Drinker's Politics

Russia, Snowden, Stoli & the Gay Movement

I don’t usually comment on the flavor of the day, but so many things came together at the same time, I had to.

It started with sex columnist Dan Savage advocating a boycott of Stolichnaya Vodka because of the anti-gay policies passed by Putin’s legislature.  High-profile gays in LA and San Francisco poured Stoli into the gutters as a nice picture opportunity.  Elsewhere – like in Minneapolis – Stoli is not being boycotted by the bars, even though Minneapolis has a large gay community. 

Putin’s policies are reactionary, as are the policies of many other countries and religions on the gay question.  How about boycotting U.S. ‘southern’ products because they are made in the bastion of anti-gay sentiments in the U.S.?  Or the Catholic Church, home of so much anti-gay theology?  The targets are endless.   7 U.S. allies punish homosexuality with death - and these countries - Kenya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Uganda, Qatar, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan - can sentence gays and lesbians to long jail terms or punishment.  70 countries ban homosexuality outright.  You don't see the U.S. complaining about them.

The Russian legislature should grow up on sexual politics and leave discrimination behind. But developing capitalist nations need to oppress women – and gays oppression is directly linked to women's oppression.  Demonizing 'female' characteristics, and keeping 'male' characteristics the prerogative of men only is how its done.  However, the gay movement should grow up too.  Dan Savage is a columnist and he reflects the middle-class bias of the gay movement’s leadership.  We saw this stunningly displayed when the San Francisco Gay Pride parade refused to honor Bradley Manning, the most heroic gay person at present.  It would have offended their corporate sponsors.  And so it goes. 

Columnists are not political leaders, as much as they try to explain the nature of ‘santorum.’  Savage actually has no ties to any Russian organization that could affect this situation, nor has he reached out to organizations in Russia to do so.  Yet that is what is necessary.  Marxists actually have organizations in Russia because they are not merely nationalists.  Russians will ultimately decide these questions, not Americans.  Marxist organizations and others in Russia will weigh in on these reactionary politics.  Secondary boycotts like this without primary boycotts are pathetic attempts to influence policy.  Consumers do not control capitalism, much as those with wallets wish they could.  (See reviews of “No Local” and “Reviving the Strike,” below) 

So how is Stolichnaya involved in this situation?  Because it is “made in Russia?”  This seems to make it the liberal’s version of ‘freedom fries’ and of American right-wingers pouring French wine into the gutters over the French government’s correct opposition to the Iraq War.  However, the truth is somewhat different.  Stolichnaya was developed somewhere between 1938 and 1944 in Samara in the Kalingrad region, according to Wiki.   Here is what Wiki says about Soli bought outside Russia:  “If bought outside of Russia, the product is produced by the SPI Group and the label reads: Premium Vodka, produced and bottled in Latvia for SPI Cyprus and is labeled as Imported Premium Vodka.”  In other words, like the Irish beer Guinness, American Stoli isn’t even made in Russia, though perhaps some of the ingredients come from there.  Bloomberg reported that Stoli made outside Russia is actually owned by SPI, which is based in Luxembourg.  The CEO even says his company supports LGBT rights.  So its not just made outside Russia, its owned by a company outside Russia!  This even our local paper figured out.

Perhaps Savage needs a research associate.

And if Stoli was made in Russia?  The logic still  doesn't stick.  The Russian legislature passed these harsh, fascistic, anti-gay rules.  Not the workers at Stoli.  At bottom, Savage's logic is nothing but crude nationalism - just like his Republican fellow-travelers.  

Now how easy is it for dumb fuck Americans to hate on Russia?  Pretty damn easy, and that crosses both Party lines.  Yesterday, Democratic Party and MSNBC blowhard Lawrence O’Donnell attacked Russia expert Julia Ioffe from the New Republic – a right-wing liberal magazine – for being insufficiently hostile to Putin.  Anyone who doesn’t roll over for American imperialism is suspect to O'Donnell, you see, even people that agree with him.  Ioffe thinks Obama boycotting the summit was a good idea too. The issues?  Syria, Snowden or … Stoli?  President Obama declined to participate in a summit with Putin over … Snowden!  The U.S. dictat is refused on one little issue – and suddenly, no dialogue, no diplomacy.  If Bush had done this, the Democrat Party chorus would have been up in arms. But it shows how important they think their surveillance state is.

