NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Tonight my grandfather (Tun Jack Lujan) and I will be on a panel at the T. Stell Newman Center near the entrance to Big Navy. We'll be talking about the film Families Under Siege, created by the Guam Humanities Council on the effect of World War II on Chamorro families. Panel is at 6 pm. It'll begin with a screening of most of the film, followed by reactions from the panelists, and then a question and answer period. See the flyer for more details.

An interesting article on Hawai'i through the framework of occupation. I was thinking that someone should write an article like this for Guam, but then I remembered that alot of people (including myself) have already written articles like this. *************** Occupying Hawaii: Paradise Lost and Found Sunday, 29 January 2012 07:44    By Michelle Fawcett,  Truthout | News Analysis   Ever since the Garden of Eden headlined the Torah, savvy marketers have realized that we all deeply desire a slice of paradise. Utopia is woven into America's national fabric starting with the Puritan ideal of a " city upon a hill " and progressing through the centuries to Shakers, Mormons, Manifest Destiny, socialists and suburbia. These days, paradise is all around us from potato chips seasoned with "harmonic convergence" to...

My brother Jeremy held his Senior recital over the weekend. This month he'll graduate from UOG. Here are some pictures from his recital that he will no doubt cringe at. I've included below his play list for the performance. ******************** Golliwog’s Cake-walk from “Children’s Corner” By Claude Debussy (1862- 1918) Arr. A. Christopherson Bist Du Bei Mir, Aria from the Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook, 1725 By Gottfried Heinirch Stolzel (1690-1749) Previously attributed to J.S. Bach (1685- 1750) Andante et Allegro By Guy Ropartz (1864-1955) Introduction and Dance By Dmitri Shostakovich (1906- 1975) Concert Rondo By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756- 1791) Arr. J. Ernst Short Intermission St. Thomas By Sonny Rollins (1930-) In a Sentimental Mood By Duke Ellington (1899- 1974) Blue Bossa By Kenny Dorham (1924- 1972) Blue Train By John Coltrane (1926- 1967) Chameleon By Herbie Hancock (19...

Solidarity message from Gangjeong to World friends!! http://youtu.be/KpSLk9OMrGQ CALL FOR GLOBAL PROTEST Jeju: pax et justitia Jeju: peace and justice Sunday 6th May 2012 from 3:00 to 6:00 PM at the Trocadero, PARIS Join us at the Trocadero in Paris, France to support peace and justice in the South Korean island of Jeju. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is the only one in the world crowned with all three UNESCO Natural Science Preserve categories: Biosphere (2002), Word Heritage (2007) and Geoparc (2010). http://english.jeju.go.kr/index.php/contents/AboutJeju/Beauty/PhotoGallery For the past 5 years, the 1,500 inhabitants of Jeju’s Ganjeong village have been leading a peaceful struggle against the construction of a vast naval base on one of Jeju’s most culturally significant sites. Against mounting local and international objections, the South Korean government recently forced through a bill authorizing the construction of this base, the largest of ...

TPM 2012 Crowd-Working 101: Romney Struggles To Hold College Students’ Attention Benjy Sarlin April 27, 2012, 5:38 PM   The volume levels at the colleges President Obama spoke at this week as part of his campaign to keep student loan rates down hovered somewhere between “NBA playoff game” and “supersonic jet.” Mitt Romney’s address Friday at Otterbein University was not quite there yet. Mostly sticking to his go-to stump topics, Romney delivered a sleepy address to students at the Ohio school, some of whom seemed to struggle to stay awake. Sometimes it was a losing struggle. The central theme Romney drove home was the fact that “sometimes appearances do not conform with the facts or reality,” and he applied it to such topics as the office supply industry, the intricacies of tax filing law and Dodd-Frank financial legislation. “I have several examples of disparity between appearance and reality,” Romney said...

One issue that every young Chamorro activist has to deal with, is the same issue that so many on Guam struggle with; their relationship to the United States. Guam's relationship to the US in general is ambiguous, it may be considered very American one moment, but then barely American the next. People from their may be the epitome of Americanness one moment, and then foreigners the next. This is not really an issue of active racism, but just a result of the basic relationship between a territory and its colonizer. Such is the nature of all fundamentally unequal power relationships. When one is supposed to be over another, there is a wide gray area where both benevolence and tyranny and be found. If we recall the era of slavery in the US for example, you could treat your slaves like garbage or you could treat them like members of your family. Either way was allowed. There was no rule that said you have to be especially cruel or that you have to torture or maim them, but there was a...

I've seen Slavoj Zizek use the example of "the red ink" many times over the years in many books. Interesting to see him now use it to describe what the Occupy movement is attempting to describe.  ************************** Published on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 by The Guardian/UK Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done... Next? How a protest movement without a program can confront a capitalist system that defies reform by Slavoj Žižek What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the center, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s: "They are asking us what is our program...

When Geocities disappeared a few years ago it was a depressing time for me. I had several websites that were stored on Geocities and alot of things that I've collected and written over the years just disappeared. Some of them I still have, and have survived the years through various laptops I've had or by being attached to an email I've sent. But I believed the majority of it had ended up in the trash can of nonexistence where so many things of the internet go. A few years back AOL closed down there community pages, and many websites that hadn't been maintained in years, but were nonetheless an important source of information were lost. One of my favorite sites there was the old Nasion Chamoru page. It had so much info there, I found myself for years going back there to look at pictures, read old articles, and see other info about the group and about Chamorros in general. The webmasters tried to start up a new Nasion Chamoru page on blogger, but never really did muc...