Tag: archive

 
Multi-faceted Oakland arts space, 21 Grand presents a night of energetic music that fuses rock, pop and jazz with experimentalism, to raise funds to bring its venue up to code. This show features performances by: Murder Murder (free improv party band led by the always-engaging Paul Costuros), K.I.T. (melodic experimental rock blasts of innovation and fun, featuring members of xbxrx), Cryptacize (jarringly lovely guitar-driven trio featuring Nedelle Torrisi, Chris Cohen and Michael Carreira), Face (guitar and electronics from the inventive, talented Rose from Zeek Sheck), and SL Morse (Sarah Lockhart’s conceptual project translating texts into morse code, that becomes the rudimentary drum score for percussion-driven improvisation heavy on the syncopation, and erratic shifts) .
 
21 Grand, co-founded in 2000 by Sarah Lockhart, a former ATA volunteer, with her partner, Darren Jenkins, presents a variety of innovative and experimental art and music in Oakland, where an art scene has grown up around it. Home to various manifestations of the underground, a chance encounter with “the enforcers of the powers that be” has prompted 21 Grand to pursue licenses and permits for its venue at 416 25th St in Oakland  to avoid discovering what exactly “or else” entails.

for over five decades, since revolutionary forces toppled the Batista regime in 1959. Officially elected by the Cuban people in 1976, Fidel has nevertheless had to survive over 600 assassination attempts.

This original documentary from the Cuban Film Archive and director Rebeca Chávez, uses rarely seen, archival footage and audio from 1959 to the present, to create a collage of pivotal moments in the life of Fidel Castro. The film includes his redefinition of Cuba’s role facing scarcity in the 1990s after the overthrow of the Soviet Union. Hear Fidel addressing millions in Havana regarding struggles of the Cuban people for land reforms, increased sugarcane production and threats of imperialist intervention. Cuba, 2004, Spanish with English subtitles.

For more info contact  answer@ANSWERsf.org

Oliver Ressler is an artist doing projects on various socio-political themes. Since 1994 he has been concerned with theme specific exhibitions, projects in public space, and videos on issues of racism, migration, genetic engineering, economics, forms of resistance and social alternatives. The films “Venezuela from Below” and “5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela” made with political analyst Dario Azzellini, will be screened on consecutive evenings, with his most recent video “The Fittest Survive”, accompanying “Venezuela from Below” on the first night. Discussions will follow.

*Venezuela From Below*
*Video – 2004 – 67 min.*
*Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler*

In the film “Venezuela from Below,” the true actors in the social process are able to speak. They are the people of the grassroots and they speak about what they did and what they are doing, how they feel about the Bolivarian process, about their expectations and ideas. They see themselves as part of the process that is underway, but also problematize numerous points. The search for a social and economic model beyond neo-liberalism is no easy terrain; there are currently no successful, tested alternatives. The protagonists in the Bolivarian process have, however, set upon a path from which there is no return.

*The Fittest Survive*
*Video – 2006 – 23 min.*

The video “The Fittest Survive” is based on filming the five-day course “Surviving Hostile Regions” done in January 2006 in Wales, Great Britain by the AKE Group. The course instructors are British ex-special force soldiers. The participants are businessmen who are preparing for business in Iraq and other dangerous regions, government officials and mainstream journalists who, with their dishonest discourse of democracy and human rights, help to legitimise and secure the ideology of market-economics expansion.

The video, primarily filmed by hand camera, follows the survival-course participants as they experience the staged reality of live shell bombardments, an assault by armed guerrillas, the rescue of accident victims, and moving through mine fields. Above this training camp in Wales, low-flying British fighter planes hold manoeuvres and foreshadow the real war theatres in which the class participants will soon be.

For more information on Oliver Ressler’s work visit http://www.ressler.at/