Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Art has long been a lever for working class solidarity and social justice. It’s also a collaborative form of labor that props up some workers and devalues others. This week, we're taking a long, hard look at two works of art: Rodrigo Valenzuela: New Works for a Post Worker’s World, an exhibition on view at BRIC House through December 23rd, and 7 MINUTES, a play produced by Waterwell that premiered at HERE Arts Center last spring. • Brooklyn, USA is produced by Emily Boghossian, Shirin Barghi, Charlie Hoxie, Khyriel Palmer, and Mayumi Sato. If you have something to say and want us to share it on the show, here’s how you can send us a message: https://bit.ly/2Z3pfaW
• Thank you to Justin Bryant, Elizabeth Ferrer, Marc Enette, Waterwell, Lee Sunday Evans, Arian Moayed, Andrew Tilson, and Matthew Munroe aka Superlative Sain.
• Transcript: https://bit.ly/3ATfJZS
Brooklyn, USA is a podcast that blends short documentary, hyperlocal journalism, personal narratives, sound art and audiovisual experimentation to reflect the diversity and beauty of our borough. We deliver New York stories told by the people who live them, and cover issues that impact our community in its own voice. #BKUSA
62 | The Worker Doesn't Go Away - Episode Transcript
Brooklyn, USA | November 16, 2022
[INTRO]
[MUSIC BED: Drone swells] Khyriel Palmer: You’re listening to the Brooklyn, USA podcast – an occasional audio love letter from Brooklyn to the world.
[CLIP from Bill Moyer’s Why Work?]
Bill Moyers: No journalist enjoys having its copy edited and none of us like to be second guessed every step of the way.
Khyriel Palmer: That's journalist Bill Moyers again, reflecting on his art as a journalist, in his documentary “Why Work?”
[CLIP from Bill Moyer’s Why Work?]
Bill Moyers: Of course I don’t mean television journalism as a one man operation. It’s a group effort all the way, and we all depend on each other. There's the producer, my colleague Al Levin, the skilled and creative people who do the filming. (Oops. I mean, shooting.) And there are editors and graphic artists and sound engineers. Quite a group. We each have our special role, which gives us our own feeling of importance and purpose. But we're also very much a team and we manage ourselves.
Khyriel Palmer: Art has long been a lever for working class solidarity and social justice. As Moyers says, it is a group effort, but it can be a double edged sword — propping up some workers and devaluing others. For the second episode of our “work” series, we’re peeling back the curtain, and going behind the scenes to learn about the messy work of art-making. This week, we spoke with artists who are using their voice or pen or camera or body to explore the intersection of art, labor, and justice.
Khyriel Palmer: The play 7 MINUTES was produced by Waterwell, written by Stefano Massini, and staged at HERE Arts Center last spring. 7 MINUTES is based on actual events, and depicts an urgent meeting of the 11 women and gender non-conforming folx elected to the union council of their rural Connecticut textile factory. Every performance of 7 MINUTES ended in a talk-back panel hosted by real labor organizers. We spoke with some of the team behind 7 MINUTES to learn why it’s important to make art about labor.
[FADE OUT MUSIC BED]
[7 MINUTES]
[FADE UP MUSIC: Slow, tuned percussion] Mei Ann Teo: My name is Mei Ann Teo, and I'm the director of 7 Minutes by Stefano Massini. Produced by Waterwell.
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: I am Ebony Marshall-Oliver. I am an actress. I am a mom. I am a singer. And I also pride myself on being a good friend. 7 MINUTES is a play about factory workers. It's based on actual events of a French factory, actually. The new management was asking for them to give up 7 minutes of their 15 minute break, and 11 workers that were part of a union called this emergency union committee meeting.
Mei Ann Teo: Lee Sunday Evans and Francesca Spedalieri, the translator did a phenomenal job of moving it to the U.S. context in the script.
