Call me a sissy, but I've never particularly cared for being referred to as cisgender. Still, the work of transgendered activists within Occupy Wall Street has been one of things that keep me optimistic. At a November 13th teach-in at Zuccotti Park, just days before the brutal eviction, trans activists took over the people's mic for an hour-long lesson in occupying gender, educating their non-trans listeners on the unearned privileges we enjoy whenever we conform to ascribed gender; outlining the work that groups like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project have long been engaged in, against police violence and medical pathologization; and outlining pragmatic and principled tactics for an occupation open to trans and cis-gendered people alike. >>

Technically, I never worked on Wall Street. But, for a difficult year in my early twenties, I did don a suit at the crack of dawn and schlep down to one bank or another in the financial district or, occasionally, to one of its outposts in Long Island City, Queens, or Stamford, CT. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, American Express, Swiss Bank. I was a perma-temp in a series of glorified secretarial pools, the highest paid work my liberal arts degree could secure me, even in the middle of the Nineties dot com boom. >>

It's hard to say that someone had a bad year because they made fewer millions than usual. And it's even harder to pity 50 Cent under any circumstances. But still, 2009 was rough on the hip-hop superstar otherwise known as Curtis Jackson. It ended with his latest album, Before I Self-Destruct, deservedly yielding the kind of sales numbers that inspire bad title-related puns. And it began with rap's most meaningless, inane and stage-managed beef yet, a feud between 50 and purported coke kingpin Rick Ross. Ross flailed around accusing numerous people of being gay. His rival MC mocked Ross's past career as a correctional officer, apparently reasoning that a rapper who never shoots a music video without a huge yacht... >>

So I got to Internet Trolls via my work on Anonymous vs the Church of Scientology but I have remained interested in grappling with them independent of Anonymous. In the last few weeks, I had the chance to bump up my knowledge some about trolling. There is a lot swimming in my head, too much to really put anything down with much coherence, but there is one issue I will throw out there for now, which has to do with the sustainability of the spectacle that is at the heart of trolling. One troll who has produced his fair share of the spectacle, Weev, during a recent chat, raised the issue of the limits of spectacle, in other words, of... >>

Introduction:Richard Ledes is an award-winning New York City-based filmmaker. His films include A Hole in One (2004) and The Caller (2008), which won Tribeca Film Festival's Made in New York award. His current project, Foreclosure, is a horror film about a broken family that struggles to remain together as the ghosts of a haunted house threaten to keep them apart. As the title "Foreclosure" suggests, Ledes's film draws on the current economic crisis in America. While Haiti and Vodou are not directly related to his film, Ledes recognizes an important relationship that American horror cinema shares with Haitian culture, which he proposes in a short video with hopes of raising awareness in the film community. The video points to various... >>