The bloodbath in Syria between a minority Shi’ite Alawite dictatorship and a majority Sunni population has become, not a class war, but a religious war with class overtones, with the U.S. on one side and Russia on the other, with Sunni Al-Qaeda on the side of the U.S.  Go figure. I can’t say which side I support – as I don’t - but I know that there is some nationalized property in Syria that the U.S. would love to privatize – with or without Al-Qaeda.  And I know that dictatorship is not in the interest of any labor movement, and oppression of a national religious majority is just another form of apartheid. Unspoken is Syria’s opposition to Israel in this situation, but certainly, a U.S. geopolitical goal is to eliminate immediate enemies of Israel.

Then we have Snowden, a whistle-blower who has exposed illegal spying on Americans, and everyone else in the world.  You bet those power-loving neo-liberals in the Democratic Party are pissed.  Their big, high-tech, hipster surveillance-state, hoping to save every piece of digital information in the world, has been exposed.  Why do we have more spies, billions of dollars, technology, government security clearances and SWAT teams now then we ever had when we were competing with the USSR, way back in the 80s?  The USSR had nuclear warheads, millions of soldiers, many allies, etc.  Certainly not because of a tiny group like Al-Qaeda, which the U.S. has incidentally now militarily-allied with in Libya and Syria.  And now, Al-Qaeda is stronger in Iraq than it ever was, after being ‘liberated’ by American bombs.  It didn't exist before then. After all, the original home of Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and it’s Sunni Wahabist sect, is our number 2 Mid-East ally.  Given this, I think the American people are the ultimate target, as is everyone else in the world.  Not 5,000 loose Al-Qaeda members.  They are only the patsies, the excuses, the sacrificial goats, bloody reactionaries as they might be. 

Russia let Snowden stay in their country because the U.S. would have sentenced and tortured him like Bradley Manning, another whistle-blower.  If the U.S. had a “Russian” Snowden, they would have protected him too.  Manning is, without a doubt, the most heroic gay person in the world right now.  Which is why the middle-class gays and the official Democratic Party gays hate him.  They should be called State Department Gays.  Call them that. 

Glenn Greenwald is another heroic gay figure, who has supported Assange, Snowden, Manning and other whistle-blowers as a journalist for the Guardian and Salon.com.  He has been offered legal protection by the Brazilian government, where he lives, if he returns to the U.S. This is because of possible threats against Greenwald by certain U.S. lawmakers and also possibly by the U.S. Justice Department under Eric Holder, which is in the process of criminalizing journalism as an ‘aid to terrorism.’  (Greenwald’s book, “With Liberty & Justice for Some” is reviewed below. A commentary on Holder, "Fire Holder," is also below.)

And that brings us back to Stolichnaya – which I am drinking at this very moment, mixed with tonic - so the Latvians will be happy.  Hey, Lativia!  Let’s look at what the gay movement has accomplished in the U.S.  Against the explicit policy of the Democratic Party, whose leadership is full of heterosexual mainliners like Obama, they tripped the trigger in so many states on gay marriage, gays in the military and even DOMA – that the Democrats caved.  Now the Democrats don’t cave on war or Wall Street or poverty or foreclosures or unemployment or surveillance or what-have-you – the non-culture war issues.  But they did cave on gay rights, and that is because their base pressured them – and also because they had to throw a bone.  A BONE.   Remember, Clinton passed DOMA and DADT. 

Bone, you say?  Don’t get suggestive now.  Let’s look at the economic roots of gay oppression.  There are many homeless gay youth who have run away from home, many for good reason.  Gays are subject to physical attack.  Gays actually have less money than heterosexuals overall.  They can also be fired for being gay in over 20 states here in the U.S.  Most are not wealthy or middle-class.  Yet the leadership of the gay movement is full of gay businessmen and is primarily middle-class.  So, like the women’s movement, there are class differences among gays, and this results in different class strategies and interests.  No surprise, as this is the same in the black and Latino movements too. Class is universal, and cuts across all lines – religious, national, every single one.  Working-class gays need their own leaders, not light-weight columnists like Savage. 

