Dark Before the Dawn?

The Coming Storm

It is not just about the climate.  It is also a political storm.  If Trump wins in the coming election, the level of class conflict will go sky-high throughout the U.S. for years.   If Trump wins, the Democratic Party will be in tatters ideologically, and they will not be able to blame Russia, China or Jill Stein this time - though they will try.  Their endless con-job as the ‘party of the people’ will be laid to waste.  If Trump wins, conditions in the U.S. will become even closer to an authoritarian police state, with fascists allied with the forces of repression, posing a huge question for the left, workers, unions and minorities. If Trump wins, leftists, minorities, ‘outsiders’ of any kind will be open targets.  Right now we are already seeing the beginnings of open fascist killings and armed self-defense by the left, with racist cops and sheriffs backing the white right.

If Trump loses, Trump’s fascist militias will come out and try to occupy state capitols to support Bill Barr’s attempt to guide the election away from the Electoral College into a single-state vote in the House of Representatives; or by Republicans nullifying some states' votes they control and choosing their own electors.  In the process, violence will be inevitable against all Republican enemies.  It will be an open season of anger.  If Trump loses, Biden will be unable to carry out anything for the working class of whatever skin color.  Social conditions will continue to deteriorate.   If Trump loses, a more effective and intelligent Trump will be promoted by the Republican Party while Biden practices patty-cake ‘bi-partisanship’ with them.  Tucker Carlson might be their next candidate!

Whatever happens, it will not be pretty.  So the boy scout motto, minus the pedophilia, is ‘Be Prepared.’  Prepare for a defense against fascist violence.  Prepare with other people.

The second part is to build a united social movement with a political arm – a Left Front among the hard-left factions; a 3^rd leftist or populist party like the Movement for a People’s Party; a Labor Party based on the unions; an Anti-Fascist Front ready to stop fascist mobilizations.  A divided and amorphous ‘resistance’ movement with little organization, transitional demands or limited goals cannot handle the coming storm or its aftermath to actually move the dial towards massive social change.  Things will stay the same with this kind of approach. The unions have to stop kow-towing to Democrats and look to strike action. The BLM movement has to chart a path towards class struggle.  Socialists have to unite on a basic platform.  The so-called ‘left’ in the Democratic Party has to prepare to break and unite with those who are charting an independent, working-class course.

Whether any of this is possible is another question.  A moment in class-struggle history is coming.  Those who don’t understand will be overwhelmed and defeated.  Those who do understand can intervene and move society to the left.
 Watch People's Convention Now:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6u5xPJaW2s

Red Frog

August 30, 2020 

Fear the Reaper ... Drones

“The Tragedy of American Science – From Truman to Trump” by Clifford Connor, 2020 
This is a socialist take on the state of science in the U.S.  Conner is a science historian who describes the slow prostitution of science to corporate and military power since the end of WWII.  Anti-communists yap about Lysenko’s political rise way back in the 1930s USSR and for good reason.  They should look at their own conflicts of interest approach which encompasses universities, professors and university presidents, various scientists, captured government agencies, laws, research journals, corporate and private research labs, national science bodies, Astroturf consumer groups and Beltway think tanks.  The dictatorship of money & militarism has encroached in many scientific disciplines, creating bad science for profit.

The Corporate Science Complex

Conner wrote the “People’s History of Science.” Among other things, here he examines how toxic sugar became a ‘benign’ ingredient in so many processed foods, brought to us by modern ‘nutrition science’ and official diet guidelines.  Almost half of all U.S. adults have food-derived health problems – heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.  He takes apart the 'high tech' Green Revolution, which now bankrupts farmers and has privatized and commodified seed, feed, fertilizer and pesticides for agro-profits.  He looks at the science debate about sales-based GMOs and the precautionary principal of ‘do no harm’ – so much so that GMOs cannot be mentioned on a package.  He remembers the lies and ‘doubt industry’ around the medical safety of cigarettes, which is reminiscent of the present lies and pseudo-scientific ‘doubts’ sown by oil & gas companies about global warming.

Conner focuses on the sciency promotion and 'tests' of deadly opioids by Big Pharma to the tune of 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocondone pain pills sold over 6 years.  This is the kind of thing that allows the drug industry to have a 21% profit rate.  The industry also gets help from patent protections enforced by the government against generics, fraudulent research, made-up diseases and a focus on high profit remedies, not ones that will help many but bring in little cash.  The privatization of public research in drugs started in 1980 with the bi-partisan Bayh-Dole act.  This allowed universities to patent discoveries, which invited Big Pharma in the front door - blurring the lines between public and private and turning the universities and their scientists into profit-centers.  As part of this, pay to publish ‘science’ journals flooded the scientific community.

