OLD TALE
When a child asks,
“When will it snow?”
It should begin
photo & poem
© bob arnold
Friday, March 2, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
OCCUPY ~
Rebecca Solnit
Mad, Passionate Love -- and Violence
Occupy Heads into the Spring
By Rebecca Solnit
When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.
Until they did.
Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.
All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.
This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.
And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless -- some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.
And then there was the violence.
The Faces of Violence
The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers, and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.
On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.
That old line of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs, and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.
But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men -- and with the rarest of exceptions they were men -- who stole the world.
That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers). And the police clubbed their opponents for them, over and over, everywhere across the United States.
The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.
Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence
Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.
The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon. Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.
Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.
A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants. Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino, and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.
This country is segregated in so many terrible ways -- and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land -- this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.
Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland," the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.
The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time -- a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 a.m. on October 25th. The sleepers were assaulted; their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2nd.
That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about. (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.
That said, they are still a problem. They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with. They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement, and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.
But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere. Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.
Those who advocate for nonviolence at Occupy should remember that nonviolence is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
Violence Against the Truth
Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2nd and January 28th.
The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported on the day’s events this way:
"Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said. Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.”
Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.
I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That's sloppy.”
The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the phrase was meant to convey police violence as well.
When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).
Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” There’s always something.
Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption, and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades, and rubber bullets on January 28th. It’s true that a small group vandalized City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.
The action on January 28th that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons, and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs, and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.
Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.
All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.
Now for the Real Work
The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill. Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.
Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system. If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront -- and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.
Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere.
In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies. February 20th, for instance, was a national day of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day, and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville to San Francisco have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.
Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum. A popular environmental campaign made President Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood. Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joes into line with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.
These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power. They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.
What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want, and how we get there, and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.
TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 (or so) books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Hope in the Dark. She lives in and occupies from San Francisco.
Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit
Tomdispatch.com
21 February 2012
Rebecca Solnit
Mad, Passionate Love -- and Violence
Occupy Heads into the Spring
By Rebecca Solnit
When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.
Until they did.
Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.
All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.
This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.
And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless -- some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.
And then there was the violence.
The Faces of Violence
The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers, and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.
On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.
That old line of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs, and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.
But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men -- and with the rarest of exceptions they were men -- who stole the world.
That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers). And the police clubbed their opponents for them, over and over, everywhere across the United States.
The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.
Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence
Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.
The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon. Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.
Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.
A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants. Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino, and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.
This country is segregated in so many terrible ways -- and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land -- this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.
Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland," the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.
The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time -- a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 a.m. on October 25th. The sleepers were assaulted; their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2nd.
That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about. (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.
That said, they are still a problem. They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with. They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement, and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.
But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere. Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.
Those who advocate for nonviolence at Occupy should remember that nonviolence is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
Violence Against the Truth
Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2nd and January 28th.
The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported on the day’s events this way:
"Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said. Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.”
Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.
I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That's sloppy.”
The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the phrase was meant to convey police violence as well.
When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).
Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” There’s always something.
Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption, and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades, and rubber bullets on January 28th. It’s true that a small group vandalized City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.
The action on January 28th that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons, and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs, and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.
Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.
All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.
Now for the Real Work
The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill. Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.
Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system. If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront -- and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.
Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere.
In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies. February 20th, for instance, was a national day of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day, and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville to San Francisco have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.
Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum. A popular environmental campaign made President Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood. Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joes into line with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.
These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power. They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.
What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want, and how we get there, and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.
TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 (or so) books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Hope in the Dark. She lives in and occupies from San Francisco.
Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit
Tomdispatch.com
21 February 2012
thank you to Geoffrey Gardner
EARTH ~
Moondog, 1953
Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin) was another of the wondrous wizards from Kansas; there have been so many in many fields. Born blind the composer, musician (keyboard, percussion, vocalist), street poet and inventor of varied musical instruments passed away in 1999 at the ripe old age of 83 in Munster Germany. Known as "The Viking of 6th Avenue" (New York City) for forever busking right there from the late 40s to 1974, wearing outfits he created based on his own interpretation of the Norse god Thor.
The trimba, Moondog percussion instrument
photo : Stefan Lakatos
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
EARTH ~
Blind Tom Wiggins
Dizzy Gillespie at Blind Tom's grave
Columbus Georgia
http://www.blindtom.org/
to JG
Blind Tom Wiggins
Dizzy Gillespie at Blind Tom's grave
Columbus Georgia
Blind Tom was one of the nineteenth century’s most extraordinary performers. An autistic savant with an encyclopedic memory, all-consuming passion for the piano and mind-boggling capacity to replicate – musically and vocally – any sound he heard, his name was a byword for eccentricity and oddball genius.
Early Life
Blind Tom was born into slavery in Columbus, Georgia in 1848. His master, Wiley Jones, unwilling to clothe and feed a disabled ‘runt’, wanted him dead and, if not for vigilance of his mother, Charity, Tom would not have survived his infancy. But when Tom was nine months old, Wiley Jones put the baby, his two older sisters and parents up for auction, intending to sell the family off individually and not as a unit. The chances of anyone buying blind infant were remote - his death was as good as certain.
Tom’s life was again spared, thanks to the tenacity of his mother. A few weeks before the auction, Charity approached a neighbor, General James Bethune, and begged him to save them from the auction block. At first he refused her, but on the day of the sale, the lawyer and newspaperman turned up at the slave mart and purchased the family.
Apart from his blindness, Tom was ‘just like any other baby’ at first, but a few months after arriving at the Bethune Farm, things began to change and the toddler began to echo the sounds around him. If a rooster crowed, he made the same noise. If a bird sang, he would pursue it or attack his younger siblings just to hear them scream. If left alone in the cabin, he would drag chairs across the floor or bang pans and pots together – anything to make a noise.