However, unlike blacks, Latinos or women in the U.S., gays are not oppressed as an economic stratum or segment of the class, but as a cultural stratum.  Super-exploitation of the economic kind, as far as I know, is not practiced on gays as a group.  Which is why ethnic or gender discrimination, where money is made, is fundamentally different from gay discrimination. Gay rights involve democratic rights.  Women's rights involve democratic rights - and economic issues like exploitation in the home or lower wages.  Capitalism is not economically thriving on keeping gays in the labor shithole.  This is why the Democratic Party can throw-a-bone on this issue. It is financially a wash.  And finance is what makes those boys get up in the morning, no matter what they tell you during elections.

Gay discrimination relates to the institution of the capitalist family, the military and masculine culture.  Democratic rights should be extended to GLBT people in every country in the world.  However, insecure males get self-important mileage out of not being gay, and of hating those who are.  They are ‘men,’ you see, and conservative culture wants them to feel good about themselves – even if they might be unemployed or uneducated. This is part of the 'male bribe' paid to some men.  And oddly, the recent gains in gay rights, which should be supported, relate to the two most conservative institutions in society – marriage and the military.  The capitalist state needs more people getting married and needs more skilled people in the military – and gays can provide both.  Watch the sad marriage statistics leap up as gay marriage is legalized.  Watch our military become even more skilled and intelligent – as long as they can keep the Bradley Mannings of the future out.  Conservatives of certain kinds will actually be happy. When they are not sad.  Poor souls. 

Red Frog

August 9, 2013

P.S. - Glenn Greenwald's companion, David Miranda, was detained by UK police for 9 hours at Heathrow on August 19, and all his electronics taken from him.  He had come back from a visit in Berlin with Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who is working on a film about the NSA.  This is a blatant attempt at intimidation of the press by Obama's Poodle, David Cameron. 

In Search of Creative Dark Matter

“9.5 Thesis on Art and Class,” by Ben Davis, 2013.

Davis is an activist New York visual arts critic who has been involved in social movements for about a decade. He’s also a rigorous and knowledgeable art critic who has absorbed the best elements of Marx and later, Trotsky.  The first point, 1.0, of his ‘thesis” on the visual arts is:  “Class is an issue of fundamental importance to art.”  And so it goes from there.  He deconstructs the various strands of ostensibly edgy and progressive art theories and practice – anarchist, utopian, Frankfort school, ‘outsider’ art, street art, graffiti, Situationist theories and post-modernism, to arrive at a realistic and progressive position that still reveres quality art, but understands that it can be combined with a political movement to really change society.  In other words, he has not yet given up.

One of Davis’ fundamental points is that actual artists occupy a position in the class structure in the ‘middle’ class – i.e. between capital and labor. He bases this on, not the amount of money they earn, which is always a crude and inaccurate measure of class position – but their control over their artistic work.  In that, they are, as the economic expression goes, ‘independent contractors’ or small businessmen – setting their own hours, topics, style, audience, materials, location, and every other input into the creative process.  In this they are not working-class, as workers lives are for the most part strictly controlled by the circumstances of their job and their bosses, but more like free-lancers.   Artists attempt to attract buyers through galleries, museums, universities, art shows, foundations, grants and corporate or non-profit involvement.  

While the vast majority of artists also work other jobs to survive (the heralded ‘day job’) – they still ultimately see themselves and their position as middle-class.  And of course, this analysis can be easily transferred to the lives of other artists, like actors or writers, photographers or film-makers.  Davis pooh-poohs the actual economic impact of ‘creative economy’ enclaves, (see review of North East Minneapolis art crawl, “The Minneapolis Spectacle,” below) and also distinguishes ‘creative’ people that work for corporations from actual artists. As such, Davis never lets the real material foundation of the ‘art world’ hide under some kind of academic or social fantasy, and this grounds the book.  It should be required reading for all art students.