Conner reminds us of the toxic water issues in Flint, Washington D.C. and Newark, ignored by the CDC until there was a crisis.  62 million deaths a year world-wide can be attributed to water, air or soil pollution and the CDC pretended nothing in the U.S. was amiss.  He dissects the oil and gas industry, especially fracking’s earthquakes, water pollution and methane venting that are routinely ignored in official and industry studies.  The Kochtopus-funded denial industry is backed by political convenience, as even Obama bragged about building oil infrastructure and development.  Yet the dangerous nature of carbon production has been known by some U.S. scientists since 1977.  Conner tracks the ‘academic-industrial’ complex, which now features leading academic scientists getting grants from corporations and starting their own private companies, leading to huge conflicts of interest.  The university, following the lead of George Mason U, is now a ‘private-public partnership’ in lockstep with neo-liberal principles. Not to ignore the heavily propagandist ‘sciences’ at Universities like political ‘science’ or economic ‘science.’  Conner takes on the fake academics and intellectuals in Beltway ‘think tanks’ like the Brookings Institution, which pretend to authority while actually being captured by corporate money.  They are now basically corporate or military advocacy and lobbying groups.  The official media and government officials continue to believe they are ‘objective’ intellectuals, not partisan parsers.

These examples of corruption of science and thought bleed into the ignoring of good science on global warming, evolution, vaccines, a single biologic race, chastity’s efficiency, gay conversion therapy, abortion, marijuana, even simple things like mask wearing.  Economic and political forces profit from taking bogus irrational stances against real scientific facts.  They are helped by the prostitution of science to money and weapons, as well as the anti-scientific cultural atmosphere engendered by religion and politicians, especially in the GOP.

Dr. Strangelove - Curtis LeMay, Kissinger, Ed Teller, Von Braun

The Military-Industrial Complex Again

R&D for the military composes more than half of all money spent on R&D in the U.S. Military spending and R&D are not just a vile waste of scientific talent, it is also the world’s worst jobs program and a non-cyclic Keynesian economic pump essential to U.S. capitalism.  This is why this technology of death never produces a ‘peace dividend.’  Conner digs into the 1600 Nazi scientists recruited by the U.S. and laundered through “Operation Paperclip” (yes…) to head U.S. programs like rocketry, where former Nazi Werner Von Braun became the first head of NASA.  Other Nazis and some Japanese fascists led U.S. programs in chemical and biologic warfare, in torture, while doing other military ‘medical’ experiments. Many of these scientists had ties to fascist slave labor or death experiments in WWII.  This was only exposed years later.

Conner looks at the U.S. “Atoms For Peace” program which is intimately tied to nuclear arms escalation and proliferation - they are not two separate things. Nuclear energy is not clean, not profitable without government support and not cheap if you take into account the radiation dangers, as proved at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the build-up of nuclear waste across the U.S. Conner reminds us of how the RAND Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) shaped much of U.S. science.  RAND’s criminal tactics advocated dropping 7.662 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, as well as torture and assassination.  As part of RAND’s game theory, John Nash’s ‘beautiful mind’ created a zero-sum game for RAND that privileged betrayal and misanthropy. Conner even gets in a dig at RAND’s ‘mathematical idolatry’ that replaced verified experimental results.  This point relates to the issue of mainstream cosmology’s almost exclusive reliance on math as well.

Military science has produced Reaper drones, ICBMs, cluster and anti-personnel munitions, napalm, neutron bombs,Cruise and Tomahawk missiles, ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, fake smart bombs and intergalactic Star Wars / Space Force plans.  It has unleashed the Stuxnet worm virus and is leading to Terminator-like ‘super soldiers’ with exo-skeletons, brain microchips, combat drugs and a Skynet of technological artificial intelligence powered by high-speed quantum computers.  Micro-assassin ‘fly-bots’ are in the works designed as if they were tiny flies, to kill or explode a target.  Facial recognition and a matrix of satellites make it possible.  CIA psychologists collaborate with torture in Guantanamo and other black sites, while other celebrated scientists design ‘no touch’ torture.  Not to mention the CIA’s MKUltra program experiments, which were notorious for their failure and violence.  All brought to you by corrupted scientists paid the big bucks.

