GREAT news, friends! This just in:

The food service workers at what for many of us is our beloved alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, have finally unionized!!

this watershed comes after years of hard fighting on the part of students and workers at SLC, where earlier union drives had faltered. when i was at SLC, students launched a campaign to get the school to supplement workers’ paychecks to provide the living wage denied them by FLIK, the company the school had contracted to do cafeteria work. the strategy culminated in a demonstration outside a meeting of the board of trustees in 2004, and the push was ultimately successful. i thought i’d post some photos from the action.

as we agitated for the 2004 campaign, Flik workers were continually intimidated and threatened by management. several people were told they could be fired for attending our rallies, or associating with students who were known organizers. still, one brave worker came out to our final rally with her husband—when i got the news telling me the workers had unionized, a friend said that folks at the unionizing meeting were reminiscing about this action and wanted photos. that maked my heart get all big and cry.

(fun fact about the 2k4 action: little did the SLC board of trustees know that, if they hadn’t agreed to raise worker wages, we had a plan in place to blockade the building. mwa-ha-ha, motherf—ers!)

now Flik workers at Sarah Lawrence are signing up with Service Workers United, a union for multi-service companies formed by SEIU and UNITE HERE. the grain of salt: a meerkat informant in the labor movement tells me that the SLC workers were probably unionized because Service Workers United bartered for the right to contract with all the workers of the company that owns the company that owns Flik.

this is a tricky truism, that big unions actually like multinational corporations if it means they can contract with thousands of constituents in one fell swoop; in the process, workers often become chips that are bought and sold between C.E.O.s and union bigwigs.

on the other hand, at least workers at SLC now have a legally-protected organization through which they can fight for dignity and justice in their workplace. and they can always count on solidarity from the students and former students at SLC, who keep their fight in our hearts!

SI SE PUEDE!

Ok, so who knows if my little film will make it anywhere near Park City, but check out this mini doc about Bolivia that won an honorable mention in short filmmaking in this years Sundance film festival.

(click the image to watch the trailer)

it’s that time during my work day where restlessness and hunger start to set in and i in turn try to stave them off in order to take my lunch break as late as possible, so the remainder of my day post-lunch is as short as possible.

so what do i come across in my attempt to pass the time : only the best news ever!

the film society of lincoln center is building a new theater! i have known and witnessed the construction around lincoln center since it began but never bothered looking into what they were actually changing until now.

click on the pictures for all the awesome details

which include 2 new theaters, meaning many more amazing films from all over the world

…full of sketches and drawings and photos and artstuffs! check out the website of our friend and fellow SLC grad Anna Venezia, whose travails in Italy, New York and New Hampshire (the land of her birth) have instilled her with a fine aesthetic sensibility.

Anna’s site is split into separate wings for photography and drawing, with new content coming soon. i’d seen the photos before from my Sarah Lawrence years, but not the pen-and-ink work, which is tre cool!

(caution: i’ve linked all these thumbnails to the full-size images on Anna’s site. to get to a full gallery of her work, click on her name above.)

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This is all excerpted from one interview, and it is, for the most part, put together in the order that he originally spoke, with the “real” words removed.

I made this way back in August of ‘05, for a high-falluttin’ bigtime videoblog that I worked for. It was Creative Commons then, and it still is now. Enjoy!

For at least as long as I have been working on my film about Bolivia, Mitch Teplitsky, a New York based filmmaker (and friend), has been working on his feature documentary called “Soy Andina”: The story of two New York women raised in different worlds — an immigrant folk dancer from the Andes, and a modern dancer from Queens, NY — who return to Peru in search of roots and dance. He’s been travelling around Peru showing the finished version and now it’s finally time for the official NY premiere. He has done a great job of using the web to build a huge buzz for his project. Through the movie’s blog, he’s let people inside the tumultuous creative process of documentary making. Click here for more info about the screening on February 16th or use the links below to learn more about the project.

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• watch the trailer
• visit the movie’s official site
• get tickets for the screening

Click To Play

Cartoons are meant for kids, supposedly. But this, while entertaining and really interesting, is downright frightening at times. There are multiple gruesomely cute deaths.

I excerpted these clips from a full version of the cartoon available at archive.org, leaving in only the stuff with Cab Calloway. Wikipedia says that after garnering a good deal of Harlem attention playing with Duke Ellington (at the Cotton Club by the 125th St. A train!), this cartoon made him nationally famous for the first time.

Info on the cartoon from the Wikipedia post:

In 1932, Calloway recorded the song for a Fleischer Studios Talkartoon short cartoon, also called Minnie the Moocher, starring Betty Boop and Bimbo. Calloway and his band provides most of the short’s score, and appear in the short themselves in a live-action introduction. The thirty-second live-action segment is the earliest-known film footage of Calloway. In the animated section of the film, Calloway appears as an animated character, a ghost walrus (whose dance movements were rotoscoped from footage of Calloway dancing).

“Rotoscoped” means they copied his movements exactly by tracing the film of him dancing (this is actually the first known instance of rotoscopy).

The act of literally “cartooning” his movements presents an interesting twist on that fuzzy line between hommage and mockery. Did the creators respect him, and put him in the cartoon because they wanted to showcase his talent? Or was this all just for a laugh at the dancing black man? It was 1932. I’m assuming that people saw it both ways, and that’s the way Paramount liked it: whatever makes a buck.

so I heard tell at the water cooler at work that today is supposed to be the coldest day in 20 years! I certainly don’t know if that is true or not but I’ve got a plan to find out: Rather than checking up on old weather dot com and reading a bunch of facts, figures, and scientific proofs I figure that, since we live in a democracy, it would be more fair if we all just voted on it.

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so what do you think? how cold is it?

(if you’re reading this, make a comment below!)

in the interest of the future, lex found this video, and showed it me. and now we show the entire universe.

Click To Play