Davis has some fascinating figures on the amount of artists in Florence during the Renaissance – only 30; the amount in Paris and France in 1780 - 500 entered a gallery competition then; in 1860 the number entering the same competition was 5,000.  Now there is such a surfeit of art MFA’s in the U.S. that a new gallery PHD has been created to allow one to ‘stand above the crowd.”  As this shows, art is no longer the province of the isolated painter who taught himself or learned from a ‘master’ but is another product of academe, ‘bought’ by tens of thousands of students. “Art” has become a more mass phenomenon in numbers – but not in remuneration.  However, these numbers have not changed the class character of the people who create most art, or their subjects or involvement, and this is one of Davis’ points.

In one chapter he addresses the gender disparities in New York shows, which now run less than 20% female artists, while more than 50% of art graduates are female.  Could it be that most art buyers are men?  Could it be that female artists are dealing with the same counter-revolutionary backlash that exists in the rest of society on abortion rights, rape and employment? (See commentary on ‘Rape, Really? below”)

In the process of his polemics, one of his sweetest jabs is at the Situationist International based in Paris, led by Guy DeBord.  (Debord’s book, “Society of the Spectacle,” reviewed below). They advocated a ‘revolutionary’ approach to art and culture.  A group that called itself the ‘society of equals’ after the French revolutionaries led by Babeuf was actually a personality cult around DeBord, which threw people out on the flimsiest of pretenses.  It never amounted to more than 70 people.  As Davis points out, in 1968 they spent more time attacking John Luc Goddard than DeGaulle. As a group that substituted artistic intellectualism for the class struggle, they couldn’t be beat, but they are a present inspiration for various anarchist art collectives.  And they mirror many present attempts at ‘revolutionary’ art.

Davis does, like many others, describe the present ‘art market’ as dominated by billionaires, Russian oligarchs, oil sheiks, hedge fund managers, corporations and a handful of extremely wealthy auction houses, museums and galleries.  As you can see, these institutions cannot provide a democratic or progressive content to art, no matter their statements to the contrary about the ‘openness’ of the art world.  Nor, by their very nature, can they decrease inequality in the art business.  Because of this, Davis does not see gaining access to the ‘art market’ as the key question – it is impossible in the present set-up.  Ultimately, the key question is what class is involved in the art, how is it involved, and how it connects with the general population and social movements.  And ultimately, presumably, how it ends the ‘market’ in art.

He does not address the issue of the government hiring people to paint, similar to what happened in the workers states or during the Depression in the U.S. This would indeed end the art market, intellectual property and instead provide thousands of artists a decent living.

Nor does Davis address Latino muralism, Soviet art or Soviet Constructivism (see review of MORA show, “Soviet Women,” below), older styles like surrealism (see review of Walker show, “Frida Kahlo,” below), various world-artists or what visual art IS useful and emancipatory.  He picks isolated artists here or there, though he praises some feminist and gay art from the near past. As a 'school,' he does highlight ‘Tropicale’ in 1960s Brazil as one of the styles he sees as significant.  This was a style of painting, later spreading into other disciplines, that reacted against the 1964 military coup and dictatorship in Brazil.  Yet that is far in the past.

Davis knows of the New York-centric nature of his work, and that it might limit his understanding.  In this book, his ‘inside-the-art-beltway’ approach is somewhat limiting and off-putting, as nearly all of his examples come from New York galleries and New York artists.  However, this has an advantage, because New York is where the bourgeoisie lives.  The Guardian printed a column August 7, 2013 titled “New York Still Capital of Art World Cool,” waxing ecstatic on how New York has again become the center of world art once again, by combining popular culture figures like Jay-Z and Lady Gaga with …  well, its not quite clear.  In that essay, Jonathan Jones writes, “To see a Mark Rothko painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art and then walk the streets outside is to experience a perfect match of art and life.”  Rothko died in 1970, so ‘modern’ art evidently is really not very modern.  Nor is ‘walking the streets of New York” the closest thing to ‘life’ unless you don’t get around much.