Conner ends with a section on socialist solutions to the perversions of science, including full public funding and control of key research; regulations with teeth of private research; and the elimination of the military-industrial complex.  He also advocates nationalization of many basic industries like pharma, health care, fossil fuels, banking and insurance.  The basic question in a capitalist society becomes “Should science be ‘for the people’ or for corporate profits and the military?”  The answer is already in…in this detailed book.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Peoples’ History of Science”(Conner); “McMindfulness,” “Big Bang,” “Pandemic”(Zizek); “Lost Connections,” “The Happiness Industry,” “The 5^th Risk”(Lewis); “A Redder Shade of Green – Intersections of Science and Socialism,” “Collapse,” “Astrology,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “New Dark Age,” “There is Only One Race,” “The Marijuana Manifesto”(Ventura); “Bit Tyrants,” “Civilization Critical,” “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 24, 2020

Covideo Nation

Streaming Run-Down

Covid has kept many people at home more than they might want.  One solution to dealing with cabin fever is streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or Disney+ if you have access.  These are political or semi-political series that might pass muster.  Two are good, one a maybe, and two are fails of typical escapism.  There are spoilers here. 

Afghan Family Fleeing Anti-Female Regimes

STATELESS (Netflix)

Good.  This short Australian series takes place in and around an immigrant detention camp in southern Australia in 2004-2005.  It is based on a true story involving a disturbed Australian woman who hides in the camp attempting to get to Germany with a stolen passport.  She is trying to avoid some psychological cultists who have threatened her life. The camp mistakenly treats her as an immigrant.  She is white, sexy and crazy and finds herself surrounded by Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, east Asians, Tamils, Syrians – no one like her except the Australian guards, who are also not like her.  The camp is full of desperate immigrants – men, women and children - who have survived the dangerous ocean journey trying to avoid various cruel circumstances in their ‘home’ countries.  Some have family members who have died on the way or from whom they have become separated.  The series focuses on an Afghan man who is trying to leave the camp with his daughter. The camp, under a careerist female officer, is not giving anyone permission to settle in Australia, so it’s a mostly hopeless holding pen except for one small exception.  In 2012 Australia shipped immigrants away from the mainland to off-shore islands to be warehoused after the mainland camps became unmanageable. That is the situation today, with the Australian Navy and Coast Guard now turning back boats.

The camp guards are also affected by dealing with this terrible situation.  One especially, a formerly happy but broke man, witnesses a beating and tries to expose it.  He then turns and blows a whistle on an camp escape organized by his sister, only to finally quit his job as a guard because of the misery he encounters. The short series brings you into the camp yourself and that is its strength.  It is a picture of a difficult capitalist world melting down.   

Not Hannah Montana.  Hannah and Erik in the woods.

HANNAH, Season 1 & 2 (Amazon Prime)

Good.  This series is based on the original 2011 Hannah revenge film about a young female trained in northern Finland to become an assassin.  In that film Hannah grows up in the woods, learning from her ex-CIA father how to shoot, fight and think on the run.  This is somewhat similar to how this series starts, but with a twist.

Besides the original Hannah film, the series borrows a premise from the Jason Bourne series and a bit of the Hunger Games.  It is focused on a group of young teenagers stolen at birth by the money-bloated and seemingly omnipotent CIA.  They want to breed and train them to become robotic assassins for a ‘wing’ of the Agency.   If you hate the CIA, you will enjoy how it is depicted in the most horrible terms.  And you will enjoy it when Hannah and her adoptive father crush various agents, much like Katniss Everdeen handles the Careers.  Like Jason Bourne, it involves a female CIA officer who gradually grows protective towards the outcast assassin, in this case Hannah.  And like Bourne it involves a rouge CIA group that carries out these policies, in this case far-right American nationalists embedded in the organization.  This is to give the series ‘deniability’ towards the rest of the 'regular' CIA, which has used assassination for years.  Taking place in cities across Europe, it is exciting and satisfying to see a young teenage girl and her allies ream these murderous and monied ‘defenders of the American Way.’

