You Should Watch This Trailer
Our collective friends at Jedidiah and my personal one, Kahana has put together an amazing documentary on surfing in Bangladesh. If your in San Diego this Friday (11/20/09) at the Sunshine Brooks Theater at 8:00pm in Oceanside as a part of the California Surf Festival.
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What I am Editing to
Unbelievable jam by the Dirty Projectors
Awesome mash up by WALE, he is going to be huge
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There is a place beyond ambition
There is a Place Beyond Ambition
When the flute players couldn’t think of what to say next
they laid down their pipes,
then they lay down themselves
beside the river
and just listened.
Some of them, after a while,
jumped up
and disappeared back inside the busy town.
But the rest—
so quiet, not even thoughtful—
are still there,
still listening.
- Mary Oliver
History tells us how to move forward
In his awe inspiring book, Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild chronicles the rise of the Abolitionist movement in England, how the entire nation rallied behind a small team of revolutionaries who made it their utmost purpose to end the horrific slave trade. We certainly don’t consider ourselves of equal stature with great men like William Wilberforce and John Newton, but we can’t help but identify with their vigor and singularity of mind in speaking out for the rights of others. And when you read about the dynamics of the 12 men who spearheaded the movement, we can’t help but see the IC office in our heads.
These men spent endless, sleepless nights rallying protests and demonstrations, doing national tours speaking at churches and community meetings sharing the shocking truth of the slave trade. This was in the 19th century. Read below, and tell me this doesn’t give you chills. This book was a major catalyst in brainstorming the Global Night Commute.
“The movement they forged is a landmark for an additional reason. There is always something mysterious about human empathy, and when we feel it and when we don’t. Its sudden upwelling at this particular moment caught everyone by surprise. Slaves and other subjugated people have rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights. And most startling of all, the rights of people of another color, on another continent. …As tens of thousands of protesters signed petitions to Parliament, Fuller (a leader in slave sugar trade) was amazed that these were “stating no grievance or injury of any kind or sort, affecting the Petitioners themselves.” His bafflement is understandable. He was seeing something new in history.”
pg 5 of Bury The Chains, Adam Hochschild.
Words from Jane
Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.
- Jane Austen
The moment we become aware of our humility, we’ve lost it.
- Unknown Source.
Moved by words and moving
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
- Lilla Watson,
Aboriginal elder, educator, and activist.
Youtube: Inspiring genius
Stephen Wiltshire from London is a star among savants. Stephen is autistic. He did not speak his first words “pencil” and “paper” until he was 5. Yet, when he was 11 he drew a perfect aerial view of London after only one helicopter ride. The filmmakers of this short decided to test his ‘living camera’ on the city of Rome. And a helicopter ride.
Derrick Jensen: someone to talk about
Derrick Jensen is a radical who articulates his critique of contemporary civilization in many books. You may hate what he has to say, you may love it. But I hope you talk about it:
“If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it’s gone. That’s what happens when you convert living beings to cash. That conversion, from living forests to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system.”
(more…)
TED Talk: We stopped being wise
Don’t know if you guys love TED talks yet, but seriously, get on it. Turn off Dating In The Dark for five minutes, and go to ted.com and commence the mind-blowing process. It is an unparalleled collection of the world’s brightest thinkers explaining what they believe and why they believe it. About business. About life. About the way the world works. Watch it, learn it, and be wise.
This one was found by our girl Margie.
A slice of inspiration
“”Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.”
- G.K. Chesterton
Movies we want to see: Drifter
This movie makes me want to buy that crazy jet-blue unlimited ticket junk, and explore explore explore.
Jon Foreman: Goodness precedes Greatness
I write songs for a living, which is to say that writing songs helps me to live. The song becomes a place where melody and tempo can cover some truly volatile topics. God, women, politics, sex, hatred, disillusionment- a song or a story can be a deeper vessel and more forgiving than most conversations. Poetry can get under the skin without your permission, and music can offer perspective or hope that might have been hidden before. And so the song becomes a vehicle to cover some serious ground.
These days I have a hard time writing a song that feels bright or hopeful. The unemployment rate is edging up even further and spending is down. Foreclosures are way up and stocks are down. Our headlines are full of war, natural disaster, and corruption. So I go looking for songs of hope and stories that remind me of the incredible privilege of living another day. I suppose I’m looking for a hero of sorts. Someone who rises above the situation and does something incredible.
Remember the guy who threw himself on top of the passenger who had suffered a seizure in the New York Subway? As the train was approaching he jumps down onto the tracks and risks his life to save the life of a complete stranger whose convulsions had thrown him into the path of an oncoming train. Incredible. Have you seen Team Hoyt, the dad who pushes his disabled son through all the marathons? They’ve even done the Iron Man competitions together as father and son, which makes me tear up. Or the story of Mother Teresa, a woman who gave her life to the less fortunate day after day after day. These are the stories that I want to sing about. These are stories of hope.
Lauryn Hill spittin truth
To me, this is why poetry, music, film, and art are important: to observe and critique society to make it better. To refine it. Bold moves. Lauryn Hill, you may be a crazy racist, but you are filling our heads with important thoughts. Checking motives and thoughts.
Mentoring Update: IC Mentors Inspire Students Before Exams
IC mentors address a group of students at Pope Paul VI Anaka School before their exams
Two thick mvule trees loomed overhead, casting webs of shadow and light across the two hundred students gathered beneath them. Sitting in a row before the students, a half dozen guest speakers waited their turn to speak. The students, all in grades S4 and S6, and all about to take the most important exams of their lives, sat wide-eyed and still. The open-air meeting was a crucial one. The guest speakers—IC mentors, the school’s Head Teacher, and the man who mentors the IC mentors, Mzee Lakwiya—were there to mentally prepare the students for their upcoming UACE and UCE exams, tests that would help determine the paths their lives would take. “On Monday,” one speaker said, “you all will jump into hot soup. We’re here to help you get ready.”
