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A Favorite Meme Rides Again!Open the nearest book at page 45 and read the first sentence, which will predict your sex life for the next year.

2012-01-25T15:01:00.000-05:00

Open the nearest book at page 45 and read the first sentence, which will predict your sex life for the next year.

" This identification of the Frontiersman as a dangerous character persisted beyond the colonial period, and affected Metropolitan response to all subsequent Frontiers."

Fatal Environment -- Richard Slotkin

Slotkin has become one of my essential thinkers, like Robert Farris Thompson and Fernand Braudel. I keep their books within reach at all times

Visions of the POTUS

2012-01-22T14:02:00.001-05:00

In the after-concert socializing last night a friend whose classes have resumed shared this bit with me re his freshman students.

Somehow or other he used Romney as an example of something in one of his classes. He recalled that one cannot take for granted anything that one of his age knows as a matter of course. So he asked the class, "You know who Romney is?"

A lot of blank stares, then one student asks, "Isn't he one of those white dudes who wants to president or something?"

His freshman are so young and thus non-historical that a lot of them take the office of the POTUS being held by a black person as a matter of course.

New York Diaries: 1609 - 2009 ed. by Teresa Carpenter & Dwight Garner

2012-01-20T11:56:00.000-05:00

New York Diaries: 1609 - 2009 ed. by Teresa Carpenter and Dwight Garner (2012); Modern Library.

On May 20, 1948, Jack Kerouac is waiting to hear from a publisher about his first novel, The Town and the City, during which he thinks about the cultural difference between New York and other parts of the country as he's known it:

No word from Scribner’s. Their silence and businesslike judicious patience is driving me crazy with tension, worry, expectation, disappointment — everything. And the novel is yet unfinished, really, and the time has come to start typing it and straightening it out. What a job in this weary life of mine, this lazy life. But I’ll get down to it. The news that Jesse James is still alive is very thrilling news to me, and my mother too, but we’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to impress the New York world at all — which does bear out, in its own way, what I say about New York, that it is a heaven for European culture and not American culture. I don’t get personally mad these things any more, because that is overdoing things in the name of culture and at the expense of general humanity, but still, I get personally mad at those who scoff at the significance of Jesse James, bandit or no, to the regular American with a sense of his nation’s past.”

The Long Ships - Winter Recreation

2012-01-17T17:36:00.000-05:00

The Swedish author, Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, is an old-fashioned historical novel, in the sense of Scott and Dumas having a child, while the Polish Nobel for Literature Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz's brilliant historical novels stand in as Godparents. Allow me the lazy cutpasta from wiki:
[ "With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1884), which took place during the 17th century Cossack revolt known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising; made into a movie with the same title. A video game based on the novel, Mount&Blade: With Fire & Sword, has been released by Turkish studio TaleWorlds.;[5]

The Deluge, (Potop, 1886), describing the Swedish invasion of Poland known as The Deluge; made into a movie with the same title;

Fire in the Steppe also called Pan Michael (Pan Wołodyjowski, 1888), which took place during wars with the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century; made into a film titled Colonel Wolodyjowski.

The Teutonic Knights, also translated as The Knights of the Cross, (Krzyżacy, 1900, relating to the Battle of Grunwald); made into a movie with the same title in 1960 by Aleksander Ford." ]

These are among my favorite historical fictions, whether as novels or films -- the films are splendid recreations of time, place and historical events. However, Sienkiewicz's novelist's narrative voice at least, is somewhat humorless, though not entirely so. There is some situational comic moments -- and if one can imagine oneself into the milieu it is funny.
It's interesting to contrast these four writers' sense of comic as they are all different. Scott finds most of his humor in character -- he deliberately writes comic characters. Dumas's sense of the comic is that of bouyant reparte among characters in conflict, whether they are friends or enemies, that often leads to a ridiculous and dangerous contretemps that resolves via an equally witty series of antic words and actions among the actors within the scene. Yes it's difficult not to visualize these scenes as upon a theater's stage, as Dumas's characters were as successful there as on the pages within book.

What is different about Bengtsson's humor is that the narrative voice contains an ironic lighteness, a twentieth century quality (though Bengtsson was born in 1894, the novel's first section was published in 1941 and the second in 1945). The narrative voice puts a slight distance between the reader and Bengtsson's characters. This is mostly pointed at 10th century Christianity and its aggressively proselytizing priests, as judged so wanting in real gods and real manhood, by the tenths century Scandinavians, Muslims, Jews and Saxons. As we read along it seems that Bengstsson's novel may likely haven been a resource-inspiration for several of the current nordic adventure series (the hero is named Orm -- and it seems that the protagonists of all these current series is named Orm) from Robert Low to M.D. Lachlan.

Though I will say that Bengtsson feels to me a more consistently graceful writer than Bernard Cornwell, Cornwell's protagonist of his Saxon Stories, Uthred, is as finely created a protagonist as Bengstsson's Orm -- whether or not he was influenced by The Long Ships.

Tales filled with the men of the old sagas and their companions, their adventures a-viking and their strife with each other -- these are what I love to read or watch, snug ~~by my fire~~ in my bed, in the dark, frigid days and nights of winter. The Long Ships fills this desire to perfection.

Why We Have Martin Luther King Day

2012-01-16T13:31:00.000-05:00

Smoky Robinson, Def Poetry Jam:

From an amigo in Maryland:

[ "Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils".[77]:365–7 He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races" " ]

Wonderful Martin Luther King birthday party yesterday, Uptown. Five different gumbo, from five different contributors, each one distinct from the others, each equally delicious.

Among other highlights of this wonderful gathering, we met the daughter of one of the song writers for Harry Belafonte's album, Calypso. Note, this is the first album to ever have sold a million copies. He was also the first sex symbol to emerge from the folk music trend. El V had memorized all the music and the words on Calypso by the time he was five. History. It lives. We speak with it every day.

When Corporations Are People ... Meet Serial Killer, Mitt the Ripper!

2012-01-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

Watch this video from the Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC, released Jan. 14, 2012.

A friend speculated last week, "If personhood begins at conception, does a corporation become a person when the first idea is scrawled on the cocktail napkin."

So, is Colbert executing intellectual property theft? It's a long, windy, twisty, sticky road we travel when embarking on this personhood begins even before conception!

Harry Belafonte, My Song, and Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

2012-01-11T16:39:00.002-05:00

Harry Belafonte published his memoirs, My Song, in September. Now that el V has gotten to read it too, there's been someone with whom I talk about it. With many friends visiting this means we both talk about it. It turns out that they, like many of the readers and reviewers of the book are surprised to learn -- or, had forgotten -- that Belafonte was such an activist, who, in a very large way, helped bankroll the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's and 70's. But My Song isn't only about himself. As Mr. Belafonte described during his time with Smiley and West on the program this last weekend, he was prompted to do this book because Marlon Brando died without doing one, and hardly anybody knew how much he did for the Movement and other Civil Liberties causes -- thus documentary, Sing Your Song, that Belafonte made for HBO, that aired back in October.

Now that el V's been able to read My Song too, I've had someone to talk with about it, which brought to mind Langston Hughes's autobiography-memoir, The Big Sea. The two artists are a generation and a half apart. Langston Hughes was born in 1902, Belafonte in 1927. They both grew up poor, they both worked extensively in theater, they both were all their lives activists for equality and civil rights. There's a photo in Belafonte's book with him and Langston Hughes together. They were both very good looking. Belafonte's noted for his Caribbean roots. Hughes spent significant periods in Mexico when he was young, as his birth father emigrated there.
I discovered Langston Hughes around the same time I discovered Harry Belafonte, while a girl on the farm: Hughes, in a poetry anthology, Belafonte on a Caribbean Christmas album, singing "The Borning Day."

Mr. Belafonte's book didn't get that much attention upon publication. Some reviewers were overtly were hostile and dismissive of both him and the book, because of his "liberal" stance, his activism, for his "paling around with dictators like Castro and Chavez." They said he was sexist because he's had three spouses in the tradition of very successful show biz people have memorably done, at least in his generations (successful female entertainers of the era married several times also). The hostility of these reader-reviewers reminded me that reader-editors of Hughes's The Big Sea (1943) -- his publishers hated his Harlem Renaissance section, declaring it far too long, overblown, filled with all these names and events that nobody cared about. Finally Carl Van Vechten intervened and insisted the section remain, just as Hughes had written it. Not long after this section was recognized for the brilliant piece of writing it is, everyone's favorite section. It has become an invaluable primary source for cultural, political and art historians. This may well be the fate of My Song.

Harry Belafonte

2012-01-08T17:21:00.001-05:00

What brought Harry Belafonte to my consciousness was a song, of course. A Christmas song, on a Christmas album of Caribbean Christmas songs that I played over and over and over as a child, entranced not only by the lyrics, but by the individual words themselves. This song was "The Borning Day." Even now, the verse that brought tears to my eyes every time I heard it, make my eyes fill. Harry Belafonte understood what it is to be poor. He's never forgotten.

Mary and the baby hungry

Yes, we know what hungry be
So we bring them peas and rice
And a little ginger tea
Only pigeon peas and rice
A little ginger tea

Mary thank us with her eyes
She poor the same as we
She poor the same as we

Mary and the baby lonely
Lonely is not good to be
So we sit awhile and chat awhile
To keep them company

Stay awhile makes the baby smile
Pass the time of day
When we see how pleased they be
It make us glad we stay
So glad that we could stay

Mary and the baby weary
Oh, we know what weary be
So we make a bed and pillow for their head
With down from the muhow tree
Only down from the muhow tree

To rest them soft and good
We feel bad this was all we had
We do the best we could
We do the best we could

Mary and the baby rest easy
We go away and let them be
On hush tip toe and voice kept low
We look up and see
Stars of hope shine in the sky
To mark the baby's birth

Seemed to say it's borning day
Of better times on earth
Of better times on earth

The marks of poverty are constant hunger, isolation without privacy, exhaustion -- and yet, still hope. O gods ....

There was no way that girl could know back then that one day she would meet Harry Belafonte, and thereafter, occasionally spend time in his company. Mr. Belafante singing "Borning Day" was the first gateway to the Caribbean for her, sparking her imagination, but she never dreamed that in the future she'd be there often, see the poverty, the joy, the fun, the beauty of the Caribbean for herself.

Mr. Belafonte's 87 now. He's written a book that speaks to what he's seen and experienced over his lifetime of artistic achievement and political activism, particularly on behalf of the poor and powerless. He was motivated to finally do this book because his dear, dear friend, Marlon Brando, died without doing so, and Belafonte is one of the remaining who know all the wonderful things Brando did too, for the poor and the powerless. What the people did with whom he's worked closely during their lifetimes, from Martin Luther King to Sidney Poitier, to Marlon Brando and others of that generation of entertainment celebrities, is the subject of his book, along with his own political education.

My Song: A Memoir (09/2011), written with Michael Shnayerson, is more than worth reading, particularly for his account of growing up poor in Jamaica and Harlem. It's full humor too. The book is the second part that fills in all he couldn't include in his documentary, on Brando and others, Sing Your Song (HBO, 10/2011)

Last fall. when Occupy Wall Street here had a weekend of panels and so on with the activists of the Civil Rights era of the 20th C, Mr. Belafonte was present and an active contributor. Today, Smiley and West gave Mr. Belafonte their whole radio program to talk of his response and ideas about what's going on now. He was as inspiring on the radio as he is in person.

Where My King Cake At?

2012-01-06T14:30:00.000-05:00

Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas!

Yum -- and Puerto Rico rox today! Woo.

And now it's official -- Mardi Gras comin' Babeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

What Time Is It?

2012-01-03T14:38:00.000-05:00

Winter Time.

In the past serious winter did arrive in Manhattan generally on New Year's or the next day. In Manhattan of 2012 it arrived last night. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

It's also the month when so many friends from elsewhere come to Manhattan for business, for a break, for fun, for whatever. It's also the month we're always pinched due to unemployment, which doesn't return until the end of the month. It's become a regular part of the yearly cycle.

The first out of town friend arrived December 24th. He comes then and goes up state to teach a klezmer music camp. This year it got cut short because the primary benefactor died. The funeral and memorial were over New Year's. We're seeing him tonight. Yesterday we received 4 phone calls and 3 e-mails from people coming in, scheduling the meet-ups.

So we may be broke but we are wealthy in friends.

With friends you are always, in the end, bottom line, A-OK!

In the meantime I have duvets, comforters and blankets and throws galore. And a space heater. Because when the temps fall below freezing here, the buildling's furnace doesn't provide any more heat than its long-ago programmed times to provide heat. So it's daymed cold in here most of the time then, unless I'm cooking. Which I did for hours yesterday. I finally made that long-postoned moussaka. It took hours! Which is why there is nothing more cozy than making food in the good old wintertime.

2011: Foxessa Read 11 Books

2012-01-01T17:21:00.004-05:00

(+ many, many more, but these reflect the most significant theme of all my reading, the endless expressions of violence that is the history of us .... )

Gordon, Lyndall. (2010) Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds. Viking.

Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life Had Stood – A Loaded Gun” can be found here. A short series of essays on the poem by various American poets can be found here.

This is an American tale of emotional violence and a desperate quest for upward social mobility, during which homes became battlefields of the heart, littered with casualties. The book’s apt title comes from Emily Dickinson’s poem, # 764:

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -

In Corners - till a Day

and concludes:

For I have but the power to kill,

Without - the power to die –

Gordon conveys the excitement with which women readers and writers of the day greeted the emergence of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Dickinson’s letters describe how much she anticipated each new work by these women, as when she sought out Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte immediately upon its publication. She requested that Emily Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul Be Mine” be read at her funeral, but she squarely agreed with Charlotte Bronte’s famous rejection of Jane Austen: “The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood . . .”

The book’s presentation of the cultural and social matrices that formed the characters of Dickinson and her community are impressive, as in her account of the effect of the second Great Awakening upon Dickinson: she would not be saved, though the pressure put on her to do so made her so ill she had to leave school. Dickinson was as reclusive as the Brontes and Browning, and Gordon carefully describes the homes, gardens, and landscapes of Dickinson’s Amherst, with details from primary sources and her poems. But Gordon’s somewhat sensationalist central subject is the affair between Emily Dickinson’s puritanical, patriarchal brother, Austin, and the gorgeous home wrecker, Mabel Loomis Todd.

Austin and Emily’s grandfather had founded Amherst College, and like his father before him, Austin served in the powerful position of college treasurer. He married Emily’s best friend, whom she called ”my soul mate”: the cultivated, vivacious Susan Huntington Gilbert, a highly regarded hostess to a long list of accomplished, famous and important friends who helped make Amherst one of the centers of New England’s intellectual and academic life. Though Dickinson never showed the largest portion of her work to anybody, Susan was permitted to see many of her poems, and some were written about her.

Enter the antagonist. In contrast to the socially prominent, financially secure Dickinsons, the enchanting Mabel Loomis Todd grew up in poverty, Her husband, David Peck Todd, was a morally careless adventurer-astronomer. A charming, conniving seducer and an early advocate of what was then called “free love,” he did well from his wife’s long affair with Austin, who obtained for him Amherst college positions at levels beyond his professional qualifications. The part of the book that tells this story is founded upon a great deal of speculation, the sort that makes for splendid historical fiction. However, for a non-fiction study, there’s so much “it could have been,” “it might be,” and “perhaps,” that a researcher would need to take care in using this work as a source.

The economic and emotional destruction of the affair between Austin and Mabel was carried down through at least three generations, and split literary and Amherst communities. At one point in her struggle to get Austin to acknowledge her publicly as his true life partner, Mabel Loomis Todd requested in a letter that he kill Susan. Fortunately, Austin was too dumb -- or too smart – to understand what she wrote, and never responded to the letter’s request, at least not in writing, or any other way, as far as we know. Mabel succeeded in pushing Susan out of Austin’s life, at the price of being socially outcast by the community she’d expected to lead through Austin. She never married Austin, who died in 1895; Susan outlived him.

However, Mabel made her fame and fortune from the poetry of Austin’s deceased sister Emily, claiming both poetry and poet. Although Mabel never met Dickinson, or read any of Dickinson’s poems until after the poet’s death in 1886, she conned the greater number of Emily’s poems out of Austin and Emily’s sister Lavinia after Lavinia discovered them. Mabel never returned them, and, in a brilliant career move, went on to edit the poems (their first publication was in 1890), while constructing a persona for Emily as the White Dove of Amherst, which has plagued Dickinson’s image ever since, though Dickinson was no demure pigeon. It was the great era of the traveling lecturer, and Mabel toured, reading Dickinson’s poems while garbed in white, as “her” Emily supposedly read them to her. The grab of both poet and unpublished poems alienated Mabel's former ally, Austin and Emily’s sister Lavinia. Austin’s son hated her, and legally fought Mabel’s possession of the family land Austin had gifted Mabel’s husband.

Speaking as a reader who argues with books as she reads them, I wonder how much to trust Gordon’s understanding of Dickinson’s inner life. Oddly, she believes that Emily Dickinson had no interest in the subjects of slavery, abolition or the Civil War. But was there a person alive in the entire country who didn’t think about the Civil War, all the time, while it was going on? * Emily Dickinson was a politically informed adult. Her father was a congressman, and she lived in an intellectually active, abolitionist atmosphere at a time when the Civil War was devouring and mangling the young men of every town and family in New England. Not only is Dickinson’s work marked by its variety of images of, and addresses to, Death, she employed frequently the imagery of the same Civil War army weaponry illustrated in newspapers and publications of the day.

Writers write what they know, and Emily Dickinson knew what the people around her felt, and she knew what she saw. For Dickinson, who lived in the years before, during, and after the Civil War, violence in all its forms was as familiar as the garden path between her house and Susan’s.

_________________________

* Other than Nathaniel Hawthorne, that is, who carried on a many-year sulk fest that everybody else wouldn't let him ignore it because they thought and talked and wrote about it all the time!

Here follows a short list of some of the other most interesting books I read this year. All of them are about America, violence and money too.

Lemay, J.A. Leo. (1991). The American Dream of Captain John Smith. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville and London.

Lukács, Georg. (1938 – 1962 -- 1983). The Historical Novel. University of Nebraska Press.

Remini, Robert V. (1977) Andrew Jackson Vol. I: The Course of American Empire 1767 – 1821. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.

“ (1981) Andrew Jackson Vol. 2: The Course of American Freedom 1822 – 1832. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.
“ (1984) Andrew Jackson Vol 3: The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.
*Note: These volumes are no longer in print and available only through dealers.

Simmon, Scott. (2003). The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Slotkin, Richard. (1973) Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 – 1860. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown.

“ (1985) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800 – 1890. Atheneum, New York.
“ (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier In Twentieth Century America. Atheneum, New York

White, Edward G. (1968) The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister. Yale University.

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois

2011-12-31T16:56:00.000-05:00

It's now officially published. El V finished reading it last week, all the while exclaiming, "National Book Award! Pulitizer!" Aftershocks has already been reviewed and highly praised in The Washington Post's book pages. It's that kind of book.
The book is reviewed this weekend in the NY Times Book Review by Adam Hochschild, an excellent choice. Full review here.

Hochschild begins by giving a run-down of Haiti's history through the Revolution, then informing the reader who may not know that Lauren's earlier book is the best book out there for learning Haiti's pre and revolutionary history:

[ " For a gripping narrative of that period, there are few better places to turn than “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” by Laurent Dubois, a Duke University scholar of the French Caribbean. Now Dubois has brought Haiti’s story up to the present in an equally well-written new book, “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History,” which is enriched by his careful attention to what Haitian intellectuals have had to say about their country over the last two centuries. " ]

It's also appropriate it's NY Times review appears today - tomorrow, since it is New Year's Eve, and NY's Eve has in the later years been a traditionally Haitian Vodoun New Year's Eve -- and this year, plus New Orleans! The spot has been moved from the usual lower east side loft out to Brooklyn, where, among other things maybe a suckling pig is being roasted, They Say.

Yeah, it's warm enough this year. For better or worse, climate change is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Another mosquito revived today. We've been killing one or two all through the fall, even after the occasional freezes of this month. We open the window at bedtime, which must be how they get in the apartment.

I got the Reading essay finished for Da List. Now we're just sort of thinking about January and 2012. We know some things that will happen in 2012, but mostly, not, like everybody else. What we do know is that we are heartily wishing a better 2012 than 2011 for a whole lot of people, including ourselves -- and ourselves don't have anywhere near as much trouble going on as the others on our list.

Happy New Year to us all.

P.S. Several people have thoughtfully instructed me in the history of the icon I've chosen for the holidays. I knew it already, which, people who know me, if they thought about it for a minute, know. :(

This is part of why I chose it :)

k?thx

Who Cares What She Does -- Just Make Her Nekkid!

2011-12-29T16:16:00.000-05:00

[ “Ker-pow! Women kick back against comic-book sexismUK-made, female-driven anthology Bayou Arcana is causing a stir for more than just its haunting images and storylines.” ]

Bayou Arcana, means New Orleans and Louisiana, one of my homes. It’s almost impossible to imagine New Orleans without Coco Robicheaux, who died last month, who was the embodiment of Bayeau Arcana if there was a living one.

One of the most interesting things about Bayou Arcana is that the writers are male and the artists are all female. This means that women decide how female characters appear.

This is a group of creative people who are positively pushing back against the long running, ever growing trend that leaves women out of the various sets of the sf/f, supernatural, horror, movie, comix, print and game worlds. Here's a pull from the long story about the many different gender bias and sexism in these areas, particularly in comix, in the U.K. Guardian linked to above:

[ " As far as the wider comic book culture is concerned, many female comic book fans have stories of being ignored, harassed, or treated with hostility in comic book stores, and there's certainly persistent gendered bullying online." The planned petition comes in the wake of another earlier this year which expressed reader outrage at the lack of female writers and characters at DC Comics, which owns rights to characters such as Superman and Batman

The proportion of female creators in its comics plunged from 12% to 1% when it relaunched its entire line of superhero titles.

More than 4,500 fans called on DC to "do something about these appalling, offensive numbers or you will only continue to see your sales numbers plummet".
DC insisted it was taking their concerns "very seriously" and pointed to writers such as Nicola Scott, Felicia D Henderson and Gail Simone. It also highlighted female DC characters such as Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Catwoman and Batwoman, who was reinvented as a lesbian.