My contention is that American art is almost dead, which is why Davis’ book is so difficult.  His thesis is that movements influence artists, and if movements are at a low ebb - at least in the U.S. – then ‘art’ in the U.S. will be at a low ebb.  At most, art in the U.S. is either expert decoration or pointless shock.  Many young artists were drawn to the Occupy movement, but its life was so short that a 'scene' could not fully develop.  Even his thin references to Trotsky’s, “Art and Revolution,” “Literature and Revolution” and “Problems of Everyday Life” are sketchy.  Really, Davis seems to have only a glancing acquaintance with working-class movements, but then, things like that can change. 

The influences from world movements or ‘painterly’ societies like Cuba, central Europe, Latin America and other peripheries could revive working-class and progressive visual art here in the U.S. - IF some kind of working-class mass movement develops.  In the U.S., working class Latino or black artists still exist, but only the edges.  Most working-class people have been barred from the ‘art world’ and given their lack of time and inculcated desires, cannot devote the necessary energy or skills to painting, let alone achieving acceptance from upscale New York gate-keepers.   Painting in the U.S. has also been ghettoized as an upper-middle class preoccupation, so museum attendance is actually down among working-class people.  This is no surprise.  

Attempts to break out of this ghetto are usually not successful.  “Banksy,” the anarchist street artist, who’s work now goes for millions, is the exception.  Davis points out that the financial ‘blue chip’ styles of impressionism, the “Old Masters” and slightly recent artists like Warhol are now so rare that ‘contemporary art’ is now the up and coming ‘speculative stock’ of the art world.  And Banksy figures in this.  The rest of the artists?  Not so much.  Indeed, the main outlet for most artists seems to be neighborhood ‘art crawls,’ not Sotheby auctions in New York. 

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog / August 7, 2013

Addendum:  Banksy is now in 'residency' in New York City.  One of the political theater events he has staged is this:  In the middle week of October, Banksy went to Central Park and set up on the sidewalk, anonymously selling his works for $60.  He made about $400+ that day, not bad for a sidewalk artist.  However his normal work sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet no one recognized who he was, or recognized the art.  Thomas Frank made the same point this week.  The art establishment decides what is valuable art, not the people.  And that art is then primarily determined and 'marked' by its price.

The Society of Magical Thinking

"Bright Sided – How Positive Thinking is Undermining America,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, 2009

Ehrenreich is a well-known progressive journalist, who’s prior book, “Nickel & Dimed” took her undercover into the world of the service-sector precariat.  Now she is tackling something that started as a personal issue – breast cancer – and evolved into an insight into American conservative psychology and propaganda.  Eternal optimism, unfazed by facts, reaches into the most personal corners of our lives, and also into our meta-political lives. 

In one way, this is a philosophic broadside against idealism and magical thinking on an internal level.  In another, it is an explanation of why ‘pessimism’ (actually, realism) is such an enemy in a capitalist society.  She tracks, chapter by chapter, the sources of the ideology of ‘positive thinking’ in the U.S. – in academics, in religion, in politics and economics, at work, even in the world of cancer.  If you have suddenly noticed a raft of ‘scientific’ studies in the mainstream news (‘lamestream’ wasn’t far off…)  promoting the uber-happiness of conservatives, married people, religious people and optimists, you know something is afoot.  If you have been denounced as ‘cynical’ or ‘pessimistic’ or ‘negative’ for saying somewhat accurate things, by family members, friends or co-workers, you know what I’m talking about.

Ehrenreich challenges these studies, and also the promoters and business firms behind them.  She reveals the personal coaches, ‘scientists’ and success gurus who people the best-seller lists, corporate functions, academic sinecures and mega-churches.  She writes a surprisingly interesting history of the development of ‘positive thinking’ as a reaction to the dour Calvinist philosophy of the early U.S.  She traces it through its various permutations, from the early Christian rumblings of Christian Science, to Norman Vincent Peale’s mid-20^th century classic, “Power of Positive Thinking,’ or Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” (which Charles Manson read cover to cover) and on to books like “The Secret” and the present corporate and political leaders of today.  Yeah, the ones who’s ‘optimism’ and ‘animal spirits’ led us into the 2007-2008 economic crash.  As she puts it, if ‘optimism’ is all we need to change reality, why is reality getting worse – more poverty, more unemployment, more foreclosures, more government militarism and less health? 