The Legend: Tibor Kalman
Tibor Kalman: a graphic design legend and the former editor in chief of COLORS magazine. Read his words, and soak up the revolution.
“Mass media, architecture, design, and art exist for the sole purpose of creating wealth. Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You’ll miss them forever. But I’m not pessimistic. Future generations not burdened by the egotism of having created wealth will be able to create a righteous society, live in harmony with nature and germinate culture from the few grains not yet destroyed.”
Why swim in real water, when you can pay to swim in fake.
“We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right…But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability… We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.”
“Everything is an experiment. The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome.”
Inspiring Woman: the story of Mother Jones
“Goodbye, boys; I’m under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up the fight! Don’t surrender! Pay no attention to the injunction machine at Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow. While you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the money powers.”
Mother Jones was a firey woman who changed labor policy and faught for human rights.
We think you should know who she is. So read on…
Jones spent the second half of her life involved in the labor movement. From the 1890s though the 1920s she worked tirelessly as a political “hell-raiser,” advancing social and political causes such as the abolition of child labor, and organizing the United Mine Workers. In 1905 she helped found the International Workers of the World (IWW).
Coal miners and their families called her “the miner’s angel” and, after she began referring to the miners as “her boys,” she took on the nickname ‘Mother’ Jones. A charismatic speaker, she was adept at staging public events to get publicity for striking workers, and her physical courage was legendary. Opponents called her “the most dangerous woman in America,” but when she was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as “the grandmother of all agitators,” she said she hoped to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.
Mother Jones, honored today by the political magazine that bears her name, lived in a time when women were not allowed to vote. “You don’t need a vote to raise hell,” she said about that. “You need convictions and a voice.” She perhaps is best known for her saying, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”
Lawrence of Arabia
“All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
- T.E. Lawrence
British archeological scholar, adventurer, military strategist, and the writer of THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM (1927), an ambitious work which combines a detailed account of the Arab revolt against the Turks and the author’s own spiritual autobiography. T.E. Lawrence was better known in his lifetime as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ because of the dashing role he had in helping Arabs against the Turks during World War I. At 31 Lawrence was an international celebrity but embittered by his country’s policy he chose obscurity and died at the age of 46 after a motorcycle accident.
“I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into
my hands and wrote my will across
the sky in stars.
To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared
worthy house, that your eyes might be
shining for me.
When we came.”
(from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926, dedication)
Franz Kafka on what books to read
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? . . . [W]e need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone… A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
—Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904
MLK on Capitalism, Communism, and Evil
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Frederick Douglass was a hero
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”
If you haven’t already read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, go read it. now. like right now. It is inspiring and a fantastic articulation of injustice, the importance of education, and the quest for what is right.
Born into slavery on the eastern shore of Maryland, Frederick Douglass was sent at age ten to a family in Baltimore where he was taught the rudiments of reading and writing by his slave master’s sympathetic wife. With no formal schooling, Douglass became self-educated through reading anything he could acquire. (He took his last name from the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Lady of the Lake.) In his late teens he was hired out to a cruel master whom he defied in an act of great moral and physical courage. Ultimately, disguised as a sailor, the twenty year-old Douglass escaped to New York and began his extraordinary career as an abolitionist orator, writer, newspaper publisher and governmental official.
Douglass published three autobiographical books, the earliest and most influential of which is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). The Narrative focuses on the victims of slavery and the barbaric crimes inflicted upon them. It was an immediate success and today is considered a classic slave narrative.
A powerful physical presence and a superb orator, Douglass dramatically preached freedom and independence for slaves. Further, he was an early champion of women’s rights and printed the motto “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color” on the masthead of his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star. His vision was also international in scope as he advocated fair treatment for working people in England, Ireland and Scotland; yet his main focus was on this country, and during the Civil War he wrote: “We are fighting for unity of idea, unity of sentiment, unity of object, unity of institutions, in which there shall be no North, no South, no East, no West, no black, no white, but a solidarity of the nation, making every slave free, and every free man a voter.”
A word from Steinbeck
“It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, aquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.” – John Steinbeck (Cannery Row)
Dan Pallotta: What nonprofits can learn from the Apollo program
“Scale” is the new buzzword on the frontier of social sector thinking. Everyone wants to “take organizations to scale.” What does this mean? Getting an organization to the point where it can sustain itself?
This isn’t what scale means to me. Something like 400,000 Americans are chronically homeless. Some 800 million people are malnourished in the world. More than 2 million adults and children die of AIDS each year. Until we’ve created responses as large as that need, we haven’t reached scale. What good is it to have a bunch of nonprofits that are able to sustain themselves, if they are only large enough to address .001% of the problem? If “scale” as currently defined represents the apogee of our aspirations, then we have a big problem with our aspirations.
It does, and we do.
Nonprofit organizations have to join forces and begin committing themselves to impossible goals that address the massive social problems we confront, and they must define those goals in time and space — a cure for MS in 10 years; the end of homelessness in Boston in 10 years, and so on. Think of President Kennedy’s challenge: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No wiggle room there.
We miss you Michael
Michael Jackson has been a big influence on a lot of us in the office. (If you saw our ‘Musical To Believe In’ you can see the evidence of it) We miss you Michael.