Comics bloggers such as Vanessa Gabriel say, however, that both DC and Marvel – which together dominate the market – have been slow to do more than pay lip service to female readers. " ]

Another fellow who is doing his bit is here, in this blog post, Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits:

[ " The brilliant tumbler feed Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor has inspired me to add my two cents to the discussion.

Why does my opinion matter? I’m an armorer. I make actual armor that people wear when they hit each other with swords. When making armor I have to strike a balance between comfort, protection, range of motion, and appearance. My experience has made me more than a little opinionated on the subject of fantasy armor.

I intend to set the internet straight. See below for how to do it wrong, how to do it right, and why you might care. " ]

Women alone can't change the way women are expected to appear in these fields, which in turn then, makes it so easy for the men in the field to dismiss them, harrass them and otherwise remove the agency of half the world, giving them only one role and one role -- sex object. Men must be a part of the push to change, and by golly, some are.

A Solstice Holiday Theme Has Emerged

2011-12-26T17:43:00.000-05:00

It is Europe, in the 12th and 13th century. We are now listening to the music of female trouvéres of the thirteenth.

We keep bringing up Alfonso X, also known as Alfonso el Sabio. He's currently my favorite European monarch. One of the things I like about him is that he created a Spanish version of the communes that began in Italian city-states of the era, the mesta, an association of 3,000 large and small sheep holders in northern Spain, notably Castile, for reasons that I don't yet know, the usual imports of wool from England had sharply dropped. Wool rapidly became a primary Spanish export. Sheep raised now on commercial scale, as later would be tobacco and sugar in the New World, the sheep soon destroyed the arable lands of Castile. Additionally the sheepholders were granted so many rights, privileges and tax exemptions, they did a great deal to destroy Spain's economy not much later, not to mention create political conflict. But nevermind.

Alfonso was a great supporter of learning, literature and the arts, and was notable for a reign of both intellectual and religious tolerance, in an era that generally elsewhere was not -- with the exception of Occitan, which not coincidentally was a close neighbor. Thus the female trouvéres ....

What other monarchs would one admire ....

Sort of an odd soundtrack to el V's current reading: he's backtracking through a stack of books on the War of 1812, I've read read and taken notes from for The American Slave Coast. Right now he's marveling at how differently the Canadian author of the one he's currently reading writes of the War for Independence. He's recovering but he's still not there. I won't let him go out because it's cold, the wind is fierce and cuts like a blade of ice.

However, he is well enough to make dinner tonight -- yay! I am burned out for cooking or even planning dinner; wouldn't bother with it at all, would contentedly graze upon all the leftovers stuffed in the refrigerator. He, however, is never, ever, burned out on foods, eating or dinner.

Merry Christmas! With Sharon Kay Penman, The Tempest and Jelly Roll Morton

2011-12-25T13:05:00.010-05:00

Which, I challenge, how can you not be merry, when listening to Jelly Roll Morton and "The Shreveport Stomp."

El V remains a fragile flower but he is no worse than yesterday, and some of the worst symptoms of his bug have ceased and desisted.

We watched part of the Julie Taymore The Tempest, before I gave up, as too tired to watch a screen, and retired to bed with Sharon Kay Penman's first installment of her Plantagenet series, When Christ and His Saints Slept.

At the end of the summer I read Lionheart (2011), the latest in Sharon Kay Penman's series set in the era of Henry the II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, their progenitors and their progency, It was so interesting I looked up the novels that came before, Devil's Brood (2008), Time and Chance (2002) and now, the first one, When Christ and His Saints Slept (1995). It's odd to read a series backwards, but that's how it works these days, when an author's earlier books take more effort to get hold of than we might like.

Lionheart follows the crowned Richard into the east on Crusade. Almost all the women who are part of the previous novels' action are still alive. Those who were born during the course of the series are now adults and often monarchs themselves. Devil's Brood brilliantly describes the political and family causes prompting King Henry II's sons and his Queen to rebellion, and his sons to further betray each other. But, in my opinion, Time and Chance is the best written of the four. That may be because Time and Chance covers what we already think we know about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, including the Thomas á Becket affair, so the events and characters are familiar to both author and reader. But Penman's Time and Chance is not the plays, Becket and Lion in Winter, or the subsequent films, the historicity of both which is more than questionable. In the course of researching these books Penman speaks on her website and in interviews how much she learned is wrong about what we think we know about these characters whose names are familiar even these many hundreds of years later. An example of this would be that Richard I was gay. One of the reasons we have so much misinformation is the politics of their own time, and the politics of later reigns. Then, as much as now, interested parties who could write, who were hostile to the Plantagenets, such as the French, used sexual slander and all the rest of the weapons in the political weapons arsenal to descredit their rivals and enemies.

It's difficult at the start, submerging oneself as a reader into When Christ And His Saints Slept, the earliest book in the series. It’s hard to know who is who, or even who is a fictional character. It turns out none of them are fictional, with the significant exception of a character who continues throughout the series, a series which at the time of this novel's writing the author didn't know she was going to write. Another obstacle, which is in no way the author's fault since these are the movers and shakers of the events, so many of them share the same names, whether monarchs, royal bastards, high ecclesiatic officials, and are not always of different generations either. Then, Penman made compositional glitch by writing a prologue set some decades before the novel proper opens, then opening the first chapter in yet another decade with yet other people we not only don’t know, but whose relationships to those in the prologue we don’t know either. These are the families and vassals who make the twenty years long civil war, the bloody conflict between Henry I's nephew, Stephen, and the King's legitimate daughter, Maud, the former Empress of the Holy Roman Empire and now Countess of Anjou.

However, that we don't know much about these people, the times, or this 12th century English civil war, will be remedied by the time this novel is finished. Additionally it brilliantly sets up what will happen throughout the following volumes, though half of those volumes weren’t planned to be written when this one was (at least one more in the series is in the process of being written). Once we've dug our way through this prologue and the next 40 pages or so, the reader is stabilized as to who the people are and where in geography and when in time they are. Unlike the unfortunates in the early pages who chose a berth on the White Ship, we're sailing on smooth waters, treated to Christmas Courts, freezing rain, icy snow, fireplaces and wine, perfect Winter Solstice reading, as are the subsequent volumes.

It's a superb story, filled with colorful, fascinating personalities who scheme against each other, love each other, hate each other, sometimes simultaneously. Henry II is born within the first pages of the novel. The war that is his parents' marriage, his divided loyalty and love, twists this future king's character, the damage of which will roll down the decades. We witness Eleanor and Henry's meeting: like Johnny Cash and June Carter, they "fell into a burning ring of fire." There are the splendid early days of Henry II's early friendship with Becket. Yes, no matter how long ago certain things, like falling in love or in friendship, and the bitter pain of betrayal by lover or friend, are the same then as they are now.

Penman's research is responsible and thorough. She's got the tenacity to keep working on her narrative until these long ago, now obscure historical events and people are comprehensible to us in the 21st century. Penman is particularly good at portraying the strength and agency of all her female characters, of whatever station and condition, without making them behave or think like late 20th century, 21st century American women. All of them are individuals, however, distinguished from each other, whether sharing high rank or low. Starting with When Christ and Etc. each volume in this series presents the waste of women's political talents denied to their gender. It becomes a theme winding its way through all the series.

In When Christ Etc. this theme is deep and broad: Henry I granted the throne of England to his daughter, Maud, formerly the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. Henry I’s nephew, Stephen, steals the crown on the pretext that bloodshed would be inevitable if Maud's crowned. Stephen invokes the period’s unquestioned belief in women’s incapacity to rule in their own right, which is founded upon both religion and, "No man will follow a woman to war." But Stephen lacks the hardness of character necessary for a monarch to hold power year after year. Maud has a tribe of loyal, illegitimate brothers, for Henry I was profligate with his affections, siring many bastards, whom he married into wealthy, powerful families, tying these powerful vassals all the more tightly to his line. Thus it is is Stephen who made bloody civil war inevitable because he siezed Maud's legitimately granted crown..

The irony contained in this theme is further deepened. Stephen, unable to quench the fires of rebellion in favor of Maud, resorts to his own wife to do it for him. He sends sweet, docile, loving Queen Matilda into the field to lead her own family and vassals, who seize the port of Dover for Stephen. Successful in no small part because of the devotion all ranks of Matilda's men give her, the Queen continues to other political successes.

As for the series as a whole, a reader who is interested in literary and cultural medieval history of Europe can’t help recalling that Chrétien de Troyes was from France’s north, and he served at the court of Eleanor’s daughter in Aquitaine. The tales of those extraordinary Plantegenets, Anjous and Aquitaines of the 12th century provided him no little inspiration, we must think, just as his Romances provided some inspiration when coupled with the real life events of these people, for Penman. And in the period when darkness falls so early, can there be better entertainment than a series of Romances, then or now?

Now el V is back in bed with my old Riverside Shakespeare looking at The Tempest. "Strange play," he remarks.

Da List Brings ... Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

2011-12-24T14:16:00.001-05:00

Our burnt-down-to-the-ashes, invald El V, breaks down Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for us:

[ " Our official Xmas reading -- utterly seasonal, as it takes place the week between Xmas and the New Year in two consecutive years -- is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my favorite poems in the English language. But then, it would be, because I love to alliterate, and this might the best alliterative poem we have, with its marvelous scheme of head-rhyme (alliteration) that gives way to a tail-rhyming quatrain at the end of each stanza. Bubbling with the energy of the mystery plays, bristling between ancient customs and Xtianity, it's a poem to be read out loud -- something best done in 14th-century English, whether one understands every word or not. Despite the transformation of the language since then, it's more comprehensible heard aloud than read off the page. There is no better phrase in English to recount the action of falling snow than "the snawe snitered ful snart." One holiday weekend back in the early 80s, I think it was, I read the entire thing live in middle English, as best I could pronounce it, at the Ear Inn -- it took about two and a half hours, as I recall -- while composer Warren Burt played burbling little space-age synthesizer sounds through polyplanar styrofoam speakers.

The poem begins with a memory of the siege of Troy that takes the listener forward in time to the figure of King Arthur. Here's the opening in middle English (with the "thorn" and "yogh" characters modernized), followed by one of many possible modern versions that strives mightily to maintain the rhyme schemes, and which I pinched from this website. And then there's the marvelous rhyme of "wonder / blunder."

Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,
The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght
Was tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe.
Hit was Ennias the athel and his highe kynde,
That sithen depreced provinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneghe of all the wele in the west iles.
Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swythe,
With gret bobbaunce that burghe he biges upon fyrst
And nevenes hit his aune nome, as hit now hat;
Ticius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes,
Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes up homes,
And fer over the French flod, Felix Brutus
On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settes
Wyth wynne,

Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysse and blunder
Full skete has skyfted synne. . . .

Translation by Marie Boroff:

Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy,
The walls breached and burnt down to brands and ashes,
The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit
Was impeached for his perfidy, proven most true,
It was high-born Aeneas and his haughty race
That since prevailed over the provinces, and proudly reigned
Over well-nigh all the wealth of the West Isles.
Great Romulus to Rome repairs in haste;
With boast and with bravery builds he that city
And names it with his own name, that it now bears.
Ticius to Tuscany, and towers raises,
Langobard in Lombardy lays out homes,
And far over the French Sea, Felix Brutus
On many broad hills and high Britain he sets,
Most fair.

Where war and wrack and wonder
By shifts have sojourned there,
And bliss by turns with blunder
In that land's lot had share . . .

Happy First Day of Winter

2011-12-22T14:24:00.000-05:00

It's the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Here we are, in the north of the mid-Atlantic, and it's 60 feakin' degrees. On the first day of winter. What is wrong with this? Mi hermana in Colorado, on the other hand, has already shoveled over 30 inches of snow this seasons and is not happy about it.

Still, it's spooky out there, this first day of winter, dark and overcast, and 60 degrees.

Terry Gilliam Christmas Card From 1968

2011-12-21T16:32:00.001-05:00

I adore this!

Probably all the more since I haven't been able to get my own cards out yet this year.

Dang three syllabi by Friday afrernoon, plus that grant Monday.

We're tired. It's been one hell of a year. People we adore want us to come up to their place on Christmas Eve. It would be so much fun, and there's nobody else I'd like to be with better. We'll do better staying home together, eating my kickass moussaka, watching Julie Taymor's The Tempest and reading Sir Gawain aloud to each other.

Who Shops More Efficiently Than Me?

2011-12-19T15:10:00.001-05:00

I did the shopping for three celebratory meals entirely between 11 AM and 3 PM -- with a cold too!

I still have all the vegetables and some herbs and spices to get. I am not making turkey gravy for I've not got the time. I can tranport the cooked turkey with no trouble, i.e. el V carries it in its roaster, but not gravy. So I have turkey gravy on order from Gourmet Garage, which I can get when I pick up the last things.

Oddly there's not a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes to be found anywhere. You can buy Yukon Golds in emporiums like Gourmet Garage, but by the lb., not in a bag.

Well, I am waiting for the wine to be delivered too, since I couldn't bring it all home myself. But it's been chosen and paid for, and will arrive tomorrow.

This is excellent because I can tell I will feel worse tomorrow. Fortunately the weather was good today!

Ooooo, this Christmas Eve moussaka is going to be good. All those Greek ingredients from the feta to the side olives -- are far less expensive than they were not long ago. Is this because of their national economic catastrophe?

But before I wear out my arm patting myself on the back -- I haven't done gifts or Christmas cards yet. But no more today, as I feel quite ill and my back is screaming from all this carrying. Nevertheless I feel emotionally happy because now I can feel personally Christmassy -- we r doin' it rite & in time. :) Tomorrow I'll do cards. Then I'll really feel Christmassy. The main thing is to not wear out the holiday spirit before the holidays are here. Las Vidas Perfectas really helped with that this year, taking up all the oxygen until today. Yesterday was recuping from that, especially for el V -- got an extension for submitting a very important document until 11:59 tonight, so that's what he's working on all day!

The. End. Las Vidas Perfectas

2011-12-18T16:42:00.000-05:00

It's been months of ever increasing domination of our lives. Imagine for the director, his team, his family -- it's been at least a year.

The performances and the entire production were very successful, by all accounts, from all and sundry who would know.

We didn't get to bed until after 3 AM since there was the cast party after the show's prolonged post performance schmoozing with various and sundry.

And now Christmas is nearly here and I've not a lick of preparation for that production, not even my cards yet. This is what happens in a household that is involved with a performance of this kind. Additional problems for getting Christmas going is the first freeze of the year happened last night. It is dayemed cold out there -- and not so warm in here, for that matter.

However, I am thinking of food, following scent trails conjured up by seasonal memory-yearning of the moment: Definitely lamb something for Christmas Eve dinner, maybe a moussaka? Turkey on Christmas Day. On hand is lamb, though freshly ground, it's been in the freezer for a week already -- my only prep for Christmas so far was purchasing lamb. On hand also are a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a bottle of Marques de Murrieta Rioja and a bottle of Lagar de Cervera -- gifts, which have been waiting for their moment, which hasn't been for months since el V was in 'training' for the production, and I also in support. Of course pesole for New Year's because what else? besides the traditional Haitian foods for our annual Haitian New Year's Eve get-together.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

2011-12-16T22:12:00.001-05:00

Harkness, Deborah. (2011) A Discovery of Witches. Vol. 1, All Souls Trilogy. Penguin, USA, NY.

Trade publication December 27th. The All Souls Trilogy's second volume, Shadow of Night, comes out this summer of 2012. A Discovery has been optioned by Warner Bros. for a film treatment.

A free copy of the trade of A Discovery of Witches will be mailed to the commentator on this entry, whose name I’ll pull out of a covered jar at the end of this month. I’ll announce the winner and provide instructions as to how to give me your contact information for the Penguin publicity department.
There are no spoilers in the following thoughts about A Discovery of Witches, or at least no more than what a reader finds in cover and jacket copy.

===================================

A Discovery of Witches is an engrossing science fiction & fantasy novel, as opposed to an engrossing science fiction or fantasy novel, because it is both science fiction and fantasy. Its only contemporary rival for excellence in this small science fiction and fantasy crossbreed is this year's World Fantasy Award winner, Who Fears Death (2010, DAW) by Nnedi Okorafor.

Within A Discovery's pages the reader will engage with the history of science, philosophical and alchemical treatises, Darwin and DNA, political and material history, medieval Romances and their nexis with fantastic literature, and the great Elizabethan playwrights. The author’s day job is as professor of history at the University of Southern California. Her scholarly work includes The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (2007, Yale University Press), which was the winner of the Pfizer Prize for Best Book in the History of Science from 2005-2007, presented by the History of Science Society. The reader doesn’t have to know this about the author, however, for A Discovery to emit all the allure of old jewels and the enticement of bright chemicals combined with precious metals.

Diana Bishop is our protagonist. Nevertheless, Diana’s specialness cannot help but bring to the mind of a close reader thoughts of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.

Sarah Seltzer at Alternet recently tried to get at aspects of Twilight that some adult readers find troubling:

"Violent Vampire Sex, Demon-Babies and Overwhelming Female Desire. Twilight is saturated with sexist tropes--to the point of being disturbing. But that disturbing element is compelling, too . . . . "

. . . . But as for the substance of her wants, therein lies the perversely haunting twist. I’d argue that Bella's desires are direct responses to the patriarchy we actually live in. In fact, Meyer has created for her heroine an inverted version of our unjust society. In this invented, inverted world, Bella is allowed to want sex, and vocalize it, and initiate it, while her partner is the gatekeeper who makes sure she is safe and married before she gets “hurt.” In her world, the men around her urge her to abort her fetus for her own safety, but she gets to “choose” to deliver it even though it kills her. In her world, her boyfriend can urge her to attend college and better herself while she can push for an early marriage--and be right! In her world, she can reject her body and trade it in for a new one that is agile, strong, lithe. Her choices are consistently to fall into the arms of the patriarchy and trust that it will catch her, and her faith is validated: she gets a perfect husband, angelic child, new body.

Some critics dismissed A Discovery of Witches when the ARCs and other promotion for the novel appeared, as more of the Bella-like, generic paranormal / urban fantasy / romance tropes: the special cipher a la Bella, helpless as can be but firming her feisty chin as her gorgeous vampire boyfriend indulges and protects her. Most of all the romantic male primary loves Bella because he can't help himself -- the smell of her special blood is just so enticing! His love object lacks any other qualities that tend to attract love, such as character and personality, curiosity, intelligence, education, knowledge of the world, interests or achievements, even a sense of humor. Bella is special because other exceptional figures such as vampires and werewolves love her, and they love her because of how she smells. A Discovery’s romantic male lead is Matthew, a 1500 year old vampire of vast wealth, intellectual brilliance and military prowess. He adores how she smells, he protects her. All his family loves Diana too. Not the least of his attractions, Matthew owns his own jet and helicopters -- yes helicopters, plural. So, in the initial pages Ms. Harkness seems to have broken out the parts of the Twilightiad that are compelling wish fulfillment for the female adolescent reader. Diana’s a witch who is special even among other witches, though in childhood, Diana chose to secede from her witch heritage, refusing even the minimum training in spells that all witches, however powerful or weak, are obligated to receive.

However, A Discovery of Witches isn’t what that description leads one to expect. Diana narrates in first person, providing only as much information about herself as we need, when we need it. Mostly she’s asking herself questions of history, of science, of families – all things outside herself, things that are bigger than she is, even though the author does make sure we know those around Diana regard her as special. Still, Diana’s specialness doesn't overwhelm the narration since the author's good judgment breaks up Diana’s voice with third person point of view of various other protagonists. There's sly humor -- every time Matthew picks up Diana, or thinks about how she smells, I swear Harkness is winking at Bella and Edward and at us too. Whereas Bella wants to never grow up, Diana is living an adult's life, though so far she's been denying herself much of what she's earned by her own efforts. Diana's family and Matthew's family bond through their mutual love of the two lovers. Merging families between creatures who are unlike and traditionally at odds is purposeful in terms the Great Mysteries we're delving into. Diana's specialness is because she's a hardworking, disciplined scholar who delights in things scientific and historic, things beautiful, who is loyal, courageous, possesses integrity and her own sense of honor. That her smell happens to so appeal to Matthew is langniappe -- he smells just as good to her. If you wish to get subtextual, you can say the way they smell to each other signifies that together they possesses the qualities they need for the great quest of the trilogy. They are equally matched lovers, who don't waste their precious energies engaging in the contrivances of – “I hate you but I love you, O what will I /we do, separations and mis-communications.” That Diana and Matthew are matched agencies who are true lovers is essential to the plot of this novel, and will play an even greater role as the trilogy progresses. They are the Lovers of the Tarot and alchemy, whose conjucio could have a conceptio that might redeem the world. A Disovery of Witches is, among other things, a quest to discover the beginnings of all things in order to continue all things. One of the essential questions is, “Is immortality the same as never dying?” There are many ghosts in A Discovery, most of them Diana’s relatives. They speak to her, and she to them. Are they persons then?

The four sentient species of A Discovery are called "creatures." The creatures are divided among vampires, witches, daemons and humans. There is council called the Congregation that governs their dealings with each other, with places for three members each representing vampires, witches and daemons. As there are no human representatives seated with the Congregation there are no humans in A Discovery of Witches (at least in this first volume of the trilogy, other than spear carriers who, generally, are besottted with the individuals of the other creatures who are our protagonists and antagonists. This is the hierarchy of A Discovery's world, a hierarchy like that of the world view that preceeded and remained in most places contemporaneous with alchemy's groping toward the scientific method: God, angels, humans, animals. Or in terms of worldly power, the Pope and his Church, King and his warrior nobles, the merchants, finally serfs and peasants. In A Discovery, vampires are the aristocratic military rank of the creatures, witches the material intelligence, daemons the creative intelligence, and humans are the serfs. Humans are relegated to useful servants – or food -- though the other three creature species conceal themselves from humans since humans have long outbred the other three divisions of creatures.

Exceptionalism is the potent point of much science fiction and fantasy. Whether YA or adult, the protagonist is part of that imaginary world's 1%, or if not starting there, will end up in that bracket. Thus, if the science fiction field really is an American conceptio, i.e. U.S. invention, as is often claimed, this exceptionalism reflects our ingrained national self-regard. This can be troublesome when looked at closely. What else that can be disturbing within the context of novels like A Discovery, is that the exceptional achievements in history, the arts and sciences, all, or most, are the production of these supernatural creatures. Within A Discovery humans have nothing to do with even the ending WWII. Entertainments like A Discovery of Witches, or Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, in which significant events of good or evil of our own recorded history are attributed to supernatual agency seem increasingly a given. Humans are not responsible for what, in fact, we know we are responsible, whether the plays of Shakespeare or slavery.