In this, you can see nothing changes in the U.S. – absolute positivity has been around since the development of industrialism.  It is an essential philosophic tool of social control.

This book started out when Ehrenreich got breast cancer and, in the process of dealing with the disease, entered the world of The Komen Foundation, pink ribbons and the ‘positive’ outlook thought necessary to fight the disease.  Of course, there is no scientific link between a mere outlook and staying alive.  That didn’t stop the message that, if you die of cancer, it is your own fault for having a poor outlook.  Survivors are winners – and dead losers are, well, insufficiently positive.  The onus is taken off corporate or environmental or food sources of cancer, and onto each individual’s attitude.  Sound familiar?

After that, Enrenreich first encounters are with the life coach industry, which believes that positive visualization, the ‘law of attraction” (pin a dollar bill to your wall and more will gather around it!) and thought re-programming will make reality accord with your thoughts!  This is covered in a veneer of misunderstood quantum mechanics that would make a scientist squirm, as ‘scientism’ is necessary nowadays to cover up the essentially magical thinking underneath.  She spies the essential underlying connection between Calvinism and ‘positive mental attitudes’ – a relentless focus on internal thinking, ideas and emotions in need of discipline.  After all, reality has a tendency to be negative sometimes.  PMA must turn those episodes into ‘opportunities.’  She cites evidence that this practice can actually make people … more unhappy when they fail, as they will do.  She also discovers, according to some life coaches, that ‘negative’ people must be shunned.

She takes a tour of religious ‘success gospel,’ and comes up with some interesting data for us atheists.  3 of the 4 largest ‘Christian’ mega-churches do not have crosses, bibles, stained windows, spires or other religious symbols in their buildings.  They are more like comfortable corporate environments with lots of pop music and uplifting sermons.  Their services do not dwell on guilt, sin or evil – negative things - but more on the ‘prosperity gospel’ – words fit for a middle-class audience or a desperate working-class one.  Jesus wants you to be rich!  It seems Calvin is missing even from some modern Protestant-derived non-denominational environments.  The smiley face has replaced the cross.

Ehrenreich’s next stop is the corporate CEOs that hire ‘life’ and success coaches, and rely on ‘hunches’, ‘instinct’ and snap decisions to make major changes – not dry statistics or numbers.  She especially highlights Tom Peters as one of the leading business gurus of ‘creative destruction’ and chaos – chaos that seems to have somewhat negative consequences, like mass layoffs.  Corporate workplaces, especially white-collar ones, are overrun with ‘team-building’ and positivity training, and ‘negative’ people are shunned and even fired.  Many ‘positivity’ coaches say, “Throw the negative people in your life out.”  While many ordinary people were deluded into buying impossible mortgages, what about the many deluded CEOs and firms that sold them to them?  Their delusions were even greater.  And that went all the way to the top, even to the Randian Alan Greenspan. (see commentary on Greenspan, “Who is Ron Paul?,” below, as well as 4 book reviews in which he is mentioned).

Her last stop is the academic environments that churn out ‘happyness’ studies, and college programs in ‘positive’ psychology.  (Really!)  While the scientific foundation of this branch of ‘psychology’ is so flimsy even the academic leader of this movement, Martin Seligman, is dubious, it soldiers on with help from corporation donations.  The Templeton Society, a right-wing foundation that also promotes creationism, has donated.  Seligman even explicitly opposes trying to change society, but instead wants you to ‘change your mind instead.’  This, ultimately, is the extremely conservative message of ‘positive’ psychology.