By the age of four, Tom could repeat conversations ten minutes in length, but expressed his own needs in whines and tugs. Unless constantly watched, he would escape: to the chicken coop, woods and finally to the piano in his master’s house, the sound of each note causing his young body to tremble in ecstasy. After a string of unwelcome visits, General Bethune finally recognized the stirrings of a musical prodigy in the raggedy slave child and installed him in the Big House where he underwent extensive tuition.
Child Prodigy
By six, Tom was performing to sell out houses throughout Georgia. His early managers promoted him as an ‘untutored’, ‘natural’ musician - fully formed from the moment he first touched the piano - who could repeat any composition, no matter how difficult, after a single hearing.
The reality, of course, failed to match the showman’s spiel. Certainly Blind Tom had a flawless memory and was extraordinarily adept at imitating but even at the high point of his career, he was unable to reproduce complex polymorphic concertos after a single hearing. (He needed an entire afternoon to accomplish that). But if the piece had a recognizable harmony – a polka, waltz, slave song or minstrel hit - Tom could just about play it as an eight-year-old and easily nail it as a sixteen-year-old.
At the age of eight, Tom was licensed out to a travelling showman named Perry Oliver who promoted him as a Barnum-styled freak: ‘a gorgon with angel’s wings’. The more animalistic Tom was perceived to be – and newspapers routinely compared him to a baboon, trusty mastiff or hulking bear - the more astonishing the transformation that took place when he began to play. Before the audience’s very eyes, the incessant rocking and blank open-mouthed expression vanished and Tom would strike the keys with the precision and ease of a master. ‘I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can, no one understands it,’ wrote one baffled member of the public.
The mystery of Tom’s transformation has been solved, at least in part, as our understanding of autism has deepened. People on the autistic spectrum struggle to assimilate the sensory information bombarding them and many engage in repetitive behavior to deflect the overload. Music seems to have offered Tom this type of escape. Behind the piano, the splintering effects of autism – the sensory overload and fragmented perception – disappeared and Tom was able to experience a sense of integration: moments he clearly savored and his inspired outpourings of joy impressed many who witnessed him.
Cipher of the Times
Hard on the heels of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential nomination in 1860, Perry Oliver brought Blind Tom to Washington DC, sensing that something was about to erupt. But the issues that so obsessed his manager - slavery, abolition and secession - meant little to Tom although, ironically, he became a cipher of these times. He was taken to the deeply divided House of Congress to soak up the political vitriol and over the following weeks, served it up on stage to audiences chortling with laughter.
Later in the election campaign, Tom was taken to hear the Democrat’s presidential candidate, Senator Stephen Douglas and for years afterwards, performed the rally speech on stage. Tom perfectly captured the Douglas’s distinctive boom and somehow, inexplicably, his physical mannerisms and posture as well. Even more bizarre, was Tom’s inclusion of the crowd’s heckles and cheers. “Startling” was how one of Douglas’s supporters described it, despite at least one less-than-accurate slip: “The franatics of the North and the franatics of the South….”
Tom’s extraordinary powers of imitation, music and memory also earned him an invitation to the White House where he performed before President James Buchanan. While the exquisite quality of the executive mansion’s Chickering piano delighted him the most, one salient point eluded both him and the clique of Washington socialites before him: Blind Tom was the first African-American musician to officially perform in the White House.
Civil War
With the outbreak of war, Tom enlisted his heart to Confederate cause – or so claimed his manager who staged a series of benefit concerts in aid of the Rebel war effort. In fact, Tom was as oblivious to sectional politics as he was to the secretive game slaves played with their masters; the lip service they paid to their Master’s authority before slipping into the woods to pray for their deliverance. Tom heard not these silent prayers but the crunch of marching feet, rat-a-tat-tat of the drum and fife, boom of musketry and cannon and mayhem of battle.
These sounds he absorbed, channelling them into his most famous composition, The Battle of Manassas, when just a lad of fifteen. The sum total of his perfect pitch, hypersensitive clarity, elastic vocal chords, lack of inhibition and total immersion in the world of sound enabled him to re-create a ‘harum-scarum’ battlefield like no other.
White southerners heralded The Battle of Manassas as a work of genius though black audiences were less effusive – not surprising, as Perry Oliver would introduce the piece as Tom’s spontaneous expression of loyalty to the Confederacy.
However this Oliver’s version does not tally with the facts. For a start, nine months passed before The Battle of Manassas was first heard in public – hardly making it a spur-of-the-moment tribute. The wily showman seems to have used Tom as a propaganda tool to serve his own political agenda.
The Wonder of the World
In the decades following the Civil War, Blind Tom became a household name, celebrated by luminaries like Mark Twain and mid-Western novelist, Willa Cather. He played virtuoso pieces to sell out crowds across Europe and America (his tour schedule was relentless), following them up with unashamedly populist novelties: imitations of trains, banjos and music boxes, playing one piece with his left hand, another with his right while singing a third, then repeating the feat with his back to piano.
At every concert, audience members put his musical memory to the test and by the time he hit his full virtuosic stride, Tom was virtually unbeatable. As the crowds wildly applauded, he would bound across the stage in a series of spectacular one-footed leaps, howling along with them. The American stage had never seen anything like him.
But Tom’s enormous fame was sullied by the deep-rooted racism of the period. His so-called ‘idiocy’ was continuously confused with the widespread belief that Africans were closer to the animal kingdom than Europeans. But his savant powers also made a nonsense of these race theories. How could a man with gifts like his be an example of ‘the lowest rung of humanity’, ‘a mind dredged of all intelligence and purity’? A century and a half ago, there were few earthly explanations, although several unearthly ones were floating about.
Tom was undoubtedly in communication with something. Many of his compositions were the fruit of a deep and profound dialogue with the natural and mechanical world. He would pass hours rapturously absorbed in a thunderstorm then sit down at the piano and play “something that the wind and rain said to me.”
Tom’s savant powers enabled him to revel in a sonic world alive with vibration and detail. Powered by an almost superhuman capacity to concentrate on details most people would find inconsequential, he could tune into a fantastically intricate world of differentiated repetition: the crank of the butter churn, the drip-drip-drip of water down a drainpipe, the clickety clack of a train or warble of a bird.
