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"Chess is similar to boxing. You need to develop a strategy, and you need to think two or three steps ahead about what your opponent is doing. But what’s the difference between chess and boxing? In chess, nobody is an expert, but everybody plays. In boxing everybody is an expert, but nobody fights."
Vitali Klitschko
BLUE SCHOLARS AND JON JON PRESENT “SEIJUN SUZUKI” THE MUSIC VIDEO
This video was filmed in Los Angeles on October 15 and 16 during the Southern California leg of the Cinemetropolis tour. We had been talking with our guy Jon Jon Augustavo for over a year about collaborating on a music video sometime before he finishes film school and blows the f up. I had become a fan of his prolific and experimental work with Seattle rappers and impressed with the quick turnaround on his projects that still never seemed rushed when you saw the final product. I like that he refuses to call music videos “visuals.” We thought that Seijun Suzuki, the most “random” of the Cinemetropolis songs, would fit the improvised production style and clean shots of a Jon Jon video. Like a trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist. We bounced around many ideas that all eventually morphed into “let’s wear some suits, get some guns and see what happens.” You ever seen a Seijun Suzuki flick? I swear that’s how he made his films too. But wielding guns around L.A. didn’t seem like a good idea. So we used the homie and tour manager C-Knowledge’s samurai swords instead. Timing was perfect w/ The Physics on this leg of the tour with us, which meant that we could get Thig’s hook cameo and then all rock out at the show afterward. So everybody in L.A., that’s the real reason why we were wearing suits that night and that night only of the entire tour. Enjoy the video.
Prometheus Brown & Bambu “Lookin’ Up” video coming soon from @northboundfilms (Taken with instagram)
manny cmon bro do it
Youth and Student Movement in the Philippines
This video was filmed during an exposure trip of July 2011 in the Philippines and featured at the report back multi-media show “Halong” in November 2011.
An exposure trip is a program designed to expose people to the harsh realities and true living conditions experienced by the people of the Philippines through educational discussions, integrations, mass actions and community organizing.
We had the opportunity to learn about the youth and student conditions in the Philippines and the movement of young people demanding basic human rights for their future. We were able to integrate with various youth and student organizations including Anakbayan chapters at the Univeristy of the Philippines Diliman and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, other youth groups, alliances and fraternities including out-of-school and working youth, as well as youth community-organizing outside of their sector in the womens movement, workers movement, cultural movement, etcetera.
To learn more about Anakbayan Seattle, the Filipino youth and student movement, and the National Democratic struggle in the Philippines, please visit anakbayan.net or email anakbayan.seattle@gmail.com.
Filmed by: Nicole Ramirez
Edited by: Janelle Quibuyen
Here is a story about two photos taken around the same time at a pivotal moment in Philippine history.
The first photo, taken by internationally renowned photojournalist and Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, was published in Aperture magazine (issue 108, Fall 1987). She spent five months in early 1986 in the Philippines documenting the last days of the Marcos dictatorship. The photo, taken during an anti-Marcos rally, looks down upon a mass of brown people raising the “L” (for Laban) signs with their hands. In the upper left, a huge effigy of Cory Aquino stands above the mass with a sign reading “Cory Power is People Power.” Brown and yellow, brown and yellow: the vivid colors scream hope, the contrast captures the political polarization of the moment. This is the kind of photo that good photojournalists always take of a big crowd.
The second photo was never published. It was taken by Uncle Dado Saturay, a former health worker and amateur photographer in the anti-Marcos movement who immigrated to Seattle in the late 80s. It was salvaged from a box of hundreds of slides that sat in the Filipino Workers Action Center in Seattle for a few years and was almost thrown away in 2006 when the center shut down. I’ve been slowly digitizing this big ass box of slides since. Here, the photographer is not aiming down at a crowd, but aiming upward from it. His gaze is fixed on a small group of people posed in a performance with their arms raised upward to the left. One holds a sickle. They stand in front of red banners with lots of long words. Unlike Meiselas’s photo, the colors are drab and faded. The word DRUG takes up more space than anything else. This is not a hopeful image, but a defiant one. It foreshadows the history that would soon follow after the colors from the first photo faded.
And just inside the far right edge of the frame of the second photo stands Susan Meiselas, camera in hand, looking away at something else.
SEIJUN SUZUKI VIDEO COMING REAL SOON
