Wheelchair Lady is now in a nursing home

Posted by Bunny.

If I recall correctly, Pinky decided to take in Wheelchair Lady in 2010, and since then taking care of her has been Pinky's #1 priority. The Pinky Show has had to take a back seat to caregiving - which happens to be 24/7 work because Alzheimer's + Parkinson's disease + strokes is no joke - and I'm sure many of you have noticed that our output has really dropped off the past couple years.

However, to make a long story short, since Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases are degenerative in nature, the caregiving was getting more and more intense and complicated. Pinky started to realize that she actually wasn’t taking proper care of WL (Don't look at me - I’m NOT the caregiving type), and some of the drugs that she needs aren’t the kind of stuff that ordinary people can administer at home. Anyway, after a lot of soul searching and research, Pinky finally decided to move WL to a nearby nursing home. It's a really nice nursing home with lots of trees and stuff, and Pinky will be visiting her every day. It's a big change though, and Pinky's still feeling very sad.

Me, though, I just think this a good decision. Wheelchair Lady will get the higher level of care she needs, and Pinky will be able to return to working on Pinky Show stuff. Which is what I think Pinky's real contribution in this lifetime is supposed to be.

~Bunny.

U.S. to UN: Noooo!!!

Posted by Bunny.

There's a front page story on The Guardian (UK) website about how the United Nations will conduct an inquiry into the U.S.'s treatment of Native Americans. The inquiry will be lead by the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples James Anaya:

"I will examine the situation of the American Indian/Native American, Alaska Native and Hawaiian peoples against the background of the United States' endorsement of the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples."

Anaya will be travelling to various places in the U.S. to meet and talk with Native Americans and present a summary of his findings at a press conference on May 4, and also to the UN Human Rights Council at its next session. Here's a picture of the front page. Big photo, bright orange header - hard to miss, isn't it?

View fullsize

​click to see a larger version

I searched the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, etc. etc. - and guess what? No mention at all of the inquiry or forthcoming report. Hmmmmmm...

HMM!

Mainstream media-style censorship aside, The Guardian story contains this statement: "The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some US conservatives likely to object to international interference in domestic matters..." This is interesting for at least a couple of reasons:

1) The U.S. has never had a problem with the UN poking its nose into the 'domestic matters' of other nations, as long as the U.S. stands to gain something from this kind of 'interference'. This is just hypocrisy.

2) It's silly to say that such an inquiry would raise objections from U.S. conservatives. Why single them out? In fact, state violence and genocide against Native Americans has just been the most consistent and obvious thing conservatives and so-called liberals tend to agree on; in fact they've been together on this throughout all of U.S. history! The real division would better be characterized as indigenous vs. settler, since it's really all settlers who benefit from violence against Native Americans.

~Bunny.

LINKS......................................................

The above-mentioned Guardian story.

UN website: UN adopts UNDRIP. (The U.S. eventually signed on - late - in 2010.)

UN website: The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in pdf form.

Bigger PINKY SHOW

Posted by Bunny.

Guess what? We are slowly making our way through our archive of past videos, converting them to a bigger size. I will be swapping out the old videos on our website with the newer, bigger versions and when I'm done mostly everything will be a lot bigger and nicer to look at. How much bigger? FOUR TIMES BIGGER. And of course everything will still be free, so we'll essentially be giving away 4 times more free stuff than before, if you count pixels as stuff. You're welcome!

First up - our Fabulous Imperialism video is now big. It was our first 'real' video - if you've never seen it before, go see it now. I hadn't watched it in years actually, it was fun to watch it again. I still think it rules. After watching it again I went and pat Pinky on the head because she really has improved a lot as a narrator these past few years. (She sucks in this video.)

~Bunny.

PS in new Art Education book

Posted by Bunny.

There's a new book out titled Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons. If you're into not sucking as a teacher you should probably go read it. I haven't read it myself but if we're in this book it must be a good book. Skimming the index, I see the Pinky Show is on pages 99, 104-106, and 190.