The bliss he experienced as he drank in these sounds, erroneously gave rise to the perception that he was perpetually happy, but after years of social and physical isolation – locked up alone in a hotel room day after day - Tom became morose and suspicious of ‘strangers’.
The Last American Slave
Tom had no concept of money and, not surprisingly, was exploited, deceived, manipulated and robbed blind by his white masters and guardians. Emancipation failed to deliver him from the shackles of slavery, his master’s son – John Bethune - merely morphing into the role of guardian and manager. In 1872, Tom was adjudged insane and the vast sums of money he earned (the equivalent of $5 million dollars today) was squandered on Bethune’s extravagant lifestyle. Then in 1884, Bethune was killed in a railroad accident.
At the time of his death John Bethune was embroiled in a bitter divorce. When his estranged wife, Eliza Bethune, discovered she was cut out of the will, she tracked down Tom’s impoverished mother and persuaded her to move to New York to mount a legal challenge. It took three years of legal wrangling, but in 1887, victory was theirs and ‘The Last American Slave’ – as the press dubbed Tom – was set free.
But Tom’s so-called ‘emancipation’ was little more than a sham. Once Charity naively handed Tom’s guardianship over to the Bethune’s widow, she was unceremoniously dumped and sent back to Georgia, never to see her son again.
Final Years
Blind Tom’s final years were shrouded in secrecy and paranoia. It was widely believed he died in The Johnstown Flood of 1889, America’s biggest man-made disaster to date. In fact, he was in one of three places: touring the backwaters of North America (his glory days long behind him), holed up in a New York apartment on the lower east side or listening to the ocean’s roar at Eliza Bethune’s country hideaway in wilds of New Jersey (purchased at his expense). In 1903 he made a brief comeback on the vaudeville stage.
By Deirdre O’Connell, author of The Ballad of Blind Tom .
http://www.blindtom.org/
to JG
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
EARTH ~
"When I go, I leave no trace."
Davis Gulch is the black hole into which Everett Ruess vanished in November of 1934. The erratic crease in the wrinkled landscape is like many similar indentations in the desert Southwest across which Everett wandered. It differs from most, however, because of the fleeting presence of the desert pilgrim and the mystery of his disappearance. Emotionally moved by Everett's story, others have followed him into the canyon during the intervening years. Some left their mark, like Everett, in various forms.
The arid canyonlands of southern Utah, and Davis Gulch in particular, are a hard and unforgiving landscape redolent with ancient human presences. Nearly impenetrable, gigantic slickrock battlements encase green fringes of vegetation along intermittent water courses. The trail and now a rough road head south from Escalante, avoiding the slot canyon beginnings of the gulch. The dirt road ends at Hole-in-the-Rock and the Colorado River. These are the remote borderlands between Utah and Arizona.
. . .
Disappearance was a recurring theme in these arid lands. The Anasazi vanished from David Gulch around 1300 C.E. They left ruins, which Everett combed for artifacts. Across the stream were a well-preserved kiva and the remnants of storage structures under a massive overhang. The elliptical kiva had survived nearly intact for almost a thousand years. The three-layered flat roof beams, thin sticks laid crossways, and an adobe roofing material partially covered the subterranean structure., It was nine feet in diameter and rose a little over five feet from the hard-packed dirt floor, in which a rectangular fire pit had been dug. Artifacts indicated a Kayenta, Arizona cultural origin from the south side of the Colorado River.
. . .
The writer-teacher-conservationist Wallace Stegner led me to Everett Ruess, whose trail I followed until it ended in David Gulch. Both westerners were shaped by landscapes and transcended their respective eras in their own distinctive ways. I read Stegner's book Mormon Country in the late 1970s in preparation for writing a book about the Colorado River and the West. The Stegner book mentioned Ruess's brief life, its fleeting promise, and his mysterious disappearance. Thirty years later I wrote a biography of Wallace Stegner. I described a man who lived a long, full life. I now write about a youth who lived a short, fragile life.
. . .
This book is the story of all of us and our loneliness and confusion during the teenage years, only writ large because Everett went to extremes. At that age our lives spread out like a topographical map before us, offering numerous diverging trails through the wilderness to choose from. How wonderful, how frightening, and how dangerous those years were. I hope readers, both young and old, can relate to Everett Ruess through either their own experiences or those of their children, a young relative, or a more distant youth. . .Everett's era forms the backdrop. His wanderings provide a snapshot of growing up nearly one hundred years ago on the East Coast and in the Middle West, the Depression years in California and the interior West, and the spaciousness of the national parks, monuments, and Indian lands in the Southwest.
In searching for a meaningful Everett Ruess, I sought the reality of who he was, or as close to that reality as I could get. I found the real Ruess to be far more interesting than the mythic one. I don't view him as a western Thoreau or a younger Muir, as some do. Those two men described and thought about their respective regions. Everett described places beautifully. However, he thought primarily about himself, which is perfectly understandable given his age. I don't know in what manner he would have matured, but I do know he was exasperating at times. This quality alone made him more human and interesting, at least for me, than the patron saint of western wilderness, as he has been portrayed.
. . .
After I began working on this project, others supplied a surprising addendum. Everett's bones were supposedly discovered three-quarters of a century after he disappeared and one hundred miles from where he had last been seen. Misguided and sales-driven journalism, as practiced by a publication of the National Geographic Society, drove the bad science that resulted in two false DNA positives. The third test, by a more experienced laboratory, proved that the bones did not belong to Ruess and that science has its own types of fragility. Then the silence of the desert returned.
~ PHILIP L. FRADKIN
University of California Press
2011
Ruess was known for cutting linoleum prints of landscapes and nature and associated with Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. His prints show scenes from the Monterey Bay coast, the northern California coast near Tomales Bay, the Sierra Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.
