Kirsten Brydum 1983-2008

To honor Kirsten’s work on the waking dream of a Really Really Free Market, we hope the parallels and analysis below will give courage to any and all to see that those who attempt to prolong the atrocities of Wall Street ( -run politics) must be held accountable otherwise they will continue to be in our faces with extraordinarily idiotic, self-serving and vicious demands that have very real and immediate impacts on neighborhoods from the 9th Ward to Sadr City to Juarez to your backyard. Now is a perfect time for any and all of us to act upon a course for Another Possible World.

Should Washington’s 2nd attempt this week to plunder the poor to save their own sorry asses succeed, there are innumerable acts that can bring an end to their hijacking of civil society. WALKOUTS may be the most obvious and most immediate response, but there will be many more strategies to come.

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Brian Holmes has been writing some key illuminations to rethink and reformulate the role of art and has become an important resource for the XL Terrestrials in developing a language for Arts + Praxis directions. The following is a response to Brian’s post Financial Crimes at the Continental Drift site:

Dear Brian and C-drift readers,

First, thank you for your words… it reminds us that creativity might be the only option to de-escalate the insanity, to rise above, to implement our self-defense, and to reclaim the meaningful.

The darkest news came over the indy posts 2day… and it had absolutely nothing and everything to do with the meltdown and the financial crimes… the news of 2 shining sisters of other possible worlds who were murdered:

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/09/26/18541460.php

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/09/30/18542023.php

The meditation on the relationships would be unbearably and inescapably deep were there not some combination of rage and sadness and repulsion and yes endless admiration that cracks open that space to imagine the necessary new art forms to become REAL again in the face of all the simulated manipulations and actual murderous chaos.

Still processing this, and won’t have time to really complete these thoughts now, but to begin:

This 2nd victim, Kirsten Brydum was the luminous organizer of an event called the Really Really Free Market ( a non-financial zone, a place of interaction off the economic grid), and she was in New Orleans to spread the wealth of arts and praxis that arose in the few remaining groves of collective community in San Francisco, some small patch of free-thinking and still-caring people that had not yet been clearcut or driven out by the rising costs of living and the expansion of corporate cubicles and lifeless terminals.

That she encountered such a brutal and unjust collision in the vacuum left by Katrina and the merciless Neocon agendas, is something that in a holistic analysis appears directly attributable to the Bush/Cheney/Paulson economicon… the entire Republicrat escalation… of winner/loser divides that you mention…and racial divides should be added here. ( see Financial Crimes article )

Meanwhile in the artworld mirror, Damien Hirst’s £111,576,800 sale ( over $200m) represents the pinnacle of commodified (and consolidated) object arts/Spectacle and its nadir of practical applications, perception value, and popular community empowerment. For us this should be the same 777 numerical sign, Art’s Black Monday, the same moment that sets the stage for the beginning of the new form, (we call it Arts + Praxis) which seizes upon both the bigger picture and precise moments to both physically and conceptually intervene, to turn the activities of our world left-side up.

Ten, twenty years, sure we can see that longview/longhaul (reference to Financial Crimes) for all sorts of desires … But demanding tomorrow is liberated from the community shredder … and the shameless fuckers who would come propose to rape and pillage the same victims twice in less than a week… Art must have innumerable acts for disengaging ourselves from this flailing and deadly and violent lunacy right now!

p.s. sorry if this went too far off on its own direction… don’t have the ability to squeeze it back into a container now.

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Justice for our sister Marcella Sali Grace!

Oaxaca de Juarez, Oaxaca.

We just don’t have time currently and don’t know enough of the backround yet to write up enough on this other tragic story, but the above parallels relate to the situation in Oaxaca as well. And please read the letter at Indybay and maybe look for ways you might help in the struggles there. Her murder was reported yesterday on Democracy Now and seems otherwise to have received very little press.

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Our comments are still not working… we’d love to hear your thoughts, but you’ll have to send them as an email. see contact page. And there is also a growing thread at Indybay.org for sending your thoughts re: Kirsten and Sali.