Therese Quinn, art education professor at The Art Institute of Chicago and one of the editors of the book, was the person who contacted us about being included in the project. She was super nice to work with, keeping us informed about the book's progress and even sending us a complimentary copy of the book when it was completed. It's always fun for me to see our work in print. But I'm disappointed that it's actually a pretty expensive book - right now I see it at Amazon.com for $45 (list price is $50) - so if you can't afford to buy a copy hopefully you can check it out at a library, assuming the one near where you live hasn't already been shut down due to "budget cuts" or whatever. The book does have a lot of pictures in it though, some in color, so I guess that probably adds to the cost of printing. It's 200 pages thick and does have a lot of examples of artists and projects that I'm sure you will like (assuming you aren't at our website by accident). I haven't read eveything but I did look at all the pictures already; they're good.

Click on the picture on make it big, then you can read the words.

Good-bye for now. ~Bunny.

Happy New Year

Posted by Bunny.

Pinky and I wish everybody reading this a very good new year.

Personally I'm very glad to have a brand new year to get started with. With a few exceptions, I thought last year sucked.

Pinky spent probably 90% of her waking hours taking care of abandoned wheelchair lady we found down by the highway. After a lot of nerve-wracking ups and downs - including a couple of times where we really thought she was about to die - her health finally seems to be improving a little. She's strong enough now that last week we were finally able to start taking her to a Level II adult daycare facility near here so that she can have some interaction with other humans, and also give Pinky and me some time to get back to doing Pinky Show work together.

What did I do last year? Well, changing adult diapers and giving sponge baths is not my thing. So I spent most of last year working on our Pinky Show book project and in my spare time building an 8-foot tall media analysis robot. I named her Mittens. She should be ready for unveiling in about a week. I'm doing final testing now.

We just got our new 4TB CalDigit RAID in the mail yesterday. This is to replace our old WiebeTech work drive that finally died after several years of very intense use. Thank you to everyone who sent us donations over the past year. Your donations helped keep the Pinky Show website online, pay our electricity and food bills, pay for the replacement harddrive as well as all the other small project expenses that began piling up during the past year. Now with wheelchair lady at daycare several days a week Pinky and I will finally have a chance to wrap up some old, unfinished work and also start some new stuff. I have a feeling this is going to be a very complicated, tumultuous, tiring, and exciting year. I feel good and ready for work.

See you soon,
Bunny

New Stuff announcement

Posted by Bunny.

Hello friends. We have new stuff:

1. New video: The Desert is Quiet. What’s it about? It’s so short, you might as well just watch it!

2. Companion animated GIF to the above-mentioned video. It’s called Despite All Appearances Every Moment is Unique.

3. Seven Scenes from Work and Life, a small e-booklet with pictures and explanatory notes.

We hope you find this stuff useful or interesting. If you have any comments please send us a note.

I’ll end with some good advice Pinky & I have been trying to think about very seriously lately:

"The desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone."

I'm not sure if our ideals are so noble but I think it's definitely important for us to work more with others, something cats are not particularly known for. Anyway, if you’re curious about the original context of this quote it's here.

Okay, good-bye for now.

Bunny

Pinky Show in Karlsruhe, Germany & Zurich, Switzerland

Posted by Pinky.

We just got back from Germany and Switzerland, where we worked a lot but also ate some tasty European food. We especially liked Turkish imbiss, all the delicious breads, and we even got to try some fancy “one-day” chocolate in Zurich. (Everything in Zurich was crazy expensive - riding the bus cost around $6 (so we walked!) and a cup of coffee is also around $6+ so we had to get out of there really fast...) Bunny ate several sausages.