Everett wrote no books during his life, but was a lifelong diarist and sent home hundreds of letters. His journals, art, and poetry were later published in two books:
On Desert Trails (1940) ed. Hugh Lacy; El Centro, California: Desert Magazine Press; 2nd ed. 1950; 3rd edition (2000) ed. Gary J. Bergera; pub. Gibbs Smith, ISBN 0879058250
Everett Ruess:Vagabond for Beauty (1983), ed. W.L. Rusho, Peregrine Smith Books; 2nd ed. 1985, pub. Gibbs Smith, ISBN 0879052104
His books are illustrated by the woodcuts for which Ruess is admired.
"Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the enduring myth of a romantic desert wanderer. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art; their value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest."
"When I go, I leave no trace."
Davis Gulch is the black hole into which Everett Ruess vanished in November of 1934. The erratic crease in the wrinkled landscape is like many similar indentations in the desert Southwest across which Everett wandered. It differs from most, however, because of the fleeting presence of the desert pilgrim and the mystery of his disappearance. Emotionally moved by Everett's story, others have followed him into the canyon during the intervening years. Some left their mark, like Everett, in various forms.
The arid canyonlands of southern Utah, and Davis Gulch in particular, are a hard and unforgiving landscape redolent with ancient human presences. Nearly impenetrable, gigantic slickrock battlements encase green fringes of vegetation along intermittent water courses. The trail and now a rough road head south from Escalante, avoiding the slot canyon beginnings of the gulch. The dirt road ends at Hole-in-the-Rock and the Colorado River. These are the remote borderlands between Utah and Arizona.
. . .
Disappearance was a recurring theme in these arid lands. The Anasazi vanished from David Gulch around 1300 C.E. They left ruins, which Everett combed for artifacts. Across the stream were a well-preserved kiva and the remnants of storage structures under a massive overhang. The elliptical kiva had survived nearly intact for almost a thousand years. The three-layered flat roof beams, thin sticks laid crossways, and an adobe roofing material partially covered the subterranean structure., It was nine feet in diameter and rose a little over five feet from the hard-packed dirt floor, in which a rectangular fire pit had been dug. Artifacts indicated a Kayenta, Arizona cultural origin from the south side of the Colorado River.
. . .
The writer-teacher-conservationist Wallace Stegner led me to Everett Ruess, whose trail I followed until it ended in David Gulch. Both westerners were shaped by landscapes and transcended their respective eras in their own distinctive ways. I read Stegner's book Mormon Country in the late 1970s in preparation for writing a book about the Colorado River and the West. The Stegner book mentioned Ruess's brief life, its fleeting promise, and his mysterious disappearance. Thirty years later I wrote a biography of Wallace Stegner. I described a man who lived a long, full life. I now write about a youth who lived a short, fragile life.
. . .
This book is the story of all of us and our loneliness and confusion during the teenage years, only writ large because Everett went to extremes. At that age our lives spread out like a topographical map before us, offering numerous diverging trails through the wilderness to choose from. How wonderful, how frightening, and how dangerous those years were. I hope readers, both young and old, can relate to Everett Ruess through either their own experiences or those of their children, a young relative, or a more distant youth. . .Everett's era forms the backdrop. His wanderings provide a snapshot of growing up nearly one hundred years ago on the East Coast and in the Middle West, the Depression years in California and the interior West, and the spaciousness of the national parks, monuments, and Indian lands in the Southwest.
In searching for a meaningful Everett Ruess, I sought the reality of who he was, or as close to that reality as I could get. I found the real Ruess to be far more interesting than the mythic one. I don't view him as a western Thoreau or a younger Muir, as some do. Those two men described and thought about their respective regions. Everett described places beautifully. However, he thought primarily about himself, which is perfectly understandable given his age. I don't know in what manner he would have matured, but I do know he was exasperating at times. This quality alone made him more human and interesting, at least for me, than the patron saint of western wilderness, as he has been portrayed.
. . .
After I began working on this project, others supplied a surprising addendum. Everett's bones were supposedly discovered three-quarters of a century after he disappeared and one hundred miles from where he had last been seen. Misguided and sales-driven journalism, as practiced by a publication of the National Geographic Society, drove the bad science that resulted in two false DNA positives. The third test, by a more experienced laboratory, proved that the bones did not belong to Ruess and that science has its own types of fragility. Then the silence of the desert returned.
~ PHILIP L. FRADKIN
University of California Press
2011
Ruess was known for cutting linoleum prints of landscapes and nature and associated with Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. His prints show scenes from the Monterey Bay coast, the northern California coast near Tomales Bay, the Sierra Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.
Everett wrote no books during his life, but was a lifelong diarist and sent home hundreds of letters. His journals, art, and poetry were later published in two books:
On Desert Trails (1940) ed. Hugh Lacy; El Centro, California: Desert Magazine Press; 2nd ed. 1950; 3rd edition (2000) ed. Gary J. Bergera; pub. Gibbs Smith, ISBN 0879058250
Everett Ruess:Vagabond for Beauty (1983), ed. W.L. Rusho, Peregrine Smith Books; 2nd ed. 1985, pub. Gibbs Smith, ISBN 0879052104
His books are illustrated by the woodcuts for which Ruess is admired.
