Mike Davis, winner of Lannan nonfiction prize, on "Katrina in the Suburbs" and on OC and Academia

Mike Davis at 2002 UCI rally supporting UC lecturers & librarians; photo © 2002 Daniel C. Tsang

Irvine -- On this Veterans Day show, KUCI's Subversity show features a veteran of countless peace and justice struggles and related literary output, cultural critic and UCI history prof. Mike Davis. Davis, who last week won the noted Lannan Literary Award for non-fiction for his prolific body of work, speaks to Subversity about developers and Orange County, and why he would like to reduce his time in academia (from full-time to one-third). He has made such a request to UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake. We talked to him after his recent (October 31) UCI talk, "Katrina in the Suburbs," about the politics of wildfires, which will also air.

Davis, who will receive $150,000 with the Lannan honor, is a past recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship award.

His biography from the Lannan Literary Awards notes:

"Mike Davis was born in Fontana, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles in 1946, and is a veteran of 1960's civil rights and anti-war movements. From his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), about unionism in the United States, to his most recent, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), Davis' fearless writing in 18 books shines a fresh light on economic, social, environmental, and political injustice. Some of his other books include City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Planet of Slums, Dead Cities, In Praise of Barbarians, and No One is Illegal. He is currently working on a book about climate change, water, and power in the U.S. West and northern Mexico. A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine."

His Wikipedia entry is here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_%28scholar%29.

The show airs on Monday, 12 November 2007, on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, California, and is webcast simultaneously via kuci.org. Subscribe to podcasts here: www.kuci.org/podcasts/?ShowID=600 .

He was last on Subversity after the Katrina disaster (14 October 2004). To listen to that show (unfortunately some audio is lost): kuci.org/~dtsang/subversity/Sv051014b.mp3.
Among his recent articles is this one, "San Diego Builds a Statute to an Arsonist: Developers with Matches".
To listen to the show, click here:

Daring Singapore film Solos and its director Loo Zihan

On our next show, airing Monday, 5 November, 2007, we talk with director Loo Zihan (on right in poster), whose provocative new film, Solos, dares to depict a taboo relationship, that of a secondary school teacher and a student.

Loo, who turns 24 next Sunday, plays the teenager.

The film has its U.S. premiere (after its world premiere at Pusan), Sunday and Tuesday at the AFI Festival in Los Angeles. It will also show in Hong Kong later this month.

The film was censored by the Singapore censorhip board and thus taken off the Singapore film festival lineup to preserve its artistic integrity in April.

The film depicts the last stages of a loving -- if agnonized -- relationship between the two with artistic, lyrical scenes in bed, in the shower and elsewhere. Its frank depiction of gay lovemaking -- even a threesome -- is pioneering in the Lion City, where sodomy and other sex acts among males remain a crime. The film also depicts the the mother while the boy is focused on seeking sexual and emotional satisfaction with the man.

Loo, originally interested in becoming a graphic designer, is pursing his MFA in digital filmmaking at Nanyang Technological University's School of Art Design and Media in Singapore, where he was among the first batch of students to enrol in the new school in 2005.

Solos: loozihan.wordpress.com/solos-2007/ (Loo is on the right in the first picture)AFI film showings: filmguide.afifest.com/tixSYS/2007/filmguide/title/detail/Biography of director Loo: loozihan.wordpress.com/about/

To listen to the show, click here:

Defending Critical Thinking in Academia

On our 29 October 2007 show, we talked with Reginald Dylan, of the National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia about attempts to suppress critical thinking and alternative viewpoints in higher education. The interview comes in the wake of a so-called "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" organized by David Horrowitz.

In the actual broadcast, we also aired a clip of Bob Avakian, who heads the Revolutionary Communist Party, on the topic of critical thinking in academia.

To listen to the show, click here:

Chinese Political Poster Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Irvine -- For our next show, KUCI's Subversity radio program interviews the compilers of a new collection of Chinese political poster art from the Cultural Revolution. We chat with Lincoln Cushing, a librarian/scholar of political posters and with Ann Tompkins, whose collection of such posters has just come out in a wonderful compilation from Chronicle Books, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

We also chat with an Chinese American activist mentioned in the book, Steve Louie, about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, and its art, on social and political movements here.

The show airs from 9-10 a.m. on Monday, 22 October, 2007, on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, Calif., and is simulcast on the Web via kuci.org.

Cushing maintains a documents for the people site: http://www.docspopuli.org/..

The bulk of the poster collection is housed at the East Asia Library at University of California,

Berkeley: www.docspopuli.org/ChinaPosters.html.

To listen to the entire show, click here:

L.A. Times and Armenian Genocide Censorship

As the U.S. Congress moves to a vote by the full body on calling the Armenian genocide a genocide, Subversity takes a look back at how one mainstream paper has dealt -- rather poorly -- with the issue. In an encore edition, we talk with Mark Arax, a longtime journalist at the Los Angeles Times, whose story on the Armenian genocide was spiked by an editor. He subsequently left the paper after an out-of-court settlement. The editor also left, to work for the Wall Street Journal in Ankara.

The interview aired Monday, October 15, 2007 at 9 am on Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, California, webcasting via kuci.org.

We discuss why the censorship occurred and what happened. See coverage in the Armenian Weekly.

See also Robert Fisk, "A Reign of Terror which History has Chosen to Neglect," The Independent, 12 October, 2007.
To listen to the entire show, click here:

CIA at 60: Domestic Surveillance Continues

Sixty years ago, the U.S. National Security Act led to the creation of the CIA. The spy agency was not supposed to spy on Americans, but KUCI's Subversity host Dan Tsang found out the CIA was spying on him. He took the CIA to federal court, with the help of the ACLU and the Center for National Security Studies, and prevailed. In an out-of-court settlement, the CIA promised to not spy on him again and promised to expunge anything collected on his First-Amendment-protected activities.

Subversity takes this 60th anniversary of the CIA as the opportunity to look back at the CIA and its history of domestic surveilance, before and after 9/11. We air a 1999 interview we did with attorney Kate Martin, of the Center for National Security Studies, who represented Tsang in his Privacy Act lawsuit against the CIA, as well as portions from an hour-long interivew, taped this past July for KUCI show host Mari Frank's "Privacy Piracy" show (www.kuci.org/privacypiracy/#09_12_07) where Frank interviewed Martin and Tsang about his lawsuit that exposed CIA domestic spying after the Privacy Act was enacted supposedly to prevent such illegal activities. We talk about how the CIA used the National Security Act to illegally spy on Tsang. Although the CIA settled the case with Tsang, a U.S. citizen at birth, it refused to promise to not spy on other Americans (or permanent residents).

To listen to the entire show, click here:

For more information, see press release.

Human Rights & Sex Offenders

On our next show, airing Monday, 1 October 2007, KUCI's Subversity show kicks off its fall 2007 season by focusing on a new report, No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the US, that recently was issued by Human Rights Watch.

We talk with the report's author, Sarah Tofte, who is a researcher with the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch. In her report, she assails "mistaken premises" that are prevalent about sex offenders and argues that we must rethink sex offender laws because the laws are counterproductive.

To listen to the entire show, click here:

Last month, we aired a related program, an interview with Paul Shannon, who has started a campaign to reform sex offender laws.

Audio of that earlier Subversity show is here.

Shannon's article in CounterPunch is here.

Shannon's web site with an online petition is here.