Sarah Hughes: I read it. I was gripped by it. I remember talking to all my coworkers about it at a staff meeting. [FADE OUT MUSIC] I'm Sarah Hughes. I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and I work for a project called Labor Notes. We work primarily with union members who are interested in building a strong and powerful rank and file labor movement. I got an email from the producer Lee, who was like, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind looking at this script that's about a union that we are having translated into English. And so they sent me the script and I read through it for just sort of like labor movement terms. I thought that the play really captured this sort of sense of like how destabilizing it is to not know the future of your job, to feel like you're at the whim of these owners. They're trying to decide if they have power or not to exert in the play, because it's a counter to sort of like how we're told the world works, we're expected to just sort of go along with things or like file your complaints, but not to actually organize and exert power. So it just felt like the conversations people had were so true to life.
[FADE UP MUSIC: Atmospheric drone, factory buzz] Mei Ann Teo: When you enter into the theater, immediately you hear these echoes of the factory.
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: The stage for 7 minutes looked like an old break room.
Mei Ann Teo: And no one's there, but you can see, you know, magazines strewn about, you know, food that people had left out.
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: None of the tables were the same. The chairs didn't match. They had this really low ceiling with fluorescent lights with stains. The linoleum on the floor was chipped.
Mei Ann Teo: And there is that sort of like question of like what happens in this space?
Mei Ann Teo: As the sound swells and people have been seated, the lights go out [FADE OUT MUSIC] and all of a sudden the lights come on and there are nine people in the space. [FADE UP MUSIC: Tuned percussion] And as they begin to speak, you realize that they've been waiting a long time. They’ve been waiting like 3 hours. Like what is happening? Where is Linda? Where's Linda? What's going on?
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: My character Linda was the president of this committee. And so I was the one that was in the meeting for 4 hours with the new powers that be.
Mei Ann Teo: Linda comes back and everyone, you know, pounces on her and says, "Tell us, tell us, tell us!" and she says, "Nothing will change." And they're like, "Wait, nothing?" Like "No, nothing, except for one thing. One of our 15 minute breaks will be cut by 7 minutes."
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: I came back with that offer and initially, you know, I thought "It's just 7 minutes." But then the more I thought about it, I'm like, "But it's not just 7 minutes. It's 7 minutes, but it's 7 minutes of free labor for 200 people. That equals however many hours they are getting of free labor from us." My character was the only one that was against it at first.
Mei Ann Teo: And at first on the whole, everyone says, "Oh yeah, great, done. No problem." The play basically takes us through the process where they reason together, what 7 minutes on our bodies means, you know, what does it mean if someone is a mother who has to pump? What does it mean if someone has an injury, a disability? What does it mean for someone who's worked for 20 years? And what are we willing to continually give up?
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: Linda had been there the longest over 25 years. I considered her the matriarch and the one who will fight for everybody, including herself. And I think being at that factory for 25 years got her to that place. I don't know that she went in and started working there and was that person.
Sarah Hughes: Linda, who's the president, you know, she's saying they should fight back, but she also recognizes that she hasn't been a part of any fighting back in a serious way for a really long time. And so people don't know that that's an option. And in my... You know, like that was how I interpreted it is that she was sort of like, "Oh, I wonder if I failed these folks in sort of like not making sure that we were ready to like tackle things like this as a union."
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: They had like 90 minutes to come back with a decision of yay or nay. [END MUSIC]
Sarah Hughes: We wanted to cast very specifically, and we actually added a lot of story by the casting that we did. For me, like when you're talking about labor, you like you have to talk about immigration. When you're talking about labor, [FADE UP MUSIC: Tuned percussion, quick-paced] you have to talk about the folks who are at the forefront of pushing for rights, which are trans women and Black trans women in particular. Like, we cannot talk about free labor without actually being able to understand it from a Black woman's perspective. So we were very specific in thinking how we cast. We kept a lot of things the same, and then we actually, like, made it more rich by actually casting more immigrants. All immigrants do not feel the same. We wanted to have a complexity of those stories.