International Streaming:

BORDERTOWN (Netflix), THE 12 (Netflix) and THE CLIFF (Amazon Prime)

Fail.  Bordertown is a traditional Finnish police procedural with the standard dysfunctional and brilliant detective solving crimes in a real border town in Finland, Lapeenranta.  The series, like so many others, pretends that many detectives are geniuses in some way or another, which of course is not true.  Its purpose is to humanize them so the police come off as brilliant heroes.  It includes other tropes - detectives who are rarely at home and have to ignore their families.  Phone calls in the middle of the night are standard.  There are an astounding number of murders in a country that has very few murders at all.  Shady government or police powers run the town but never get caught.  Nasty Russians, the enemy de jure, are behind many of the crimes in one way or another, as Lapeenranta is on the Russian border close to St. Petersburg.  Bodies washing up on shore, found in the woods, in shallow graves or out, chopped up or maimed, dead in a house with plenty of splatter or blood pools – the same obsessive stuff we see all the time.

Ending with the tricky search for the killer involving psychology, science, organization, motive and emotional intelligence.  This is probably what draws so many people to detective series – a creepy form of problem solving, even though the clues are completely arbitrary.

The most disturbing part of series like this is the murder, injuries or fear directed at women, female teenagers and young girls – including the cops’ own kids.  I found this bloody trope common to a number of Scandinavian detective series and it extends to nearly the whole genre.  It usually ends with a male, though sometimes female cop, solving the crime. In some of these series the ‘clueless teenage girl’ is a stock character.  Why are ‘dead women’ at the center of so many detective stories?  I think it is a way to instill fear in females and to normalize violent male chauvinism against women and girls. It is not just to show ‘reality.’ Unlike the Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc., this focus on dead women has no politics behind it.

Stephen King likes it but this series is not worth watching unless you like to see young women constantly a target.

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Maybe.  The 12 is about a Belgian jury that in no way resembles the classic U.S. film 12 Angry Men.  It involves 12 jurors and 2 alternates who barely discuss the two subject murders until the very last scene in the jury room.  It’s a sad bunch. They are mostly concerned with their own private traumas or relations.  One has seen her parents murdered.  Another is a construction boss hiding the death of an undocumented worker.  There is an alcoholic who gives information to a journalist.  One juror is a depressed keeper of monkeys.  Another is an autistic father with problems with his daughter.  A key juror is brutalized by her husband.  At the end the accused is convicted on one murder charge and one murder charge is dropped, all based on circumstantial evidence. Both killings involve dead females – one teenager, one a child – so it fits with the ‘dead woman’ pattern.  You are led by the defendant’s clever defense counsel to believe that the flaky accused is probably innocent, but at the last moment we are shown less murky clues that the jury is only half right.

At any rate, ‘a jury of your peers’ at work, showing how each brings their personal experience into their votes.  Not something that should be too surprising.  In a way, it makes a joke of the jury system and a joke of the humans in it.  Compared to the 1957 film 12 Angry Men it reflects a decline in the competence and focus of individual human beings.

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Fail. The Cliff (Hamarinn) is an Icelandic police procedural about a construction project that is attempting to build an electrical transmission tower on an historical and ‘magical’ cliff in the countryside.  Local environmentalists are protesting the project and eventually the viewer finds out how 2 deaths actually happened. In this case, only one women is harmed in the making of this series.  The divorced male detective helping investigate the crimes has trouble relating to his daughter, while the other female detective is becoming estranged from her husband.  Since dysfunctional home life is part of the cop trope, perhaps cops should never get married or have children.

Dull, even with the Nordic ‘magic’ touches.  Make environmentalists look like lunatics.  Works best as Icelandic tourism.

Other prior blog reviews on movie or TV series, use search box, upper left (you can click on the next page for more hits):  “Hunger Games” “The Peaky Blinders,” “Comrade Detective,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Game of Thrones,” “Line of Separation,” “Damnation,” “The Golden Age of U.S. Television,” “Black Sails,” “Fargo,” “Deadwood,” “The Wire” “Treme,” “Mayans M.C.,” “Rebellion.”

The Cultural Marxist

August 10, 2020

The Outrider

“The Outsider,” By Howard Fast, 1984

There are many literary outsiders.  This is not the outsiders of S.E.Hinton fame, working-class teens in Oklahoma getting into trouble with Socs and cops.  This is not the existential stranger of Albert Camus, wandering on Moroccan beaches.   This is not Dostoevsky’s underground man, hidden from society in a St. Petersburg warren. Nor is it the dark skin of Ellison’s invisible man in Harlem.  Or Kafka’s human cockroach in Prague.  And definitely not a supernatural phantom from Stephen King.

