yellowchair reality

Anne-Marie Angelo: The Black Panthers

yellowchair — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:02:22 +0000

Anne-Marie Angelo is a PhD Candidate in Duke University’s History Department. While the Black Panther Movement is largely associated with the U.S., Angelo’s dissertation focuses on Black Panther groups in the United Kingdom and Israel. Like their American counterparts, these were potent movements fighting for equal rights and to have their voices heard.

While this short film gives a taste of Angelo’s research, it also features her experience living in Cairo during the Arab Spring. The firsthand experience of a revolution resonated greatly with her research on the Black Panthers.

The music featured in this film includes:

Quality and Anger (Aestrid Byrne) / CC BY-SA 3.0
Human Sacrifice For Beginners (The Emer Mulholland Group) / CC BY-SA 3.0
Invisible Walls (Revolution Void) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
As We May Think (Revolution Void) / CC BY-NC 3.0

Brian Goldstone: The Miraculous Life

yellowchair — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:43:59 +0000

Brian Goldstone performs his anthropological research in the north of Ghana, studying Pentecostal churches cropping up in traditionally Muslim areas. In this region where miracles are taken as a common occurrence, Goldstone asks what this belief system says about Western society.

Kristina Jacobsen: On the Navajo Nation

yellowchair — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:04:12 +0000

Kristina Jacobsen has recently completed her dissertation on the life of a group of musicians on the Navajo Nation. In this 5-minute film, she discusses her time as a performer with Native Country Band, the nuances of the Navajo language, and what it was like living in a hogan.

“Consider yellow, for example…”

yellowchair — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:14:34 +0000

“Consider yellow, for example. We may try to define it, by describing its physical equivalent; we may state what kind of light-vibrations must stimulate the normal eye, in order that we may perceive it. But a moment’s reflection is sufficient to shew that those light-vibrations are not themselves what we mean by yellow. They are not what we perceive. Indeed, we should never have been able to discover their existence, unless we had first been struck by the patent difference of quality between the different colours. The most we can be entitled to say of those vibrations is that they are what corresponds in space to the yellow which we actually perceive.”

- G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

Layers&Lines now on Documentary24.com

yellowchair — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:23:29 +0000

“Roberta Allen: Layers & Lines” is now being featured at Documentary24. Her latest novel The Dreaming Girl is currently available from Ellipsis Press.

“Now they kiss, the water and the moon”

yellowchair — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:37:19 +0000

“I think I’ve written this scene before, but I’ll write it once again.” – So begins Robert Walser in his short story The Boat, before going on to depict a magical scene of two impassioned lovers. The moon, the water, and Walser’s language seem to do the physical acts that the characters themselves cannot.

Below, this story of love is lovingly read by Roberta Allen.

“The jungle lives at the borders of their sleep…”

yellowchair — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 13:03:10 +0000

In this pivotal chapter of Roberta Allen‘s The Dreaming Girl, a woman sleeps in a hut next to her lover in the jungles of Belize. Though she has only recently shared intimate relations with him, it is the jungle itself that is her true companion.

As the morning dawns, the jungle bears itself for her. Her mind meets its myriad creatures – the ants, the beetles, the butterfly larvae, the maggots, the peccaries – and she becomes one of them.

“(T)he leaves touch her with their knowing, the roots touch her, the vines touch her. There is life touching life. The living things that land on her body know her body is land like the earth.”

Below, Allen reads the chapter in full.

“in all the cities and countries, even Persia”

yellowchair — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 02:46:57 +0000

A child is lost, and a maid spends years, decades, looking for it – “in all the cities and countries” of the world.

Yes… “even Persia.”

In “The Maid,” the great Swiss writer Robert Walser encapsulates an entire epic in a few short paragraphs. A master of concision – not to mention irony and sheer, unadulterated play – Walser would seem a natural fit for Roberta Allen, who here reads one of her favorite of his stories.

“all my continents will be lost like Atlantis”

yellowchair — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 02:06:11 +0000

Do places have a reality in and of themselves, or are they always what we imagine them to be – products of our imagination, created with language?

In “Africa,” a story from the The Daughter, a novella in short stories, Roberta Allen creates her own Africa amidst the wildness and wreckage of vacant city lots.

Hear her read the story in full bellow…

Second Trip to Geer

yellowchair — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:45:16 +0000

David Eustice told me that now was a relatively good time to go check out Geer Cemetery, so far as it goes – “because there won’t be so many snakes.” Yikes! I took his advice, but not without wondering how close I came last time around…

Here are some pics from this my second trip (check out my first here). They do, I think you’ll agree, strike quite a big contrast to my set on Maplewood.

Geer Cemetery 2