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: During the rehearsal process, Mei Ann asked us, "I want you to just sit and figure out where you feel most comfortable."
Mei Ann Teo: We really looked at dynamics of relationships in the space because it is one room. And being able to be like, where would they move to? Who were the people that they would feel closer to? Who would actually play cards together and sit together for lunch? Who would never do that?
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: There was also an old sofa that was a part of the set, and two of the immigrants sat on that sofa and it was like their safe space. And that was deliberate. We sometimes in real life gravitate to the people that we have the most in common with and feel the most safe with.
Sarah Hughes: You know, you see all the different ways that people interact with their coworkers and the ways that we are formally and informally split up at work. You see these divisions in the play between an older generation and a younger generation of workers. You see the difference between the office workers and the floor workers. You know, there's these questions about sort of like gender and immigration that come up in the way that people see themselves as different, or as... They have something in common. There's a part where one of the women is an immigrant and she sort of talks about feeling more precarious in her work and that she used to ride the bus with these people and they've lost their jobs. And she's the last one on her commute now of her friends. All of that is so true to life. I feel like those sorts of conversations really do happen where even when you decide that something is wrong, that question of like, well, who is going to bear the brunt of the blowback of this?
Mei Ann Teo: There's a line that I remember that Linda says and she says, "Always the same, always the same, always the same." And then you start talking about the history of who gets squeezed first, who gets shafted first.
Sarah Hughes: I can think of a time when I was working with some coworkers. I was a union steward because we realized that the women of color in our office were being paid less than the white people. And so we were trying to figure out how to kind of like wage this campaign for pay parity. We had some really tense moments in this multiracial group of, like, trying to talk through, like, you know, who is leading this campaign, what are the different risk factors? Who is going to be targeted if there is retaliation and who are our allies? What are the ways that solidarity is tested across race and gender lines? That campaign sort of fell apart. But the interesting thing is that the people who had done some of that work of like planning and talking to each other about these really hard topics were much more connected than they had been before and had much stronger relationships. And, you know, I think it's a great reminder that, you know, to really be able to, like, take risks together and confront a boss, you have to trust each other and you just can't really build that trust overnight. I think that's something you see in the play, is that trust breaks down across some of those lines. And that's part of what we see in like successful movements is people building tight knit relationships, doing things transparently and democratically, involving as many people as you can. And sometimes just taking sort of baby steps to bring people along to that point where they feel comfortable taking risks. [END MUSIC]
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: We had a few unions come to see the show and it was very interesting, their feedback. We had some of the Starbucks workers that were trying to unionize and it was very interesting to do the show that night because they were very vocal. [FADE UP MUSIC: Atmospheric drone] When Linda was asking questions, they were very like, "That's right!" and "No, don't do that!" And "No!" And so when the first person switched, there was an applause where we had never gotten an applause before.
Mei Ann Teo: Snapping, saying like, "Yaaaas", you know. There was one night that was just so lit because like we had the union folks and every time someone turned, there was a celebration. There were like, "Yeah! Someone turned!"
Sarah Hughes: I think it's cool that there's art being made about these really like fundamental struggles in people's lives. And there's just so little of that talked about. You know, there's so little sort of like worker and working class art, like in the mainstream where we talk about like people having shitty jobs and how do you fight back against that? And, you know, the people who do so are so passionate and their deserves to be more art about that.
Mei Ann Teo: So the end of the play... We come to the end and it had been one against ten, and by the end you have five who are like, "We, we can't give them our 7 minutes." And then the other five who are still on that side of like, "Yeah, let's just do it. The stakes are too high." And the youngest, the youngest character is left with that decision.
Ebony Marshall-Oliver: And we still don't know how they voted because the play ended with a cliffhanger of the last person. And so every night I was like, I was trying to figure out if I could figure out from her which way she was leaning. And I never did. I never did.
