Photography and Urban Studies

These reviews were rejected by the Berkeley Non-Profit Radical Newspaper Slingshot. The first co-legitimized the research of Gilens and Page's work determining the US Government is an oligarchy. The second was Robert Ogman's work supporting post-occupational grassroots struggle. Whatever Slingshot's collective reasoning might be, they seem unready to cross the threshold of serious academic critique, even when it would otherwise fit to their questionable rhetorical standards, albeit at times congruous with my own.

This was my section in a publication called A Fresh Look.
A Fresh Look: Observations on Artistic and Social Practices in Urban Farming. A book and website project by the second year MA students at The San Francisco Art Institute. One collaborative interview and one article, plus photography, 2010.
http://darinorsteven.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2

With some resistance from the Slingshot collective, [by some I mean normative,] the interview was seemingly accepted by the collective, yet Jessie S. was essentially rejected from a Slingshot collective meeting. I felt that some discrimination had occured, [Slingshot is horribly biased and secular, I wasn't sure at the time if this was prejudice.] This photography rejection was racist in nature. In the past myself and many others have been snubbed by Slingshot, all kinds of prejudiced feelings have been felt by myself and others to this regard. The photos were part of an elaborate editing process between Jessie S. and myself regarding her initial trip to Fergusson, Missouri. -Saturday Nov 29th, 2014 12:45 PM

[The only irony now is that the latest 2015 Spring Slingshot seems to 'splain the connection between their staff and local Black Lives Matters considerations within the local and extraneous political movement. 3/8/15]

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/11/29/18764821.php

This summer I took part in Anticipate, Plan & Deter Responder Resilience: With Listen, Protect & Connect Training, here in the East Bay, sponsored by Alameda County. The training took place in Fremont at the firehouse, which is very near the BART station. Keeping in mind Occupy Sandy, Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster, and events in the Middle East including Occupy Turkey, I felt that when the next big one hits the bay area, Occupy Oakland should be on the ready for a pro-active response. There are way way too many active fault-lines in California, Tsunamis are a very real threat, flooding, landslides, and forest fires are a consistent threat to us, and more tornados, a phenomena of the mid-west and south has begun to grace California with alarming regularity. For the record I have no professional interest in this kind of training outside of something definitively  Occupy, on the other hand, you never know when it’s going to go down.

Using my Star Trek Online meme as the main character, I have once again furthered the causality of all things Klingon in the name of the Glory of their Revolution[s]. My considerations on political science and activism have expanded in that outside of the solar system thinking might actually help perpetuate our very own species.

Given that time had passed, I thought it wise to give some feedback on the topic of bicycle block, for the sense of safety and perseverance to direct action that I believed was beginning to lack here in the San Francisco East Bay Area with grassroots activism.