1. With apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford and Lena...uh, if you're a woman, you make exactly .77 cents to the 'man's' dollar while you're grinding away elbow to elbow in the salt mines. Don't have a college education? A woman of color? Hispanic or Black? Hey babe you're earning approximately .68 cents, retro, to the buck. Yesterday, was the 50th anni of the signing of the equal pay act. And no, we haven't come a long way; the gender gap is still held hostage by the prickly zipper. A seminal moment for me: a printing job I stumbled upon down in the western Oakland warehouse district; a stone's throw from deFremery park, site of the Black Panthers rally's. The shop was youthful, filled with vibrant, brash individuals who believed in equal 'everything' much to the owner's outrage and chagrin. My first day on the job, I heard the tapping of a razor blade on a light table. And knew illicit adventures beckoned. Unionized, every contract negotiation was brutal. In the end, equal pay, a concept, which never existed before for any of us sparked and burnt like wild fire. It was the 70's.
2. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. HBO. A documentary. Somewhere in the Gulag deep in Mother Russia, Nadia and Masha are serving out their 2 year sentence for 40 seconds of theater in a Moscow Cathedral before a shocked congregation. With one act, three women belonging to the Pussy Riot collective exposed Putin and his government as draconian neanderthals, scared shitless, by masked neon balaclava'd women engaged in guerrilla punk music and going all H.A.M on them...the thing is, now more than ever, the whole world was, and is still watching.
3. Game of Thrones. It was the shizzil. Good summer reading if you can't wait for next year.
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