Walking into Bare Life in Jerusalem's Museum on the Seam, one is immediately absorbed by the exhibit's thick layers of context and irony. The building, which once functioned as Israel's military outpost on the seam between Israel and Jordan when the city was divided (1948-67), is now a venue for contemporary socio-political art. Among the human rights-themed artworks are windows backed by sliding steel doors originally used for armed lookouts.

Bare Life provides the space to reflect on the tension in this ideologically and religiously divided city, and the normalization of its militarization. Thoughts of Apartheid might enter viewers' minds when they approach the exhibit's first installation: the South African artist Kendell Geers's Time of the Harvest constructed with shelves filled with Belgian police riot helmets. From the surveillance works of Sophie Calle to psychologically disturbing photos by Paul McCarthy and absurdist films of Samual Beckett, the museum's curator has woven together the works of 42 diverse international artists. The selected pieces incite the viewer to examine infringements on civil liberties and human rights, the cultural effects of such violations, and the eventual threat of violence and paranoia becoming status quo.

While there I saw Orthodox Jews and Muslim women in hijab meditating on the same works and was inspired to linger even longer to absorb the whole of the experience. The show is open until June. If you miss it, their next exhibit, Heartquake, looks like it will provide an equally intense critique of global and local conflict. To deepen the context of Bare Life, visit the nearby Israeli Occupation Wall dividing the Holy Land or the Western Wall, where you'll often witness soldiers slinging guns on their backs before they begin to pray.

On May 4, 1970 four students of Kent State University were shot dead by National Guardsmen during a protest against the US government's invasion of Cambodia. It was a frightening acting out of violence by the state -- like the earlier and less well remembered murder of three black students by state troopers at South Carolina State College (February 8, 1968; another 28 injured), and at Jackson State University on May 14, 1970 where two black students were killed (another 12 injured) by local police. In all three tragedies the state turned against its citizens engaged only in the democratically legitimate activity of dissent.

Mike and Kendra's website – May 4, 1970 – is an online archival memorial about the Kent State event and about the subsequent struggle with University officials to have memorials constructed in the parking lot where the students were killed. The website documents in detail and with photographs what happened not only on May 4, but in the days leading up to the May 4 killings and the subsequent court trial.

The website also provides information about the lesser known Jackson State University tragedy.

In memoriam.

UPDATED MAY 5TH

Looks like Barrick Gold is following up on a previous threat:

On April 30th, Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold announced it is making good on threat of legal action against a small, non-profit Quebec publishing house. The world's largest gold mining company - which took in $1.73 billion last year - is suing Les Éditions Écosociété and the authors of the book Noir Canada: pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique for an incredible six million dollars - 25 times the amount the publisher says it makes in a year. The company also wants all copies of the book pulled from shelves.

The books principal author, Alain Denault, and the publishing house immediately denounced the lawsuit as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) meant simply to silence the mining company's critics. Both the author and the publisher have pointed out that the book is thoroughly researched and relies heavily on research that is publicly available.

In the suit, Barrick claims it has been defamed by the contents of the book, and that the authors and publisher have undertaken a widespread smear campaign against the company. The book outlines alleged human rights abuses carried out by Barrick Gold in various African countries, including the deaths of more than 50 Tanzanians in 1996 and fuelling the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A spokesperson for Écosociété has called on the Quebec government to act quickly to instate legislation that would outlaw SLAPP lawsuits. Deneault and Guy Cheyney, coordinator at Éditions Écosociété, will be holding a press conference Monday, presumably to discuss their next step.

UPDATE - MAY 5TH: At their press conference today, Cheyney and Denault made an appeal for financial support from the population and called on the Quebec government to pass legislation against SLAPPs. Full text of their press release and interview with Alain Deneault after the jump (in French).

In the wake of the recent Conservative election spending scandal that has erupted in Canada, author and activist David Bernans sent in a nifty new tune he wrote to commemorate the issue. Enjoy!

The Harper Hokey-Pokey
aka the "in-and-out shuffle"

Tory Verse

You put a million bucks in
You take a million bucks out
You buy some national ads and you spin them all about
You do the hokey-pokey, but don't get caught
That's how an election is bought!

Elections Canada Verse

You see the money go in
You see the money come out
You see a million overspent and think "what's this all about?"
You can't get the docs, so you call the cops
That's how the Tories get caught!

Liberal Verse

You see the Mounties go in
You see the Mounties come out
It looks like a scandal, so its time to scream and shout
You do the hokey-pokey and you shout "shame, shame!"
That's how you play the game!

Voters' Verse

You vote the Liberals in
You vote the Liberals out
You vote the Conservatives in to clean the adscam out
You do the hokey-pokey, watch a new scandal on TV
In our capitalist democracy!

David Bernans is the author of North of 9/11 (Cumulus Press, 2006).

Photo by thivierr.