Food for thought indeed, and A Discovery of Witches provides us a banquet of ideas to consider. For instance, there are the questions of time. What is the past? Where is it? Perhaps fairyland is the past, a dimension that we can enter, if we know the right things? Diana – and we -- have a guide into these unknown historic eras, Matthew, who assures Diana, that in the past she will yearn with a passion she cannot now in our present time even imagine -- hot water. This has me impatient for the next volume, Shadow of Night, to see where these questions lead Harkness and her characters.

Theory: Status, Jargon and Conflict

2011-12-16T13:39:00.006-05:00

Jazz musicians know an enormous amount of theory. Music is the oldest theoretic discipline. And in the 19th century the European music theoreticians drove European musical practice off the cliff, as much as did the two world wars of the 20th century. European 'art' music has yet to recover from that splatter under the cliff. Theory isn't only in French, you know.

Nicked from a happy argument between a supreme theoretical anthropologist (who also does great work in the field), and a composer - musician - performer - musicologist.

May I add that the anthropologist was vastly outnumbered by the numbers of musicians in the space, though she was not out-gunned! JS can more than hold her own, thank you.

She's our number one advisor, teacher, mentor in all things theoretical in academia. You can see where there is a conflict though. She doesn't believe there is such a thing as music theory -- fightin' words among musicians! -- which el V is actually teaching a course in this coming semester. She really wasn't aware that the arts have disciplined theoretical structures. A terrific illustration of what the strict academic divisions we've made between technology, science, art and the humanties has lost/cost us as curious, rational and creative creatures.

This is the joy, the delight, the pure value of academia at its best -- this exercise of the mind that can take you somewhere you haven't been before. It's the value of intellectual, analytical give and of take.

Dress Rehearsal for Las Vidas Perfectas

2011-12-15T14:05:00.003-05:00

The first four words that came into this audience member's mind last night at the not un-glitch free dress rehearsal for Alex Waterman's production of the opera, Las Vidas Perfectas, were, in this order: elegant, beautiful, lush, exciting. This production is exciting in the way that opera can be exciting, though it does not include elephants.

It's a complex piece, this Robert Ashley opera, Perfect Lives, composed back in the 1970's, one of the outstanding examples of what was then called New Music. An enormous amount of hard work, intellectual, creative, and woodshedding, has gone into this production, and it shows by not showing any of the seams or the effort.

We are provided layers upon layers of sound, none of them the same, none of them fighting each other, but all of them individual, retaining their own integrity, not dissolving into a sonic mud. Elio Villafranca's brilliant piano music is between Peter Gordon's gorgeous, deep tracks, and the vocal music produced by el V -- 90 minutes of him chanting, singing, talking, emoting Ashley's text, his own body providing kinetic visul accompaniment, that is kept within strict geometric bounds. Another current of music that winds through the other layers is provided by the vocals of el coro, Elisa Santiago and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. One way to describe what Ned does is a vocal equivalent of the dressage exercise of volte – changing the horse’s (Ashley’s words) lead and gait on a dime via hand and heel aids, as the animal’s direction catapaults left, now above, now below, around, between and around the other musical layers. Another way to describe it is as vocal slalom skiing, an alpine discipline, involving skiing between poles (gates) spaced close together. This is complex geometric grid -- one that is a part of composer Ashley's original template of composition. Elio's music also exists in a space that is next to El V's music, as well as between El V's and Peter's. This is a complex geometric grid -- one that is a part of composer Ashley's original template of composition.

Sarah Crown, the set designer, whose own art expresses a passionate engagement with geometry, created the visual interpretation of this work. There are many geometries in this opera, which is first symbolized by a vibrant colored neon rune of intersecting angles and lines that hangs above stage right. The vari-colored backdrop design is a fabric patchwork of geometries. Center stage is the curves of Elio's grand piano. The bed and decor of stage left are combination of angles and curves. The colors and geometries are echoed in the costumes of the two singers of el coro, one male, one female. Occasionally supertitles in English are projected upon the rectangular blank spaces of the stage risers and platforms, and upon the curved surfaces of the piano's case and sound board. The convexity of these shapes distorts the words into softer curves themselves. The stage design illustrates the geometries of the composition, harmonizing with the build-up of the musical layers, providing sensual pleasure for the eye, and interest to the mind. It is sharp, clear, plain, while vibrantly colorful.

The space of the Irongate Theater is one of those fine stone churches from 19th century Brooklyn, deconsecrated. The acoustics are splendid, the seating comfortable. A lot of friends turned out to provide an audience of other peformers of the piece (Ashley's work in general and Perfect Lives in particular is currently being re-staged and performed), musicians, music writers, music lovers, fashion designers, photographers and other artists and critical writers. Their feedback before tonight's opening is valuable and appreciated.

Whew -- the first three performances are really upon us now, after four months of work. There are more in the future, and not so far away. This is after all, too, only the first three episodes of the seven episodes that make up the whole of Perfect Lives - Las Vidas Perfectas.

BALOJI with KONONO N°1 - KARIBU YA BINTOU (subtitled)

2011-12-12T15:45:00.002-05:00

I started the day with this, as a friend had sent it to me.

You want to see powerful? The artist lives in France, but this is made at home in Kinshasa.

le Barone Gedi, in the streets.

"It is from this Bantu Center We Find Our Breath."

Wiki Afraid of the Truth in Bertolucci's 1900 ?

2011-12-09T14:28:00.000-05:00

Bertolucci's epic 1976 film (the title in Italian is Novecento, which would translate into English as Twentieth Century -- very different from the title the U.S. market gave it, 1900) follows the conflict of the great Italian landowners and the agriculture workers from the turn of the 20th century to WWII, and the years immediately following. It does so through the relationship between the son of a landowner and the bastard grandson of an agriculture labor clan, the two born on the same day in 1900.

All through the wiki description of this film, 'socialist' and 'socialism' are substituted for communist, communism. * This significantly distorts the history that the writer and director so carefully work to depict in this vast film. In the workers' community center, their homes, their schools, are frescos of the hammer and sickle, portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. In Italy communism was, and still is, an active political and economic alternative. You can see why this is so, in a country where the other choices are to be oppressed by the Church, the Mafia or Fascism - Corporate interests. This is particularly true for the agricultural worker, during these decades from the turn of the 20th century through the Depression, when agricultural populism was powerfully struggling everywhere, including right here in the U.S., leading to riots, assassinations, murders and thuggery of every kind, sponsored by the Bosses and their minions, whether hired or elected.

The irony here though, is that Marx, Lenin and Stalin were not in sympathy with the agricultural worker. It was urban industrial labor that they were concerned with, and from whom the great communist movements were expected to birth their success. Yet, in history, the longest successful Communist revolution came from the nation which was the least industrialized: China, and later, Cuba. Stalin in particular declared war on the land worker -- from which came the constant hunger of so many in the Soviet countries.

So why is Wiki insisting this is socialism and not communism in this great Bertolucci film? Is it really fear, that we can't even name communism in a great film to which communism is central to the conflict, because the 'good' protagonists are so clearly communists and the bad ones are so clearly the great capitalists?

* This is striking, since the history of the medieval economic mutual assistance and governing bodies, known as communes, began in the city-states of Italy and very quickly, if not simultaneously, moved into France.

The Atlantic Monthly's Civil War

2011-12-06T17:25:00.002-05:00

I have just now returned from a expedition in the rain with the Special Commemorative Civil War Issue of The Atlantic Monthly. They'd just been racked at the local corner newstand store, and were at the very top. I had to ask one of the proprietors to get a copy down for me. When they realized what this is, they re-racked them at eye height. First generation immigrants from Uttar Predesh, asked me about "What is this Civil War?" They are all too familiar with civil wars, of course. But they don't know this one. A fairly long history lesson ensued, since at this hour the store was still empty, as the Lotto buying customers were still some minutes from getting off work and stopping by hoping for a little luck.

This is the first magazine I've bought in years. It's not only, or solely because because our President has an article in this Civil War Commemorative Issue, though I'm very curious to see what he has written about the ACW. He may be the first U.S. President to write of this event in -- how long? -- certainly as a sitting POTUS. But there's also a story by Louisia May Alcott included, set in one of the D.C. military hospitals. The offerings out the magazine's archives are priceless.

I've spent a fair amount of time in the Harper's Weekly archives, which during these years published the same bold face names as we see taken out of the Atlantic's archives, but I've not dug much into the Atlantic's.
I'll be sharing this issue with several people. I hope they all return it, so it can be borrowed again.

Remembering Coco Robicheaux -- Mark Folse in The Gambit

2011-12-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

"Mark Folse talks to friends of the late Frenchmen Street bluesman and artist ...."

When news of the death of local blues and spiritual icon Coco Robicheaux went viral on the Internet Nov. 25, some said his last words were, "I'm home." Bartender Sara Shaw at the Apple Barrel bar on Frenchmen Street, who attended to him in his last moments, as well as the patrons seated next to him when he collapsed, remember them as "The next round is on me."

Full story in the Gambit here.

Tomorrow, Coco Robicheaux, 2 Memorial Parades

2011-12-03T18:30:00.000-05:00

In the Times-Pic:

[ " At least three events in the coming days will memorialize Curtis Arceneaux, aka Coco Robicheaux, the popular local hoodoo blues guitarist, singer and vocalist. Robicheaux died of a suspected heart attack after collapsing at the Apple Barrel Bar on Nov. 25. He was 64.

Relatives and friends of the family are invited to attend the memorial service at DW Rhodes Chapel, 3933 Washington on Saturday, December 3 at 3:30 pm. Visitation will begin at 3:00 pm. Interment is private.

Also on Dec. 3, friends have organized another event at Marie’s Bar (2843 Burgundy), starting at 5 p.m. A second-line will depart from Marie’s, bound for the Apple Barrel on Frenchmen Street, one of Robicheaux’s favorite haunts.

His family and musicians with whom he played have orchestrated a more involved event nine days later, on Dec. 12. A procession starts on Frenchmen Street at 3:30 p.m. and ends at the House of Blues, 225 Decatur St. Starting at 6 p.m., a host of musicians will perform at the HOB in honor of Robicheaux. " ]

We're playing Spiritlands tonight, up here in the cold crisp Saturday night pasta ritual, giving up the traditional Saturday night Phil Schaap's Traditions in Swing, for Coco instead.

So many people are so upset. It took a while for it to become real, irrevocable, that Coco was really gone.

El V's interview with Coco for Bomb Magazine here.

Lighting the National Christmas Tree!

2011-12-02T11:32:00.002-05:00

Again, this being their beat, the WaPo does a good job with this annual holiday tradition with video and photos, so that we who love Christmas Trees and live elsewhere get to feel a little part of it.

My dear Austin amiga, L, gifted me with a Jackie Lawson digital Advent Calendar again this year. Last year the calendar was 24 days of filling in the details of a small town that looked remarkably like C'town in MD, where we were living. This year it's London. I thought yesterday that London wasn't as satisfactory as last year's, but as of this morning, decorating the Christmas Tree, I think it's just as wonderful as last year's. It's urban, yes, but with the small town neighborhood in the forefront that so much of NYC used to be like, and still is, in pockets, if you are part of that small town -- I can even find it here in SoHo, surely the most overbuilt, overhyped, overtouristed, overtacky, rat haven in the country.

I spent a full hour playing with the Advent calendar's tree and the decorations, getting it just as I like it. I hadn't even made my tea yet. I can get lost in these things forever, exactly like as a child, I got lost for hours with my color pencils, crayons and paints, making dream Christmas scenes from after Thanksgiving until the night before Christmas Eve Day. It went along with decorating the Christmas tree.

Once I was old enough I hogged the whole process. Dad could put the up in the stand and put on the lights –- this was always fraught because somehow every year, between tree lights that worked when we took the tree down, a certain number of the lights didn’t work when the next year's tree went up. But once those teensie irrelvancies were resolved, man, I took over. By the later years Mom even conceded to me the tinsel – that old fashioned aluminum stuff you put on last of everything else, that hung like Spanish moss does on live oaks down south, then in later years that much less satisfactory celophane static electricity stuff. The tinsel had always been her part because the rest of us didn’t have the sense to properly distribute. But when I got old enough, I did too, and better than she did, at least I thought so. I spent hours putting the tinsel on, one strand at a time. I continued to re-arrange the ornaments and tinsel until we took the tree down. The very concept of a tree in the house stunned me delirious with joy. We were people of the treeless prairies after all.

Now the national Christmas tree. The faces of the children in the photos are filled with Oh! and Ah!, just as they should be. The president's face is for once happy and content, as he performs with his family this annual national tradition of lighting the tree and as a spectator enjoys the accompanying entertainments. When the First Family together lights up the tree, his mother-in-law is part of that, as she's part of the family, and is part of the raising of the Obama daughters. Then, there is the part played by the First Lady. I keep repeating this, but I believe it more every time -- whatever criticisms I have of the president, and they are many and they are serious -- the one thing he's done perfectly is his marriage partner. She is wonderful in every way.

Here's the WaPo site for the National Christmas Tree Lighting photos and video.

Oooooo, and here the WaPo has a photo series of the evolution of the National Christmas Tree, since Calvin Coolidge! lighted the first one in 1923. Calvin started this tradition? Dour CC? Who would have thought?

It Beginning to Look Like Christmas

2011-12-01T14:33:00.000-05:00

The first week of December has long been my favorite week of the holidays. Thanksgiving hurly burly has come and gone – isn’t it grand how the one holiday that really was about friends and family is now about gigonomous BUYING? Is capitalism great or what? Why I like this week is because routines are back and observed, while real people as opposed to retail oppressors, are leisurely, here and there, putting out lights and other Christmas decorations, and they are sparkling and bright, not yet tired. I love the light at this time of year. And now with the re-instatement of normal temperatures, the light and the feel of the air have matched up again. Next week is traditionally the favorite one for both private and corporate and charity Christmas parties, so this weekend kicks into high gear the hurly burly of Christmas and New Year's. Thus, we'll be in uncommon, non-routine mode for the next few weeks -- particularly as el V's so taken up with rehearsals and the premiere of the first three sections of LasVidas Perfectas on the 15th, 16th and 17th.

Since the Obama family moved into the White House I've been uncharacteristically, and for the first time, fascinated with how things are done there. I love how the First Lady and her staff do Christmas, and in particular how they decorate the White House. The WaPo always covers in detail the unveiling of the Christmas White House, so today all of us get to see it. The star of the Holiday White House this year is Bo, which surely is something kids all over the country can appreciate. The WaPo coverage, "Bo is Christmas star in White House decor," is here.

There is a slide show of photographs, and a video also -- though just now it doesn't seem to be working so well.

Merry Christmas! Woof Woof Woof!

Death Comes To Pemberly by P.D. James!

2011-11-30T13:21:00.002-05:00

I suppose I can forgive this author, as she can and does write and sell other books, and has an acclaimed, lucrative and long career doing so. I honestly believe James did this for fun. Yes, even P.D. James has succombed to mashing up Jane Austen -- this with, naturally, a murder mystery. Is this what it comes to, to be finally accepted as a Great Novelist despite being female, despite not writing first hand about war and stuff that goes bang, despite being concerned about the state of the single woman and the state of the married woman, to have your work and characters mauled by everyone from cheap suits to designer brands?

[ Death Comes to Pemberly by PD James (Faber, £18.99)

PD James's Jane Austen sequel-with-a-murder is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for the Boden-wearing classes, best approached as the jeu d'esprit it was conceived as rather than as a serious attempt to ape Austen's style and extend the canon. Six years after her wedding, Lizzie B is mistress of Pemberley, happily married and with two young sons. But on the night before the annual Lady Anne's ball, Lydia Wickham arrives at the front door, screaming that her husband has been shot in nearby woodland … There's much here to rile purists, from the sometimes clunky and inconsistent pastiche to the introduction of characters from other Austen novels. The murder mystery, too, is hardly James's finest, but her enthusiasm and affection for the characters keeps you reading in spite of the flaws. ]

Not everyone sees it the way the above reviewer does:

[ … In my view Death Comes to Pemberley is as good as anything PD James has written and that is very high praise indeed." The Independent's Jane Jakeman also applauded the "dream team of crime fiction, Austen and James", finding the novel "a great joint achievement, and a joyous read". Equally enthusiastic was the Sunday Times's Peter Kemp, enjoying "an elegantly gauged homage to Austen and an exhilarating tribute to the inexhaustible vitality of James's imagination". ]

And here is a trailer for the book, on YouTube.

The Bloody, Twisted, Inverted World of Twilight + Discovery of Witches

2011-11-28T15:37:00.002-05:00

"Violent Vampire Sex, Demon-Babies and Overwhelming Female Desire. Twilight is saturated with sexist tropes--to the point of being disturbing. But that disturbing element is compelling, too."

I have been thinking about Twilight a lot because of the author of A Discovery of Witches appears to have studied it carefully. Deborah Harkness seems to have broken out all the parts that seem to be the most appealing wish fulfillment for the adolescent reader, and then transmuted them to an adult woman's fantasy wish fulfillment.

Sarah Seltzer at Alternet recently has been thoughtfull about Twilight, sparked by the professional obligation to screen the latest Twilight movie franchise:

[ " But as for the substance of her wants, therein lies the perversely haunting twist. I’d argue that Bella's desires are direct responses to the patriarchy we actually live in. In fact, Meyer has created for her heroine an inverted version of our unjust society. In this invented, inverted world, Bella is allowed to want sex, and vocalize it, and initiate it, while her partner is the gatekeeper who makes sure she is safe and married before she gets “hurt.” In her world, the men around her urge her to abort her fetus for her own safety, but she gets to “choose” to deliver it even though it kills her. In her world, her boyfriend can urge her to attend college and better herself while she can push for an early marriage--and be right! In her world, she can reject her body and trade it in for a new one that is agile, strong, lithe. Her choices are consistently to fall into the arms of the patriarchy and trust that it will catch her, and her faith is validated: she gets a perfect husband, angelic child, new body.

What if we could do this, the fantasy suggests? What if we could just will ourselves to accept the prescribed roles society gives us (damsel in distress, object of protection, vessel for childbearing) and make it okay through the power of our wills? And what if the men in our society were horrified by their power: physical, social, sexual, and curbed it themselves and we didn't constantly have to be on our guard? " ]

It's interesting in terms of fantasy and what women want to compare and contrast Bella with the witch Diane. Bella starts as human. Diane starts speshul as can be, a witch, a witch is even speshul among witches. But Diane is an adult with a highly successful career, who in childhood, eschewed her witchy heritage of specialness. Or so it seems. What makes it so interesting a contrast and comparison is what Diana wants vs what Bella wants -- what an intelligent, educated, curious, adult woman wants is very different from what an incurious, uneducated, non-disciplined teenager wants.

A Discovery of Witches (2011), Book 1 of The All Souls Trilogy is the most engrossing sf/f (as opposed to sf or f -- sf/f here referes to a novel that is both science fiction and fantasy) I've read in some time. It's only rival for excellence is in this cross genre of science fiction and fantasy is this year's World Fantasy Award winner, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor.

Now, many whose judgment I tend to agree with have hated A Discovery of Witches and made great big fun of it. I had read the first chapter excerpt on Tor, and what we got from that seemed to confirm that this was yet another version of the Twilight tiresomes: the special snowflake helpless as can be but firming her feisty chin in determination to take care of herself instead of allowing the gorgreous, brilliant, unbelievably ancient, powerful and wealthy vamp protect her -- and who loves her because -- why? since the love object is a zero, lacking all qualities other than shallow and ignorant, without curiosity, intelligence, education, knowledge of the world, interests or achievements.

But that's not what Discovery of Witches turns out to be. For once we have two lovers who are equally matched, who don't pull that I hate you but I love you o what will I do garbage. In fact, that they are matched equalities and agencies who truly love each other actually matters to the plot -- and not in that simple-minded when will they do it with each other? way. These are The Lovers, that you feel are worthy of the Tarot Major Arcana card named "The Lovers."

A Discovery of Witches is a fiction infused with intelligence. It's well-written, well-structured. For once I'm not going "They should have cut out at least 125 pp. of the 579 pp. that make up this novel."

I am enthusiastically looking forward to the second volume, Shadow of Night, which comes out next summer. I'm expecting this second volume in the projected trilogy will not fall into 'disappointing trilogy middle volume' syndrome as Deborah Harkness is highly intelligent, deeply and broadly educated, and she's also an experienced author.

Later I'll try to break down in particulars and specifics why this book worked so well for this reader at least. A lot of it has to do, alas, with all the wrongs it did not commit, that are embedded in almost all fantasy novels now, it seems, whatever variety of fantasy they are. But even more has to do with what all the rights the book commits.

Coco Robicheaux -- Walking the Spiritlands Forever More

2011-11-26T16:53:00.001-05:00

Coco's gone. New Orleans cannot be the same without him.

Coco's greatest song, "Walk With the Spirit," a truly spiritual song that was our personal battery-charger during the dark days after the 2005 flood, is here. The album it was on, 1995's Spiritland, is one of our all-time faves.

Sometimes I walk all by myself
I don’t want to talk to no one else
And I close my eyes
And I feel the spirit rise

That he had made this album made his attendence for the entire duration of The Year Before the Flood party all that more precious to us.

Season 3 of Treme won't be the same either, without a bit of Coco.

Occupy Wall Street protesters arrive in D.C. after 231-mile walk from New York

2011-11-23T13:26:00.000-05:00

One of the commentators to the article in the Washington Post that includes photos of the Walkers' bloody feet, stated, "Tea partiers would never do this." No truer words could be uttered than these by one of the Walkers, "Most people don't know what it is to walk two miles."

[ " Planting their flag in the District, they immediately held a meeting to try to figure out how best to take their frustrations to Capitol Hill, a growing focus for the movement that started Sept. 17 in a park near Wall Street but now includes more than 1,000 occupation sites around the world.

“I will march till my feet bleed to make this point,” Mike Gibb, 21, of Bel Air, Md., told several dozen reporters and well-wishers at the park. “You may ask why I went on this march. I ask you, ‘Why didn’t you?’ ”

On Nov. 9, before New York police raided Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park, the 21 protesters set out from Manhattan to take their message to Congress, timed for when the congressional “supercommittee” would issue its decision on how to reduce the deficit.