We were there to attend the opening to an art exhibition in which included some of our work, The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 at ZKM Center for Media and Art Karlsruhe (Germany), and also to do some workshops with the ZKM Education Department. Here is a short interview we did for the ZKM blog while we were there: [ to the ZKM blog ]

The workshops went very well I think, especially the very intense three-day workshop we had with museum education and curator-people. That was fun. Also we did a very short workshop with high school art students that was not-so-intense; basically we just showed some examples of how you can put audio recordings with pictures or animation to make different forms of story-telling and stuff like that. For example:

.

Bunny and I want to send a special thank you to Henrike Plegge at ZKM for organizing the workshops and all her hard work in making sure our trip to Germany was comfortable, work-efficient, and fun. We learned a lot from everybody we met, especially Uta, Peter, & Ella who let us stay at their apartment the whole time and told us so many wonderful stories that we will never forget. Thank you.

Now some pictures!​

Bunny in front of the ZKM, on her way to the Karlsruhe Zoo.

Ella next to the bread slicing machine.

Swans and ducks floating on Lake Zurich.

walking in the woods on the banks of the Rhine river near Karlsruhe.

New war poster, image macros, and button art in the PS archives.

Posted by Pinky.

Hi everybody! It's the end of the week - yay! I hope your week has been filled with many victories against the forces of evil!

I just finished posting some stuff in the Pinky Show archives. The thing that I'm guessing will interest the most people is the poster Bunny and I made a couple of weeks ago. It's called Figure 1: War Deaths, Traumas, and Other Miscellaneous Injuries. We made it primarily for classroom teachers and other educators, to help students think and talk more about the wide range of suffering violent conflicts like wars and "interventions" produce - suffering that for the most part is never covered by TV news broadcasts. We made two versions - please note that version two contains images that may be unsettling to some viewers.

Oh, speaking of TV news, for those of you who are into media studies, journalism, and whatnot, we also have two new image macros that takes TV news as its subject matter so you might be interested in that… Also, I finally added in some of our button-work (buttons are a means of communication too!) to the archive. Hmm, only took me 6 months to get around to posting it...​

Whenever possible we always try to have a digital version of our work available for free on our website. We have students and educators downloading our materials from almost every corner of this planet, including some places where money is unbelievably hard to come by. For those of you who have the means, please help keep this project floating!

And, as always, if you are handy with Facebook and stuff like that please transmit this info far and wide. Bunny and I've kinda given up on the social media thing. We kind of understand how Twitter works but Facebook seems too confusing.

Okay, I will sign off now. It is already very late and I still haven't cooked supper!

Thank you and a big hug to all Pinky Show friends!

~p.

Buttons to help the Japanese cats (and dogs too)

Posted by Pinky.

It's been over a month since the giant earthquake, tsunami, & nuclear plant disaster struck Japan and the situation remains dire - not only for human beings but also for the environment and millions of animals. In my March 19 blog entry I included links to organizations that are working very hard to take care of thousands of suffering cats and dogs. Some of the people working for these organizations are even risking their own health by going into areas contaminated by radiation to try to find hungry, lost, injured, and traumatized cats. Our hearts go out to these dedicated and kind people.

Bunny and I are trying to use our Pinky Show-resources to raise as much money as possible so that we can send it to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support, World Society for the Protection of Animals, and World Vets. This morning we made buttons:

The buttons say, "Please Help the Japanese Cats." Anyone who makes a $10 donation to The Pinky Show will receive five buttons. Please share them with your friends, help us get the word out. Just write "Japanese Cats fundraiser" or something similar in the message field of our donation form and we will send 100% of all proceeds collected to the above-mentioned organizations so they can keep doing their work. Of course if you can afford to send more than $10, please do so. It's difficult, tiring, and potentially very dangerous work and these people need support.

Sincerely yours,
pinky

P.S. Thank you to Reiko Cat for volunteering to model for our button.​

....................................

April 19 evening update! Tonight we collected $68.25 at a nearby fighting school (!?) and gave away lots of buttons! I'm sure that'll pay for several bags of cat food. We will keep you posted as to how much progress we make with this fundraiser. ~ p.

