Steve Kurtz is a rebel rouser. And in the post-9/11, "you're either with us, or against us" backlash, he is a strange beacon of hope. While the mass majority leans back pretending to be unaware of violations to our civil rights, Kurtz's life-as-art-performance intervention art illustrates it for us. Avoiding the nihilism of pranks, he prods us to see things for ourselves.

As he describes it, it's not what he does that is considered so unacceptable; it's how he mixes and mingles it that elicits the authorities' seeming need for what he calls "expression management." Interdisciplinary studies are on the frontline for this, and while censorship is often the jump-to reaction, it's our self-policing that bothers him. How he frames things, how he expresses them through collective action, is just not good M&M (Mixing & Mingling) in the authorities' view. This self-censorship, a restriction of our expressions, is becoming quite commonplace. Kurtz likes to stir things up. That we become threatened by this proves his point. Difference threatens us. We tend to launch wars over difference, even in our back yards.

Next up: Haggis!