StumbleUpon | caravia's blog posts

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/33482611/

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:33:01 -0700

I spent two terrible days in the middle of the green zone, which is supposedly the only safe area of the country. But even though there was a safe haven an explosion ocurred 50 meters from the U.S. embassy, which is huge and will have the dimensions of the Pentagon and it will have schools and McDonalds, Pizza Huts, cinemas and sports clubs and churches and banks, such as Americans need in an American city in the middle of Baghdad. The explosion killed an American truck driver who was returning to United States after two years of work there.
And the same day that we arrived, 75 journalists from the whole world an American was found dead at the entrance to the green zone, beheaded with his hands tied behind his back .
We spent two days in the middle of a bunker surrounded by American soldiers and Peruvians mercenaries, Peruvians are 2000 men, working as paramilitaries, who are responsible for the security of the area. Recruited in Lima and Bogota, and San Salvador and are being taken to be cannon fodder there, do not know a word of English and live in dusty barracks in Baghdad on the day off they go to play soccer in the U.S. embassy the only fun they have.
We met journalists and translators, they told us about a ghost town deserted and where people who are lucky to have that work run from home to work and from work to home, without looking anywhere without talking to anyone. We spoke with relatives of the 295 journalists killed in the course of 6 years.

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/32862123/

Sat, 16 May 2009 09:58:42 -0700

I am now back from Guatemala, one of the Earth's most violent places, where 17 people are killed every day. And it's now peace, when they were at war 300000 people were killed. United Fruits favorite land, where Indians were exploited by the company. I never buy Chiquita bananas, the heirs of the infamous United Fruit.

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/32516340/

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:57:23 -0700

On Monday I travel to Guatemala with 80 Spanish women, poets, singers, actresses. We are going to meet women from indian ethnic groups and with organizations working against the killing of women.
No al femminicidio, no to women killings!
http://www.cristinadelvalle.com/

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/32211956/

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:14:24 -0700

I feel as a nomad, being lecturing in Ume� Gotland and Stockholm, speaking about my book, about social media, about activism and art. Having difficulties with Stumble Upon, please friends bear with me and read my old posts, many of them are still worth to read!! :)

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/30967125/

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:57:36 -0700

I am very sad I has not been able to actualize my blog, I has been in Palestine, in Syria, in Damascus, and my surfing routines have been difficult to follow. No connections or bad connections, war, electricity cuts, I am now home again and I will share more links and thoughts, soon :) As soon I have washed the tons of clothes and answered the hundreds of mail I got in my mailbok.
Peace

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/29840657/

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:36:55 -0800

Cadbury Eyebrows from Nils-Petter Lovgren on Vimeo.

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/29652997/

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:54:17 -0800

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP4d4oFKv78

Wonderful Letterman show about George W Bush worst speeches!

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/29312619/

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:25:22 -0800

I am now in Damascus, Syria, together with a delegation of Spanish politicians and intellectuals. Last week 300000 people went out i Spain and reclaimed a ceasefire for Gaza. We are going to demonstrate tomorrow in a Palestine refugee camp, 500000 palestines live in Syria as refugees.

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/29205783/

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:43:05 -0800

Naomi Klein writes in the Nation about South Africa and Israel:

"1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures--quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non-Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza in 2007 was "infinitely worse than apartheid."

http://caravia.stumbleupon.com/review/29181321/

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 07:26:53 -0800

Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture, a must read about the intellectual's duty with their time.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html

"In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter."