Spare Change News

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Danny Glover: Artist & Activist

    Danny Glover: Artist & Activist

    SCN caught up with Danny Glover walking down Flower Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The 6’4’ actor is towering and humble at once. His salutation is a standard greeting that is southern hospitality mixed with California cool—“How you doing, baby?” Glover is most widely known for his role in the Lethal Weapon franchise Since 1979,…

  • Art That Moves

    Human Geographer Fabrizio Eva comments, in the documentary film The Possibility of Hope (companion piece to the theatrical release Children of Men) that “‘one of the primary characteristics of human beings is that they have always moved.’” Homeless artist Darcy DeSouza embodies that human trait in both physicality and imagination. For the past fifty years…

  • Lost Scriptures of Hip Hop

    Old and white, and I still get it. Saul Williams creates a miracle book pretending to be something else. He re-writes history exclusive to change, except the way you see it when you read it. Beginning with “The Confession”, Saul Williams takes you deep into the catacombs of the New York City Subways’ abandoned tunnels.…

  • Talking About Revolution

    Tufts, President Lawrence S. Bacow presents Tufts graduate, singer songwriter and four time Grammy winner Tracy Chapman, with an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts during the universities 2004 commencement in Medford, MA. Recognizing her for social activism, music and community work. Growing up in a poor, working class family, raised by a single mother in…

  • Orwell's Economy

    The Price of Inequality, by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton & Company). While reading The Price of Inequality, one seems confronted by a society that was merely imaginative in Jack London’s 1908 dystopian novel The Iron Heel. Rampant poverty, political and economic imbalance, entrenched class divisions, and middle class evaporation, all engendered by an oligarchic…

  • In the Grip of the Possible

    At the center of Bread and Puppet Theater’s performance on Cambridge Common on Sunday, September 2, and reaching into all the troupe’s high-spirited paraphernalia (magically painted school bus, raucous parade), are the Possibilitarians (ie. all of us) who make up the performance’s “Complete Everything Everywhere Dance Circus.” The famed political puppet collective, started in 1963…

  • Strike Up the Chorus

    “Who wants to read a poem?” Saul Williams asked the audience. The crowd gathered at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., was small, just a couple hundred people, but it appeared to be made up of devout fans. Many people clutched dog-eared copies of Williams’ books of poetry to their chests. The audience froze…

  • A Controlled Dangerous Substance Act (Part Five-Conclusion)

    Start at the beginning with A Controlled Dangerous Substance Act Part I (Everything is about to go crazy. The cops screwed up on the charges and Dean’s play for the cops with Frost Pharmacy is no good and they want him to do it again. The four are all drunk and the run into Mickey,…

  • Torture Survivors' Dance

    “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or…

  • People Power

    First-time congressional candidate Able Collins (I) hopes to put people back in politics. At a political rally in Rhode Island last month, he told the crowd that if elected to the United States House of Representatives he would help steer the nation back to towards democratic ideals of political participation. First, as a newcomer to…

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