Composing Spaces

Pangea Day is this Saturday, May 10th. I’ve been working with two students to plan the only public screening event in Southern Jersey. The planning is getting intense and exciting. We’ve posted signs everywhere, invited local schools and community members. One of the student co-coordinators has been on the radio (.mp3). We’ve got a Facebook page, and we’re hoping for a respectable turnout. And for the weather to be nice, as expected.

The Pangea Day folks have released a new trailer which seems to include portions of the 24 films that will be shown:

In 2006 Jehane Noujaim won the TED prize for her wish “to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film.” Pangea Day is the realization of that wish—a global event with thousands of screenings in homes, fields, stadiums, and, like at Rowan, auditoriums. In these public and private spaces people will come together to get to know each other, to learn about each other, to celebrate each other in ways that only film can provide. Photographs and video that we take at the event will join those from around the world, adding Rowan, its students, and the South Jersey community to a world-wide text that encourages openness, curiosity, friendship, and hope.

Here is here 2006 TED talk:

"Be an active citizen [because] . . . we have a sclerosis in our democracy and we have to change that." Here, here.

Referenced at the end: The Alliance for Climate Protection’s We Can Solve It campaign

The goal of Pangea Day is to unite the world through the visual power of short films. Submit your own by 15 Feb 2008 at http://www.pangeaday.org/.

A good friend from from Texas blogs at Ima Shalom under the name Maya. Her recent post, pre-Veterans Day, reminded me of great work that the Patriot Guard Riders are still doing.

Listen to this NPR story about what they are doing for families of the fallen and for sailors, soldies, and marines upon coming home:

A funny thing happened to Army Spc. Jeremiah Sullivan after his recent return from Iraq. As he and his fiancée were on their way home from Fort Bragg, N.C., they stopped at a gas station and were abruptly circled by a motorcycle brigade, gathered to welcome the soldier home.

The event was planned by the Patriot Guard Riders, a grassroots group that just keeps growing.

Over the past year . . . 61,000 strangers have come together to do works of good will: homecomings, visits to veterans hospitals, even house-painting. Sadly, though, their chief mission — done only with family approval — is to attend the funerals of military personnel.

The Nobel Foundation has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in doing so have continued to refine the characteristics of peace. By locating efforts to fight global warming and climate change within the peace category (instead of, say, chemistry or economics), the Foundation is supporting Gore’s (and others) argument that fighting global warming is a moral issue, as well as a rhetorical issue and, I would argue, a spatial issue. The geographical spaces that are going to be most affected (or have been most affected) by climate change are going to become war zones, where people fight for scarce resources:

“It is a question of war and peace,” Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

Yesterday, in another act of classifying, the House Foreign Relations Committee, in a non-binding resolution, voted to label the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as “genocide.” The Bush administration countered by calling the atrocities “historic mass killings.” (Update: Ira Schorr noted possible political reasons for the creation of the resolution.) As usual, The Daily Show offered the most meaningful assessment of the ironical and political ramifications of such a vote:

Today, as part of International Day of Peace activities, Rowan University’s College of Fine Arts hosted an exhibition of Pinwheels for Peace (1 of 4 such exhibitions in Glassboro, NJ) on the lawn between Science and Westby Halls.

This non-political organization aims to provide an alternative to the violent images that bombard children via TV, video games, and the movies. The organization web site says that it is their “hope that through the Pinwheels for Peace project, we can help the students make a public visual statement about their feelings about war/ peace/ tolerance/ cooperation/ harmony/ unity and, in some way, maybe, awaken the public and let them know what the next generation is thinking.”

I walked over to the exhibition with Sandy Tweedie, expecting to take a few pictures of it for an old friend who is an elementary school art teacher, and then be on my way to the Amish market in Mullica Hill. I didn’t expect there to be a table outfitted with markers and pastels so that passers-by could make their own. Some of the pinwheels were exceptional–amazing colors, wonderful patterns–and clearly took a lot of time and thought. On the other hand, my pinwheel (front and back):

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