They walked through Trenton, N.J.; Philadelphia; Wilmington, Del.; Joppatowne, Md.; and Baltimore, then to College Park, relying on supporters for food, a place to sleep and some cash. " ]

Occupy to Liberate: Council of Elders - Occupy March 11/20/11

2011-11-21T11:49:00.001-05:00

After the sessions in Judson Church, there rallies Washington Square Park. The very large crowd then marched down Avenue of the Americas to our backdoor, Duarte Park, property owned by Trinity Church, right off Canal, not used by anyone for anything, except to cut through on the way to and from the subway. Occupy SoHo? Down with that!

Among the Elders was a Rabbi from Philadelphia who advised about space. He said you need indoor space. There is so much abandoned property everywhere -- factories, warehouses, etc.. Except here in NYC, there is not. We've never had a real estate crash here, not even a little bit. So, he said, go to church and synagogue property -- religious institutions are huge real estates owners.

The March then, occupied the sky.

In the meantime that Mayors of U.S. Cities with Occupy movement conference (organized by Obama's Dept. of Justice!) have settled on the meme that Occupy is unsanitary. I challenge any of those mayors to contrast what Zuccotti Park was like with the way it is here down in SoHo all the time with the rats, the restaurants, the vendors, the tourists, the dogs, all throwing their garbage into our streets, onto the streets and occupying our sidewalks. Zuccotti Park did not smell any time I was there. Any time I was there people were busy cleaning it. But SoHo does reek frequently.

A C'town Amiga Writes Concerning Today's Council Of Elders Event

2011-11-20T12:09:00.001-05:00

Her own words below, with her permission. First she taught elementary school, then she became a social worker.

The cop helicopters, cop tanks, cop horses, copscopscops are swarming all over us again, because elders of the non-violent Civil Rights Movement of over a half century ago are addressing the younger generations.

[ " That made me cry.......could it possibly be that "somthin's happenin' here, what it is isn't really clear..." ? Am I an Elder? I was 15 when I went to my first civil rights march, I was 19 when my first friends died in Viet Nam, I was 23 when children were shot down in cold blood at Kent State and Jackson State .....and the gym teacher shoved me up against the wall in the teachers' room at Back River Elementary School for wearing a black armband the next day..."They shoulda' shot a hundred of the little bastards!".........man,that was a memorable day................................now I'm 65 and 80 year old ladies in tennis shoes are being peppersprayed in Seattle...........I think I've got my tennis shoes around here somewhere!

Golden light here, shining thru the last of the magnificent gingkos and Autumn Glory maples........more golden here than there I think....you are that much closer to the North Pole :) Wonderful description ........keep the faith.........Love, *******

p.s. WIN is almost sold out of (second hand) Christmas stuff, a sure indicator of reality here...................p.p.s. Read Naomi Klein in current The Nation............stunning analysis................Happy Martini weather! And Happy Thanksgiving! I will be sharing it with the others of my Fellowship at the Alano Club! " ]

Council of Elders dialogue with OWS this Sunday, Nov. 20th

2011-11-19T18:53:00.000-05:00

In New York City on November 20^th, members of the Elder Council will spend time with those encamped at Zuccoti Park, beginning at 2:30 PM. They will lead a worship service in front of the “red structure” within Zuccotti Park at 3:30 pm. Elders will then host a dialogue with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and other interested individuals at 5pm, at 74 Trinity Place. Both events are open to the public.

http://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org/

Veterans of America’s 20^th Century civil rights movement will enter the 21^st Century Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles on Sunday, November 20.

Known as the “Council of Elders,” they will step inside the nationwide encampments to symbolically share the torch of hope and justice and engage the Occupiers in dialogue about defining movements of the past. “We want to contribute to this intergenerational movement,” says Dr. Vincent Harding, activist and writer in the civil rights movement. “We are thankful for the efforts of Occupy Wall Street to unite the 99% and bring the many gifts and great energy of millions into effective action to transform our nation.”
The Council of Elders is an independent group of leaders from the farm workers, sanctuary and human rights movements that shook the nation’s conscience with public protests over the past 50 years.
“We see Occupy Wall Street as a continuation, a deepening and expansion of the determination of the diverse peoples of our nation to transform our country into a more democratic, equitable, just, and compassionate society,” excerpt from the statement of solidarity by the Council of Elders to be read at each of the Occupy encampments.

By bringing their voices to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the elders are addressing a litany of social grievances, including poverty, mass incarceration, and what they call a culture of war and violence. Dolores Huerta, activist with Cesar Chavez and the farm-workers movement, believes today’s conditions create bitter divisions among peoples across the United States and throughout the world.
“We applaud the miraculous extent to which the Occupy initiative around the nation has been non-violent and democratic, especially in light of the weight of the systematic violence under which the great majority of people are forced to live,” says Rev. James Lawson, leading theoretician, tactician and theologian of the civil rights movement.

The economic crisis which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement also motivated the veteran protesters. They cite soaring unemployment rates, home foreclosures, and inadequate health care as issues that require public outcries.
The Council of Elders promotes compassion and non-violent action as the highest values to reverse trends that put profits ahead of people in its quest to contribute to the much-needed movement for a more just society and a more peaceful world.
The council members are urging elders from around the nation to join the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In New York City on November 20^th, members of the Elder Council will spend time with those encamped at Zuccoti Park, beginning at 2:30 PM. They will lead a worship service in front of the “red structure” within Zuccotti Park at 3:30 pm. Elders will then host a dialogue with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and other interested individuals at 5pm, at 74 Trinity Place. Both events are open to the public.

Click here to download press release

Barbarians & Thugs Destroy Libraries = Bloomberg & the NYPD

2011-11-17T14:30:00.000-05:00

From "Who Destroys Libraries?"

Thugs and barbarians.

Ergo Bloomberg & the NYPD.

From a commentator:

What is meaningful in a library? The books and media? The access to information, or to story, or to history? The gathering and cultivating and cataloging of those elements so necessary to civilization? The refuge from ignorance? The refuge from isolation? The people who make it all happen and help us understand the resources available to us? The open door?

A library to me is a public place, defined by who is allowed in rather than by public ownership. And on that measure, as well as every measure which I mentioned above, the library tent at Occupy Wall Street was a public library. They had over 5000 published books, original writing and poetry and art, people who volunteered there, and people who used the library. They had all that until New York City made the conscious decision to destroy the library.

That act of destruction was, to me, not qualitatively different from the book burning in Opernplatz in 1933. Both were political acts of destruction intended as statements of power, demeaning and diminishing those disfavored by the state, targeting the tangible instantiations of knowledge and discourse.

It's so weird how our primary media are reporting these matters -- the Italians protesting Berlusconi are considered worthy of our support, understanding and even admiration. Even the vaguest semblance of public protest on the part of the non-1% here is at best ridiculous and at worst lese majesty that deserves at least very long prison sentences.

The Wondrous Database

2011-11-17T12:44:00.000-05:00

"This Book Is 119 Years Overdue

The wondrous database that reveals what Americans checked out of the library a century ago."

The long article describing the database and its place in a the long sociological study of Middletown, U.S.A (Muncie, Indiana), and the author's personal engagement with what Louis Bloom, a particular patron's checkouts might mean is in Slate today:

Ever since the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published a pathbreaking pair of books about the city (Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, 1929, and Middletown in Transition : A Study in Cultural Conflicts, 1937) the place has been awash in social scientists studying its every move; this database is in fact part of Ball State’s Center for Middletown Studies

Each part of it is fascinating, even though the author's goal, to use it as time travel failed. In this part anyone who reads / or writes history or historical fiction can't fail but to be interested.

Stuart’s point about the gap between what you read and who you are got me thinking. Maybe the way Louis receded as I chased after him was not my problem but my answer. In the books Louis checked out he found, as readers everywhere always do, more than just a perfect mirror of his own life (as if “what Middletown read” told us “what Middletown really was”). He also found a way out: a glimpse of the Italy where scientists experimented with frog’s legs, or the state of Mississippi back when killing a slave was a simple property crime. The books he read might even have helped him catch a glimpse of what he wanted his own future to be working in the world of mechanics and of physics, far from Muncie (“Go West, young man”—yes, until you hit the Philippines). Thanks to those books, he too had a telescope. Like mine, it was small and imperfect, with no guarantees about the accuracy of what he glimpsed through it. Still, coming from the sort of Muncie life that he did (his mom had moved them in with in-laws, had even been threatened with having to send the kids off to various relatives) I bet that glimpse at a distant world loomed fairly large for him.

The database, What Middletown Read, can be accessed here.

War Horse & Louisa May Alcott

2011-11-13T14:49:00.003-05:00

Speilberg did a special early screening for Canadian veterans for Veterans Day. War Horse, the film, which like the theater work is made from the children's novel by Michael Mopurgo, opens here at Christmas.

The trailers show the horse beautiful, but what happens to animals in war, as to the earth, other animals, women and children is so disgusting I probably won't be able to watch this film (and Spielberg is not my cuppa anway). Even the story told in Louisa May Alcott's Little Men to the boys and girls at Plumfield by the black man-of-all-work, Silas, and his cavalry horse, Major, in the Civil War disturbed me the reader as much as it disturbed Daisy. Like her I cried to see Silas still carried a bit of the horse's mane wrapped in paper and kept in his wallet.

[ " "I don't know but jest one story, and that's about a horse," he said, much flattered by the reception he received.

"Tell it! tell it!" cried the boys.

"Wal," began Silas, tipping his chair back against the wall, and putting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, "I jined a cavalry regiment durin' the war, and see a consid'able amount of fightin'. My horse, Major, was a fust-rate animal, and I was as fond on him as ef he'd ben a human critter. He warn't harnsome, but he was the best-tempered, stiddyest, lovenest brute I ever see. I fust battle we went into, he gave me a lesson that I didn't forgit in a hurry, and I'll tell you how it was. It ain't no use tryin' to picter the noise and hurry, and general horridness of a battle to you young fellers, for I ain't no words to do it in; but I'm free to confess that I got so sort of confused and upset at the fust on it, that I didn't know what I was about. We was ordered to charge, and went ahead like good ones, never stoppin' to pick up them that went down in the scrimmage. I got a shot in the arm, and was pitched out of the saddle–don't know how, but there I was left behind with two or three others, dead and wounded, for the rest went on, as I say. Wal, I picked myself up and looked round for Major, feeling as ef I'd had about enough for that spell. I didn't see him nowhere, and was kinder walking back to camp, when I heard a whinny that sounded nateral. I looked round, and there was Major stopping for me a long way off, and lookin' as ef he didn't understand why I was loiterin' behind. I whistled, and he trotted up to me as I'd trained him to do. I mounted as well as I could with my left arm bleedin' and was for going on to camp, for I declare I felt as sick and wimbly as a woman; folks often do in their fust battle. But, no sir! Major was the bravest of the two, and he wouldn't go, not a peg; he jest rared up, and danced, and snorted, and acted as ef the smell of powder and the noise had drove him half wild. I done my best, but he wouldn't give in, so I did; and what do you think that plucky brute done? He wheeled slap round, and galloped back like a hurricane, right into the thickest of the scrimmage!"

"Good for him!" cried Dan excitedly, while the other boys forgot apples and nuts in their interest.

"I wish I may die ef I warn't ashamed of myself," continued Silas, warming up at the recollection of that day. "I was mad as a hornet, and I forgot my waound, and jest pitched in, rampagin' raound like fury till there come a shell into the midst of us, and in bustin' knocked a lot of us flat. I didn't know nothin' for a spell, and when I come-to, the fight was over just there, and I found myself layin' by a wall of poor Major long-side wuss wounded than I was. My leg was broke, and I had a ball in my shoulder, but he, poor old feller! was all tore in the side with a piece of that blasted shell."

"O Silas! what did you do?" cried Nan, pressing close to him with a face full of eager sympathy and interest.

"I dragged myself nigher, and tried to stop the bleedin' with sech rags as I could tear off of me with one hand. But it warn't no use, and he lay moanin' with horrid pain, and lookin' at me with them lovin' eyes of his, till I thought I couldn't bear it. I give him all the help I could, and when the sun got hotter and hotter, and he began to lap out his tongue, I tried to get to a brook that was a good piece away, but I couldn't do it, being stiff and faint, so I give it up and fanned him with my hat. Now you listen to this, and when you hear folks comin' down on the rebs, you jest remember what one on 'em did, and give him credit of it. I poor feller in gray laid not fur off, shot through the lungs and dyin' fast. I'd offered him my handkerchief to keep the sun off his face, and he'd thanked me kindly, for in sech times as that men don't stop to think on which side they belong, but jest buckle-to and help one another. When he see me mournin' over Major and tryin' to ease his pain, he looked up with his face all damp and white with sufferin', and sez he, 'There's water in my canteen; take it, for it can't help me,' and he flung it to me. I couldn't have took it ef I hadn't had a little brandy in a pocket flask, and I made him drink it. It done him good, and I felt as much set up as if I'd drunk it myself. It's surprisin' the good sech little things do folks sometime;" and Silas paused as if he felt again the comfort of that moment when he and his enemy forgot their feud, and helped one another like brothers.

"Tell about Major," cried the boys, impatient for the catastrophe.

"I poured the water over his poor pantin' tongue, and ef ever a dumb critter looked grateful, he did then. But it warn't of much use, for the dreadful waound kep on tormentin' him, till I couldn't bear it any longer. It was hard, but I done it in mercy, and I know he forgive me."

"What did you do?" asked Emil, as Silas stopped abruptly with a loud "hem," and a look in his rough face that made Daisy go and stand by him with her little hand on his knee.
"I shot him."

Quite a thrill went through the listeners as Silas said that, for Major seemed a hero in their eyes, and his tragic end roused all their sympathy.

"Yes, I shot him, and put him out of his misery. I patted him fust, and said, 'Good-by;' then I laid his head easy on the grass, give a last look into his lovin' eyes, and sent a bullet through his head. He hardly stirred, I aimed so true, and when I seen him quite still, with no more moanin' and pain, I was glad, and yet–wal, I don't know as I need by ashamed on't–I jest put my arms raound his neck and boo-hooed like a great baby. Sho! I didn't know I was sech a fool;" and Silas drew his sleeve across his eyes, as much touched by Daisy's sob, as by the memory of faithful Major.

No one spoke for a minute, because the boys were as quick to feel the pathos of the little story as tender-hearted Daisy, though they did not show it by crying.

"I'd like a horse like that," said Dan, half-aloud.

"Did the rebel man die, too?" asked Nan, anxiously.

"Not then. We laid there all day, and at night some of our fellers came to look after the missing ones. They nat'rally wanted to take me fust, but I knew I could wait, and the rebel had but one chance, maybe, so I made them carry him off right away. He had jest strength enough to hold out his hand to me and say, 'Thanky, comrade!' and them was the last words he spoke, for he died an hour after he got to the hospital-tent."

"How glad you must have been that you were kind to him!" said Demi, who was deeply impressed by this story.

"Wal, I did take comfort thinkin' of it, as I laid there alone for a number of hours with my head on Major's neck, and see the moon come up. I'd like to have buried the poor beast decent, but it warn't possible; so I cut off a bit of his mane, and I've kep it ever sence. Want to see it, sissy?"

"Oh, yes, please," answered Daisy, wiping away her tears to look.

Silas took out an old "wallet" as he called his pocket-book, and produced from an inner fold a bit of brown paper, in which was a rough lock of white horse-hair. The children looked at it silently, as it lay in the broad palm, and no one found any thing to ridicule in the love Silas bore his good horse Major.

"That is a sweet story, and I like it, though it did make me cry. Thank you very much, Si," and Daisy helped him fold and put away his little relic; while Nan stuffed a handful of pop-corn into his pocket, and the boys loudly expressed their flattering opinions of his story, feeling that there had been two heroes in it. " ]

Louisa May Alcott was herself a hero in the Civil War, She spent so much time with soldiers, writing for them and doing other sympathetic kindnesses beyond her nursing and assisting at surgery, one wonders if she heard this story or one much like it during that time. Alcott nursed the wounded soldiers in D.C. until she herself took so ill from the conditions that she came thisclosetodeath and as consequence suffered ill health for the rest of her life.

And I whine that I'm too sensitive to watch a movie made from a children's book.

Angel, Elizabeth Taylor: "Fashions Change. Time Is Cruel"

2011-11-12T16:03:00.001-05:00

Angel (2007) a Francois Ozon film, adapted from the same-titled 1947 novel by English novelist Elizabeth Taylor (1912 - 1972).

“Fashions change. Time is cruel.” This is the epitaph pronounced by the publisher upon melodramatic Romance novelist Angel Deverill’s vast bibliography. When Angel begins to publish, around the turn of the 20th century she supposedly is 15 or 16 or 17. This, like much else is unclear as this is a Romance; such specific and mundane details are expected to be glossed over. She dies in the inter WW era, supposedly as in her old age but she looks the same, except frail and ill as she fades away regretted by no one but her faithful, aristocratic, perhaps lesbian retainer. Trembling, exquisite hand of expiring Angel reaches tenderly up, the whisper in the ear, "You are the only one who truly loved me." How often had Angel finished her novels with those words and that scene! But o, the difference in what the scene meant in Angel's life. Yet, they are true, for no one loved her truly and so passionately as Nora did all her life.

The Modern had nothing whatsoever to do with Angel, though the art produced by her aristorcrat of a husband, a painter and bohemian, exemplars of the Modern in art. Angel, however, remains true to her vision of Romance all her life, in her novels, which no longer sell, and in her death. This romantic vision not only lost her her husband, but kills her too, but not before wild success, the adulation of millions, millions in revenue, and wild passionate love.

This is an interesting film, which presents on screen all the conventions of Romantic Fiction and the fantasy imagined by the readers of the author who writes such works, without changing a thing from the pages of such books. Rather it presents all of it in concrete detail: this is a film that is about fabulous clothes, precious jewelry, lush, opulent interiors and settings that are as full of bad art, hangings, bibelots, pets, unlikely devotion of inferiors as the reader wishes for his / her own life. It unavoidably falls into camp then, when presented on the screen, because the screen is lacking the passionate convictions of the writer, Angel, who marshals all these elements out of her own passionate imagination of desire. This is even more interesting because this highly reputed director marshalled a stellar cast that includes, but is not limited to, Sam Neil, Charlotte Rampling and Michael Fassbinder as the Romantic Aristocratic lead. Unfortunately the Romantic Writer lead was given to the ever-grimacing and constantly unconvincing Romola Gerais.

This is a novel-to-screen adaptation that fiction writers of any kind should not be able to resist watching. More information about the author, fromwhose satiric book this film was made – the classic Virago author -- can be found here.

More information about the novel (pub. 1957)can be found in the NYRB here.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence then, that I watched this movie while waiting for the last installment of Paradise Postponed, since both are mostly shot in Buckinghamshire County, and neither of them have likeable characters that lend themselves to comfortable submergence of watcher's self into their bigger than life representations. Indeed, Angel is so unlikable from start to finish that you believe in her, but not the way Angel herself believes in herself. She is so selfish and self-centered you do not fault her mother for slapping her, and indeed, you really can't understand how her mother then comes and begs for her forgiveness for doing so. But then, this is Romantic fiction, in which all who come in contact with the protagonist, for better or worse, fall under her spell, can never forget her and will always stand by her, no matter what. It's those moments when we see outside of Angel's own vision that we can see truly, and see her for the monster she is -- one of those Magnificent Monsters of which Hollywood is so fond ... As I say, this is a very interesting film, which among other things is about the difference between how we, whether writers and artists or anyone else, see ourselves and our work, and how others may or may not see us.

Country Music Association (CMA) Awards Nominees & Other Country Stars' Opinions Of The Gay Community

2011-11-09T16:57:00.001-05:00

Number 12 of the 15 is Willie Nelson, who name checks You Know Who for "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly."

{ " Nelson's manager David Anderson, who came out in 2004, noted, "This song obviously has special meaning to me in more ways than one... I want people to know more than anything -- gay, straight, whatever -- just how cool Willie is and ... his way of thinking, his tolerance, everything about him." " }

All 15 have interesting stories -- check it out.

Dark Tangos by Lewis Shiner

2011-11-08T15:29:00.000-05:00

I picked up a copy from the library this afternoon of this Subterrannean Press publication -- a CUNY grad center colleague -- a Texas native -- told me I had to read it. Examining the book -- copyright page, etc. -- as I'm wont to do, I saw it was autographed. Then I see this is s "Deluxe hardcover edition." I wonder if there was a shelving mistake because this press's works aren't usually available for borrowing, but rather go into the humantiies research library's collections, and thus can only be requested directly from that facility and read there, in the reading room.

Like Shiner's previous novel there aren't sf/f elements in this one either. It's a suspense novel, the subject of which is Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970's. Well, it being Shiner, it's also about the lonely heart of the solitary journalist who once was a musician, and will he ever again find someone who can fill that empty heart -- while encountering immediately an exotic, mysterious beautiful woman with secrets. Location is Buenas Aires, thus that coupled with exotic mysterious beautiful woman of secrets = dark tangos. But the tango is dark, that's what its about, at least in some way. Have you ever heard of tango as frothy and opéra bouffe? Unless danced by the Marx brothers? Which I think they do, or at least Groucho does, in -- maybe, Night at the Opera?

Tangos notoriously are danced in dark, smoky clubs, often underground, and that is meant literally.

The great book of tango is Robert Farris Thompson's Tango: The Art History of Love (2005). Bob spent a lot of time in Buenas Aires working his way through the origins and significance of the form, including specifically the music and the rhythm, as well as the postures, tracing them all back to Africa. Ned conducted an extensive interview with Bob on the occasion of the book's publication, which is included in the art book collection of Bob's essays, Aesthetics of Cool: Afro Atlantic Art and Music (2011 -- though for some reason this edition is still not shipping from amazon, it is in museum stores).

Shiner's novel is available as a free pdf, if you go to his website and click the link.

The Betsy-Tacy Treasury Published Today - HarperCollins

2011-11-08T10:38:00.002-05:00

Betsy-Tacy and Tib, Deep Valley, Minnesota, 10 books in all, culminating in 1955 with Betsy's Wedding.