Everett Ruess (March 28, 1914 – 1934)
Monday, February 27, 2012
SOUND ~
Going out
to see the moon
is part of seeing it
Remembering
it inside
is another
ACTUAL
At the back of
my head
some
thing crouching
I sit
down with
rain no
longer rain
I step
in
When the path I was on disappeared
I knew that was the path to follow
ECHO
What we
listen to
the sea for
we are
ocean she
brings me
her
hands too
small
for
FIVE
My daughter
writes me
a poem —
some words
she knows
on a page,
saying what-
ever she
wants
for the sake of
hearing it
said
rain on
leaf I
touch
--------my fingers
with
JOHN PHILLIPS
WHAT SHAPE SOUND
Skysill Press
3 Gervase Gardens
Clifton Village
Nottingham NG11 8LZ
skysillpressblogspot. com
a native islander, john phillips
lives in st. ives u.k. w/ his family
jasna, eva & lana ~
longhouse published three booklets
by john phillips that may be found
in our archive deep sea chest
thank you for the book j
Going out
to see the moon
is part of seeing it
Remembering
it inside
is another
ACTUAL
At the back of
my head
some
thing crouching
I sit
down with
rain no
longer rain
I step
in
When the path I was on disappeared
I knew that was the path to follow
ECHO
What we
listen to
the sea for
we are
ocean she
brings me
her
hands too
small
for
FIVE
My daughter
writes me
a poem —
some words
she knows
on a page,
saying what-
ever she
wants
for the sake of
hearing it
said
rain on
leaf I
touch
--------my fingers
with
JOHN PHILLIPS
WHAT SHAPE SOUND
Skysill Press
3 Gervase Gardens
Clifton Village
Nottingham NG11 8LZ
skysillpressblogspot. com
a native islander, john phillips
lives in st. ives u.k. w/ his family
jasna, eva & lana ~
longhouse published three booklets
by john phillips that may be found
in our archive deep sea chest
thank you for the book j
Sunday, February 26, 2012
EARTH ALMOST ~
nite nite
boat photo : pablo vanez
What am I crazy speaking aloud about the Academy Awards? It's past midnight.
Out of my head:
It was great to see Iran acknowledged. Their cinema has been terrific for years.
Cirque de Soleil's aerial act, over the heads of the powerful, now powerless, was exciting.
Too bad about The Tree of Life, maybe the only film absolutely hated by some critics and viewers, and likewise loved by many of the same. There's something there. Time is the teacher.
Not a bad relaxed and humorous acceptance speech by Meryl Streep, as if she is forever playing the part of her character in Postcards From the Edge in real life, though the award belonged to Viola Davis.
Emma Stone razing was a delight.
Robert Downey's, not as much.
Large cymbals in the hands of Will Ferrell could go anywhere, almost did.
Some excited guys got bleeped out, some others guy from Louisiana seemed genuine.
One of Billy Crystal's best jokes was about how — after he viewed the film The Help in a ritzy Los Angeles theater — he was so moved he wanted to hug the first black woman he saw, “which in Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” Others found the joke dated, "old", fuddy-duddy. Ah, what are you gonna do?
About this point in this summing up I'm already bored, ready to erase.
Chris Rock is growing his hair and not losing an inch of his stealth. His joke on voice over (donkeys & zebras) was the haiku moment.
George Clooney never got on stage. Probably for the better.
Nick Nolte should have, if we're talking about a work horse.
Jessica Chastain has to be the most down to earth beauty Hollywood has seen in a long time. One actually feels her rooting for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The In Memoriam segment should have given a longer pause and voice for Ben Gazzara.
The garish gold and red curtain on the big stage did look impressive. Like Douglas Fairbanks maybe was there. The company that owns the building has gone bankrupt. The wealthy are entertaining us and being presented with gold statues, all in a new era of the 1% vs. the 99%. And the Best Picture award goes to a silent film in the year 2012. Blame it on global warming.
There were many and many more films that should have been mentioned and never will in this world; it's what keeps us plugging.
Sacha Baron Cohen showing up in full regalia as "The Dictator" and depositing fake ashes of Kim Jong-il from an urn he carried onto a Ryan Seacrest was pretty okay live television. It sullied the red carpet. Stirred a to-do. As the satirist was being escorted away by security guards he said to Seacrest, “When someone asks you what you are wearing, you will say Kim Jong-il.” I await to hear what Joan Rivers thinks.
My smart cookie companion stayed up way past her bedtime until 10 and then gave up with these words, "It doesn't seem held together".
If it was a boat, you wouldn't get on.
Out of my head:
It was great to see Iran acknowledged. Their cinema has been terrific for years.
Cirque de Soleil's aerial act, over the heads of the powerful, now powerless, was exciting.
Too bad about The Tree of Life, maybe the only film absolutely hated by some critics and viewers, and likewise loved by many of the same. There's something there. Time is the teacher.
Not a bad relaxed and humorous acceptance speech by Meryl Streep, as if she is forever playing the part of her character in Postcards From the Edge in real life, though the award belonged to Viola Davis.
Emma Stone razing was a delight.
Robert Downey's, not as much.
Large cymbals in the hands of Will Ferrell could go anywhere, almost did.
Some excited guys got bleeped out, some others guy from Louisiana seemed genuine.
One of Billy Crystal's best jokes was about how — after he viewed the film The Help in a ritzy Los Angeles theater — he was so moved he wanted to hug the first black woman he saw, “which in Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” Others found the joke dated, "old", fuddy-duddy. Ah, what are you gonna do?
About this point in this summing up I'm already bored, ready to erase.
Chris Rock is growing his hair and not losing an inch of his stealth. His joke on voice over (donkeys & zebras) was the haiku moment.
George Clooney never got on stage. Probably for the better.
Nick Nolte should have, if we're talking about a work horse.
Jessica Chastain has to be the most down to earth beauty Hollywood has seen in a long time. One actually feels her rooting for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The In Memoriam segment should have given a longer pause and voice for Ben Gazzara.
The garish gold and red curtain on the big stage did look impressive. Like Douglas Fairbanks maybe was there. The company that owns the building has gone bankrupt. The wealthy are entertaining us and being presented with gold statues, all in a new era of the 1% vs. the 99%. And the Best Picture award goes to a silent film in the year 2012. Blame it on global warming.
There were many and many more films that should have been mentioned and never will in this world; it's what keeps us plugging.
Sacha Baron Cohen showing up in full regalia as "The Dictator" and depositing fake ashes of Kim Jong-il from an urn he carried onto a Ryan Seacrest was pretty okay live television. It sullied the red carpet. Stirred a to-do. As the satirist was being escorted away by security guards he said to Seacrest, “When someone asks you what you are wearing, you will say Kim Jong-il.” I await to hear what Joan Rivers thinks.
My smart cookie companion stayed up way past her bedtime until 10 and then gave up with these words, "It doesn't seem held together".