Mei Ann Teo: Everybody by the end is asking themselves like, "I am -- if I'm Sophie, what, what would I choose?" I think about theater often as like we are actually watching people make decisions on stage. That is that is a school for empathy to be like, "Oh, I would have made that decision too," or "I wouldn't have made that decision," or whatever. And it's also the School for transformation. We're actually watching how people can change.
Sarah Hughes: You know, it's not like in any general strike in history, people have all woken up on the same day and been like, "Today's the day!" [laughs] You know? I mean, it starts with people practicing organizing, winning small victories... Or maybe you lose, but then like you get another job and five years later, like, you try it again there. Or you like talk to a friend about it. Like, any time people are taking action together, we are transformed by that.
Mei Ann Teo: Gracie Lee Boggs said, "We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of critical mass. It's always about critical connections." So there's no critical mass without critical connections. And that is actually the very close way I feel like labor organizing and theater-making are aligned, is that we are actually always about the critical connections we can make with each other in order to make those critical connections with the audience.
[END MUSIC]
[RODRIGO VALENZUELA]
[FADE UP MUSIC: Atmospheric, space-y drone] Elizabeth Ferrer: I'm Elizabeth Ferrer, chief curator at BRIC and curator of New Works for A Post-Worker's World featuring artist Rodrigo Valenzuela. We invited Rodrigo to exhibit at BRIC because of the deeply innovative means he uses to express ideas around important social issues. The exhibition includes photography, video, sculpture, and installation. And while his work in each media is visually distinct, it is united around the theme of work. This has personal significance for Rodrigo, who came from Chile to the United States and spent several years as an undocumented manual laborer before he became an artist. And labor has much relevance to our time, right? As we think about work in the post-COVID era and about unionizing. But he does not portray work literally. The artist's elaborate constructions made of scrap metal and industrial discards take on the appearance of obsolete factories, archaic machinery or the kinds of weapons workers might devise for an uprising. His photographs of these constructions have the feel of science fiction, a realm Rodrigo turns to, because it offers us the possibility to imagine new worlds.
[FADE OUT MUSIC]
Rodrigo Valenzuela: What do I do? That is a lot of pressure. My name is Rodrigo Valenzuela. I'm a visual artist, originally from Chile, living in Los Angeles. For a lot of people, mostly minorities, you don't grow up with a lot of models to how to be an artist. You know, it's a mystery. [FADE UP MUSIC: Slow drone] For me, it was through a lot of education. I always thought that studying art and history and being really into cultures, of all different forms of knowledge was a way to escape poverty. So to me, even if I didn't study art right away, I always thought about art, thought about movies and music as a way to escape. I studied art history at first in Chile. To be in touch with art, to feel confident. Because I think that's going to be a component of being an artist that come from a humble background. [FADE OUT MUSIC]
Rodrigo Valenzuela: It's like that you don't feel confident because there is not a lot of references for your life. I made a lot of art. I made a lot of experiments, a lot of movies with my friends. But mostly I focus to study art, to feel confident in my knowledge and skills, to feel I have something to fall back and to give a lot of foundation to my ideas. I'm here because I wanted to be an artist and I wanted to really just escape Chilean culture. I decided to move here to try to be an artist and try to experiment with, you know, all the possibilities. I originally wanted to be a filmmaker and then I got more into photography and painting and sculptor. But that was like 17 years ago. I was mopping floors in construction sites in Boston to be in a landscaping work here in Seattle and in Olympia, Washington -- I did all kind of manual jobs possible for many years until I got my green card. So all these things that I have learned from framing to concrete work, moving and organizing and making everything kind of fit into some way. I mean, I transported the work from LA to here. I packed the truck myself and I drove. I made the frames because I learned carpentry since very young age. So, yeah, the worker doesn't go away. But there is a linear like a history that I have to respect, right? Like my dad, for example, was a labor union organizer in Chile, and was part of the Union of Mailmen. My grandpa was a carpenter. I think there is a lot of components of being part of the working class as an artist that are important. From personal reasons, like my dad being part of the labor unions, growing up poor and having a lot of support from cooperatives and collectives that help us to go vacation, to have like, you know, more stability for my parents. Making art of working class issues is very complicated because it feels very different. A lot of artists don't realize that they are more poor than most people that they're considering blue collar. And you have a lot of more precarious conditions. So like most artists don't have health insurance, for example. I like to address those things. The stability, the confidence you have, like how the future looks like for you when you live in precarity. And I think that is something that I really like to think and make work about.