into drinking water
obese consumers blindly
wallowing in themselves.
-
our sewers wrap us together
in dreamy abstraction
our faucets rip our outer skin off
every morning,
and pure waterfall flesh
cannot hide behind dirt reality.
Plumbers tie cities together
so that we may roam streets
avoiding the eyes of passersby.
our cities enable solipsistic
self images
masterbatory subcultures
conversation murdered by
perfectly accessorized
pictured people.

Monday, June 27, 2005


"3", Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Unregistered

makin' copies

This place is getting a little sparse. (i.e. 5 posts about public broadcasting funds in a row)
Yet this is not a pinko's copies obituary.
Instead, in exchange for reading this, you have been enlisted to post one piece of writing to the site, so we all may read it. It really doesn't matter what it is: poetry, a screenplay, an essay, your notes, your grocery list - as long as it has words... well, symbols anyway.
On that note, if you would like to scan in a jpg of some handwritten, drawn or printed work to be posted, you can e-mail that to me at tylly@brown.edu. Other kinds of images are also more than welcome, as long as you have had a hand in creating them.

To be clear, this site is a gallery, a forum, and a workshop.

And of course, feel free - no... obligated - to post responses to anything you see. You do not need an account to add comments to posts.

If you need an account, let me know at tylly@brown.edu, or just e-mail me your post.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Congress Will Not Cut Public Broadcasting Funds

CPB Announces New President: Patricia Harrison, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs

Kenneth Tomlinson makes me physically ill.

(or maybe it was that Byblos falafel I just ate.... eh, probably both.)

Not only is Patricia Harrison currently in the state department, but she is also a former Republican Party chairman.
And in about a month, she will be my boss.

Here is the link to the Times article.

House Vote Today on PBS/NPR Cuts

For those who are following the unfolding events concerning the CPB funding cuts as closely as I am, with my internship at RIPBS scheduled to start mid-July...
I got this e-mail today from FreePress.net:


The House is scheduled to vote today on drastic funding cuts for PBS, NPR and other public media. The cuts are part of the partisan campaign to both defang and defund public broadcasting.

Your calls and letters to Congress are making a difference. We need your help now to support two amendments that would put the money back IN public broadcasting while taking the politics OUT of the funding process.

Call your representative now to save public broadcasting.

Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is engaged in a deliberate campaign to bully programmers to produce shows that echo the White House line. His cronies in Congress are slashing funding for the news, children's and cultural programming Americans trust.

Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) and Diane Watson (D-Calif.) have introduced an amendment that would block Tomlinson from meddling in noncommercial programming. And Reps. David Obey (D-Wis.), Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and James Leach (R-Iowa) have offered an amendment that would restore $100 million in funding stripped out by the Appropriations Committee.

Call now and urge your representative to support both amendments.

In the past two weeks, millions of Americans have spoken out against efforts to gag and starve public broadcasting. You can help us further by forwarding this e-mail and telling five friends to join the campaign.

Together, we can put the public back in public broadcasting and wrest control of our media from the hands of Washington politicians and partisans.

Onward,


Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net


P.S. To learn more about the Free Press campaign to save public broadcasting, visit www.freepress.net/publicbroadcasting.

Friday, June 17, 2005

SAVE PBS NOW

From an e-mail I received today from FreePress.net:
(By the way, you should all sign up for their mailing list - They don't send out junk, only important activist issues from time to time).

"Congress has turned a deaf ear to the public and taken the next step to unplug PBS and NPR.

Last night, a House committee voted to halve funding for public broadcasting -- cuts that are so drastic that they will decimate public television and radio stations across the country. We stand to lose the educational, news and cultural programs that Americans trust above all others.

In the past week, nearly one million Americans have signed petitions to stop Congress from taking this action against PBS, NPR and other public media. Tens of thousands more have joined mass call-ins urging representatives to restore funding. But our elected officials have ignored the outcry.

It’s time we pried open the doors of power and demanded to be heard. Free Press is taking this campaign beyond point-and-click petitions directly into the chambers of Congress. It is with your personal stories that we guarantee that politicians WILL take notice:"

Write a letter to Congress asking them not to cut funding from PBS and NPR.

Here is the message I sent:

Dear Congress,

I write to you now not only as a media student at Brown University in Rhode Island, but also as an intelligent American citizen who loves the root-principles of his country - the first, and foremost of which is the "inalienable right" of Free Speech. I, therefore, wholeheartedly denounce any attempt to cut government funding for the reputable and, indeed, necessary American institutions that are PBS and NPR.

The advent of mass-media has created a legal grey-area in the conjunction of public airwaves and private enterprise. In other words, though the airwaves are public, the only information widely broadcast over these airwaves that is actually public is what is broadcast by PBS and NPR. This is because the vast majority of broadcasters operate on a commercial basis, and therefore their existence depends on the corporate advertising market. This results not only in programming that is fully influenced, if not dictated, by private corporations, but also in broadcasts that are overrun, more and more, with hypnotic and unwholesome commercial messages. This holds true for supposedly "independent" news channels.

PBS and NPR operate mostly without corporate sponsorship, and therefore they are able to air programs that are in the public interest, not that of private corporations. This means that PBS and NPR are bastions of truly Free Speech in a broadcasting world of powerfully silencing payoffs and hierarchy. Without strong government funding, these fundamental media institutions will deteriorate to the point of ruin.

I will not stand by and let one of the pillars of a free American society be chopped in half for politically ideological purposes. There are many who share this commitment with me. If you choose to ignore our numbers now, the backlash from such a measure, if passed by our congress, will surely show them to you. Indeed, the resulting outcry would be a victory for Free Speech in itself, and perhaps the communal outrage would spur the public to develop even more politically controversial public mass-media outlets. This is United States of America - I implore you to choose public freedom over politics.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Tyler Henry
Brown University '07

Tyler Henry
248 Williams St.
Providence, RI 02906

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Are you kidding?....

White House aide Philip A. Cooney doctored reports on global warming to weaken their efficacy.

Please, can we protest this? Please, can we get mad and reignite the movement? Please, can we start to see again that the environment is the most pressing issue of our time? National and international tension is of course the most immediately visible and notable news, but the hastening effects of global warming are major factors in aggravating these strained relations. Since the beginning of humankind, the struggle has been for land, as it remains today, though veiled in politics, ideology, and war. Aknowledging the problems that we all cause for the balance of our world's ecosystem, therefore, is an absolute neccesity in order to realize lasting peace. If we are honest, we have nothing to hide.

Please Please Please
Read the New York Times article, and get mad.
We all are from the same planet, whether we aknowledge that or not. Please do.

Monday, June 06, 2005


Untitled, 6th in a series
Photoshop 7.0, Unregistered