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Another blog to watch: Japanese Cat Network
Posted by Bunny.

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April 22 update! So far in-person donations are trouncing donations from the internet. We've collected around $170 just by talking to people and about $45 came from online donations. This weekend Pinky and I will knocking on some doors and also visiting a hospital and a shopping mall or something. We'll keep at it. Posted by Bunny.

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April 24 update! We have collected a total of $474.25. Our sincerest thank you to everyone who has made donations. We will be fundraising for another week - if you have not yet sent in a donation, please do. Earthquake, tsunami, radiation - it's difficult to imagine a worse disaster, right? If it happened here, I'm sure we all would be praying that others would come to help us with food, medicine, soap, and shelter. Please think about it. Thank you, Bunny.

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May 1 update! The total collected is now almost $700. We've been walking around talking to people about the situation in Japan and handing out little slips of paper with links to rescue and support organizations. I hope at least some of those people made donations on their own. The largest donation we received so far from an individual was $100, smallest 25 cents (yes, they got a button too). We are going to wrap up this collection at the end of this week so we can hurry up and send the money. Our most sincere thank you to everybody who made a donation. Posted by Bunny.

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May 8 update! Final total: $857.

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May 18 update! Wow, just received another late donation! Final FINAL total: $870.

Here comes Patrick Wolfe... "soon".

Posted by Bunny.

We are editing our 2009 interview with historian Patrick Wolfe. Actually this is the second time we are editing it. The first time we edited it we thought we wanted to combine excerpts from Dr. Wolfe's interview with interview footage from other scholars all talking about settler colonialism. But, with a little push from our friend Giordano who very correctly pointed out to us that there isn't enough Patrick Wolfe stuff on the internet, we are re-editing it to present a large portion of the interview as a stand-alone video. I guess we can always interview other people about settler colonialism later, then we'll just have lots of stuff on our website about settler colonialism. Which would be a good thing. The video will also an introduction by Pinky.

Yes, we are slow. If you simply can't wait to get your PS PW fix, you can read (parts of) his great book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetry of an Ethnographic Event here.

~Bunny.​

I Want to Punch Your Face v2.0 is now a PDF

Posted by Bunny.

Recently we ran out of I Want to Punch Your Face books. Since we still get requests for them Pinky and I decided to make it into a digital file (PDF) and make it available for anyone to download from the Project Archives area of this website. Although I like it way better as a physical object (i.e., a real book) instead of a PDF, printing a bunch of books is very expensive. Hopefully one day we'll be able to get it printed as a hardcover, like a real, old-fashioned children's book, which is the way we originally wanted it to look and feel.

Till then, I guess you can just make believe the PDF version is a nice hardcover book.

​[ read / get it here ]

The file is pretty small (1.5MB) - you can e-mail it to all your violent friends.

Good-bye for now, I'll be back with more announcements soon.

Later. Bunny.​​

Please think about Japanese cats

Posted by Pinky.

There has been a lot of news about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and how it is affecting people. But during these kinds of catastrophes countless animals also suffer - not only cats but also dogs, bunnies, pet birds, turtles, rats, squirrels, insects, and so on.

For those of you who have been wanting to help Japanese cats and other animals affected by this horrible disaster, please visit these sites and make a donation. They are people who are helping.

World Society for the Protection of Animals

World Vets

Thank you for reading.

Please take care,
pinky

Phyllis Bennis explains about Libya & "No-Fly Zones"

Posted by Bunny.

Everybody's debating whether we ("we") should make a so-called "No-Fly Zone" over Libya. Here's a helpful video (March 10, 2011) of Phyllis Bennis making a very complicated question both easier and more complex (in a good way) to think about:

IPS fellow Phyllis Bennis discusses the 2011 Libyan revolt.