I didn't discover these books until about age 10 or 11, and when I did they were already in high school -- Betsy Was a Junior. It immediately became one of my most re-read volumes on our tiny rural school library's shelves. So the young girls -- age 5 when the first book comes out in 1945 -- never much interested me. It was teenage Betsy, Tacy and Tib, in their somehow wondrous lives in my recognizable midwest -- but o, so sophisticated! they lived in Town, not on a farm like I did! -- and also fantastical because they lived so long ago, in a different world that happened before World War I, a war I hardly knew other than my paternal grandfather had been a part of it. Who were these people? I didn't know anyone like them, but now I did, inside these books.

[ "But there may be no world that provokes such profound girlish longing as the bucolic century-old Minnesota of “Betsy-Tacy.” " ]

Paradise Postponed

2011-11-07T12:35:00.001-05:00

Paradise Postponed was a 1986 BBC series written by John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey; PBS broadcast it in the U.S. Mortimer wrote the novel of Paradise Postponed at the same time he wrote the scripts for the series; critics have written that the novel is inferior to what we see on the screen. I've not read the novel, but I'm watching the series, and it is wonderful.

U.S. critics say the series is excruciatingly slow and most of it, if not exactly dull, is inpenetrable to most U.S. viewers. This is the case because what turns the narrative is rooted in the changes in the English political landscape over a period of about 50 years.  The narrative flashes back to the 50's, 60's and 70's, not necessarily in that order, always returning to the present of the 80's in which the oldest son of one of the families attempts to fight the will that leaves the family money to someone who isn't part of the family. During these back-and-forths the narrative traces the rise and fall of families and communities and classes, among the ebbs and turns of the Labor and Conservative party currents, and the Thatcher Tory triumph of the 80's.

But I find this series engrossing and amusing from the language, the characters, the location, and the history of politics and class relationships. The language spoken by every single character, no matter how peripheral or how central, is sharp as a box cutter, and has the rhythm appropriate to how actual people speak. Of course, it is enhanced by a supremely gifted writer, presented by highly trainded and skilled actors, so though the words are emoted as in natural mode, the delivery is not, by and large, that of everyday communication -- but you do wish it was! It is cerebral, but it is firmly rooted in a place, because the families of all the characters of whatever class are firmly rooted there -- and this county in such easy commuting distance from London, is beautiful. The characters are not conventionally likeable, but they are all in the round, and always fascinating, to listen to, and to look at. There is no leavening of one or two likeables among them, as we have in, say, the Barchester Chronicles, with Donald Pleasence's role as Mr. Harding the godly and sweet clergyman. The most ruthless among Paradise Postponed -- the working class social climbing entrepreneur and politician, Lesley Titmuss -- lacks the satirical comic turns of Alan Rickman's Obadiah Slope, that allow the viewer's comfortable sense of superiority, and that all shall be well in the world.

However, you cannot turn your eyes from Titmuss. In some ways he will remind a constant reader of Kenneth Widmerpool, from Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, as the series will remind one to a lesser degree of that 12 volume fiction series tracing England from WWI through the end of the 1960's. But Titmuss doesn't provoke even the peripetetic twinges of sympathy that Widmerpool does. Titmuss's speech to the members of his local Conservative party's candidate selection committee is brilliant. For that alone, if you are a U.S. leftist or liberal or reformist, you should see this series and re-play that speech a hundred times. It explains, briefly and entirely to the point, the rise and triumph of our regressive, mean, and successful politics of the far right.  It is the distillation of the failure of the left to understand the very people they think they are representing.

There is a sequel to Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained, broadcast in the early 90's, also written by Mortimer.  This single disk sequel is built around the out-of-control land development and despoilation that only -- so far -- the crash of 2008 has slowed to degree. Titmuss is now Conservative secretary of state for Housing, Ecology, and Planning. Will it be as good as Paradise Postponed? The rumor is that the title could just as well be Titmuss Redeemed.

Books & Libraries, Girls & Education -- This Person Tries

2011-11-06T13:52:00.001-05:00

Here is something else that like Occupy Wall Street, though in a different way, is delightfully inspirational -- or, perhaps, not that differently after all, upon reflection.

His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives, Ny Times Op-ed today.

[ " The cost per girl for this program is $250 annually. To provide perspective, Kim Kardashian’s wedding is said to have cost $10 million; that sum could have supported an additional 40,000 girls in Room to Read.

So many American efforts to influence foreign countries have misfired — not least here in Vietnam a generation ago. We launch missiles, dispatch troops, rent foreign puppets and spend billions without accomplishing much. In contrast, schooling is cheap and revolutionary. The more money we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.

Wood, 47, is tireless, enthusiastic and emotional: a motivational speaker with no off button. He teared up as girls described how Room to Read had transformed their lives. " ]

Books still matter, the printed-words-on-paper kind. Classrooms still matter, the room-pupils-teacher kind. Giving still matters, a person with means-with an idea-executes idea kind.

If you click the link to Friedman's blog where this piece went up originally or maybe the same time, comments are enabled. The very first one is really interesting because the commentator says:

[ " May be it is just me, but Microsoft employees are frequently in news for doing these kind of things. I have never seen Apple employees in similar articles. Everyone loves Steve Jobs but all I read about him is how self involved he was. Compare that to Bill Gates and you could not have a greater contrast.No matter how much an Iphone adds to your life, it could not be more then saving a life or giving the most deprived people an avenue to reach their goals. " ]

Librarians in the public systems have noticed this, re Microsoft vs. the cult of Jobs. Apple has never provided a thing for the common good. Public libraries may well have gone down back at the end ofthe 80's early 90's without all the donation of monies, equipment and upgrade provided by Gates's foundations. Librarians may feel deeply constrained by IE but without Gates they'd still be rooting around in the print indices -- or more likely without jobs at all. Not to mention all the collateral jobs that came into being as libraries digitized (though also the collateral loss of jobs as well with automization that came with digitization). Still, at least here in NYC, we still have public libraries and they are used more and more by more and more people, while still expected to provide more and more with less and less.

Thank the lordessa for people like this gentleman, and like a woman I met last night at a dinner party uptown. She works in the Financial District, supports the Occupy Wall Streeters, and donates thousands of dollars to the NYPL every year.

One of the first components of the Occupy Wall Street camp communities to get established, along with community kitches, are libraries ....

Gub Walker Gets Mike Checked! Plus Oakland's Mayor & the Cops

2011-11-05T13:57:00.002-04:00

For whatever reason stupid blogger isn't putting in YouTubes.

Go here because it is a powerful action to watch unfolding. The participants did some strong work in planning the infiltration. Only fair, yes, since the cops and Others are forever planting criminals and provocateurs into the Occupy Wall Street actions to cause violence.

As with the Oakland cops who hate the mayor and have overtly said they will use this to take her out. She defeated Their Guy, who was in cops pockets, and has gotten the cops to pay more out of their pockets into their pensions. This, according to a friend of ours reporting in from Oakland where he's lived for many years.

We have so many different security and police forces now, they are wagging the national dog for sure. Can we mike check Praetorian Guard?

Hell on Wheels: No Cliche Left Behind, Plus, yanno, THAT Revisionism

2011-11-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

Nor am I alone in this 'toode:

Goldman Sachs To Be Tried By People's Court in Zuccotti Park

2011-11-03T11:19:00.000-04:00

The speakers tie the practices and objectives of Goldman Sachs and their ilks to the deeply corrupted community and local systems that they too either directly or indirectly exploit for their gain, from mortgages to public education to public housing, to the current culture of rape and demeaning of women and other groups.

Alas that the streaming options are as iffy as they are, but it's impoverished WBAI, not the vastly wealthy NPR, that blatantly shills many times a day to get their listeners to not merely donate -- but to leave their money to NPR in their wills -- and which couldn't be bothered to report at all on yesterday's Oakland's Occupy strike, or the march of the vets here, to Zuccotti Park, in support of Oakland's Occupy strike. Instead, like all the primary media, they drumbeated non-stop the inanities of the idiot Herman Caine and his potential to lose his top spot as the gop nom candidate for POTUS. Whisky Tango Foxtrot ....

Whatever streaming problems, however, the station does have up a downloadable app that will bring you the live action. It's far more organized and focused than the primary media will have you believe. They are doing an excellent job.

Goldman Sachs To Be Tried By People's Court in Zuccotti
Park
By AlterNet
Posted on
November 1, 2011

Goldman Sachs will be tried this Thursday, November 3,
for crimes against the American public. Cornel West, noted civil rights
activist, and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winner, will be among those
presiding, and testimony for the prosecution will include individuals who have been directly affected and harmed by the actions of Goldman Sachs. The trial is open to the public, and if you can't make it? Tune in to WBAI (99.5 FM in New York) or online at www.wbai.org this Thursday, from 10 AM to 12 noon, where it will be broadcast live. If the government won't do it? We'll take it into our own hands.

© 2011 All rights reserved.

Trans Caribbean Reflections: The City Seeds Event

2011-11-01T17:05:00.001-04:00

Last night was another one of those wonderful experiences, of musical forensics illuminating the past. It was Halloween * yet the attendence was standing room only -- rsvp, and those who hadn't, had to be turned away by the end, alas. It was one of those special kinds of events that are a gathering of the tribes, which feel more like family than instruction. A perfect balance of history and hot percussion and dancing.
Ned Sublette and Alexander LaSalle

“Canga Mundele: Tracing the Secret of Bomba from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans to Puerto Rico”

“White and black people in the United States speak the same language—up to a point, anyway. But Spanish speakers in the United States have always been the ‘other.’”
“At the time when Cuba was experiencing intensive economic growth, Spain invested in Louisiana, holding the colony through the years of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and all but the very end of the Haitian Revolution.”
Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo
Los Pleneros de la 21

About one third of the audience were CUNY grad students from anthro and history classes that are using The World That Made New Orleans as one of their texts. Others were regular attendees of this series, friends in the Puerto Rican and Haitian and other Caribbean communities in which we participate. Some of these are really old friends such as M and M and their daughter, K.

The best bit was right after el Ned put up a bit of illo of Quadrilles and contra danses, and the Caller of the dance moves and patterns, played some of the rhythms, then spoke of how you can still hear this in dance hall in Jamaica with the Commadeur. and contemporary reggaeton. Then Alex and Manuella played the rhythms on their drums, and while they were doing that el Ned rapped out a couple of verses of a very popular reggaeton number. The audience knows this number, of course, cracked up, and applauded. And the point of The continuity of this Carribbean cultural-musical meme -- Postmamboism -- was well and driven home. Very cool.

Then we were taken out to dinner, down there, in the Financial District -- now that was cultural dissonance! The Halloween decorations of the faux Mexican bar - restaurant were very good -- much better than the food (but I'm the kind who thinks even mediocre fake Mexican is better than no Mexican), but the beers were cold and good, it was open that late (nearly 10 when we got there) and could handle a dozen people, no problem. With their big, heavy tables it made it easier for everyone to exchange contact info, since not everyone had met personally before, but everyone shares the same interests. There were some grad students, which provided me an odd sensation as they whipped out their notebooks and write down things I said about history, about fiction, about writing.

And then, when el V and MS and I got back to our own neighborhood the mess that it is every year on Halloween due to the annual Village parade stepping off from our street had mostly removed itself. True, left behind were some lurching, howling mobs, and an odd singleton behaving oddly, appropriately wearing a clown outfit. So we retreated back into our small apartment to drink a nightcap and talk editors and publishing. A great night had by all.

________________________________

* On the subway riding downtown to the event I spotted a young woman wearing a Sons of Anarchy patch leather jacket!

We Have It All

2011-10-29T16:10:00.000-04:00

Rain, sleet, snow, thunder, wind -- and police brutality: "Emperors! Beware, Beware, the Praetorian Guard!"

Fortunately we are prepared for this as I spent yesterday scurrying about getting in supplies. Excellent cold weather comfort food dinner last night, pasta tonight.

We have plenty of work.

Yesterday also brought me American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson, by the handsome, distinguished and o so brilliant and entertaining David O. Stewart -- who will be reading here next month

and

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, who surely is the equal, if different from, Mr. Stewart. This is his second Tines world novel, the first, A Fire Upon the Deep, was published in 1993. Having zipped through the first 100 pages last night before bed, this one may be even more mind provoking than the first. Built upon the strong foundations of the first Tines' world book, Children is equally strong, but is revealing itself to possess an elegance perhaps the first one did not have, yet the elegance is dependent upon what was made in the first. Recall, Mr. Vinge, is a retired math and computer science professor, as well as Science Fiction writer. He's much credited for the concept of the "singularity" -- quoting wiki:

"His 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the point at which "the human era will be ended," such that no current models of reality are sufficient to predict beyond it.

“	Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

In the meantime this week I've been devoting myself to Charles B . Dew's Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession and the Causes of the Civil War (2001), in order to get absolutely straight the process of secession -- at least as far as one can get straight such a white hot emotional fury and terror at the curtailing expansion of their wealth and national political domination on the part of the slaveholding class's ruling elite.

Laundry, also. I am doing it. le sigh.

Again, With the Punching in the Face Thing

2011-10-27T14:08:00.002-04:00

AND, the fisting of the hands.

What is this among female fantasy YA writers and their female readers, the "punch in the face" and the "fisting of the hands?"

What am I missing? Is this contributing to my growing dislike of the sound of the current crop of narrator-protag's first person pov's voices in YA fiction?

Additionally, keep in mind that for this reader, the usage of 'turned on his / her heel' is exceedingly annoying as well, and throws me out of disbelief suspension every time it is used.

A description of the color and expression of eyes by protagonist from across a room also -- as well as running, running, running while talking talking, talking for hours, days, weeks -- for all we know, considering the length of the book, for YEARS -- without sleeping, drinking, eating or peeing -- talking always about how sexy this one is, and how beautifully dressed, and how this and how that, on every page, while falling down the rabbit hole, and how unspecial "I" (protagonist) is and don't seek attention to ourselves, while narrating on every page how special, how attractive, how sexy -- too sexy we are for our shirts, every one us in this special way! protagonist(s) Is(Are), Really, and special in that speshul snowflake way, in fact, while loudly proclaiming we are not, indeed Speshul Snowflakes, in the attempt to snow the reader -- and this while supposedly life-threatening events are occuring! And at least another new character -- often several! -- introduced per page, and then we never see them again.

Again I ask: What is it I'm missing about living in the book reading-buying sector of the U.S.A. population about how to write fantasy fiction if you are female and attempting to appeal to the female audience these days? Because, I'm not getting any of this! To me it seems like bad writing.

Freelance Journalism: Report From The Trenches

2011-10-26T16:01:00.000-04:00

Last night we went out with a friend who we spent lots of time with in an earlier phase of our then mutual lives. That stopped when she began living for the most part in Asia about 2003 -- we literally haven't seen her since then, though there is e-mail, etc. She's been back here this fall for the process of selling her condo. She reports.

"We all are serfs of the 1% now. Those of us who are lucky are existing on the drippings left over from the 1%, who now and again throw us some largess because we're among that tiny percentage of the 99% who happen to have skills and abilities that the 1% find useful or amusing at times. We're the court fools."

Her supposedly counted on income is from a Big Internationally Distributed magazine, in print and online, to report on the culture and cuisine of southeast Asia. Every year the contractual situation is up until the last moment -- will it be renewed or not? They say they are paying her too much. She's still getting what she got back when she began working for them in 2000. Accounting 'forgets' to pay her some months, and so on a so forth.

Our friend has been a freelance journalist, and a successful one, much of her professional writing life (before that she was a singer), starting long before the internet, before blogs, and e-publishing. She's never seen it this bad in all the years she's been a journalist. There are no gigs .... With over 17000 professional journalists let go by magazines and newspapers ten years ago, suddenly there were 17000 new, professional, competitors out there for the number of freelance jobs that shrink every months so. Additionally there are all the graduates since then from journalism and other writing programs ....

If you do have a job, you are obliged to spend hours and hours twitting, fbing, blogging, e-mailing, linked-inning, etc. about it because the beancounters back at hq -- i.e. accounts payable, are counting every hit you get. So you have the added job that you didn't used to have of being your own PR person. Sounds famiiar doesn't it?

And after all that the employer doesn't want to let go of any money, particularly to PAY YOU THE WRITER, even though contractually obligated to do so. The attitude is that you are taking advantage of them by bugging them about getting paid for work of yours they published six months ago.
She's started a personal Edith Wharton / Henry James gig of her own. She speaks Chinese fluently by now -- and more to the point can read it. Fujian Chinese in particular is two different languages: the spoken language and the written - read one, and they are not the same. So you hear a pop song and if you can speak Chinese you can't track it because songs are 'written,' so the singer's singing in that language. (Our friend's intonation is gorgeous, and she can sing and she has a beautiful voice -- she sang some ballads popular in Hongkong last night when the karaoke kicked in, so I enjoyed hearing her - unlike the others who got up to sing there last night -- shuddersome!) She also can get around in a number of other Asian languages too -- and her Spanish has long been fluent, which is also useful with as many Filippinos as there are in these cities. Anyone from Goldman Sachs is far too important to learn a language or figure out how to do anything for themselves, so they pay her thousands. She see first hand that the obscenely wealthy are more wealthy than ever, as the poor are more poor than ever.

She says that you may think you know how much money is in Asia, but until you live there you have no idea at all. It's drowning in money.

So that's the report from an expat in Asia.

American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson' America by David Stewart

2011-10-25T14:13:00.000-04:00

Publishes today!

I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who has an in interest in the history of this nation, no matter which era one may specialize in either as general interest or as a scholar and historian.

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962)

2011-10-25T13:50:00.000-04:00

Edmund Wilson was a significant literary and social critic in his lifetime -- not to mention a passionate, rejected, suitor of Edna St. Vincent Millay -- but more lately his work has gone into eclipse. As an intellectual who was based (1895 - 1972) in the rise and full flowering of the Modern, his thinking was deeply informed by Marx and Freud, who have also been in eclipse for some decades. Perhaps more to the point right now, in this zenith era of nerd culture, Wilson is most famous for characterizing J.R.R. Tolkien as "juvenile trast" and H.P. Lovecraft as "hackwork."

Nevertheless he had a keen mind for the excellent in American letters. However, re-reading Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) for the first time since the early 1980's for the first time since the early 80's, it's showing itself to be almost an oddity of writing and of literary criticism, for reasons that did not register with me upon that earlier reading.

This oddness begins with the Introduction, in which he flatly states that slavery was nerely a demagogic strategy employed by the Union and the Confederacy both to whip up warring partisanship. However, as he brings us the body of the work, he begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe, and from her proceedes to give us writers who, on both sides, are saying that slavery is the reason for the war. Then there is his discussion of the figures of the era and their output about the war, which seems to be more about him and his thinking than about them and their thinking. And finally, he doesn't include the two writers who really were in the war in its most terrible phase, Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman, who cared for the dead, the dying, the maimed and the wounded who are war's great production. He doesn't include any writer that isn't worth looking at, but that he leaves out these two, seems peculiar.

Frank Rich on Occupy Wall Street and the Great Depression

2011-10-25T12:16:00.000-04:00

The Class War Has Begun:

And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

Music, plus Media and the Occupation: Today's Da List

2011-10-22T16:06:00.000-04:00

El V's new episode of Afropop Worldwide, "A (Jazzy) Visit to Barranquilla," airs tonight (Saturday) in NYC on 91.5 WNYE at 11 p.m. (and will be repeated Monday at 11 a.m., a new time for Afropop in NYC).

It's available streaming on demand here (click on the orange "play" icon). The program features music by Alfredo Naranjo (Venezuela), Jo ão Donato (Brazil), Justo Almario (Colombia), Diego El Cigala (Andalusia), Terence Blanchard (New Orleans), Andrés Ortiz (Colombia), Harold López-Nussa (Cuba), and Eddie Palmieri (New York), plus El Joe Arroyo's "Rebelión," along with bits of conversation with some of the above. There's also a li'l slide show. I hear they're tweeting it in BQ.

Now to the streets:

30 people, including Cornel West, were arrested outside the 28th precinct NYPD station in Harlem at a protest against the NYPD's racist stop-and-frisk policy, which stopped and frisked 601,055 people, according to an article in the NY Daily News by Matthew DeLuca and Jose Martinez that continues: >"You have to do nothing else except live in your neighborhood and be a young black or Latino male to be a suspect," Matt Main, of the National Lawyers Guild, told the Daily News.

Jonathan Demme has uploaded End the War, Tax the Rich: We're the 99%, a 15-minute video he shot at OWS. I especially like the audio.

NOLA's Truth Universal has a new Occupy-related rap over what Alison Fensterstock identifies as a Rick Ross track.

The NY Times continues to be clueless about Occupy. No amount of snark from its writers will obscure the fact that they slept on a huge story in their home town while New Yorkers went to the UK Guardian to find out what those shouts we heard in the street were about.

Today the Times offer a front-page piece by Kate Zernike that focuses entirely on pushing a frame of reference in which the Tea Party and Occupy are counterparts of each other. The editorial synopsis says: >Where the Occupy forces and the Tea Party differ is in where they place the blame. No, they differ in many other ways, including that the Tea Party has been treated far more respectfully by the mainstream media. Zernike is the author of a new book on Tea Party activists that (reading the prologue) peremptorily dismisses the idea that the TP was astro-turfed and claims it as a true populist movement (that just happened to be promoted nonstop by Fox News and underwritten financially by billionaires, I guess, though I haven't read her book). The Times article ends with a quote from a Tea Partier:
Ms. Martin, of Tea Party Patriots, said the next year would determine whether more Americans agree with the Occupy forces or the Tea Party.

“That’s what the whole election comes down to,” she said, “what direction do we think America’s going to go in, and what’s the proper size and scope of government.”

No, the election, which the Republicans will do their best to steal, comes down to whether we will have a fascist president or a conservative one. Neither is an appealing option to people who are taking to the streets.

The Times also devoted a piece to the non-issue of whether Occupy is anti-Semitic, a straight-up libel floated by the far-right media in order to achieve precisely this effect: associate the words Occupy and anti-Semitism in the mainstream media.
Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow continues to condescend and trivialize. In a piece that asserts people are showing up at Occupy for no other reason than it's cool, he calls the action Occupy-apalooza, and, confusing his generational references, compares it to . . . a Nirvana album.

