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Welcome to thecie dot org. We make poetic media with people of all ages from all over
the world for everyone. Please explore our website to learn more about our
videos and our art
work in the schools.
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Monday, June 16, 2008MEDIA DADA is a multimedia portrait by Media Mike Hazard of his daughter.
MEDIA DADA opens on June 18, 2008 at the Rourke Art Museum in Moorhead, Minnesota as part of the NEO-DADA Midwestern. Running through September 9, call 218.236.8861 for more.
Here is a poem from MEDIA DADA.
THE WEE ONE WONDERS
Where does outer space go?
Did dinosaurs turn into monkeys?
Dada, can I watch you sexing?
I said my prayers after Grammie's treatment; why is she getting sicker?
Don't you know watching TV is my hobby?
When can I get keys?
Does a camera take pictures when you are not looking through it?
Can I use the f word?
How does the Easter Bunny lay all those eggs in one night?
Do you think there is one of you that is good up in heaven and one of you that is bad in the underworld?
Why do we have to pay to live, if these are our bodies?
Who made God?
There are lots of things in this world we don't know, do we?
MEDIA DADA began as a video made to show and tell the kids at my daughter's day care center what her daddy does for a living. Now 21 years in progress, the length will always stay the same, but new images and sounds will be added as life evolves.
PULLING DUCHAMP'S LEG was made with kids once upon a time one Saturday morning at the Walker Art Center to complement an exhibition called DUCHAMP'S LEG.
MEDIA DADA plays with the playful ideas of the Dada artists, using chance and peace as sources of power. Here is another piece of MEDIA DADA.
THINK TANK
My kid freaked yesterday. A tank wheeled onto the schoolyard at Central High, recruiting.
She got it. At the school with a zero tolerance policy for weapons of ass destruction, a killing machine parks.
In her face, the soldier told her her right to go to a public school, to wear long hair, was because of his tank. The Pentagon thinks it wrote the Bill of Rights.
In her face, the history teacher tells my child she is free because of our tank. Two men, one teen.
War is my job, that's what I do.
No, you are an army recruiter. You are parked here following orders. You are promising the moon to kids who dream big with little means.
With raw poise, like our children, we have to stand in the way of the tank.Sunday, June 15, 2008GEORGE C. STONEY, a veteran maker of over 50 documentaries and professor of film at New York University, is subject of a biographical documentary in progress.
Legendary in the field as a documentary filmmaker, community activist and video pioneer, Stoney is perhaps most famous as the "godfather of public access to cable television," a title he characteristically declines. Still, his advocacy for a citizen's right to use the new media for public expression helped create the federal legislation which now enables public access. Click to watch CABLE FABLE.
His students are everywhere: Paul Barnes (chief editor for Ken Burns), Judith Helfand (BLUE VINYL and UPRISING OF 34), Jim Brown (THE WEAVERS), John Whitehead (MAKE 'EM DANCE), and Mike Hazard (I'M SORRY I WAS RIGHT) to name only a few.
The nonagenarian Stoney teaches that "films should do, not just be."
For an exhaustive catalog of his works, click.
For a clip of George speaking, click.
You can also see two early films of Stoney's on line. Booked for Safekeeping (1960) was made to train police officers in the assistance and management of mentally ill and confused persons.
Palmour Street (1949) was Stoney's first film. One reviewer called it "a curious hybrid of soap opera, history lesson, race relation film, melodrama and Coronet instructional film about a poor family growing up in the South".
The Stoney Project is directed by Mike Hazard, who has just been awarded a Bush Foundation Fellowship to support this piece. Stay tuned.Wednesday, June 11, 2008FOR 17 SHORTS created by Media Mike with a host of great collaborators including Deb Wallwork, Laura Youngbird, Mary Megee, George Stoney and Ossian Or, zoom to YouTube.
You will see pieces on Esther Horne, star quilts, Peace House, Carol Bly, Everett Parker, Pelican Rapids, Circle of Nations School, Jerome Liebling, the Ghost Dance and more.Monday, June 09, 2008THREE MEDIA PIONEERS, George Stoney, Nicholas Johnson, and Randall Pinkston, presented a session at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis on Saturday, June 7, 2008. It will be available soon as both an audio podcast on line and a dvd.
Called Past Success and Future Possibilities: A Discussion with Media Reform Pioneers, these three engaged veterans of civil rights and media activism bore witness to and helped shape more than half a century of U.S. media policy.
Together--Stoney, as independent filmmaker and professor of film and television at NYU's Tisch School; Pinkston, as broadcast journalist and the first African-American news anchor at WLBT-TV, the Jackson, Mississippi, CBS affiliate; and Johnson, as writer and former FCC commissioner--provide a unique complex of views on social change, from the inside out. Stevie Converse, Free Press Communications Coordinator, moderated.
This session featured a video history of the landmark WLBT case, in which Dr. Everett C. Parker and other concerned citizens ultimately moved the FCC to revoke the station's license--the first and only time a station lost its license for failing to serve the public interest. It was this case which established the right of American citizens to testify at federal regulatory hearings, the right of standing.
Another clip shown at the session documents the history of the public interest in American media. Excerpted by Media Mike, both clips come from ON TELEVISION: PUBLIC TRUST OR PRIVATE PROPERTY, written and directed by Mary Megee for On Television, Ltd. Aired on PBS from 1988 to 1992 and first distributed by Charles Benton’s Films Inc., this documentary is available through California Newsreel. Megee [ontel2@aol.com] is currently developing a 20-year update on the issues.
Generous support for this session was provided by the Benton Foundation.Tuesday, May 20, 2008HAN SHAN? Over a thousand years ago, a man laughed up and down the slopes of a cold mountain in China. He wrote poems on trees and walls of caves and on leaves. He limped. He sported a birch-bark hat, big wooden clogs, a patched robe, a pigweed staff and a demeanor interpreted by others as craziness.
He was Han Shan, and he wrote poems for everyone, not just the educated elite.
A man free of spiritual conceit, it is unclear whether or not he was a monk, whether he was a Buddhist or a Taoist or both.
By great good luck, we flew to Japan and China to videotape a story about Han Shan, also known as Cold Mountain. We interviewed Burton Watson and Red Pine, two of his key translators. Then we recorded with Gary Snyder, whose Han Shan translations he published in his first book.
A film called COLD MOUNTAIN is in progress. Co-directed by Mike Hazard and Deb Wallwork, it will be released in the fall of 2008.
Here are four of Han Shan's 300 poems.
Born thirty years ago
I've traveled countless miles
along rivers where the green rushes swayed
to the frontier where the red dust swirled
I've made elixirs and tried to become immortal
I've read the classics and written odes
and now I've retired to Cold Mountain
to lie in a stream and wash out my ears
--translated by Red Pine
Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars,
Battered by extremes of hunger and cold.
Out of work, our only joy is poetry:
Scribble, scribble we wear out our brains.
Who will read the works of such men?
On that point you can save your sighs.
We could inscribe our poems on biscuits
And homeless dogs wouldn't deign to nibble.
--translated by Burton Watson
I can't stand these bird songs
Now I'll go rest in my straw shack.
The cherry flowers are scarlet
The willow shoots up feathery.
Morning sun drives over blue peaks
Bright clouds wash green ponds.
Who knows that I'm out of the dusty world
Climbing the southern slope of Cold Mountain?
--translated by Gary Snyder
Dust, this life is lost in dust.
Like bugs, bugs in a bowl
we circle, daily, circle
unable to get out.
We're nothing like the gods, nothing.
Our sorrows never end, ever.
Years and months flow like water
when, all of a sudden, we're old.
--version by Mike Hazard
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