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: The work has, the show "New Works for a Post-Worker's World" it is kind of sci fi where there is like photos, printmaking, painting, ceramics, and video. They are all addressed in this kind of like fictional time that may be located in like Union Station, Air Force of the 1940s and early modernism, high industrialization of American, but also could be a high Latin-American surrealism or can be like German expressionist films. So they have a big mix and I think they work together, but not necessarily all are coming from the same place. The ceramics and the screen prints are very different and the photographs kind of is a connector or catalyzer between those two works.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: The labor unions play a big role on my understanding of the world, not only because they were part of my upbringing, but also there is a friction in an understanding of their role historically in the formation of the working class and the middle class, and their role now as a kind of way of resistance of capitalism, but also as an ideological movement. It makes you immediately a leftist if you want to support labor unions. It makes you immediately anti-corporations and maybe anti-American. But to me, it's very interesting to consider that the car industry and the metal industry, the places that were the foundation for what we understand now -- minimum wage, 40 hour-week, all this vacation time -- they happened through unionization and a lot of violence and a lot of loss. And that area of the country like pittsburgh detroit, the Rust Belt in general is the very same parts that you have to convince right now to not vote against the interests of the middle class. The people that went for Trump in the last couple of elections are the ones that create all this social systems that benefit them, thathave create the system that allows them to have a middle class life, and middle class jobs, and like still be able to like send kids to college, and have time away for vacation, and have some rest, and be able to sit at work. The very first thing that the Republican Party does is like eliminate collective bargaining rights because they know that is not a communist thing, it's that people will be happier and stronger when they unionize, when they like associate. Even if you don't consider that union, just collectivity is necessary. I like I don't want to talk about destroying capitalism, I want to try to have like a more kinder capitalism, and less abusive capitalism, and a lot of collectivity to help each other. The only way we can do it is through a very solid organization, that is socially what we call unions.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: I never understood the difference between artists and working class people. I mean, I understand that now that when I hang out with artists, I totally get there is a disconnect. And I think it mostly has to do with classism. And you know, it took a long time for me to not feel out of place in this circles. A lot of people in the arts come from privilege. So it's very hard, I think, for people to understand what it takes to wake up at six in the morning and just show up to work. [FADE UP MUSIC: Slow drone] Even if you are fucking depressed, broke, and sad, if you kids are sick, or something bad happens, the letters still get delivered. You know, the mailman get depressed too. So having a hard day at the studio and being broke, not having a successful painting happening doesn't excuse you from being part of the working class. I wish artists would be more engaged with class issues. I think the pandemic really did a good job creating the conditions for disassociation, which is the very thing that capitalism won. Divide and conquer. Becoming producers and consumers and not citizens is like that dream. So if you're going to stay home clicking around, and sometimes making money, and sometimes clicking around, and sometimes spending money, it will be a time where you don't understand the problems of the person that cleaned the office. You don't understand what your boss and the manager come from. You don't jump in the bus. You really create this bubbles where whatever beliefs you have, they stay there. Therefore, you can be a lot easier to brainwash. You can be a lot easier to convinced of whatever you already believe. I think that was the most negative component of this.