If it was a boat, you wouldn't get on.
nite nite
EARTH ~
A cult singer, 12-string guitarist, and banjo player of the New York 1960s folk revival, Karen Dalton still remains known to very few, despite counting the likes of Bob Dylan and Fred Neil among her acquaintances. This was partly because she seldom recorded, only making one album in the 1960s -- and that didn't come out until 1969, although she had been known on the Greenwich Village circuit since the beginning of the decade. It was also partly because, unlike other folksingers of the era, she was an interpreter who did not record original material. And it was also because her voice -- often compared to Billie Holiday, but with a rural twang -- was too strange and inaccessible to pop audiences. Nik Venet, producer of her debut album, went as far as to remark in Goldmine, "She was very much like Billie Holiday. Let me say this, she wasn't Billie Holiday but she had that phrasing Holiday had and she was a remarkable one-of-a-kind type of thing.... Unfortunately, it's an acquired taste, you really have to look for the music."
Dalton grew up in Oklahoma, moving to New York around 1960. Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, who was in her backup band in the early '70s, points out in his liner notes to the CD reissue of her first album that "she was the only folk singer I ever met with an authentic 'folk' background. She came to the folk music scene under her own steam, as opposed to being 'discovered' and introduced to it by people already involved in it." There is a photograph from February 1961 (now printed on the back cover of the It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best reissue) of Dalton singing and playing with Fred Neil and Bob Dylan, the latter of whom was barely known at the time. Unlike her friends she was unable to even capture a recording contract, spending much of the next few years roaming around North America.
Dalton was not comfortable in the studio, and her Capitol album It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best came about when Nik Venet, who had tried unsuccessfully to record her several times, invited her to a Fred Neil session. He asked her to cut a Neil composition, "Little Bit of Rain," as a personal favor so he could have it in his private collection; that led to an entire album, recorded in one session, most of the tracks done in one take. Dalton recorded one more album in the early '70s, produced by Harvey Brooks (who had played on some '60s Dylan sessions). Done in Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, it, like her debut, had an eclectic assortment of traditional folk tunes, blues, covers of soul hits ("When a Man Loves a Woman," "How Sweet It Is"), and contemporary numbers by singer/songwriters (Dino Valente, the Band's Richard Manuel). The Band's "Katie's Been Gone," included on The Basement Tapes, is rumored to be about Dalton.
~ Richie Unterberger
Karen Dalton struggled with drugs and alcohol for many years. She reputedly died in 1993 on the streets of New York after an eight-year battle with AIDS. However, an article in Uncut magazine, confirmed that Dalton was actually being cared for by the guitarist Peter Walker in upstate New York during her last months.
She was married to the guitarist Richard Tucker. She had at least two children: a son, who she lost custody of, and a daughter, Abralyn Baird, born when Dalton was 17, who she 'kidnapped' and took with her to New York when she was 19. By the time she was 21, she had been married and divorced twice.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
EARTH ~
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891? – January 28, 1960) American folklorist, anthropologist, backcountry traveler and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-30s). Hurston wrote four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays. Many know her best for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Friday, February 24, 2012
EARTH ~
from Sex and the River Styx
I never totaled a car (machines may not have interested me enough) or
broke my bones, and had an upbeat view of life, experiencing the kindness
of many strangers when I hitchhiked, for instance. I speculated as
to what the anthropological purpose could be of the brimming, broadgauge
affection people like me felt when watching a wriggling tadpole
or clouds wreathing a massif — sights that have no reproductive or
nutritional aspect. Call it “biophilia” or agape; it wasn’t in response to
a hunter’s blunt hunger, or kinship-protective, or sexual in some way.
Was it a religious wellspring, then? Silence and solitude are fertile if
the aptitude is there, and love in its wider applications is also, I think,
an aptitude, like the capacity for romantic love, indeed — stilling for a
few minutes the chatterbox in us. That massif wreathed in clouds, or
the modest pond that has been left in peace to breed its toad, is not
a godhead. Like sparks flung, out each perhaps as evidence instead (as
are our empathy and exuberance), but not a locus. And yet a link seems
to need to take hold somewhere around nine, ten or eleven — about
Mowgli’s age, in Kipling — between the onset of one’s ability to marinate
in the spices of solitude, in other words , in puberty, when the
emphases will shift to contact sports, or dress, and other sexual ploys
and fantasies or calculations.
But nine was fine; and when you came to feel at home in Connecticut's
woods, New Hampshire’s were not a large step up the ladder,
or Wyoming’s expansive mountains after that, then California’s by
twenty, building toward British Columbia’s and Alaska’s, Africa’s and
India’s, in the course of the future. The sea was different, however.
I admired it from the beach or a steamship but never acquired the
nonchalance required for solo sailing; was afraid of drowning. On the
other hand, having been born in New York City and then returned to
live there as an adult, I loved metropolises and saw no conflict between
exalting in their magnetism and in wild places. Human nature is interstitial
with nature and not be shunned by a naturalist. This accidental and by ambidexterity
enriched by traveling because I enjoyed landing and staying awhile in London
on the way to Africa, or exploring Bombay and Calcutta enroute to Coimbatore
or Dibrugarh. Didn’t just want to hurry on to a tribal or wildlife wilderness
area without first poking around in these great cities, which I rejoiced in as
much. Although there are now far too many people for nature to digest,
we are all going to go down together, I believe. We are part and parcel of it,
and as it sickens so will we.
In the meantime, joy is joy: the blue and yellow stripes of a perfect day,
with green effusive trees in the dramatic shapes of the streaming clouds.
Our moods can be altered simply by sunlight, and I found that having cared
for primates, giraffes, and big cats in the circus made it easier to meander almost
anywhere. Few people were scarier than a tiger, or lovelier than a striding
giraffe, or more poignant than our brethren, the chimps and orangutans,
and you can often disarm an adversary if you recognize the poignancy in him.