This environment is not limited to conservative religious, economic, political and corporate figures.  It extends to some liberals, like Oprah Winfrey, whose positive ‘feel-good’ philosophy is merely a gentler rehashing of the same magical idealism dished out by the prosperity gospel’s religious figures.  Though at least if you sit in her audience, you might win a car.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

August 5, 2013

Orange Has Been the New Black ... for a Long Time

“Are Prisons Obsolete?” by Angela Davis, 2003

Prisoners in Guantanamo on hunger strike.  Prisoners in California on hunger strike.  Volleyed and thundered.  Almost total black-out by the bourgeois ‘news.’  We know the majority of prisoners in Guantanamo are innocent or with short term charges.  The prisoners in California are protesting, as their number one demand, the practice of long solitary confinement.  They say it is an abridgement of the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, as prohibited in the U.S. Bill of Rights.  Solitary for many years is torture.  Of course, the U.S. protects torturers and still sends suspects to be tortured, even under Obama.  Solitary?  The U.S. CIA developed that technique long ago – referred to in Naomi Klein’s book, “The Shock Doctrine.” (reviewed below)

Angela Davis, of course, was jailed herself long ago, and is still an anti-prison activist.  This book is a description of the need for prison ‘abolition’ – not prison ‘reform.’  The term ‘prison reform,’ as she points out, is as old as prisons themselves – showing they were flawed from the get-go.  Prisons were at one time thought as a progressive reform over English capital punishment and mutilation for minor crimes (see Saudi Islamist criminal law now).  However, even in the 1800s a normal liberal like Dickens understood that prisons were cruel and rehabilitated no one.  Nothing has changed – except, perhaps, the neo-liberals, as they now embrace the prison-industrial complex.

Davis’ figures are somewhat dated, as things have gotten worse since she wrote this book.  2.3 million prisoners are now incarcerated in the U.S., the highest percentage in the world.  25% of all the prisoners in the world are in U.S. prisons, when we have only 5% of the world population.  Half are in jail for drug ‘crimes.’  The majority are black.  70% of arrested blacks go to jail for drug ‘crimes’ – a percentage many times higher than whites. The super-max isolation prison – invented here in the states, the land of the ‘free’ – is now being exported to South Africa, Australia and other countries. 

Her book fits in perfectly with the books “Slavery by Another Name” and “The New Jim Crow” (both reviewed below.) It is a short primer on prison justice issues, covering the profiteering corporations, women’s issues in jail, the theory and a bit of the history of prisons, and the politics of abolition versus ‘reform.’  As Davis points out, mass incarceration in the U.S. is an extension of slavery and of Jim Crow convict leasing.  It plays the same role in the black – and now Latino population – as those systems did, as a form of labor profit and control.  Prison and police hang over the black and Latino communities like Damocles swords, as a warning to all – even if you are never jailed.  Time passes in the U.S., but only the forms change.

After the Attica revolt in 1971, college courses were offered to prisoners by a local college.  That program ended 21 years later and that is symbolic - as U.S. prisons no longer pretend to ‘reform’ anyone.  It is a purely punitive institution, measured in time only – just like work.  Libraries are shut, educational opportunities reduced, even weight-training cut back or ended.  Instead, prisoners work for capitalist firms for peanuts – Hospital Corporation of America, Dial Soap, AT&T, Famous Amos, ADM, Nestle, Wal-Mart, Ace, Hewlett Packard, RJ Reynolds, Verizon, Polaroid, Sprint and Ameritech. Not to mention the integration of the military with the prison-industrial complex, or the firms like Wackenhut or Correctional Corporation of America (“CCA”) and the food/ medical/ drug firms that can make direct profit in the privatization of prisons.  And no surprise, privatization is most prominent in the south and west of the U.S.  The American Gulag is a very profitable place. 

The strip search, which is legal in the American prison system – which involves probing a woman’s vagina and anus and a man’s anus for ‘contraband’ – is a form of sexual assault.  And it is just the beginning of the practices of sexual abuse and assault practiced in U.S. prisons, of which women are especial targets  (See commentary on "Rape, Really?"  below.) While ‘outlawed,’ the practices are not prosecuted, but tolerated as a part of the punishment regime.  Hey, you’re in ‘prison.’  What do you expect? 

