WHOLENESS/order | Politicolor

Awe

Reverend Pinckney and the Creative Synthesis of Civic Leadership

By Shellee O'Brien

In his tribute to Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Henry Louis Gates reflects on an interview from a few years ago. Gates shares that what was remarkable was “for one still so young, Mr. Pinckney was deeply aware of the history he carried within himself, a history of the courageous and the slain, of the triumphant and the terrorized.” That tension of opposites, of all we can celebrate and all we can lament, is easy to read through without noticing its weight. You can read it as the work of a gifted writer but you can also read it as an important…

Connectedness

Kennedy’s Purple Prose

By Shellee O'Brien

Connectedness, Echoes

Echoes: Creativity and Aristotle’s Potluck

By Shellee O'Brien

As classic works become more familiar you find those ideas are anything but dead and gone. In fact, they have us surrounded. The ubiquity of ideas you’ve come to associate with Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Federalists or Antifederalists suggests those writers captured something fundamental about how we understand the world and ourselves. Our Echoes series attempts to capture these reverberations through time. Perhaps there is new insight to be seen by presenting the past to the present and vice versa. I recently read Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer in an attempt to keep thinking creatively despite the doldrums of…

Connectedness

Seeing and Knowing

By Shellee O'Brien

Or, you might be thinking, “seeing is believing.” Any survey of Politicolor quickly reveals a certain fascination with SEEING. But, here, seeing is not constrained by our… but is something of another (grey) matter. Our posts have asked what we know from what we see and how seeing changes how we think about what we know. That sentence could make you dizzy but that’s the point. There is an inextricable bond between what we see and what we know. Our previous investigations have involved reference to Cicero and Scipio’s Dream or Carl Sagan and astronauts. And sometimes both. We have…

Discovery, Reading LIst

Reading List: The Warmth of Other Suns

By Shellee O'Brien

If you’ve ever taught the Civil Rights Movement or even had a conversation about it, there’s a book you should read. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson reminded me of one of my favorite classroom moments talking about the Movement. It also made me re-think what I taught while I was there. First, that classroom moment… It was Black History month and two of my students asked to interview me about the Civil Rights Movement for the morning’s video announcement program. This was not an easy question for me. I was not a subscriber to these (sometimes) empty…

Connectedness

Politics on the Inside

By Shellee O'Brien

No, we’re not talking about political insiders. Not those hideous creatures that live inside the much maligned Beltway. We’re talking about one man’s perspective on the truth about politics as he understands it through human experience. For rapper El-P, all politics is internal to one’s self or to mankind. In an interview on Sound Opinions, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot asked the rapper about the subversive or personalized politics they heard embedded in his music. Jim and/or Greg (I’ve been listening for years but can’t tell their voices apart) asserted that El-P’s music had captured something important about the “tenor…

Awe

Detroit’s Hiedelberg Project: Questions of liveliness at the edges & organized complexity

By Shellee O'Brien

It was like walking through a graveyard. We found ourselves talking in hushed tones or, mostly, not talking at all. Spookiest of all was the hope that still occupied the hollow spaces of the Hiedelberg Project. Horror and hope. Calling out from the empty houses, there was at once a community abandoned and a community committed to persevere. A four minute intro to the space that includes community voice and the artist, Tyree Guyton, who grew up in the neighborhood: Keith (Hobbes21), his family and mine walked through the Hiedelberg Project in Detroit enjoying the whimsy of giant polka dots…

Discovery, Reading LIst

Reading List: Longitude and How We Know

By Shellee O'Brien

We think KNOWING is so easy that we approach the unknowable with suspicion. Longitude by Dava Sobel and William J.H. Andrews is a worthwhile read if only to challenge the certainty of our suppositions. Modern precision is grounded in countless struggles with imprecision. Anyone who believes the modern world is a simple one should read Dava Sobel’s Longitude. Lucky for us, many of our modern luxuries make this historical puzzle of knowing your location an interesting story rather than a daily challenge. It’s as easy as an app on a smartphone, the right Google search string or clicking a city…

Discovery, Reading LIst

Citizen’s Conundrum: Dirt, Data and Digging Out

By Shellee O'Brien

Now showing: “every utterance, every court filing, every public transaction, every burp, every miscue.” In an interesting read, Jack Shafer wonders about the state of our politics “now that we have dirt on everyone.” While some debate the power of the Internet to democratize even the most authoritarian regimes, we should consider its role in making our politics dirtier than ever. Shafer describes the shift by comparing a campaign’s opposition research to mining for gold: The past no longer matters to the political present the way it once did, because we have such better access to it today. Just 15…

Discovery

Politics and Public Art

By Shellee O'Brien

There’s something about public art that gets to the heart of Politicolor’s project. When Carlos Collejo offered a tour of L.A. murals to our National Academy group in 2009, he explained the people and the art meet in the streets through these works of art. In the short video, “The Battle for LA’s Murals,” a muralist suggests museums are for dead people. While that might be a bit extreme, the art we saw on the mural tour was electrified with what a community aspired to and accomplished alongside the challenges they faced, the conflicts they still carried on their shoulders…