By the way, in case you haven't already seen it, we also have an excellent Q&A with Phyllis Bennis on U.S. & Iran. In some ways it's a little dated now because lots has happened since 2008, but her analysis is still helpful for understanding what's going on even now.

~Bunny.

Donald L. Cox (1936-2011)

Posted by Bunny.

Donald L. Cox, rest in peace.

Pinky and I highly recommend the book The Black Panthers Speak (2002, second edition). Borrow it from the library.

~Bunny.​

Disaster, compounded.

Posted by Bunny.

[ video still from news video ]

With an earthquake-damaged nuclear power plant in Fukushima exploding and spewing radioactivity into the  environment, now may be a good time to re-watch our Pinky Show video 27,000 Holocausts. Please pay special attention to the section near the end, where John Burroughs discusses the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation.

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan is yet another reminder that NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT SAFE and remains an unacceptable "alternative energy source". As a starting point, please read the FAQs at NukeFree.org.

They are compiling related news reports on the unfolding disaster in their news section. Also, don't forget to visit the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy website; it is a giant heap of excellent information.

~Bunny.

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Posted by Kim, 3/19: Ralph Nader tells it like it is: Nuclear Nightmare.

Pinky Show has our own perfume!

Posted by Pinky.

Actually, it's not perfume, but I don't really know what to call this. Our friend/badass indy curator/researcher/body-care alchemist Milena sent it to us all the way from Canada. She made it for us herself!​

I guess my photo doesn't show the whole label, it says: "'love and rage', for The Pinky Show." Isn't that neat? And it smells AMAZING. Bunny, Kim, and I put some on and now we all smell super delicious! Who knows how such beautiful scents get suspended in oil, but maybe I don't want to know how she did it since the final effect is very similar to magic. Bunny and I are often very stressed out by our work but somehow this tiny bottle makes me feel very happy! ^_^

Thank you Milena! Much love and hugs from all of us here in the desert! xoxoxoxxo!

pinky

p.s. We miss you lots. Please come visit us.

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Posted by Bunny.

Pinky is so dense. All talk and no links. Go here:

Just the Goods etsy store

Also, Just the Goods also has its own website.

I'm not saying Milena's creations are awesome because she's our friend. We became friends because Milena and her work are both awesome. ~Bunny.​

The People of Egypt Bring Down the Mubarak Regime

Posted by Bunny.

Ordinary people in Egypt are showing, teaching the world what is possible! Watch and be inspired! Now go do something!

[ watch below: The Egyptian Revolution: A Democracy Now! Special on Mubarak’s Resignation ]​

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2/27 Paraphrasing Teacup: But what does it mean that the military is in control?

~B.

1st Pinky Show Human-in-Residence over.

Posted by Pinky.

For those of you who dropped by over the past couple of weeks looking for updates on our residency project, my apologies. I said I was going to post periodic updates but ended up posting none. Bleh - I guess I am just not good at writing in diaries. Sorry.

The residency itself was very good for us, I hope it was also good for our visitor. The main thing we wanted was to have lots of time to exchange ideas, walk together, eat and drink coffee together, stuff like that. We all drank a lot of coffee and tea and some juice. We got to do all that plus introduce him to some nice animals and people and I think he liked looking at the unique rocks, vegetation, and water-forms we have around here. He left yesterday to go back to Australia. I hope he is safely home by now.

A few people have e-mailed us to ask how we selected Mr. Nanni to be our first visiting human. The simple answer is that we didn't really choose per se, it just sort of happened. I had been chatting with Mr. Nanni via e-mails for quite some time - he liked The Pinky Show and we liked Rap News, etc. We just thought it'd be easier to have longer, more involved discussions face-to-face. (duh) So it was, and I hope in the future we will have a chance to do this with other people too. Maybe once a year would work nicely?

So if you are a nice human being and would like to come talk and study with Bunny and me for "X" (?) amount of time, please feel free to send us a letter. We'll put it in a special folder and choose someone from that folder, maybe for next year.