Arshad Khan's Threadbare is understandably a little rough around the edges (some shaky camera, sound and lighting), but delivers an emotional and lucid blow to the dangerously paranoid and racist echelons of state power in Canada. The 40 minute documentary follows the story of the "Toronto 24"–the South Asian men in Toronto wrongly suspected of being a terror cell operating inside Canada, supposedly targeting the CN tower. After violent and publicized arrests of the men, their names and loose associations with Al-Queda (they had no associations with Al-Qaeda at all) traveled the globe, culminating in CNN reports and front page stories on every Canadian newspaper. Khan's film traces the absurd media blow-up following their arrest and detention, and offers some more sober insights into irresponsible and responsible journalism from some of the writers at Canada's only large left-of-center daily, The Toronto Star.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) project that was racially profiling these men and wrongfully surveilling their lives as they went about school, jobs and regular life, was called Project Thread. Some extremely loose connections between the 24 (such as being Pakistani and Muslim, or allegedly attending the same business school) was enough of a "thread" to knock in their doors one morning and drag them to prison where many stayed for months despite no charges and dropped allegations two weeks later. The film also documents the small but fierce group of people who rally in support of the detained men, who call themselves Project Threadbare.

When I was a smoker, the world was my ashtray. It's a philosophy on a short leash of intelligence (or, should I say, with short-sheeted intelligence). I don't smoke any more, but it looks like the world is still somebody's ashtray - actually, somebody's garbage dump. And this is what Delhi artist Vivan Sundaram forces us to reconsider in his new exhibition at the Chemould Prescott Road Gallery in Mumbai.

The exhibition (called Trash) is made up of sculpture, video and photographs. The huge digital prints (some as large as 60” x 40”) are of changing perspectives of a massive urban cityscape made of compressed and reconfigured garbage. Picture in your mind waste transformed into teetering skyscrapers, bridges, streets and parks, and old toothbrushes mangled into sickly palm trees.

Sundaram built the garbage cityscape in his studio a few years ago with the help of members of Delhi's waste-picker community (the waste-pickers were hired and the project coordinated through an NGO called Chintan that works to help waste-pickers gain rights). The photos capture the garbage-scape from a dizzying array of angles designed to both highlight the junkheap's at times remarkable simulacra of an urban landscape, and to playfully provoke. Take, for example, the digital print of skyscrapers of trash ornamented with a tiny Spiderman in mid-leap floating above the city ...

Imagine a world where the power company controlled which appliances you could plug into the outlet, or charged special fees for some appliances and not others. It's a clever analogy used by Lawrence Lessig to explain the importance of net neutrality. Imagine a world where your ISP had the power to charge you more to visit some websites over others, to decide which websites you can visit on their network, and charged some websites more than others for network access.

Lawrence Lessig -- Stanford Professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society, makes the case in a recent interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Lessig also talks about the phenomenal growth of Google -- originally an experiment by a group of graduate students at Standford looking for a better search engine. He says that if telecommunications companies had the ability to 'traffic shape' and 'data manage' when Google was started, the Google folks would have needed permission from the network provider (AT & T) to start their project.

Others matters talked about include concerns over the amount of personal information being accumulated by Google, Yahoo's handing over personal information to the government of China, the Creative Commons, and Lessig's most recent project -- Change Congress, his attempt to instigate anti-corruption congressional reform in the United States.

It's a great interview. Check out the April 17, 2008 Democracy Now program, the interview starts about 40:00 in (the rest of the show is great, too).

Stalags, a documentary film about Israeli Nazi porn paperbacks of the same name, is exposing audiences in North America to one of history's most bizarre literary genres. The film asks probing questions about post-Holocaust Jewish identity and sexuality, in an attempt to explain why Israeli teens had an irresistible infatuation with busty blonde Nazis.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum. (New York Times)

Salon.com has an interesting review of the film, which is not surprisingly gathering mixed reviews.

Stalags is screening in New York City until next week.

At a recent Cinema Politica screening at Concordia University, Montreal, filmmaker and professor Liz Miller caught up with Svetla Turnin and yours truly to get our two cents on organizing grassroots political film screenings. She interviewed us at her very packed screening of her new documentary, The Water Front.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Cinema Politica was started five years ago at Concordia and has grown into an alternative network for distributing and exhibiting independent cinema (with a focus on Canadian titles and documentaries). There are currently about 30 locals (chapters) in operation across Canaada, mostly at college and university campuses.

Cinema Politica has also sprung up in Germany, France, and Romania. The first Cinema Politica "festival" will take place this May in Transylvania.

überculture, the non-profit responsible for this here blog, is the organization behind the project. We started Cinema Politica to support independent political cinema as well as to address the lack of diversity on Canada's movie screens.

Once again, graffiti artist Banksy has aesthetically liberated a patch of cement in downtown London.

According to the Sydney Herald, Banksy created the image (of a child on a ladder and the message) on a post office wall in downtown London after constructing three stories of scaffolding and hiding the process with plastic tarps.

The whole event was a captured on closed circuit television (CCTV), but Banksy was not.