"No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy" by writer and formerly Boston-based organizer Wendy Call covers a range of topics better known of than they are understood: indigenous struggles to preserve livelihoods, environments, language and identity; resistance to corporate globalization; popular education, bi-lingualism and interculturalism; and, in an older frame, development and underdevelopment. Through a nuanced and textured recounting of conversations and their contexts, Wendy remaps the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico’s Deep South while surfacing each of these topics.

Come share your energies at the 5th monthly Peña Rebelde at the encuentro 5 movement space on September 10th at 7 p.m., a gathering of souls in verse and rebellion. Gabrilla Ballard-Thakore, a recent transplant to Boston from New Orleans, will share her singer-songwriter creations. Gabrilla's music, an imaginative hybrid of her musical inspirations--from Bob Marley to Nina Simone - will delve into where she comes from and where she's going, not only as a musician, but as an activist and mother.

Ernesto “Eroc” Arroyo is a Boston emcee, one of the city’s key revolutionary rappers and “jipjoperos.” Eroc will be featured August 13th for the Peña Rebelde, a musical/poetical gathering taking place the 2nd Saturday of each month.

Adam Curtis’ new documentary, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, gives hope that at least some of the world is waking up from the mass hallucination of disembodied information. The documentary, which is subtitled, “The Rise of the Machines,” explores how in the later part of the 20th Century, and the first decade of the 21st, much of the world became organized around the old gnostic fantasy that information or souls can be separated from the constraints of the material world, becoming free to circulate through time and space. This way of seeing the world has always unleashed powerful fantasies of power among the powerful. And it has recently led some to the ludicrous conclusion that, “information wants to be free,” or that human beings are merely meat vehicles for the transport of genetic information through time.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has magnificent collections of objects housed in an extraordinary building, but I go there rarely, as so much of their permanent collection is, in fact, colonial plunder. Too often I have left enraged at the flaunting of stolen goods or disturbed by what must have been a lifetime of work identified with its owner and not for the unrecognized craftspeople who created it.

It’s not really right to skip the theatre when in London, so out of all the possible shows, I choose to see the revival of Mike Leigh’s “Ecstasy,” which has now closed.

Mike Leigh is a director I often admire; he is frequently called “a darling of the Left.” He is not a big campaigner, but when asked if he feels he is a political director has said, “You can't not be political. It's like asking if I consider myself a human being.”

“Shh,” the well-dressed woman with a finger to her lips cautions as she stealthily approaches the man asleep in his chair. A self-satisfied look plays on her face as she dips her hand into his jacket pocket. She need have no concern. From the pitcher and glass on the crimson tablecloth, it appears that he has passed out from too much drink and is not likely to awaken.

“Sleeping Man Having His Pockets Picked” was painted around 1655 by Nicolaes Maes, a student of Rembrandt. The oil on board genre scene is one of almost seventy masterpieces on view – portraits, still lifes, landscapes, sea paintings, and furniture – in “Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection.” The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, organized and is hosting the exhibition through June 19 when it begins a national tour.

Music by Si Kahn, book by Amy Merrill



Musical theater, noted singer/songwriter and activist Si Kahn in a recent radio interview, has often tackled serious issues in our lives. The personal and the comedic have often been used to confront real problems. Think race in “South Pacific,” oppression and identity in “La Cage Aux Foils.” These are plays that confront big issues and do it with a smile and some style.

“Silver Spoons” by the North Carolina-based Kahn (music) and Cambridge playwright Amy Merrill now through June 19th in its world premiere with the Nora Theater Company at Cambridge’s Central Square Theater tackles serious political issues with humor and music, albeit on a smaller scale (piano, a guitar, reeds and a violin arranged and orchestrated by Larry Hochman whose other recent credits include the Tony-nominated “Book of Mormon” and “The Scottsboro Boys”).

A young man decides to confront race by questioning strangers on the street. The result of the process is powerful. In his first conversation, the stranger seemed to search deep inside himself for his understanding of race in order to genuinely help J.A. Mitchell and offer him some closure. Mitchell developed these conversations into the book 30 Days of Race.

The conversations and the people he spoke with varied. They were a mix of races, ages, genders, and opinions. Mitchell asked them if we focus too much on race in the U.S., if all white people are racist, what people think about race and dress, or race and international politics, and so on. His project become like a sociological or anthropological study, gathering threads of narratives used to explain the concept of race that arose through natural flows of conversation. The book presents the “Idea of Race” and its social realities like a tangled yarn ball or a wildflower bouquet, with some shriveled and ugly pieces indeed.

So what’s funny about being in my 60s? It’s funny to be at an age where historical documentaries are being made about political actions I was involved in. Am I history?

Recently, on the exact fortieth anniversary of our takeover of a Harvard building, the final cut of “Left on Pearl” was shown to a sold-out crowd at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a documentary about the 1971 feminist takeover of a Harvard University building – one of very few such incidents ever – leading to 10 days of occupation, political agitation, individual transformation and media hysteria. We activists were told to scurry back to our husbands’ kitchens. The press could not get enough of us, or rather of bashing us.