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: So I've been building a lot of these installations where you can really choose your vantage points and you can really move around the works and at some point be completely surrounded by works sometimes, but without being trapped. The largest series I have is call "Afterworks", and is a series of 26 silver gelatin prints that were done in early 2020. And they're evocative of a factory or a place were production happen and then there is no longer bodies there. Then I have the series "Weapons", that is in my mind is a map of the workers leaving the factories and creating these weapons out of precarious materials. And those weapons are printed on to time cards, the object that you use to check in to work every day. Those are collage and glue onto canvas and then a screen printed. The photos I did of the weapons get translated into screens and then printed onto these time cards. And that series "Weapons", which is also a series of around 30 images. Then I have after airstrip is a series of ceramics. Airstrip is the fictitious town where in 1984 the book happened. They are a small ceramic objects that operate as a bird's eye view perspective of a city or a place. And then I have two video pieces. They talk about labor unions from different perspectives -- from the workers and from the youth, from the young people entering the labor market. [00:28:20][93.0]
[00:28:22] I think the title of the project really embodies a lot of what I'm trying to say. "New Works for a Post-Worker's World", which it doesn't mean would without workers. It means we are not people consider working anymore, but they're still producers. That is the kind of general message of the work. There is an absence of the body that produces the stuff. The accumulation of all the works is really trying to search of what will happen after the idea of the worker disappears. Everybody wants to be the first one that does something, but everybody wants to be the best at something. Right? But it's very hard to find that collectivity that will help us to find stability and retirement and all the benefits that a lot of our parents had. So there was something to be said about like actually be part of the labor unions and collective desires. The idea of the project has a lot to do with that, with the search for collectivity, even sometimes the show looks a little bit depressive, it is searching for those moments. [FADE OUT MUSIC]
[VOICE MEMO - Andrew Tilson]
[beep] [voicemail] Andrew Tilson: My name is Andrew Tilson. I'm the founder and director for the Workers Unite Film Festival here in New York, which is one of the largest worker labor film festivals now in the country. This is going into our 12th season now in 2023. I came out of a program, a master's program in what was called Labor Studies for a fairly new school, the School of Labor in the City University of New York system. And having had a long background in both the music industry and in video stuff, I realized there was no labor worker film festival in this union town of New York City. So we started and it was successful enough to keep going. Our whole position is that global labor solidarity is the key to solving most of our labor issues in the long term because as we've seen, corporations are very adept at moving jobs overseas to try and pay the lowest possible salary, exploiting workers, basically. So we have to kind of make networks and make partnerships with our fellow workers and union organizers all over the world, which is one of the things that we try and do at the film festival. We try and have stories and films and screenplays that come from all different parts of the world, and we've been pretty successful at that. It's very important to us to screen these stories because you can tell people a bunch of facts and figures about why a union is better, why they're being exploited. But if they see a story about another worker, for example, right now Starbucks workers and Amazon workers risking their work life, their jobs, you know, the risk of getting fired in order to obtain fair wages and fair benefits on the job, it's a very emotionally driven point where people actually react in a much more positive way to seeing that it's possible. The system is designed to tell people it is impossible to organize and it is very hard, but it's not impossible. And so the role of art, as in any art, is to expand the horizon of people so that they can see that people all around the world, even people in countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, who have none of the protections that we have, which are not great at all, but even without any protections, they're willing to really risk their livelihood, often risk their lives to organize into these unions and to worker associations to gain the leverage that they need to fight the exploitation of people who own these massive companies. Right now, we've seen Twitter, very large social media company, lay off enormous number of workers in one shot. And if you notice, the difference this time is that a lot of them who are tech savvy and web savvy, they posted videos of how after giving everything and building this company for five or six years, they were sent a nasty email with a, almost like a joke, "You're fired." And that has made a difference. Even at that level, not even a full fledged documentary or even a short film, video plays a very important role in our lives, for better or worse. And that's where we come from. We try and portray stories, both documentaries and narratives. And we try and show people that other people are fighting the same battles and that other people, they're having some losses, but they're also having successes and that there is a pathway to gain control of your working life.