This is a middle-class outsider.  He is a low-paid Jewish Reform rabbi, David Hartman, living in a small town in Connecticut.  He never really reconciles with his job as a rabbi.  Over the years he loses his belief in God and even in his wife.  His basic problem is that he served as a rabbi in World War II and was part of the gruesome liberation of Dachau, which haunts him for the rest of his life.  He can’t just be a small-town family man.  His wife Lucy is an apolitical atheist and doesn’t understand his concern for issues beyond them.  She eventually leaves him because of his job, his unrest and the town they live in, which is limited and stultifying to her. At one point he can’t explain ‘evil’ to one of his synagogue members, and this finally trips him up.

Instead he gets involved in politics in various ways. Hartman has to deal with local anti-Semites in his own gentle way.  He defends a congregant who is on the McCarthyite ‘black list’ from his Republican Jewish colleagues.  He has to counsel the Jewish hanging judge in the Sacco & Venzetti trial.  He marches for civil rights in the South with Christian ministers and gets beaten by police.  He opposes nuclear weapons and the nuclear cold war.  He sits down across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a candle to protest the Vietnam War as a pacifist.  Yet he’s not allowed to get angry or ‘pass judgment’ in his personal life.

This is one of Fast’s last books.   He was a left-wing writer who wrote Spartacus and was blacklisted in the 1950s.  At one point he edited the Communist Party's "Daily Worker" but broke with the Party in 1956.  The book is saturated in Jewish identity and religion in the period 1946 to 1971.  I’m third-generation Finnish-Welsh-French.  I do not labor over my ethnic European roots like this, but then I’m not Jewish.  Instead this book demarcates everyone into religious boxes.  It is full of Jewish religious debates, atheist remarks and conversations with David’s friend, a Congregationalist minister. Reform Judaism has to contend with Conservative and Orthodox Judaism.  Hartmann has to stand against the Pentagon and the war-mongers.  He has to avoid the rationalist barbs of his wife.  In a way the book makes all religions function as separatist, tribal forces, which they have ended up being.

It is all somewhat wearying for him.  He feels distanced from the WASPY, middle-class Jewish synagogue goers in his congregation in fictional Leighton Ridge, Connecticut.  His wife and kids don’t really fulfill him. The town has its limits, though he enjoys nature.  Through it all he remains alienated from everything that is happening.  It is not his static, dark world, even though many have high opinions of him.  This I think is what Fast was getting at with the title The Outsider.  His knowledge of the criminal nature of the powerful in society never leaves him.  Not quite an existential Sartrèan character, but close.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Spartacus,” “Citizen Tom Paine,” “April Morning” (all by Fast); “I Married A Communist,” “American Pastoral” (both by Roth).

And I bought it at Chapman Street Books, Ely MN USA

Kulture Kommissar

August 7, 2020         

Automatic From the People

“Cool Town – How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture,” by Grace Hale, 2020

“Place is the space,” to flip a lyric from Sun Ra.  This is one of the rules of creativity, especially in U.S. music scenes.  Athens, Georgia became one of those hotbeds of original musical talent, a smaller version of places like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Laurel Canyon in L.A., Greenwich Village in New York, New Orleans in Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta or Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Nashville and Memphis. 

Hale was part of the ‘80s scene in Athens and she tracks the bands and artists that initially emerged from that small college town – bands like R.E.M., the B-52s, Pylon, Vic Chesnutt and Mathew Sweet.  She does not deal with later Athens’ bands like the Drive-By Truckers, Neutral Milk Hotel and Widespread Panic.  All were nurtured by the presence of the University of Georgia (UGA), but later the town became a magnet for musicians throughout the South.  Today many still live in Athens, which has a great number of music venues and is still partially affordable.  The remnants of the former Georgia Music Museum in Macon are now housed at UGA.

Whether Athens alone ‘launched’ alternative music is certainly questionable and typical southern tub-thumping, but that is beside the point.  Hale goes into incredible detail on the many individual artists and band members who built the Athens music scene.  She starts with local Jeremy Ayers, one of Warhol’s original Factory members, who died in 2016.  These individuals played in the bands and built or benefited from local institutions - the famous 40 Watt Club, the Georgia Theater, local college radio station WUOG and student paper The Red & Black, the Wuxtry record store, the Grit coffeehouse, the UGA art school, the North Georgia Folk Festival and Hale’s own café, the Downstairs.  The Athenian musicians also had direct and essential connections with the punk, CBGB and Warhol scenes in New York City, which lifted them to fame.

