Introducing: MIDHEAVEN NETWORK

20 July 2020

The Vanderbilt Republic (“VR”) was founded in 2008 to serve archetype expansion.

Launching a minority-owned creative business on high ideals in the depths of an economic recession often felt like the path of supreme folly — and I had just become a father. Yet seeing our world of systemic, naked inequity & suffering-by-design reflected in my son’s eyes gave me no option. They say that the best time to plant a tree is right now, or twelve years ago…

In our decade+ of work with BIPOC & LGBTQI artists across the creative spectrum, genocide survivors, the wrongfully convicted, Muslim/immigrant/marginalized communities, survivors of atomic war, revolutionary female producers, female-founded businesses and more, VR has always stood on the front lines of the movement towards equality, truth and understanding. In America’s saturation of inhumanity, the nearest approximation to justice is available to us in these three nouns. As an oppressed people, our only viable revenge is elevation: first to equal footing, and then to the most high. The stories/archetypes we exalt culturally are the blueprints of what we can inhabit.

But no real progress can be reasonably expected from a society that still harbors slavery. This understanding will drive all aspects of VR’s response to the obligation of these times: we can have no hope for lasting peace and progress in America until we strike white supremacy from the Constitution of the United States, beginning immediately with the 13th amendment. Every historical & present-tense horror the country has perpetrated ties directly to the grotesque fact that has defined America from its founding: the rot of slavery remains.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

To this end it is my pleasure to introduce MIDHEAVEN NETWORK: a brave, generative space of healing and for the building - not rebuilding - of a fully inclusive society together. Around the world there is a deep well of intersectional human expression that is devoted to our transformation — just as there are educators, scholars and facilitators who strive to preserve & uphold the accumulated wisdom of human experience. MIDHEAVEN exists to unify these movements with possibility-driven, courageous, informative & inspirational live arts programming from a global roster of music, dance, opera, theater, spoken word, performance art, social justice, human development, and cinema/film/VR practitioners.

MIDHEAVEN beta launches 6 August 2020 as the executive broadcast partner for the final 10 hours (the American timezones) of a 24-hour global livestream with the City of Hiroshima, for the 75th memorial of the atomic catastrophe: midheaven.network. With survival stories and peace culture prayers from Hibakusha, we’ll showcase visionary art, music & performance from all over the world alongside crucial dialogues with urgent and informed voices. We recognize that there is no way to float a message of peace here and now without understanding the very real pain that persists, as a first step to it’s remediation. For the uniquely American segment of the broadcast, there’s a legacy of destruction to reckon with, and a straight-line continuity to every horror white supremacy & racial capitalism have wrought against the Other. We are doing this work because the bottom-line truth is we have no more time to waste and no more lives to give.

I believe the world has never been more ready for empathetic action, and the power of story is re-centering itself on an entirely new axis, guided by our common root. In the blinding dark, on a greased precipice, with apathy and mutually assured destruction in the place where we lay — go gently on,