[VOICE MEMO - Superlative Sain ]
[beep] [voicemail] Superlative Sain: My name is Matthew Monroe, a.k.a. Superlative Sain. I am a music artist and media company owner, slash photographer, videographer, graphic designer, etc.. As a musician, we are required to do a lot more work. As a musician, we have to be our own marketing agent. We have to be our own manager. We have to be our own PR. We have to do a lot of things for ourselves, and that requires multiple hats than just the musician. It's a bit of work, but you know, it's worth it when you get to the point where you're trying to get to. Working on music feels like the most work when you have to do all of the back end work, such as registering your songs and making sure that you are copyrighting your music and making sure that everything is through your BMI and all the other things that you have to be on the music business side of things to make sure that you're good. That's when it really becomes like work or tedious. As a musician, somebody's always trying to scam you. Someone's always trying to take your money and not offer up the services that they claim that they actually have. You know, social media, every other day, there's somebody claiming to be able to give you followers or give you engagement or boost your streams. And it's usually bots or somebody trying to scam an artist out of thousands of dollars to perform at a festival when it doesn't even work that way. As a musician, you get exploited a lot and you don't get taught enough about the people who are doing the exploiting. Musicians need more protection and knowledge about protecting themselves in the music industry, because a lot of us start off taking beats off of YouTube, recording it and putting it out on streaming services, not realizing that we can definitely get sued for that. If any of those songs go viral, or pop, or get big and we make money off of it and we didn't do the necessary splits or didn't do the necessary back end work, you can get sued out of a lot of money and you could end up just having a viral song that you get in no money off of. If we all got together and band together and said, "Cool, we don't need the labels or we don't need this or we don't need that." If everyone did it, then we would have the collective power as a workers. But that would probably never happen cause everybody's out for themselves ultimately. The more fun it is, the less that feels like work in regards to even like my media company. When I'm editing a video, if I'm very much into the song, I probably finish editing the video within a couple of hours. If I'm not into the song, it'll probably take me a little bit more time to try to come up with a creative way to make it more enjoyable. So if you like the work and if it's what you love to do, it doesn't seem like work doesn't feel tedious as a labor of love. [beep]
[MUSIC BED: Beat with space-y melody]
[CREDITS]
Khyriel Palmer: Brooklyn, USA is produced by me, Khyriel Palmer…
Emily Boghossian: and me Emily Boghossian,
Shirin Barghi: and me Shirin Barghi
Charlie Hoxie: and me, Charlie Hoxie
Mayumi Sato: and me, Mayumi Sato
Khyriel Palmer: …with help this week from Justin Bryant, Elizabeth Ferrer, Marc Enette, Waterwell, Lee Sunday Evans, Andrew Tilson, and Matthew Munroe aka Superlative Sain.
Khyriel Palmer: You can find Mei Ann Teo’s work at www.meiannteo.com. You can see Mei Ann’s latest play – Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet – at the Public Theater through November 27th.
Khyriel Palmer: If you’re interested in organizing your workplace, Labor Notes is having a mini Troublemakers School conference on November 19th. Register on their website. visit www.labornotes.org.
Khyriel Palmer: Rodrigo Valenzuela’s New Works For A Post-Worker’s World will be on view at BRIC House in downtown Brooklyn through December 23rd. Explore more of Rodrigo’s work at www.rodrigovalenzuela.com.
Khyriel Palmer: If you want to tell us a story, or somehow end up on the podcast, check the show notes for a link to our guide on recording a voice memo on your mobile phone and sending it to us on the internet. And if you like what you hear or think we missed something, comment, like, share and subscribe, and follow at BRIC TV on twitter and instagram, for updates.
Khyriel Palmer: For more information on this and all BRIC Radio podcasts, visit www.bricartsmedia.org/radio.
[FADE OUT MUSIC]