Sexual ambiguity – bisexual, drag, gay and lesbian – was one of the ‘transgressive’ conditions that inspired the Athens music scene, along with a very unorthodox art school.  Both attracted gay, ‘bohemian,’ hippie, punk or outcast kids from conservative Georgia to attend UGA or to live in town. Hale thinks they were mostly middle class, though she does not define the concept. Whether these kids knew music or not, they became DIY artists or formed a band, even if it was performance art, even if they were broke, even if they had to work low-paying food jobs to survive.

Hale covers the origins of the retro B-52s, who first played at a Valentine’s Day house party in Athens, and a few months later, played in NYC’s punk clubs.  And Pylon, an art rock band that refused to consider music a career and disbanded in 1983 when it was no longer fun.  Most famously, R.E.M. – Rapid Eye Movement – who took a different, intentional tack and became an internationally-known alternative rock band.  R.E.M. started out playing a raucous Athens birthday party at an abandoned church.  Many of these bands were received well by the rock press, got recording contracts and went on tour with other punk or new wave acts like Gang of Four or Talking Heads.  Hale goes into other Athens bands that are known to the alternative and punk rock cognoscenti – Love Tractor, the Squalls, Guadalcanal Diary, the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies.  This detail sometimes reads like a journalistic “What’s Happenin’?” column in the local Flagpole alternative paper.  Part of this is her nostalgia.

Drive By Truckers w/Peter Buck at the 40 Watt club

Hale is now a history professor and so puts the music in a socio-political context.  She describes the vibrant original Athens scene as ‘post-modernism in sonic form,’ generally a-political, a cultural rebellion instead of a political one.  R.E.M. members Michael Stipe and Peter Buck initially wanted the band to be non-political and ambiguous.  The focus on sexuality, clothing, pop culture, individualism, apolitical art, ‘coolness’ were actually cultural moves to the right after the defeat of the sixties and seventies rebellions.  

In this context Hale wrestles with the ‘colorblind’ approach to the legacy of Jim Crow in the South, as the art scene in town was unavoidably light-skinned, as was UGA.  Especially during the 1980s Reaganite political counter-revolution, the Athens boho atmosphere comes off as inward and abstentionist.  But after 8 years of Reagan and Christian fundamentalism according to Hale, even the Athens’ indies had to turn towards preserving their retro pocket downtown, the cradle of the scene, and then to liberal-left politics.  

As Thomas Frank explained in The Conquest of Cool, capital can co-opt any amount of purely cultural rebellion. To this day, Athens is a mildly liberal city still dominated as a company town by UGA.  Due to the heavy southern color-caste and class structure, Athens-Clarke County is one of the most unequal counties in the U.S., combining high-earning mostly-white professionals living in the same town as proletarian black people working for barely minimum wage.  Drinking beer seems to be the main student occupation.  Yeah, there is still a counter-culture - venues, cafes, bars and bands, house parties and art shows, hipsters, hippies, folkies and scenesters - but there is no cultural revolution here.  In short, ‘cool’ is overrated, even if the music is not. 

The real fun here is how this ‘cool’ town connects to the rock music scene all over the country in the 1970s and beyond.  New York rockers like the Ramones and Patti Smith take precedence, with nods to famous music magazines and critics like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau.  The Athens rockers intersected with local rural traditions and musicians, New York bands, British punks, new wave acts, LA punk metal, Minnesota alternative bands like the Replacements and Husker Dü and more.  If you like music, art and creativity, you’ll get a kick out of this in-depth look at a place in time, a place that still endures despite being in politically reactionary Georgia.

P.S. –  In Athens I’ve sat on a blanket at the North Georgia Folk Festival, heard locals sing love duets at the Foundry, listened to crappy noise bands in the basement Caledonia Lounge, been to dancin’ house parties with Stipe in attendance, enjoyed banjo, beer, bong and bonfire bashes in the Georgia countryside, attended music shows at Hendershott’s, seen Gang of Four at the 40 Watt, shared a joint at the Georgia Theater, read the Flagpole, drank at the Manhattan, Little Kings and the Globe, eaten at the Grit and gone to art shows at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.  For 14 years of visits I’ve known Athens as an outsider knows Athens.

 
Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left (if its working):  “Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta."

And I bought it at May Day Books’ music section!

The Cranky Yankee

August 4, 2020