Okay, now I have to finish drawing our Pinky Show comic for Fuse magazine's upcoming Spring issue!

Take care,
pinky

1st Human Guest here

Posted by Pinky.

Hi everybody. I'm going to try to post periodic updates while our residence-thing is going on.

Our first-ever Pinky Show human-in-residence participant arrived safely from Australia early this morning. His name is Giordano Nanni and he is a researcher, historian, writer, musician-composer, and also one-half of the RapNews team. The first thing we did was feed him because traveling makes you hungry (we gave him a fish). Then we sat down and talked for a long time about settler colonialism, both in Australia and also in the United States and Hawaii. We also had some time to compare notes about our respective media projects - we found out we have a lot of very similar long-term objectives, which is nice because it kind of makes us feel less crazy. Then Bunny cooked dinner for everybody (another fish). Then after dinner we got a call that our friend was having difficulty breathing so we used a van to take her to the hospital. That wasn't work-related but it is life-related, which in some ways more important than work-related. We just got home a few minutes ago, it is now just a few minutes before midnight.

Giordano is very nice (I don't use that term lightly), we all like him.

On a project-oriented note, one of the interesting things that came up was a conversation about how to choose a media format to work in. Specifically, Giordano was asking why we did not make any Pinky Show videos last year, because he thinks our videos are probably the most accessible format (as opposed to things like, say, an art installation, which only a few hundred or thousands of people will see because it's primarily an in-person experience). Bunny and I have talked about this to each other a lot in the past, but somehow I guess we never really got around to explaining this stuff here in our diary.

The main reason for the lack of new videos in 2010 was that we had decided to use last year to explore other formats: reports, comics, flat art, art installations, lecture-presentations, face-to-face dialog and so on. After being so video-focused for the first four years, we thought we should be careful to explore the limits (for us) and possibilities of other formats. It's not that we want to find a replacement for making videos, because we do think videos are very useful. But sometimes other formats allow us to build-in more ambiguity or mysterious aspects that are different from what we can do in our usual video presentational style. Or other things that are difficult for us to show as a video or animation - like Bunny riding her bike - are just easier to show as a static image. Or the different ways you can play with the portrayal of time and space in formats other than PS videos simply allow us to use different narrative strategies to talk about stuff in ways that otherwise wouldn't be so easy or natural. Finally we think it's very important to test our ideas and work in different cultural and institutional spaces. For example, whereas in the first four years of our project most of our communications have been with students, activists, and educators, in 2010 we had a lot of interaction with art-world people (they are not mutually exclusive, I'm generalizing here). And since art schools/artists/museums/galleries/culture-writers tend to bring a different slant to their approach to political material, it was a nice opportunity for us to look at our work again with different audiences. So I guess what I'm saying is that altogether, the main reason why we spent so much time experimenting with non-video forms in 2010 is that we wanted to expand and test different ways of communicating. Although it may not look like we did much from the outside, for us it was a very important and productive year because we learned a lot about how people are understanding our work, and we will be bringing all of this with us as we move forward. We think it's important to periodically re-theorize, test, and reflect, otherwise we could easily spend the rest of our lives doing the same things over and over again and before you know it oops we're dead. Anyway, that's just one of the things we talked about with Giordano. Bunny told me to write all this down because we had kind of forgot that people might be wondering why we suddenly stopped making videos, like maybe we're lazy or something.

This has turned into a not-very-short entry. Bunny says I talk too much. I will try to keep my entries shorter from now on.

Okay, I have to go now. I have some split pea soup on the stove - that will be our breakfast tomorrow morning.

Please take care, pinky

Happy Birthday Daisy

Happy Birthday to you Daisy, where ever you are! xoxo, pinky

Best birthday wishes to you Daisy. Hope to see you soon, Bunny.

Happy Birthday Daisy! Next time you come visit us can we go looking for insects again? How old are you now? I love you! ~kim