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M.T. Karthik

~ midcareer archive, 1977 – 2017 plus 2022

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: editor

Summer Issue: Hot Joy! Plexus no. 26 #ALSIce BucketChallenge, Bats, Cicadas, Not as many TripDigit Days

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by mtk in Letter From MTK

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antone, antonio, blog, editor, home, in, letter, netzine, quarterly, San, texas, zine

Hi Everybody and Welcome!

Home in San Antone is a netzine and blog named for the Fred Rose song popularized by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys – video on our About Page.

My name is Karthik. I grew up on the Northwest side in the 1970’s and ’80’s: Locke-Hill Elementary (original and current); Hobby middle; Clark high (’85). I left to do my Bachelors at U.T. (’89), then went traveling, living outside of Texas for many years. I’ve returned to San Antonio at least once a year and often three or four times a year since I left.

I’ve dropped in and out of town, so I’ve observed the rampant development and growth like a skipping stone observes a lake.

This is massive change: people, places and things disappearing, some reappearing. Newness sprouting up everywhere.

Waste, violence, overcrowding and traffic are terrible byproducts of the era, but though San Antonio’s culture has been in tremendous flux, just a few years shy of her 300th birthday, she’s beginning to look pretty diverse, eclectic and vibrant.

Now I find a complex city bursting at the seams.

There are already a few excellent “hyper-local” blogs (Geekette, SAFlavor, Rivard, Dr. Denise Barkis-Richter’s)  in the blogroll. I will add links as I think of them (actually right now I’m going to go add Blue Star, which I witnessed born).

This blog’s just a slow-growing image of our town through my lens; a zine that reflects, documents, journals and archives with photographs and video from the present and past for the future.

I’ll be inviting others to provide content and setting themes for future issues, but for now, here’s Volume 1, Issue 1, of Home in San Antone.

See you ’round San Antone

Karthik aka MTK

@homeinsanantone

21st Century Elections

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, NYC, S.F., San Antonio

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

2000, 2004, barack, Bush, chief, City, count, editor, F.Kennedy, fiasco, Filippacchi, Florida, frank, George, Hachette, in, Jeb, John, Jr., Karl, kerry, Lalli, lawsuits, loss, magazine, manhattan, new, obama, publisher, Rove, swiftboat, vote, W., york

In Spring of 2000, Hachette-Filippacchi Inc.,hired me and a half-dozen others to work as independently-contracted temporary employees to fact-check and conduct research for George magazine – whose founder and editor-in-chief John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been killed in a light-plane crash amidst fog off the coast of Maine eight months before. They hired us to ensure George remained, in the wake of its founder’s passing, an audible element of the political discourse during the Election of 2000.

As a national magazine which was read by hundreds of thousands of voters in many states, particular focus was paid to the Presidential Election between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas.

My fellow employees, under Editor-in-Chief Frank Lalli, were a tight-knit, smart and savvy crew. In fact, on Election Night we were all together at Mr. Lalli’s beautiful upper westside home where he had invited us to watch returns. But Karl Rove’s fat face and a flipped state later, many of us were back in the office. A few of us stayed up most of the night and by 10 a.m. I was not alone in the office when I was posting coverage of Florida on the George website.

Though admittedly not a heavy-hitter politically, George was engaged throughout the Election and maintained an immense audience of voting readers before the magazine was finally brought to an end in 2001.

In 2003 I covered Schwarzenegger’s Election via Recall of Davis for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles.

I also covered The Election of 2004 and the Presidential Race between George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles and in part for Pacifica Radio. Some of that 2004 Election work exists here and online at Pacifica’s Audioport and in the Pacifica Radio Archives, but I have complete digital copies of everything I did for KPFK and Pacifica between 2003 and 2005 backed up on disc in my studio as well.

In 2008, I was no longer working as a journalist, but did cover Obama’s Victory in Iowa for KPFK and produced short Audio-Visual Installments for Freshjive on the Internet. These were amateurish and clunky by design, yet carried considerable data for anyone who had tuned in to the broadcasts I produced for KPFK four years before.

When Obama won in ’08, I was with Lloyd Dangle, who hosted a book signing and Election Night Returns Party at the Riptide in San Francisco. Earlier in the day I had a drink with former SF Mayor Willie Brown at the St. Regis – we discussed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s plans for appointing a Senator to replace disgraced Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, forced to retire.

This year,I did not work as a journalist, but rather observed as a reader of the news media and a regular Californian voter.

The biggest single predictor of the elections of the 21st century has to be the margin of difference in registrations for the two major parties.

There are many reasons for this: smaller parties are being absorbed and disappearing for lack of membership, corporate interests fund the two major parties only, people threatened by one of the two parties runs to join the other and the demography of the nation is changing.

I have successfully predicted the last two elections as a result of my study of data and my knowledge of voting history. I think I see the electorate again.

Some points on 21st Century US Elections:

It’s impossible to write a blog about all my experiences voting and covering General Elections in the United States in the 21st Century, but suffice it to say there is a distinct difference between these and the Elections of the latter half of the 20th century, in which I also participated.

Much of this is discussed in my talk Political Media, Messages and More.

2003 was the Recall Election and spawned recalls in the 21st Century because of Schwarzenegger’s success.

2008 was the Youtube Election.

2012 was the Twitter Election.

Money and media are the driving forces of what has become a political system mired in divided, brutal contests between two immense parties which are financed primarily by corporations and special interest groups that define their policies.