Nevertheless, I prefer to step off the road, when I was walking in the woods at
night and saw headlights approaching. Better to take one’s chances with
any creature that might conceivably be lurking there than with the potential
aberrations of the drive-by human being behind the wheel. It may seem
contradictory that for reverence and revelation one needs a balance. You
can be staggered by the feast of sensations out-of-doors, but not staggering.
Your pins ought to be under you and your eyes focused. As in music, where
beauty lodges not in one note but in combining many, your pleasure surges
from the counterpoint of saplings and windthrow, or the moon and snow.
Both are pale and cold, yet mysteriously scrimshawed — the moon by craters,
mountains, and lava flows, the snow by swaying withes or maybe a buck’s
feet and antler tines. Although like snow, the moon will disappear predictably
and reappear when it is suppose to, moonlight is an elixir with mystical
reverberations that we can pine and yet grin over, even when “emptyarmed.”
It’s off-the-loop, a private swatch of time, unaccountable to anybody else
if we have paused to gaze upward, and not burdened with the responsibility
of name birdcalls, identifying flowers, or the other complications of
the hobby of nature study. One just admires a sickle moon, half-moon, full moon
that weightless and yet punctual, rises, hovering. Sometimes it may seem
almost as if under water, the way its dimensions and yellow-ruddy coloring
appear to change to butter, or russet, or polar. The Hungry Moon, Harvest Moon,
Hunter Moon, are each emotional, and expertise about their candlepower
or mileage from the earth is a bit extraneous. Although our own cycles are
no longer tied to whether they are waning or gibbous, we feel a vestigial
tropism. This is our moon. It’s full, will murmur; or it’s a crescent, or like a
cradle line partly tipped. And a new moon is no moon.
Twilight, the stalking hour, itself can energize us to go out and employ that
natural itch to put our best foot forward and “socialize.” The collared neck,
the twitching calf, and tumid penis will respond to daylight’s variations or
the moonrise, as we gulp raw oysters and crunch soft-shelled crabs that still
possess that caught quality, not that precooked pig or process cow. If we’ve
lost the sense of astrological spell and navigational exigency that the stars’
constellations used to hold, we at least present fragrant bouquets and suck
the legs of briny lobsters like savages on important occasions. The stunning
galaxies have been diminished to blackboard equations that physicists compute,
and are dulled eyes, when we glance up, instead of seeing cryptic patterns
and metaphors, settle rather cursorily for the moon.
Water does retain a good deal more of its ancient power to please or panic us.
Bouncing downhill in a rocky bed, shouldering into any indentation, and then
nurturing fish, mirroring a spectrum of colors, or bulking into waves that hit
the spindrift beach at the inducement of the wind, it’s the most protean of life’s
building blocks the womb of the world. “My God, there’s the river!” We will say,
in pure delight at the big waterway willows, the glistering currents bounding along
like a dozen otters seizing ownership of the place, as we walk within sight. Our
bodies, seventy percent water (and our brains more), only mimic the earth’s surface
in this respect. And we want a mixed and muscular sky, bulging yet depthless,
and full of totems, talismans, in the clouds colon not every day but when we have
the energy for it, just to know that we’re alive. Rising land of course will lift our
spirits too. Hills, a ridgeline, not to begin toiling right up today but the possibility
of doing so, perhaps discovering unmapped crannies up there and trees as tiny
as bonsai on the crest, yet dips for the eyes to rest in as we look. We already think
we know too much about too much, so mountains are for the mystery of ungeometric
convolutions, a boost without knowing what’s on top. Awe is not a word much used
lately, sounding primitive, like kerosene lamps. What’s to be awed about — is this
the Three Wise Men following the Star? — what hasn’t been explained? Actually,
I don’t know what has been explained. If we are told, for example, that 99 percent of
our genes are similar to those of a mouse, does that explain anything? Apprehension,
disillusion, disorientation, selfishness, lust, irony, envy, greed, and even self-sacrifice
are commonplace: but awe? Society is not annealed enough. trust and continuity and
leadership are deteriorating, and the problem when you are alone is the clutter. Finding
even a sight line outdoors without buildings, pavement, people, is a task, and we’re
not awed by other people anymore: too much of a good thing. We need to glimpse
a portion of the axle, the undercarriage, of what it’s all about. And mountains (an
axis, if not an axle) are harder to be glib about than technological news reports. But
if you wait until you’re mature years to get to know a patch of countryside thoroughly
or intimately, your responses may be generic, not specific — just curiosity and good
intentions — and you will wind up going in for golf and tennis and power mowers,
bypassing nature, instead.
Author Edward Hoagland with some of the covers from his books at his summer home in Sutton, Vermont, June 7, 2011.
from Sex and the River Styx
I never totaled a car (machines may not have interested me enough) or
broke my bones, and had an upbeat view of life, experiencing the kindness
of many strangers when I hitchhiked, for instance. I speculated as
to what the anthropological purpose could be of the brimming, broadgauge
affection people like me felt when watching a wriggling tadpole
or clouds wreathing a massif — sights that have no reproductive or
nutritional aspect. Call it “biophilia” or agape; it wasn’t in response to
a hunter’s blunt hunger, or kinship-protective, or sexual in some way.
Was it a religious wellspring, then? Silence and solitude are fertile if
the aptitude is there, and love in its wider applications is also, I think,
an aptitude, like the capacity for romantic love, indeed — stilling for a
few minutes the chatterbox in us. That massif wreathed in clouds, or
the modest pond that has been left in peace to breed its toad, is not
a godhead. Like sparks flung, out each perhaps as evidence instead (as
are our empathy and exuberance), but not a locus. And yet a link seems
to need to take hold somewhere around nine, ten or eleven — about
Mowgli’s age, in Kipling — between the onset of one’s ability to marinate
in the spices of solitude, in other words , in puberty, when the
emphases will shift to contact sports, or dress, and other sexual ploys
and fantasies or calculations.
But nine was fine; and when you came to feel at home in Connecticut's
woods, New Hampshire’s were not a large step up the ladder,
or Wyoming’s expansive mountains after that, then California’s by
twenty, building toward British Columbia’s and Alaska’s, Africa’s and
India’s, in the course of the future. The sea was different, however.