Then there's Bill Keller. It should be noted that the Times changed executive editors in September, and as per Times tradition, outgoing exec editor Bill Keller is now a dreadful columnist. He began his new column on Monday with a breezy >Bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street? In his subsequent column, Keller seemed taken aback by the torrent of generally polite but firm rebuttal in the comments section before comments were closed. The first relevant comment said: >I, for one, am not at all tired of hearing about "Occupy Wall street". To the contrary, I can't get enough of it. Yeah, and that's why we go to the Guardian, YouTube, and http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution instead of the Times. In a piece in Truthdig, Robert Scheer wrote: >Perhaps [Keller's] contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.
And there was Is Occupy Wall Street Being Overhyped?

Then there is the concern-troll meme that the protestors don't have clear demands. I think if you can read the signs people are carrying -- e.g., "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one" -- you get it pretty quick. My paraphrase of some of the demands:

We demand a government that operates on behalf of the 99% instead of the 1%. Stop pretending the super-rich aren't actively waging class war against the rest of us. Stop pretending that the system the right has put in place isn't rigged against us. Stop expecting this problem to be solved by elections, because there is no political party that represents the people. Go out in the street everywhere and say this in public, since we have no other way to express it and the mainstream media is either actively hostile to this point of view or is kept safely in check. Re-regulate the financial industry. Hold financial criminals accountable. End corporate personhood. Stop privatizing public resources.

It's a nice cool day in New York. I'm going out.

Aesthetic of the Cool - Robert Farris Thompson

2011-10-21T15:03:00.001-04:00

We had no idea this is the book, to which El V contributed, nor that El V had contributed so significantly. Not only his piece with about Bob and the Tango, and Congo Square, but many of his photographs illustrate Bob's own essays, from New Orleans, the DR, Cuba, etc. are all through this publication -- he's even one of the photos on the jacket. We'd no idea for the publisher and editor (an art professor at Yale) approached Ned for permission to use something he'd written about Bob quite some time ago. Much went on in the meantime, including nearly going under from the economic crash. Periodically she'd e-mail and ask if he had a photo that would be relevant for this or that, because Bob thought he might, and he did, and he'd send it to her. They never met. He never even thought to google her.

In other words Aesthetic of the Cool is a book about art, created as art itself. One of those .... And el V is a big part of it. At the reception and dinner after the Studio Museum of Harlem, the publisher informed me that she'd no idea when beginning the project that this would happen either. It just grew. And she's ecstatic how it turned out. And so is everyone else. We received a book before Bob's presentation on "Cool," and the following Conversation, and then the Q&A. Our jaws kept falling lower and lower.

I feel that el V has a great deal for which he can feel justifiable pride and a sense he's not spent his time on the planet in vain, and has given back at least as much he's been given. To have been given such a place in this project says it all. This is one of the greatest honors he could receive.

This is how Bob put it last night during the Q&A, in response to someone who asked how he felt about having worked his entire life to spread the African expression of art and the spirit. "I am an old white guy, a really old white guy, don't look at me. But for some reason I was made a medium. When I'm good it's the spirit working through me, attracted by me, and I throw it out there, BAM! And then it's out there. I'm nobody. It's not me. It's the spirit."

Last night is the very best of our life. This is why we are where are. This is the world in which I am most at home, where I feel among family. It's African, it's AfroLatin, it's Caribbean and Latin American, it's African American, it's New Orleans, it's the U.S. People are all colors. It's art, music, dance, it's performative, it's spiritual, and it has one hell of sense of style, wit and humor. It's ecumenical, not exclusive. It's beautiful.

It's cool. Watch this Yoruba woman dancing -- warming up, swimming, slowly, falling to the bottom of the waters. Flowing, Flowing, Now it's hot. She's got Ogún in her head. Stomp-stomp-stomp those adulterers, Stomp those Cheneys, Stomp those Oil CEOs, Stomp, stomp, the evil. And now we cool, we cool, we flow, we swim up, out of the waters from where we destroyed the evil. Cool, cool, cool. So cool. She still dances, with the Sacred Object on her head, and it never falls. Her head is straight for she is cool.

Africa is infectious. Where there is something of Africa it will spread -- as in Argentina, from a small population of Africans and create the Tango. In the Union army the black soldiers never wore their military caps bill straight forward, but at any other angle. In Rio in the 1930's, where Africans were in huge numbers as they are now, they already wore their caps bills backwards. See how differently the NFL running plays are now that the NFL players are mostly African American, than when the players were mostly white and they ran so straight. When interviewed about why the black players' style are so much more, well, stylish, than the white players, "Man, we dance and we play drums."

Giving is cool. Bob has given so much, and we give back to him. We love this man so very much.

Washing Out One's Mouth

2011-10-20T14:11:00.001-04:00

Adult Programs

Books & Authors

Dr. Robert Farris Thompson in conversation with Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims

So many old friends will be there! Before, during and after!

Every event that features Bob is wonderful.

This will help take out some of the ugly taste in my mouth from this:

Lisa Simeone, NPR Freelance Host, Fired For Occupy DC Involvement

Proving once again that the message is even if you have a job, you protest your masters in any damned way outside of work and you too join the ranks of the jobless.

And this:

Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street

A stalinist state we have become.

As soon as the Department of Homeland Security was floated by cheneybushroveetal. we knew it was about controlling U.S. citizens who live inside the 'homeland' not about threats from outside. And this dramatizes it. Further, it dramatizes that Obama and the dems never rescinded or modified either, yet they wish to co-opt the Occupy movement for their political gain.

I Just Have to Say That I'm Currently Suffering

2011-10-18T21:35:00.000-04:00

Unadulterated happiness and content. Both my body and mind are unusually relaxed. Last night, later, after dinner, El V and I went to the corner bar to have a pint of the seasonal pumpkin ale they are featuring this month, which was very good. We talked about what I've been up to with the book while he's been too otherwise occupied these last weeks. He loves where I going!

Today I made excellent progress (at least it feels that I did) on the new first chapter I'm writing for the book. Then, outside, the temperature is as perfect as it can be -- just between warm and cool. Everything is autumnally pretty. The traffic wasn't so great. I stumbled upon one those unexpected quarter percent off a purchase of $100 or more that J. Peterson throws randomly up on the web, and was able to order el V a duster!

AND -- the first breakthrough in a malaria vaccine was announced today! Yes, the cost may well be prohibitive (people all over the U.S. are noticing shortages of their prescription drugs these days, as well as the prices soaring -- I am very worried about diabetics -- the hahahahaha health in$urance companie$ are lobbying to raise their premiums again this year -- cost$ from 20% increa$e$ to even 52% in one case and 56% in another!)

Yes, in the meantime helicopters swarm endlessly over our neighborhood, keeping an eye on the Occupation ... why should they when they and Goldman Sachs etc. sit with the cops in their surveillance bunker down there with thousands of cameras all over the place, but there ya go.

But me, in the meantime, I am savoring a perfectly happy and calm day.

Expressing Violence

2011-10-18T16:13:00.002-04:00

The other day by chance I ran into a small discussion about what I believe is a forthcoming YA post apocalypse novel, with a young woman protagonist who is a page in D.C. (though the congressional page program was eliminated this summer). Suddenly there's civil war and Washington D.C. is invaded. The protagonist runs to get home, but the airports are closed, setting her on a cross-country trek. I think. I wish I could recall the title of this novel, or the author because then I'd be able to know both author and title, whereas now I know neither, which is frustrating. Anyway, I was intrigued by the premise as I'm always interested in expressions that deal with our own civil wars, however and whenever and on which grounds the struggles play out.

All this by way of getting to the discussion about this novel. For some reason a lot of people had read it, even though it's not published yet. The discussion was all squees of wonderful. "The best part," wrote one of the participants, 'is when she was trying to use a computer in an internet cafe and when this other girl got in her way she punched her in the face."

This expression, "punch in the face," I realized, I've been seeing frequently online by who I am assuming (it's online) are young females, in discussions and descriptions and desires to do, i.e. -- I wanted to punch her in the face, I will punch you in the face, she punched her in the face.

I have been thinking about this ever since. Because I never think, "I want to punch her in the face." Never. Not even that bitch on a bike on the sidewalk and her running all over the place stupid dog. I do believe even now she's too stupid to live, but she will continue to live, while probably being the cause of knocking down somebody who will never be able to walk again.

Is this kind of talk another sign of the general toxicity of our interactive discourse among very self-centered, impatient people? Or is this considered innocuous, like telling your friend, "O that's so gay!" (which I admit to not find innocuous either).

Edited to add: It occurs to me that expressing oneself this way is an attempt to signify aspirational kick-ass bad-assary power on the part of a young person? Gads, that could come through as patronizing of youth, which, when I consider my own youthful attempts of aspirational signification, believe me, is not!

This is probably the right time to admit this too: I think the film, Anonymous is a complete crock, and that schools should not permit classes to teach the CLASS DISCUSSION GUIDES TO SCHOOLS THAT SAY SHAKESPEARE DID NOT WRITE SHAKESPEARE being sent to them by Emmerich.

Occupation, Music & Friends

2011-10-16T20:27:00.003-04:00

I was social three times this week and now I'm trashed. I can hardly walk. This is not good.

Wednesday I walked and ate and talked with friends from out town. I didn't feel very good the next day, so I was quiet.

Friday in the daytime I was out doing errands. Naturally a woman was riding her bike here on the sidewalks that were packed with people doing the Friday thing. She had her dog on one of those expandable leashes. The dog had no training. He would suddenly cut out to run up to another dog, or pee on garbage or try to eat a piece of trash -- whatever. She would suddenly brake and stop, or slew her stupid bike right around blocking the entire sidewalk. I told her it was illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk, that she was a great danger to everyone else, her dog and herself. Her mouth fell open in complete idiocy. And then she rode the wrong way against the light right through the traffic. So my conclusion is that I don't care a thing about her, and she is too stupid to live. Except, she WILL take down innocents with her. She's definitely one of the 1% -- the world is me and me and me and more me, period.

Friday evening we went out fairly early to meet up with a bunch of music people including the journalists before the kick-off to the Arturo O'Farrill AfroLatin Jazz Orchestra's season at Symphony Space. They were so good. You know how good they had to be for me, non-musician, to get how good they are: 5 saxes, two of which players doubled on flutes and soprano sax, 4 trumpets, 5 bones, a set of 5 congas, Arturo’s piano, another set of 3 congas, bongos, drum kit, timbales and the assorted other percussion small things like clave sticks, shakares, and so on, including Jerry Gonzalez having brought one of the kids from his group in Spain, Antonio Linzana, who sang flamanco AND played sax (every woman in that audience whatever age she was swooned), an upright bass, and then Andy Gonzales playing upright and doing vocals too, when so moved. Also three great vocalists who danced. These are verily the gods of AfroLatin jazz. I'm so glad I got to be there.*

Yesterday was the Occupy Wall Street march up 6th Avenue to Washington Square Park, sort of a preliminary march to the occupation at 42nd Street (which seems, by many accounts, to have had many cops and surveillance people pretending to be Occupiers. They wore t-shirt proclaiming them Occupy Wall Street, among other things, and nobody connected with this who is sharing the effort has made Occupy Wall Street t-shirts. These guys were noticed after the event, wearing orange wrist bands as well as having the t-shirts, and talking intimately with the cops. When challenged they claimed to be city sanitation employees but there were no city sanitation people in the area.

During the 6th avenue part el V started chanting: "Take Back the Sidewalks. No bikers! No restaurants! Sidewalks for Walkers!" He was delighted that the marchers in his vicinity immediately backed him up on that. The privatization of public space has tipped way over beyond tolerance. No matter how small the private, the bitch on the bike, takes over the entire sidewalk from the pedestrians; the vendors on the sidewalk from out of the city and anywhere and everywher; the restaurants' sidewalk cafes; the scooters, you name it -- they are all private and they get right of way. Zuccoti Park was public, but now it is private. There is talk of a serious occupation later this fall of Washington Square Park. That is city property, but you wouldn't know it for NYU regards it and treats it as its own, and shuts out the pubic whenever it so desires for its private events and use. There will be blood if the Occupiers go into WS, one thinks.

Last night we headed up to 245th street for S's home cooked by herself! fabulous Puerto Rican dinner, and guitar playing among Puerto Rican theater people and musicians.

Now I’m sick, or feeling like I’m sick – and this is entirely without any alcohol, eating sensibly. So many aches and pains. It’s that hard on me to be in social situations of prolonged sitting and standing. This stupid back condition. I’m going to be very quiet for a while now. But -- it is the season, which is merely heating up now for through the holidays, most of which I missed last year due to not being here.

* Review of the concert by Ben Ratiliff in the NY Times here.

For --- ------, who commented in a seeming heartless manner

2011-10-14T11:49:00.002-04:00

to an earlier Occupy Wall Street post. I didn't click to publish your comment because it revealed a heartlessness that was surprising in the context of the comments you make frequently at P T's. So it seemed more likely you hadn't yet had the opportunity to be more informed,

Look at this article, please. Your assessment of who is part and parcel of these Occupy camps and protests is mostly wrong.

This, from an e-mail, came to me from a friend in MD this morning, in response to my earlier post below about Friendship and Lukács, which again, is more about the people being pushed into these camps and movements, due to the decades' long policies and activities of the corps, aided and abetted and enabled by the politicians.

[ "There's a family of five down the block from me. They don't have electricity. They were taking it from an empty house next door that was on the market and then sold. But an interfering neighbour found out they were doing that and told the seller so the seller had the electricity cut off. Now the family doesn't have electricity. I thought the house had been sold anyway, and who was it hurting that they were borrowing some electricity. They shouldn't have been tattled on. You're right. This winter is going to be cruel. " ]

What this meaness by the neighbors means is that when the freeze comes the family will try to keep their children from freezing by other means, means which could all too easily not only burn down their home, but all the homes around them. Meanness spreads in every widening circles of remorse -- except among those who are just plain mean, like the 1%, who are immune to remorse for the consequences to people of what they do.

And there is this -- and by golly it is in the NY Times today, the Times which has turned completely around on the Occupation movement. You can find a great deal of food for thought in this piece by Bernard E. Harcourt, "Occupy Wall Street's Political Disobedience."

In the meantime the ~~clean up~~ eviction of the occupiers of Zuccoti Park has been postponed, pissing off the mayor majorly. He is so SICK AND TIRED of these people. Who are ruining tourism and the rep of NYC as being a secure citadel for the class of the obscenely wealthy from all over the globe, a member of which, natch he is (though I am going to say this about the pouting mayor who really can't stand not getting his way and lashes out when he does: he, unlike most of the obscenely wealthy class, achieved his obscenely wealthy status pretty much by lifting his own bootstraps).
In another meantime, early this Friday morning in Milan, the Italian Occupiers managed to occupy the cathedral-like hall of Goldman Sachs, which is near to La Scala Opera House. Also, extremely polluted, going by the times I've been in Milan. They have no gas emmisions regulations or anything like that in Italy. I've literally become ill in Milan from the automotive pollution. This is how the Too Big To Fail Or To Punish demand to have it, you all. Can anyone be surprised that the Occupy movement in whatever form is demonstrating globally today?

Off With Their Heads! Screamed the Red Queen

2011-10-13T19:55:00.002-04:00

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/told-to-leave-protesters-talk-pre-emptive-strategy/?hp

So this is how it ends. As soon as there was actual media attention, and the attention showed that there were millions of people who are impacted by this long corruption of collusion between the corps and the politicians, and damned angry about it – out they go. It was OK as long as everyone laughed at them. But when it could not longer be denied they had some influence and attention – off with their heads! as screamed the Red Queen!

My Heart & My Head Get Full of Friendship and Lukács

2011-10-13T13:14:00.002-04:00

Two amigas from C'town roused themselves in the 4:30 of the dark AM yesterday, met each other and drove in the pouring rain to the town where one catches the bus that takes passengers to NYC. We ate a lovely lunch at Tea and Sympathy (one of them lived a long time in London, and her husband's mother is English), wandered and shopped and talked and talked and talked. We walked so much that when I got home bout 6 AM I felt crippled. I had gone over the edge of what I can do.

Crashing hard I was able to curl up with Georg Lukács (have you ever heard anybody employ that locution in connection with Lukács before?). It's not quick reading, reading this theorist's study of the historical novel. Last night's reading in this work was the chapter focused on the predecessor foundations of the historical novel and the18th century view of history and historigraphy. One of the passages that bounced me into calling out to el V, "Please, listen to this!" was this one:

[ " It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience {itals translator-Lukács's}, and moreover on a European scale. During the decades between 1789 {me -- two years after the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention} and 1814 {two years after the U.S. declares the war with England called the War of 1812, the Napoleonic wars affecting this nation's part of the globe -- particularly in the part of this nation from when my C'town friends and their forebears were born and still live -- which claimed then as consquence all these lands that immediately became the heart of the slaveholders' Cotton Kingdom} each nation of Europe underwent more upheavals than they had previously experienced in centuries. And the quick succession of these upheavals gives them a qualitatively distinct character, it makes their historical character far more visible than would be the case in isolated, individual instances: the masses no longer have the impression of a "natural ocurrence". One need only read over Heine's reminiscences of his youth in Buch le Grand, to quote just one example, where it is vividly shown how the rapid change of governments affected Heine as a boy. Now if experiences such as these are linked with the knowledge that similar upheavals are taking place all over the world, this must enormously strengthen the feeling first that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of the individual. " ]

We are in one of those eras in which the global masses realize there is such a thing as history that affects each of us individually. This was one of the many topics of the talk talk talk with mis amigas yesterday, via the Occupy Wall Streets and the Arab Spring, how the economic perception the youth of the world has digested that their future has been eaten by the collusion of corporations and politicians. As both of my friends are grandmothers you don't need to think a moment of how much in sympathy they are with the Occupiers whereever they are located. But that's only one reason they are in sympathy. As Lukács points out, back in Russia, in the winter of 1936/7, history affects all of us in personal ways that we see and evaluate.

As part of this subject we spoke of how much we are fearing the winter, not only the weather, which if as bitter and long as last year will eat my friends' budget to heat their homes, but because there are so many destitute people, and the price of food and shelter continues to increase rapidly, while the banks are instituting new ways to squeeze us nearly every week, and our politicians give them all assistance. The three of us are reminded of scenes of many a novel of Louisa May Alcott, in most of which are characters who are actively attempting to alleviate some of the winter miseries of the destitute classses. What I didn’t know back when I first read these books as a girl is how often those miseries were caused by the financiers’ and the greed, competition and corruption of these new corporations that exploded in the wake of the Civil War, causing financial panics, shutting down credit, going bankrupt, foreclosing, with the additional victimization of inflation and ever-spiraling costs of food and other necessities. Not to mention the labor-capital clashes, the racism against the emancipated and the hostile anti-immigrant exploitation.

So why does it help us to cast what’s going on within the perimeters of Little Women and Rose in Bloom? But it does. It’s also history. In novels. Couched in terms of personal, individual cause and affect. Novels didn't do this prior to Scott, whose first historical fiction was published in 1814.

My friends are no tbaggers and never have been -- always staunch dems. But no longer. They too know that neither party is an answer, and that both of them are actively enabling the misery of the 99%. That my friends see this clearly and understand that the Occupiers do as well, says a great deal about the effectiveness of this movement, despite the mediapundocracy superiors instruct us their actions are meaningless.

The Romantic Armchair Traveller

2011-10-11T14:27:00.000-04:00

Mi amiga, who analyzes in depth new historical fiction, with an emphasis on romantic historical fiction though not always, on her blog, Romantic Armchair Traveller, last month posted a thoughtful entry titled, "On the Matter of Historical Accuracy in Fiction."

She makes a strong argument as to why twisting history, getting the culture as well as the historical facts wrong, matters.

1493 -- Because Yesterday Was Columbus Day in the USA

2011-10-11T14:14:00.001-04:00

I have both audio and print versions of this follow-up to Charles Mann's 1491.
First I read, then I listen to the same text soon after.

Among the many excitements of this book is how much I am bringing to the work from my own / our research work within the Atlantic framework of knitting together all the continents of the world that were populated -- the Columbia Exchange -- except, until much later, Australia. Much of what he talks of we already had dealt with extensively from Cuba and Its Music, because it is Spain-Portugal and Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America -- and these last years, North America too. Thus there is no problem over here sailing right along with Mann and his run-down that the voyages of Columbus initiates the greatest change that has ever happened so far in the history of the word and its biology: the Homogenocene, which is why we now speak constantly of globalization in everything from economics to pathogens.

So far, among what I did / do not know until dealing with this work, the most unexpected bit of information hitherto entirely unknown to me is that this hemisphere did not have earthworms.* They came, of course, almost immediately, in the ballast of rocks (which play a role in The American Slave Coast) and the earth balls around European plants and trees. They helped destroy the North American Atlantic forests as they used to be. I'd not a clue about that.

Go thou now and read thineselves, and if you're contemplating writing fiction of any kind that involves first contacts with a pristine, hitherto isolated from the rest of the world, this work is fundamental as is Braudel, in another way. This collision of two heretofore excluded continents with the flora and fauna of all the other inhabited continents was the authentic global singularity event of the homo saps.

* If I'd spent a second thinking about it, which until now I had not, there are scientific periodicals dedicated entirely to earthworm studies and research.

Does Your City Do This?

2011-10-10T13:33:00.000-04:00

Does your city have this kind of relationship between the financial and other corporate industries and the city's tax-payer funded police department? Or does this happen only in NYC? This is a serious question.

Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?

From Counterpunch: "Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll" by PAM MARTENS

{ "If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002." }

There is much more to this article.

Occupy Wall Street Occupied Washington Square Park This Afternoon

2011-10-08T18:26:00.001-04:00

As they say, this is a conversation, not a demonstration.

As with conversations with more than one participant, there are many conversations going on at once. And there were tourists who had never heard of this movement, entirely bewildered The Blue Shirt Cops seemed pretty bored. So were the NYPD horses, fully tacked up, but kept in their trailers when they clearly wanted to be outside in the beautiful weather as much as the hordes of people crowding the outdoors wanted to be.

Presumably the inhabitants of the swarms of helicopters over this part of the city weren't bored though. It must have been perfect flying weather.

I was fairly impressed with the entire thing. It really was a conversation not a demonstration. That there are cadres present who like dressing in costumes and doing the street theater version is just fine. And there are others who are very articulate in the hand gestures and broadcasting of the texts being delivered in waves, since you need special permits from the city to use amplifiers and so on in public -- and so, they don't. Again, great bafflement on behalf of the out-of-towners who pay no attention to anything. Though these young people are dressed like students dress pretty much everywhere, the hand signs and so on, made them freaks in the eyes of these people. There ya go.