We are in desperate need of a new Federal Elections Reform Act, as was passed in the early 1970’s.

Our democracy is sick. Hardly half the people with the right to vote even participate.

We need to update, nationalize and standardize voting procedures and make them more secure. We need to increase registration and participation. We need to subsidize the creation and maintenance of additional parties in the face of the massive expenditures made by Republicans and Democrats that have taken elections out of the reach of the common person. We need proportional representation in Congress.

Have been saying all of this for years, and it has only gotten worse. Here’s hoping the young people who are increasing in numbers at the polls pull off what my generation couldn’t.

ritual du matin, age 40, Tamil Nadu, India

23 Friday Mar 2007

Posted by mtk in Asia, fiction, India, short film, Tamil Coast

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2007, 23, 40, actor, age, chavady, director, editor, film, Karthik, m.t., March, mudaliar, Nadu, narrative, periya, producer, short, tamil, writer

Letter to the Editor of the New Yorker, 1997

10 Sunday Aug 1997

Posted by mtk in essay, NYC, public letters

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1997, City, editor, Karthik, letter, m.t. karthik, mtk, new, york, Yorker

The idea called India today affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people.  This idea is embodied by a geographic area which has ever-changing borders in the minds of those who name(d) it.  We who were born on Indian soil know it.  Those who were not but who are related to India in some way feel a very powerful relationship between themselves and India.

Those born at this moment, in these hours, weeks and months fall into a different category.  They are the contemporaries of nations and countries named.

They will come to call places India, Israel, Ecuador, Panama, America, Europe & etc. There is lessening influence from the time when they were not named as such.  As the years pass those who called other names, or fought for other names or fought naming, grow older and eventually die.

When a person who thinks carefully about names has a child, it is a moment of great importance.  For many, naming a child is an important act, but for many others naming does not stop there.  The act of teaching names to a child is equally important.  Because the names one teaches may live for at least another  generation through this act.

Early in his essay, “Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!” (New Yorker, June 23 & 30, 1997, p.52) Salman Rushdie makes use of a newborn name: Indo-Anglian literature.  And in so doing teaches the many children of his revolution a new name.  Whether this name lives for another literary generation depends upon its use and its use, as with all language, is a function of its necessity. Indo-Anglian literature is, by the parameters of its creation, a contemporary art.  Contemporary arts throughout history are marked with factors that distinguish them from previous movements. Among these factors perhaps the most impressive is risk.  In contemporary arts risk may become more valuable than endurance.

History is dying.

The era of the written word as a valuable and trustworthy guide to understanding is yielding itself to other processes by which we come to estimate the world around us.  The diversity of the tools and media we have available to estimate and distribute estimations of events and acts around the world are affecting literature in unprecedented ways.  The historical word, first spoken, then written and now reduced to an accompaniment to images in both written and oral forms, is dying.

In its place a concert of word and image and sound and space and portrayal and metaphor are being utilized to represent truth.  The modern citizen of the physical world must deal with this as the ideological world shrinks to the size of a p-nut in the palm of an Indian boy running the aisle of a plane travelling a tres grande vitesse on 16mm film, 24 frames per second.

The greatest contemporary artists in the written history of the arts have been brave.  In the face of change and alteration of beliefs, they have sought methods by which they can represent truths.  These artists exist today.  They seek trust.  They try to represent hope.  They are as Gandhiji, conducting “My Experiments with the Truth.”  In this way we are living in a very complex time for an artist or writer who wishes to participate at the most important, the most global, the most contemporary level.

Indo-Anglian writing and arts share, with the arts of other ancient cultures (Afro-Anglian?  Chino-Anglian?  Sino-Anglian?) the new joy of working in the Post-Colonial Era.  Indeed, the joy of supporting the end of the colonial era in an effort to support the whole one-ness of the human species.  At his wonderfully unifying musical concerts, the great Fela Anikulapo Kuti used to say, “You can say many things with English, but in order to say many other things which are true you must break it, which is why we speak broken English.  This next song is in broken English. You must break your English to understand it.”

In this country, we are faced with a unique set of problems as artists and writers trying to represent truth with the tools available to us.  We are subject to the philosophies of the dominant culture in the United States of America, which paradoxically represent the Colonial Attitude in a different aspect.

To be an Indo-Anglian writer in the United States is to choose to be a contemporary artist working in a contemporary arena to represent truths which affect millions of people using the tools available in the most powerful country in the world, an awesome task.

The writers who represent post-colonial Indian thought in literature in English are dedicated to many similar topics, but writers who are Indo-Anglian face the same difficulties with naming as anyone who wishes to express: we do not want to be grouped.  And yet we are all tied to this land mass which, as an island something like 45 million years ago smashed its way into the continental spread of Asia forcing up the formation of the tallest mountain in the world and the twisted masses of mountainous geography in the North of India.  Such a violent, willful act of inclusion seems so contradictory to this desire for independence.

Choosing to be here in the US, I struggle to represent the truths I experience despite this. In the United States the way in which the cultures relate has been poisoned by the specter of racism.  The complex way in which racism was born, named and now has insidiously changed itself into a thing which can exist despite the stated collective desires for freedom, peace and equality is a direct function of the way this country has been created.  It is something for which everyone who lives here is responsible.

In conclusion, I care about where you are from … but how we behave now that we are all here is what concerns me most.

M.T. Karthik, Harlem, August 10, 1997
[did not appear in the New Yorker magazine]

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

a minute of rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLHNRS8ik4

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