I admired it from the beach or a steamship but never acquired the
nonchalance required for solo sailing; was afraid of drowning. On the
other hand, having been born in New York City and then returned to
live there as an adult, I loved metropolises and saw no conflict between
exalting in their magnetism and in wild places. Human nature is interstitial
with nature and not be shunned by a naturalist. This accidental and by ambidexterity
enriched by traveling because I enjoyed landing and staying awhile in London
on the way to Africa, or exploring Bombay and Calcutta enroute to Coimbatore
or Dibrugarh. Didn’t just want to hurry on to a tribal or wildlife wilderness
area without first poking around in these great cities, which I rejoiced in as
much. Although there are now far too many people for nature to digest,
we are all going to go down together, I believe. We are part and parcel of it,
and as it sickens so will we.
In the meantime, joy is joy: the blue and yellow stripes of a perfect day,
with green effusive trees in the dramatic shapes of the streaming clouds.
Our moods can be altered simply by sunlight, and I found that having cared
for primates, giraffes, and big cats in the circus made it easier to meander almost
anywhere. Few people were scarier than a tiger, or lovelier than a striding
giraffe, or more poignant than our brethren, the chimps and orangutans,
and you can often disarm an adversary if you recognize the poignancy in him.
Nevertheless, I prefer to step off the road, when I was walking in the woods at
night and saw headlights approaching. Better to take one’s chances with
any creature that might conceivably be lurking there than with the potential
aberrations of the drive-by human being behind the wheel. It may seem
contradictory that for reverence and revelation one needs a balance. You
can be staggered by the feast of sensations out-of-doors, but not staggering.
Your pins ought to be under you and your eyes focused. As in music, where
beauty lodges not in one note but in combining many, your pleasure surges
from the counterpoint of saplings and windthrow, or the moon and snow.
Both are pale and cold, yet mysteriously scrimshawed — the moon by craters,
mountains, and lava flows, the snow by swaying withes or maybe a buck’s
feet and antler tines. Although like snow, the moon will disappear predictably
and reappear when it is suppose to, moonlight is an elixir with mystical
reverberations that we can pine and yet grin over, even when “emptyarmed.”
It’s off-the-loop, a private swatch of time, unaccountable to anybody else
if we have paused to gaze upward, and not burdened with the responsibility
of name birdcalls, identifying flowers, or the other complications of
the hobby of nature study. One just admires a sickle moon, half-moon, full moon
that weightless and yet punctual, rises, hovering. Sometimes it may seem
almost as if under water, the way its dimensions and yellow-ruddy coloring
appear to change to butter, or russet, or polar. The Hungry Moon, Harvest Moon,
Hunter Moon, are each emotional, and expertise about their candlepower
or mileage from the earth is a bit extraneous. Although our own cycles are
no longer tied to whether they are waning or gibbous, we feel a vestigial
tropism. This is our moon. It’s full, will murmur; or it’s a crescent, or like a
cradle line partly tipped. And a new moon is no moon.
Twilight, the stalking hour, itself can energize us to go out and employ that
natural itch to put our best foot forward and “socialize.” The collared neck,
the twitching calf, and tumid penis will respond to daylight’s variations or
the moonrise, as we gulp raw oysters and crunch soft-shelled crabs that still
possess that caught quality, not that precooked pig or process cow. If we’ve
lost the sense of astrological spell and navigational exigency that the stars’
constellations used to hold, we at least present fragrant bouquets and suck
the legs of briny lobsters like savages on important occasions. The stunning
galaxies have been diminished to blackboard equations that physicists compute,
and are dulled eyes, when we glance up, instead of seeing cryptic patterns
and metaphors, settle rather cursorily for the moon.
Water does retain a good deal more of its ancient power to please or panic us.
Bouncing downhill in a rocky bed, shouldering into any indentation, and then
nurturing fish, mirroring a spectrum of colors, or bulking into waves that hit
the spindrift beach at the inducement of the wind, it’s the most protean of life’s
building blocks the womb of the world. “My God, there’s the river!” We will say,
in pure delight at the big waterway willows, the glistering currents bounding along
like a dozen otters seizing ownership of the place, as we walk within sight. Our
bodies, seventy percent water (and our brains more), only mimic the earth’s surface
in this respect. And we want a mixed and muscular sky, bulging yet depthless,
and full of totems, talismans, in the clouds colon not every day but when we have
the energy for it, just to know that we’re alive. Rising land of course will lift our
spirits too. Hills, a ridgeline, not to begin toiling right up today but the possibility
of doing so, perhaps discovering unmapped crannies up there and trees as tiny
as bonsai on the crest, yet dips for the eyes to rest in as we look. We already think
we know too much about too much, so mountains are for the mystery of ungeometric
convolutions, a boost without knowing what’s on top. Awe is not a word much used
lately, sounding primitive, like kerosene lamps. What’s to be awed about — is this
the Three Wise Men following the Star? — what hasn’t been explained? Actually,
I don’t know what has been explained. If we are told, for example, that 99 percent of
our genes are similar to those of a mouse, does that explain anything? Apprehension,
disillusion, disorientation, selfishness, lust, irony, envy, greed, and even self-sacrifice
are commonplace: but awe? Society is not annealed enough. trust and continuity and
leadership are deteriorating, and the problem when you are alone is the clutter. Finding
even a sight line outdoors without buildings, pavement, people, is a task, and we’re
not awed by other people anymore: too much of a good thing. We need to glimpse
a portion of the axle, the undercarriage, of what it’s all about. And mountains (an
axis, if not an axle) are harder to be glib about than technological news reports. But
if you wait until you’re mature years to get to know a patch of countryside thoroughly
or intimately, your responses may be generic, not specific — just curiosity and good
intentions — and you will wind up going in for golf and tennis and power mowers,
bypassing nature, instead.
author's photo : glenn russell (free press)
sex and the river styx (chelsea green)
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