Again, the participants are overwhelmingly young, as you must expect, when the student loan ponzi scheme is such a focus of the anger with the financial institutions. There are discussions about the best way of going about just reneging on the lans all together since the other end of the bargain, the job that enables you to pay off the loans you took out to get the education to get you that job will never materialize. There is a lot of discussion of how best to close down your checking account and taking whatever money you have out of the banks, and if you have a job, how to get paid without using a bank account. That's the hurdle, isn't it? That's how the banks hold a gun to all our heads: if we get paid for anything there's always a bank involved. We've been trying to figure out this one for several years now, and so far have failed.

The Downside To Occupy Wall Street Media Spotlight

2011-10-07T11:13:00.003-04:00

ETA: This afternoon Eric Cantor (R-VA) says we must be very afraid of the growing number of mobs occupying Wall Street and this nation.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7383837n&tag=contentBody;housing

Personally, I'm concerned about the growing number of districts across the country cutting out their domestic violence teams from community services and police departments in order to save money.
Just thinking of the Hard Hat Riot down there back in the Vietnam era, and before that with the Labor movement. They've got the crazy tbagger cadres who would like nothing better than wade into these gatherings with guns and bludgeons, and I'm not talking about the cops -- a lot of the non-white shirt NYPD are emotional and intellectual supporters of the movement (yes, class, labor and management, etc., those terms we haven't heard in decades).

These are the people who glory in demonstrating their assholery for the entire world to witness, who will walk into a crowd and shoot Gabrielle Giffords (D), leaving her nearly dead, along with other, accumulated 'collateral damage,' who were killed outright. Look at the comments to articles about the Occupiers in the primary media: first it was superior sneering snark; now, as the movement spreads, they're spewing incoherent vitriolic hatred and threat to kill and maim.

As for the media ignoring the Occupiers in the first place, and only now paying attention, while still insisting the Occupiers don't have a clue about anything from organization to what they're protesting -- think about this: they picked private property close to the metaphorical and symbolic epi center of the corruption of the nation from which to launch their protests, Zuccoti Park. (The irony that this once public park used to be named Liberty Plaze does not escape.) Thus, as long as Chairman of the Board of Brookfield Real Estate (mayor bloomie's novia, she of let them eat cake how dare they, is a member of the board), says they can stay, they can. The city cannot evict them, though the NYPD and the mayor would like nothing better than to get them out of there.

This looks like planning to me. From the start they've said they planned to occupy the ground for two months -- which is also smart because in two months it will be really miserable there, particularly when January rolls around -- yes, I know this ground very well, in all seasons.

Yesterday WNYC received many calls from 'listeners' demanding that the occupiers be removed, all of whom are really big on the only sacred belief this nation holds, that of the sacredness of private property. "I don't care if it's private property and the owner says they can stay, beat those spoiled brats out of there!" Why it so infuriated that caller and others that the Occupiers are occupying private ground with permission, well, that never came through except that the caller hates them. For years, in fact, that's all that comes through to me, at least, from these people is that they are filled with hatred for everybody and everything, so they must really hate themselves. I wonder why.

Good. Grief. Andrew. Ross. Sorkin. Not Much of a Journalist Are You.

2011-10-05T11:03:00.001-04:00

The NY Times's does the bidding of its masters --

The New York Times economic columnist, Andrew Ross Sorkin, paid zip attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement, knew nothing about it -- until:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/on-wall-street-a-protest-matures/?ref=business

[ " I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet. ' ]

Glenn Greenwald discusses further the significance of what it means that the NY Times economic columnist never even bothered to learn about the movement until a banking C.E.O. calls him up to ask questions -- and why the C.E.O. need to call a newspaper about what is going on only a few steps away from where, presumably, his office is located.

http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/04/andrew_ross_sorkins_assignment_editor/
[ " Though it’s not evident in Sorkin’s column (nor in this characteristically snotty, petty, pseudo-intellectual condescension of yesterday from The New Republic), the prevailing media (and progressive) narrative about the protests has rapidly shifted from these-are-childish-vapid-losers to there-is-something-significant-happening-here. In part that’s because the protests have endured and grown; in part it’s because the participants are far less homogeneous and suscepitble to caricature than originally assumed; in part it’s because they are motivated by genuine and widespread financial suffering that huge numbers of Americans know intimately even though it receives so little attention from insulated media stars; in part it’s because NYPD abuse became its own galvanizing force and served to highlight the validity of the grievances; and in part because their refusal to adhere to the demands from the political and media class for Power Point professionalization and organizational hierarchies has enabled the protests to remain real, organic, independent, and passionate.

What will determine how long-lasting and significant is the impact of these protests is whether they allow themselves to be exploited into nothing more than vote-producing organs of the Democratic Party — the way the GOP so successfully converted the Tea Party into nothing more than a Party re-branding project. There is no question that such efforts are underway, as organizations that serve as Party loyalists try to glom onto the protests and distort them into partisan tools.

I have a hard time seeing that working. After all, the reason this is a street protest movement (rather than, say, a voter-registration crusade or an OFA project) is precisely because the protesters concluded that dedicating themselves to the President’s re-election and/or the Democratic Party is hardly a means for combating Wall Street’s influence, rising wealth inequality or corporatist control of the political process. Still, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the reason these protests are now receiving more respect in establishment venues is because those venues now see some potential use to be made of them. Those dedicated to the original purpose and message of the protest – and Matt Stoller defined that as well as anyone here — will need to make resisting those efforts a top priority if they want to succeed. " ]

River Walking Yesterday

2011-10-03T12:01:00.002-04:00

A 2 1/2 hour walk down to the Battery and back. I took photos and when I transfer them to my hard drive maybe they will provide a sense of what river walking is like around here .... I think I saw two Monarchs. I saw a pigeon brain itself by flying itself right into the trunk of a tree – oh, I laughed! I continue to laugh every time I recollect it. Later, at Fanelli's, el V says I am a cruel woman and he'd never before even suspected; I say, "It's a pigeon ...." The usual spoiled squoiles, posed classically, nut in mouths. Cool and blowy and cloudy, not the best for taking photos, but maybe I got some good ones of the duck pond and the ducks, who were getting no noms because it was too chilly with the wind for parents to sit there with their tiny children whose joy it is throw ducks bread -- which of course is not allowed, which of course no one pays any mind to, any more than bikers pay any mind as to signage that tells them to dismount and walk the bikes on this pedestrian only path, or those with dogs pay any mind to the signs that insist "No Dogs Here" ....

Friday at a Farmer's Market, te obtained some of the last of a New Jersey organic producer’s heirloom tomatoes. I have home-made pesto from Raffetto’s (est. 1906!) and their home-made mozzarella, some Sicilian olives and olive oil, and prosciutto bread ... made the sandwich of sandwiches! The last taste of summer 2011. Gotta say the summer of 2011 was maybe the most unpleasant summer we’ve ever experienced. I love summer but this one, not much.

This morning it was 53 when we got up. Summer was a clumsy, messed up first draft, not ready in the least for professional consideration. It's in desperate need of an entire re-think, as lacking in organization and coherence as it was, with a risable number of repetitions of weather-caused disasters, lurching from one thing to another without continuity or motivation or even sufficient set-up (other than that catastrophe of global climate change that we must never mention for fear of either being lynched or laughed out of the room). Does not meet our needs at this time. Don't call us. We are never calling you.

However, this evening I have an informal symposium in C's studio on the history of Hollywood costuming in the Western. Yay, C! A symposium with champagne and people bringing you food. What more can you want?

The Declaration of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-10-02T11:44:00.000-04:00

And here's the Declaration:
http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city/

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
Posted on September 30, 2011 by NYCGA
This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

Arresting Them, One At A Time

2011-10-01T16:49:00.004-04:00

Live at

http://gothamist.com/2011/10/01/breaking_occupy_wall_street_protest.php

Kettled on both sides of the Brooklyn Bridge.

10 - 12 thousand people?

They are arresting them -- one at a time.

Asking, "What's the charge?"

Occupy Wall Street Protest today, 10/1/11.

Grabbing the documentors equipment. No other media is covering this -- nothing on television.

"Let Us Go! Let Us Go! Let Us Go!"

" We Are Not The Criminals! We Are Not The Criminals! We Are Not The Criminals!"

J.P. Morgan donated over 10 million dollars to the NYPD.

You Know, It Feel Weird

2011-10-01T16:19:00.000-04:00

To know that somebody you don't even know deliberately tried to kill you.

Jaysus!

2011-10-01T12:24:00.002-04:00

Downstairs neighbor on the opposite side turned on all the stove's burners without lighting them, and left. He also left his big ridgeback dog inside -- in a cage. Our beloved Across-the-Hall neighbor of many years, who lives above him, smelled the gas, called the fire department and they broke down the door. Asshole hasn't come back yet. Cops are there. This could be a terrorist event. I don't think so. I think it is a young always indulged who has lost it, and decided to take it out, whatever it is, on the rest of the world. Including the expensive pedigree dog.

EDITED TO ADD UPDATE TO THE ABANDONED DOG: Shipley's not in a shelter, he's in the apartment of the neighbor across from his owner. Dog's very upset. It seems the fellow's cell phone was left behind in the apartment -- but he was out all night his neighbor says, but she got a text from that phone, though no way of knowing it was him, at 3 AM asking if she were home. She was basically asleep and didn't respond. She says he liked to date crazy Russian girls.
Never a dull moment on this street.

In the meantime Occupy Wall Street protests are taking place all around the country, from Boston to Portland, but the NY Times can't mention that. Instead they run an opinion poll as to whether this is a carnival of silly people, or yes, an unfocused hippie stunt.

Unions Join in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-09-30T12:28:00.000-04:00

As per usual, the NY Times isn't reporting this; instead they stay with Anthony Bologna, the infamous, non-justifiable pepper spraying NYPD cop, whose behaviors of this nature reach back to the 2004 rethug con here -- thereby derailing any discussion of the issues that Occupy Wall Street is protesting -- oooh violence, lets look at that instead of what the banks are doing right this minute to us all:

Groups that are joining the marches and providing support (as well as friends and acquaintances) include: The United Federation of Teachers; 32BJ SEIU & 1199 SEIU; Workers United; and Transport Workers Union Local 100, which has 38,000 members.

Additionally, Working Families Party, Moveon.org, Make the Road New York, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Alliance for Quality Education, Community Voices Heard, United New York and Strong Economy For All are involved in the organization of the march.

Other affiliated protests and groups are or already have created demonstrations across the country.

You all know the banks are charging us a fee for using our debit cards? This means at least another $60 of OUR MONEY that the banks are grabbing.

It's gonna be a big one tonight, that march to Wall Street.

* The Glades * Season 1

2011-09-29T13:28:00.000-04:00

The Glades is an A&E Network drama series starring Matt Passmore, who is an attractive fellow. His character, Jim Longworth, is anything but attractive, but actively dislikeable. At least this was so in the first episode. So much was he dislikeable that it's kind of a surprising I continued into the second episode. They'd immediately dialed his arrogant self-centered selfish assholery waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. Nevertheless there remained a lot of blanks here -- it took at least until the 5th episode that I actually learned his name and about that long until I learned the name of the romantic interest, and I'm still not sure how it is spelled -- Calley? Kelly? Cali? Callie? I don't know what her last name is either (ah, Wiki says Cargill, which for me, midwesterner born, means the eviLe grain and commodies family monopoly), and can't remember the name of her son (Jeff). Yes, she's a mom with a husband in prison, who works as a nurse while in medical school. She has a dragon MIL, who guards Callie and her grandson from the utterly charming and obviously besotted (alas, MIL seems to have gotten lost along the way) Jim Longworth on behalf of her convict son. This loser husband's name was the first one I ever got -- Ray, since the name of his prison contains Ray's name -- Raiford.

Not the best television series by any means, but entirely shot in southern Florida, the locations are delightful eye candy, particularly as winter rolls every closer up here. Even walk-ons and generic passersby are mostly young, glossy and very pretty. What I do admire is that while keeping this show light entertainment the writers center each episode on a subject or activity that is endemic to Florida – Seminole casinos plus Seminole racism keeping Seminole-African descent peoples out of their tribe so they can’t collect the $7,000 a month stipend from said casinos – sunken treasure, -- golf --, paranormal practioners (Seance was weakest episode, even weaker than the first one) a high school reunion during a hurricane -- Big Sugar -- golf.

The other thing I truly admired about The Glades is that Callie's rival for Jim's affections is a pretty, very rich blonde, who works as a pharmaceutical salesperson. She is not a bitch -- Callie's the bitch here --. She's nice. She's fun. She's a cool person. Even though they named her Heather.

Whatever they are they center around, the focus is a murder, which Jim Longworth solves, with the noble support system of Callie, Colleen his African American Regional Director (who in the first episode was a hardass you didn't like anymore than Jim, but by the second ep they'd also dialed all that waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down too), a young Jewish grad student intern named Daniel, who functions as Willow does in Buffy, and my favorite character, Carlos Sanchez, a latino (though they carefully do not individualize of which background – Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Central American – who is the forensics guy.

And here are the verisimilitude problems. Carlos would not be a homicide detective's partner in the car. In fact, the entire organization and behavior of the FDLE (Florida Department of Legal Enforcement) makes a farce of the real FDLE, as well as providing surely much prettier faces. Like Raylon Givens in Justified (located in Kentucky), Jim Longworth operates as a lone wolf, skirting and breaking law and rule as he pleases. Unlike Raylon though, Jim never has reprecussions for his behaviors and always gets his man or woman. Both of them feed into the bottomless appetite of the U.S. audiences to see our police state portrayed as invincible supermen who are always right, who can be as violent as they please. But it is much lighter and more fun here in The Glades, which is clearly a fantasy world, without angst.
As Callie and Jim gave the audience what the writers surely believed the audience wanted in the last episode I'm not sure their relationship is going to be interesting any longer. I will check out the second season when it's available with no effort on my part, but I'm not expecting it to hold up as well as this first one did.

From A Long-time Amiga & Lister

2011-09-29T12:29:00.001-04:00

The NY Times, along with the rest of the primary media, seem to be wishing that the Occupy Wall Street story would go away. Meanwhile, responding to Ms. ExPat's piece yesterday on Occupy Wall Street, a friend in Israel writes:

[ " >It seems to be a replica of the social protest that gained such a momentum here over the summer. They were also accused of being "without focus", " middle class spoiled brats," "sushi and narghilas" but they brought close to a 1/2 million people to the streets. that is the equivalent of 15 million people on the streets in the US (some say 25, I'm being conservative here). I feel there is an international movement framing itself here, and it's equivalent in its demands. It should not be underestimated, even if it seems unfocused. . . .

>If you look at what is happening in spain, chile, israel and other places, I think it's the same all over. the middle class in every country where capitalism has gone wild is being proletariarized. once they wake up and see that its not "the security situation" (here); the "recession" (the u.s.) but a trend borne of policy, young people start coming out. and they know how to organize and how to speak to power and how to write. it remains to be seen here whether real change will come after the tent city phase, but they have completely changed the discourse in the country. They have taken academics (economists, sociologists) to advise them on how to negotiate with the government, which is what is happening at the moment. here they have banded with low income folks, under the banner "the people demand social justice" and "welfare state". that's what they want, and according to the polls, 87% of the population identifies with this. " ]

BTW, this particular friend is a member of one of Israeli's Founding Families. Her first name is that of the first Spy Network-Service, that began in the 19-teens, in the Middle East, started by her great whatever grandfather.
It's probably unneccesary to say that she and her friends and immediate family are anti-war with the Palestinians, appalled by the state of Israel and its leadership and its U.S. supporters in these matters, and is among those out on the streets. She's currently writing her dissertation in ethnomusicology. Her M.A. thesis was on the music of the Jews of Ethiopia.

Personal Life Is All Good

2011-09-28T21:10:00.000-04:00

I have been posting and will continue to post about the Occupy Wall Street movement here in NYC, and the ugly, stupid, counter-offensive launched by the primary media, not least public radio's NPR, and right here at home WNYC -- by first ignoring it is happening, and then when they kept it up, sneering at the people protesting that the Banksters are eating their present and future, and third lining up to tell us that they asked for illegal treatment by the cops.

But at home things are good. This doesn't mean that our friends aren't out there doing what they can to support the protesters -- this didn't happen in a void or out of nowhere. In a way that the primary media is ignoring it's well-organized, planned, and had a lot of fore-thought for a long time going into it.

But still, I'm one of the privileged ones for whom things are going relatively well, at least for us. I am feeling productive on at least three fronts at the same time -- and I cannot express how much what these protestors are doing for my own frame of mind. Can you be more privileged, can you make any of this more about ME than that?

But it's still NYC in the fall and all kinds of events and actions are going on, and in one way and another we're part of that. There is nowhere like NYC in the fall to be energized with hope and action and productivity!

Corrente: Ms ExPat: Don't be afraid to say revolution!

2011-09-28T09:56:00.000-04:00

Dr. Cornel West was at Zuccotti Park last night, and Ms. ExPat got video of it. Here's her account, but follow the link to her blogpost to see the video.

Also recommended today: Ralph Nader's article in Counterpunch on drones.
http://www.correntewire.com/dont_be_afraid_to_say_revolution

[ " Don't Be Afraid to Say Revolution!

Wed, 09/28/2011 - 1:55am — MsExPat

"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will smile from the grave/ And say, we movin' step by step/ Toward what he called a revolution/Don't be afraid to say, Revolution!"

"Cornel West is here", Milcho said, as we were wandering through Zuccotti Park at dusk. The sky was gray and it smelled like rain; people here and there were securing food, medicine, bedding, under plastic tarps. Milcho, Wendy and Amy and I came to Wall Street together tonight. I am corralling everyone I know to come to the Park to see this live and without filters. And you who are reading this, and can get here should come too, for this is history, friends!

We walked over to the meeting area, and sure enough, there was the unmistakable corona of hair, the too-long white shirtcuffs. We followed him up to the meeting area, sat down. And then watched as tonight's General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street unfolded:

It's late, and I'm too tired to write this well, but as the 11th night of Occupy Wall Street closes, I note a couple of new things:

1. Demographics: Changing, indeed. More diverse, different ages. Some union people, college professors doing teach-ins, old lefties having a look-see. Also: the front line of the media has officially landed. Yesterday it was Michael Moore, today Susan Sarandon. Matt Taibbi says he's visiting tomorrow. Moore is coming back tomorrow to film the General Assembly with Laurence O'Donnell for his MSNBC show. I think O'Donnell is a jerk, but if they just sit back and film the process of the meeting, that would be a real breakthrough in changing the MSM narrative, I think. Right now, most of the people I talk to in my daily life still think OWS is a hippie fest.

2. Cops: Now there are two kinds of blue shirts on the scene--the regular patrol cops, and the (kinder, gentler) Community liason cops in royal blue polo shirts. No white shirts. When the community police are around, you know someone is worried about image. What this says to me is that the city's decided that more violence would be really bad for optics.

3. The Organization--continues to dazzle! After West's remarks, the meeting began with reports from Outreach Committees (they've teamed up with an important black radio station in Philadelphia for Occupy Philly, and they're going to support the Verizon worker's union strike), from the Medics who've started a counseling service, from techies who are doing Linux and open source teach-ins, and from the Laundry Committee, who've washed everything. They've even organized morning tours of Wall Street, which they're offering free to passing tourists!

The most interesting report though was from the committee that's drafting Demands. This is the big media sticking point ("But What Do They Want? There's No Unified Message!").

The group is going to use the next few days to talk about demands. And then here's what they'll do: on Friday, they will spread blank sheets of white paper all across the park. Some will have topic headings, some will be all blank. Magic markers will then be distributed, and everyone will write, in large letters, the issues and goals they think are most important. If you agree with someone's poster, you can put a "Check".

Fascinating! It is actually rather Chinese in technique. It reminds me of the student Big Character Posters that appeared in Tienanmen Square.

After the writing exercise, they'll collect all the papers and collate them into a larger online manifesto, which can then be debated/modified/changed online in a Wikipedia-style collaboration.

4. Location, location location: It's becoming clearer that the choice of New York City, as opposed to say, Washington DC, for the launch of this effort, was genius. For what it says is, of course, that this movement is not about the US government. The real enemy is the Financial-Bankster complex. I have not heard or seen any mention of any political candidate or party inside the Park. Forget "post-partisan"--that was so 2008. This is a post-party movement. It is what we Correntians have been waiting for--but not in the form we expected!

5. Obama is dead, dead, dead. Really. These young people were his eager troops. And they've moved on. Way on. The talk on the ground is not about elections anymore. It's about transforming society.

That's it for now. I urge all of you who can to come to Wall Street if you possibly can make it. This is one of those moments when time seems to hover and pause, and focus is laser-sharp. It's a rare moment of collective creativity. Who could have guessed it would bloom now? " ]

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, YOU SHOULD BE ABOLISHED!

2011-09-27T18:32:00.004-04:00

They got on a woman who,from John Jay College for Criminal Justice (justice, her? hah!), who sounded as though she was one of the torturers employed during Pinochet's "Dirty War" in Argentina, is supposedly an expert in violence. She blithely scolds us for our ignorance and over-reaction. The cops didn't do anything wrong pepper spraying those women, she instructs us. The problem is, she says, that violence isn't pretty so when we who aren't used to violence see those women who are confined in an orange net and then deliberately sprayed by cop, it's our problem because we don't like to see the non-prettiness of violence. But there wasn't a thing wrong done by the cops, you know. The young women got what they had to expect to get BY THEIR VIOLENCE FOR MARCHING PEACEFULLY.

You should probably be able to hear it here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/27/140854961/wall-street-protest-continues-this-week?ft=1&f=2

The Guardian: NYPD Officer, Anthony Bologna, Civil Rights Violator

2011-09-27T10:03:00.001-04:00

This is from the US edition of the Guardian, which is completely different from the UK edition, but even so: it's a British newspaper, and they've been way out in front of the NY Times on this . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/27/occupy-wall-street-anthony-bologna

[ " Anthony Bologna, NYPD officer named in pepper-spray incident, is accused of civil rights violations at the time of the 2004 Republican national convention protests

Karen McVeigh
guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 September 2011 19.46 EDT

A senior New York police officer accused of pepper-spraying young women on the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations is the subject of a pending legal action over his conduct at another protest in the city.

The Guardian has learned that the officer, named by activists as deputy inspector Anthony Bologna, stands accused of false arrest and civil rights violations in a claim brought by a protester involved in the 2004 demonstrations at the Republican national convention.

Then, 1,800 people were arrested during protests against the Iraq war and the policies of president George W Bush.

Alan Levine, a civil rights lawyer representing Post A Posr, a protester at the 2004 event, told the Guardian that he filed an action against Bologna and another officer, Tulio Camejo, in 2007. The case, filed at the New York Southern District Court, is expected to be heard next year.

Levine said that when he heard about the pepper spray incident "a bunch of us were wondering if any of the same guys were involved".

The lawyer said Posr was arrested on 31 August 2004, after he approached the driver of a Volkswagen festooned with anti-abortion slogans.

His arrest was not directly related to the protest against the Republican convention, but was at a time of heightened tension in New York.

Levine said: "Police contend that Posr hit the man with a rolled-up newspaper. He said he was just talking to the guy. Bologna ordered another officer, Camejo, to arrest Posr."

Posr was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct and one count of second degree harassment, and held until September 2. On November 8, all charges against him were dropped.

Levine said that, in a departure from normal police procedure, his client was held in a special detention facility, at Pier 57, where he and others arrested were held until the protests were over.

The Guardian asked the NYPD to respond to the naming of the officer and the allegation that he was previously the subject of a civil rights complaint, but a spokesman said the department had not yet decided whether to comment.

Bologna's name appeared on Twitter and on activists' websites after the incident on Saturday. YouTube footage appears to show a white-shirted NYPD officer firing the spray into the eyes of the protesters, who are penned in by other officers with orange netting. As the officer walks away, two of the women crumple to the ground, screaming in pain.

There were a number of clashes between protesters and police at the march, when protesters moved uptown from their base at a park in the Financial District. There were about 80 arrests.

Hacker collective Anonymnous claimed responsibility on Monday for posting Bologna's details, which they said was in retribution for the pepper-spray incident.

The online postings identified Bologna as a deputy inspector of Patrol Borough Manhattan South, and revealed his phone number and family details.

The information, posted on a site called Pastebin, included a statement which read: "As we watched your officers kettle innocent women, we observed you barbarically pepper-spray wildly into the group of kettled women. We were shocked and disgusted by your behaviour."

"You know who the innocent women were; now they will have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE WATCHING!!! Expect Us!"

Since the post, other activists have followed suit, urging people to call his precinct to complain or to call him directly.

The move drew a mixed response from the Occupy Wall Street activists who have been camped out in Zuccotti Park for nine days. Many say they were angry about the "brutal and unnecessary" tactics used by police at the weekend.

Hero Vincent, 28, an artist from the Bronx, said: "I think it should be out there, so that people know what's going on and if people want to enter his precinct and ask that he should be fired, they can. We are a peaceful protest. For them to attack us is wrong."

Vincent, who was arrested for resisting arrest on Saturday, claimed he was kicked in the stomach by officers.

But there was also disquiet over the officer's family details being made public.

Another protester, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian: "My dad is a police officer and he got a lot of death threats. I don't know if his family details should be out there. But if the information is correct and he has a rights case against him, I'm extremely concerned that he was put into what was a very tense situation."

One protester, Jeanne Mansfield – who said she was standing so close to the women sprayed in the face that her own eyes burned – claimed other NYPD officers had expressed disbelief at the actions of the senior officer.

In a vivid account of the incident in the Boston Review, Mansfield said: "A white-shirt, now known to be NYPD Lieutenant Anthony Bologna, comes from the left, walks straight up to the three young girls at the front of the crowd, and pepper-sprays them in the face for a few seconds, continuing as they scream 'No! Why are you doing that?!'"

Despite her attempts to turn away from the "unavoidable" spray, Mansfield, who took part in Saturday's march with her boyfriend on a whim after "stumbling across" it, said she suffered burning and temporary blindness in her left eye and tears streaming down her face.

She continued: "In the street I shout for water to rinse my eyes or give to the girls on the ground. But no one responds. One of the blue-shirts, tall and bald, stares in disbelief and says, 'I can't believe he just fuckin' maced her.'" ]

Oh dear, the NY Times tells us: the problem is the NYPD is trained to handle much bigger events than this, soooooooooooooooo ......

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/nyregion/wall-street-demonstrations-test-police-trained-for-bigger-threats.html?_r=1&hp

[ " The police’s actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism, in a city whose police commissioner acknowledges the ownership of a gun big enough to take down a plane, but that may appear less nimble in dealing with the likes of the Wall Street protesters. So even as the members of Occupy Wall Street seem unorganized and, at times, uninformed, their continued presence creates a vexing problem for the Police Department. " ]

I don't know about you, but I worry about a police department that can't tell the difference between a protest of economic conditions and a terrorist event.

This is the real point:

[ " “I can see it from a demonstrator’s view, asking, ‘What changed?’ ” Mr. Richter said. “But there comes a point when the command staff makes a decision that the crowd is too big, and we’re at a breaking point, and we have to take back the street.” " ]

In other words the cops are sick of these people, who march once a day, and are interferring with their comfy routine.

Live, Eye Witness Report From Zuccotti Park

2011-09-26T20:48:00.000-04:00

One of the most interesting eye witnesses to this is a journalist friend who lives out of the country much of the time, and is fluent in several languages. She's also a musician so she hears as well as sees.

You can see what she says about Zucotti Park affairs here. The piece, about yesterday, up today, is titled "The People's Microphone."

http://www.correntewire.com/the_peoples_microphone_in_zuccotti_park#more

09/25/11: NYT: Joseph Goldstein: Videos show police using pepper spray at protest

2011-09-26T11:55:00.000-04:00

It took a second day to get this article in the NYT, which, though it gives the police every benefit of doubt and minimizes the extent of what they did, begins to acknowledge that the police mistreated protestors. (It should be noted that, as every writer knows, much of the spin in news articles, including the Times, happens in the editing and the headline- and caption-writing.)

I don't think we'd have seen this piece at all without that video of the girls getting pepper-sprayed by a white-collar cop, which has now been clicked 681,315 times. And here's a slo-mo analysis of the incident. Or this video, or this one, or this one, or this one. Or . . . this one, which contains no violence but is intense. And here are stills, including a sequence of a drummer being brutalized. Later we'll talk about the role of drums in this, to say nothing of rapping. The policeman who sprayed the girls' faces is being identified by name on the chat stream of the live-witness channel (http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution) along with an appeal to call Mayor Bloomberg's office and demand that he be fired.

Meanwhile, this article doesn't mention anyone being thrown face first to the ground (police "shoved"), or a knee on anyone's throat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/nyregion/videos-show-police-using-pepper-spray-at-protest.html?ref=todayspaper

[ " September 25, 2011
Videos Show Police Using Pepper Spray at Protest on the Financial System
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

For a few moments on Saturday, the confrontations between the police and the protesters just south of Union Square in Manhattan seemed fairly typical. People pushed, the police shoved and arrests were made, and in the many videos recording the protest, it was not always clear which of the three had come first.

As the police arrested a protester in the street, an officer wearing a white shirt — indicating a rank of lieutenant or above — walked toward a group of demonstrators nearby and sent a blast of pepper spray that hit four women, the videos show.

Numerous videos and photos captured the aftermath: two women crumpled on the sidewalk in pain, one of them screaming. They were temporarily blinded, one of the women, Chelsea Elliott, said.

Ms. Elliott, 25, who was not arrested, acknowledged that “there were some rough people out there” at the protests. She and the other women were penned in behind police netting meant for crowd control. But, she said, neither she nor the women around her did anything to warrant having pepper spray used on them.

“Out of all the people they chose to spray, it was just me and three other girls,” she said Sunday in a telephone interview. “I’m not pushing against anybody, or trying to escape.”

The Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the police had used the pepper spray “appropriately.”

“Pepper spray was used once,” he added, “after individuals confronted officers and tried to prevent them from deploying a mesh barrier — something that was edited out or otherwise not captured in the video.”

Since Sept. 17, a few hundred protesters have occupied Zuccotti Park on Liberty Street and Broadway, seeking attention for what they say is a financial system that is unjust and flawed. They have embarked on a series of daily marches near Wall Street, but their march to Union Square on Saturday was their largest and most ambitious.

Returning to the financial district from Union Square, many protesters used University Place, and the demonstration spilled into the street with protesters walking against traffic. The police put up mesh nets to prevent them from going any farther down University Place, and many of the demonstrators ended up on East 12th Street.

Ms. Elliott was one of several protesters on East 12th Street who had been corralled behind the plastic netting, which was being held by a line of police officers.

Ms. Elliott said she spent part of the time trying to engage the police officer nearest her in a conversation about pensions.

“I’m just trying to converse with them in a civilized manner, and tell them I’m a civilized human being,” Ms. Elliott said. She remembered saying, “Stop! Why are you doing this?” in response to an arrest not far away, but doing nothing else to attract attention.

“A cop in a white shirt — I think he’s a superior officer — just comes along and does these quick little spritzes of pepper spray in my and these three other girls’ eyes,” she added. The officer’s identity was not provided by the police.

The scene around Ms. Elliott verged on the unruly on Saturday. The police made arrests in the area on charges not only of disorderly conduct and impeding traffic, but also of inciting to riot and assaulting a police officer. About 80 people were arrested; some spent the night in jail and were arraigned on Sunday.

Patrick Bruner, a spokesman for the protesters, said he believed that pepper spray was used several times on Saturday. “I think it is very fair to call it police brutality,” he said.

The Police Department rarely uses pepper spray as a means of crowd control. Although the police used it during a large-scale antiwar protest in 2003, it was not used with much frequency during the protests associated with the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, although they were some of the largest demonstrations in the city in years.

“We don’t use it indiscriminately like other cities do,” said Thomas Graham, a retired deputy chief who until last year commanded the department’s Disorder Control Unit. “You’re not just spraying indiscriminately into a crowd.”

Police officers, he said, “have the choice between spraying the guy or struggling with the guy with the night stick,” he said, adding, “Get poked with a nightstick good and hard and you might have a cracked rib from that.”

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting. " ]

More FollowUps to the Wall Street Protests

2011-09-25T15:08:00.001-04:00

El V made the protests the point of da List today -- and by golly even WNYC has a story on it -- on its website, and another, earlier one -- but the story was not on their broadcast news. The commentary is bitter and angry with WNYC's coverage that is also slanted to make the protesters look violent and stupid -- commentary by people who were there yesterday, as bystanders, accidentally. Again, the NYC cops went out of control.

From da List:
[ " The slogan is, "We are the 99%."

Do not worry about these protests, capital. At least for now. Y'all can go back to figuring out how best to short-sell the euro. As Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado assured the National
City Bank of New York back in the 1920s, "there will be absolute guarantees for businesses . . . there are sufficient forces to repress all disorder." But that was before the crash.

We first became aware that the Occupy Wall Street protests had achieved some kind of traction when one day last week the noise was audible from our home as the march moved down along the channels permitted by the police, from Union Square to Wall Street. But we couldn't immediately find out what it was.

If thirty people dress up and call themselves a tea party, the national media is there. The Occupy Wall Street protest, now in its second week, has mostly been in a news blackout. Until people got arrested it didn't count, but the arrest of at least 80 people yesterday has been hard to ignore, and if the movement can keep it up and make good on its claim to spread the protests to other cities, it will get even harder to ignore, though of course what makes the "mainstream media" the mainstream media is what they choose to ignore. (In this connection, I note that the MSM's copious face time given to the most extreme of right-wingers essentially confers mainstream status on them.)

Our useless public radio station, WNYC, ran a brief article on their website yesterday that, with only a couple of pictures, appeared to depict the protestors as old-school communists. The comments were more informative than the article, as per:

>I was there yesterday with my daughter and I saw no signs about socialism. I just saw police out of control. The police blocked the traffic with their plastic fence. I saw the police sweep up 12th Street between University and 5th, at around 3pm, telling
all the shopowners and restaurants on the south side of the street to lock their
doors. They then circled people on the south side sidewalk with the plastic
fence they carried and started arresting everyone. Their intention was to arrest
everyone on the block. If any investigator/reporter wants to know the truth just
ask the commercial tenants on the south side of 12th Street about the
premeditated police mass arrest action. The people on the sidewalk were not
obstructing anything. I had nothing to do with the people on the sidewalk or the
police. I was just walking in my neighborhood with my daughter. I stood on the
12th street north side sidewalk watching all of this. When I asked a police
officer why they were arresting everyone on the south side he told me to go home
or else I would also be arrested. That is exactly what I saw and heard.

In the case of the New York Times, a particularly smarmy
article by Gina Bellafante, higher-listed on their website than the
factual-reportage article, focuses on the clueless to tut-tut the young
protestors' lack of political knowledge. Her lede was a 37-year-old woman
stripping to her panties in public. (What's the difference between the Times
and a tabloid? A tab would have had a picture.) Yes, we have a problem with
political education in this country -- and with any kind of education, as anyone
who teaches undergraduates can tell you. But for me, it's hard to see the Occupy
Wall Streeters (who are mostly considerably younger than 37) as any less
informed than the people who dress up as Uncle Sam and claim social security is
a Ponzi scheme. Those people are in general treated quite respectfully as a
legitimate slice of public opinion -- and they won't get pepper-sprayed by the
police, either.

Perhaps revealing a gap in her own political education,
Ms. Bellefante writes dismissively of "the opportunity to air societal
grievances as carnival." But carnival and political consciousness have a long
history of intertwining, and this movement is at least groping toward
a political consciousness. Some of the people who have
put themselves on the line here seem to have a clear idea of what they're
doing. Granted, convulsive destruction of property gets more respect from
journalists, to say nothing of self-immolation.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, an assiduous defender of the interests of his class, has a horror of the -- he's referred to it more than once -- and the New York police are experienced practitioners of kettling. This week, the preferred police tactic is netting. They use big orange nets -- day-glo orange, the color of repression -- to cordon off protestors as if they were schools of tuna, fencing them in and holding them. Then, if is any indication, they pepper-spray those caught in their web. Granted, that's pretty lightweight compared to, say, this video from Syntagma
Square in Athens on June 29.

As you might imagine, the people arrested and those around them are social media-izing like crazy. (I saw a new word, when someone was encouraged to keep up the "retweetage.") One aggregator is http://www.reddit.com/r/occupywallstreet/ ,, and there's a live streaming camera plus chat at http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution . A number of videos and stills are posted at https://occupywallst.org/ A national-protest website is http://occupytogether.org/ A "we are the 99%" poster is downloadable at http://www.occupytogether.org/posters/OccupyTogether_poster01.pdf

Demonstrators a Sotheby's auction on Thursday, protesting Sotheby's union-busting against the IBT 814 Art Handlers Union. And according to, there was a moment on Thursday when Occupy Wall Street and a march in support of Troy Davis converged in the street "in a cathartic and compelling moment that the police did not expect. More than a thousand people were now overrunning the streets of lower Manhattan, and they were able to push their way on to Wall Street together."

The Times article by Colin Moynihan below might leave you with the impression that the arrests yesterday did not involve tasering, tackling, and punching, but check this video (in which "Justice for Troy Davis" signs are visible) . . . " ] {I quoted from it in the previous post}

Arrests Yesterday -- Follow-up to Working for Amazon Is Hot As Hell

2011-09-25T15:05:00.001-04:00

Finally the NY Times gives it some coverage today, since people got arrested yesterday. The slant is definitely one of snark and sneer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/nyregion/protesters-are-gunning-for-wall-street-with-faulty-aim.html?_r=1&hp

It's very well written, scoring point after point off the protestors.

[ " Last week brought a disheartening coupling of statistics further delineating the city’s economic divide: The Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, which included more than 50 New Yorkers whose combined net worth totaled $211 billion, arrived at the same moment as census data showing that the percentage of the city’s population living in poverty had risen to 20.1 percent. And yet the revolution did not appear to be brewing. " ]

[ " The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face — finding work, repaying student loans, figuring out ways to finish college when money has run out. But what were the chances that its members were going to receive the attention they so richly deserve carrying signs like “Even if the World Were to End Tomorrow I’d Still Plant a Tree Today”?
One day, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Adam Sarzen, a decade or so older than many of the protesters, came to Zuccotti Park seemingly just to shake his head. “Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers,” he said. “Apple, one of the biggest monopolies in the world. It trades at $400 a share. Do they even know that?” ]

It's Hot As Hell Inside Amazon.com

2011-09-25T15:04:00.001-04:00

[ Inside Amazon's warehouse
Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer.
By Spencer Soper, Of The Morning Call

10:34 PM EDT, September 17, 2011
Allentown, Pa.

Elmer Goris spent a year working in Amazon.com's Lehigh Valley warehouse, where books, CDs and various other products are packed and shipped to customers who order from the world's largest online retailer.

The 34-year-old Allentown resident, who has worked in warehouses for more than 10 years, said he quit in July because he was frustrated with the heat and demands that he work mandatory overtime. Working conditions at the warehouse got worse earlier this year, especially during summer heat waves when heat in the warehouse soared above 100 degrees, he said.

He got light-headed, he said, and his legs cramped, symptoms he never experienced in previous warehouse jobs. One hot day, Goris said, he saw a co-worker pass out at the water fountain. On other hot days, he saw paramedics bring people out of the warehouse in wheelchairs and on stretchers.

"I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one," Goris said. "They can do that because there aren't any jobs in the area."

Goris' complaints are not unique. ]
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story

[ "Over the past two months, The Morning Call interviewed 20 current and former warehouse workers who showed pay stubs, tax forms or other proof of employment. They offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it's like to work in the Amazon warehouse, where temperatures soar on hot summer days, production rates are difficult to achieve and the permanent jobs sought by many temporary workers hired by an outside agency are tough to get.

Only one of the employees interviewed described it as a good place to work.

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an "unsafe environment" after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor's report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat. ]

There is much more, and it's all horrifying. End slavery at Amazon. This is the single retail success this nation has had and it's built like this.

Today I saw yet again another march of the students and the young people, of ethnic heritage diversity -- and they are all young, either still in school or graduated recently with thousands of debt and no jobs available to pay it off -- who are protesting all week down at Wall Street. Among the constant broadcast is CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE. These people all looked healthy, well-nourished, with those perfect, even white teeth that means much money spent by parents at the dentists when young. Their children won't have braces and caps though.

By the way you haven't heard about this week-long sit-in protest at Wall Street, have you? Yet it is making for a lot of cop overtime, and they march every day. Once they were even 'kettled' (the term cops use for crowd control, to keep everybody in a crowd / demonstration in one place so they don't spread out) right here on my street, with either end blocked by cops and their cars and their horses.

Steel Bonnets

2011-09-23T16:42:00.000-04:00

The quoted material below is copied from George MacDonald Fraser (yes, he who created Flashman, etc.), his history of the Borderlanders, Steel Bonnets (1971). This follows a chapter that lists the great Borderlander families with graphs of their internicine feuds, intermarriages, alliances and conflicts, whether on the English side or the Scots side of the border, centered on the 16th century. His arc argument is these families were more in tune with each other and more allied with each other despite the ferocity of their crimes against each other than with those who claimed administrative and legal sovereignty over the regions in question. He describes the history and reasons for this; these lands are where the English and the Scots literally battled each other for defense or sovereignty, thus this was a region that was always suffering the conditions of war. That said, however, it's clear: their criminality could not be put in the shade even by the mafia and their families' activities on Sicily, in Italy, or in the U.S. The difference was that the scope of their activities was confined to the borderlands.

The following comes from the opening chapter titled, "The Game and the Song," beginning on page 77.

[ "Like so many warlike people, the Borderers were sports enthusiasts, and still are. The little Scottish towns, with their small catchment areas, produce Rugby teams that compare with the biggest club sides anywhere; within living memory th wrestlers of Cumberland, farm boys and Saturday afternoon amateurs, could send out a team to meet the best in the world and beat them.

There was no Rugby in the sixteenth century, but there was "football," the father of Rugby, Soccer, and the American game.

In its primitive form it lingers today in places like Jedburgh and Workington, where most of the young male population is supposed to take part and the playing area covers the whole town. The old Borderers loved their football, and on the Scottish side even the nobility joined in, despite the laws against "fitbawis, gouff, or uthir sic unproffitable sportis". [One of the joys of this book is that MacDonald quotes so much from the texts of the period without changing the spelling for our contemporary eyes.] Mary Queen of Scots once watched a two-hour match on the meadow beneath Carlisle Castle, and Francis, Earl Bothwell, the notorious "King Devil", played the game on the Esk with other "declarit traitours to his Majesty" in 1592. He occasionally played dirty too, if we can accept Robert Bowes' accont of an earlier match in which "some quarrel happened betwixt Bothwell and the Master of Marishal upon a stroke given at football on Bothwell's leg by the Master, after that the Master had received a sore fall by B thwell." Every football fan will recognize this squence of events; obviously some things about the game have not changed. Following the incident Bothwell and the Master agreed to meet secretly next day to fight the matter out, and the king had to intervene.

Football incidents were not always so trivial, however. One match, the fore-runner of the Scotland v. England internationsl, perhaps, resulted in slaughter. It happened in 1599, when six Armstrongs came to Bewcastle to play a match against six of the local English boys, and after the game there was "drynkyng hard at Bewcastle house". However, it happened that a Mr William Ridley, an Englishman, "knowing the continual haunt and receipt the great thieves and arch murderers of Scotland had with the captain of Bewcastle", determined to capture the Armstrong footballers while they were on English ground. No sportman, he assembled his friends and lay in wait, but somehow the Armstrongs had been tipped off, and Mr Ridley's ambush party found themselves suddenly set on by more than 200 riders. Ridley and two of his friends were killed, thirty taken prisoner, "and many sore hurt, expecially John Whytfeild whose bowells came out, but are sowed up again."

The result of the game is not recorded.

Even more popular was horse-racing ...." ]

Why am I reading this book, other than it is an interesting read? The dates of this era's timeline take in those of Jamestown and the first settlements in the Caribbean and North America by the English. The names -- these names are on the roll call of the Confederacy, for another, with, of course, many others. I've read accounts of sporting events in the south in the late 17th century and 18th century that were no different in event than these. Albion's Seed's four British folkways in action! This book was written and published long before David Hackett-Fischer published this seminal study -- for which even today the Scots Irish among others revile him. In response I say to that -- read the biography of Andrew Jackson.

Another reason I bring up this book is football and how ancient is the passionate adoration of the sport lodged in the breasts of those who invented it.