Davis does not dwell on the death penalty or the drug war or draconian sentencing laws or even solitary, opposing all, but instead shows how these practices are part of a wider prison system that is actually an integral part of capitalism.  Prisons are the place where economic, cultural and ethnic ‘violators’ are put; where the surplus population can be housed; where corporate super-profits can be made; where punishment can be meted out that is not meant to deter crime; where minorities can be disenfranchised; where the ‘free’ work-force can be terrorized; where blame can be laid. 

So far, it seems to be working.  But like every other oppressed group, prisoners are rising.

And I bought it at Mayday Books.

Red Frog

July 24, 2013

P.S. - A quote from the Guardian re prison ’reform’ and racist disparities in crack cocaine sentencing, July 23^rd:  "Last month, President Obama quietly did something that should shake every American to the core. Seeking to enforce federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed, the Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to ensure that thousands of human beings, mostly poor and mostly black, remain locked in prison – even though everyone agrees that there is no justification for them to be there."

I.E. Obama & Holder want to continue the sentences of mostly black crack cocaine convicts, even after those laws have been repealed.  In other words, the black upper-middle class running the STATE can be as big an enemy of black people as the white upper middle class.

Block 17 on the El Camino Real

“Camino Real,” play by Tennessee Williams.  Girl Friday Productions, July 19, 2013

Minneapolis is reputed to be second to NYC in number of theaters per resident.  So there are plenty of plays to see here, by all kinds of companies, fly-by and not.  This ensemble group, which seems to specialize in mainstream plays, chose Tennessee William’s most abstract work, “Camino Real” for its latest outing.  The parts played by Gutman, the Gypsy and Kilroy were especially strong.  The title is mostly pronounced in the gringo fashion, ‘CAM-ino Real, as in reality, not 'RE-al.’

Normally, Williams specialized in sad humanistic dramas about realistic, sometimes working-class, people. Instead, this play is sort of a sprawling, symbolic mess.  Written in 1952, it starts out as some kind of veiled political allegory, ‘perhaps’ about life under an unidentified dictator called the ‘Generalissimo.’  The real Camino Real or “royal” or “kings highway,” is a road in California linking Catholic missions.  Another with that name links Mexico City and California, so it might reference someone like the Mexican dictator Porfiro Diaz, prior to the Mexican revolution. The El Camino de Santiago is a religious trek in the Spanish Pyrenees, which would reference Generalissimo Franco. It could mean Generalissimo Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, who was another bastard during that period. Or it could just mean the ‘Democrats and Republicans’ dominating Los Angeles and the U.S. at the time.

The dictator, through his front man ‘Gutman” and his bandolier-wearing soldiers, controls the water fountain at the center of town, shoots people to death in the plaza, controls the main hotel, and captures people to turn them into ‘patsies’ or clowns.  His ‘street cleaners’ patrol the streets and haul away the dead bodies of the poor.  The Gypsy and her hooker daughter work with Gutman to dominate the Town, which he has divided into 16 blocks – just as the play has 16 sections.  Gypsies in the 50s, of course, still meant ‘treacherous.” Gutman has banned the use of the word, “hermano” – brother in Spanish.  The pronunciation alone hints that the play is dominated by Nortenos.  So it looks like a veiled and hesitant look at oppression.   Perhaps a theater version of magical realism a la “100 Years of Solitude.”  Indeed, the Camino Real is a bleak place, and Williams said it was his vision of his world at the time. 

The lead characters are various ridiculous romantics – Don Quixote, Casanova, Baron de Charlus from Proust’s “Remembrances of Things Past,” Lord Byron (as a rock and roll poet), a famous courtesan, Marquerite Gautier, and a famous gypsy.  Into this batch of hapless romantics runs “Kilroy.”  Kilroy is the name U.S. soldiers used during World War II to mark their presence in various European towns through drawings.  Kilroy is a former Golden Gloves champ, down on his luck, but still happy, energetic, naïve, yet pure at heart.  Kilroy, who is working-class, stands up to Gutman, with no help from the romantics, and is ultimately beaten and turned into a ‘patsy’ with a blinking ‘red’ nose.

Most of the ostensibly political action takes place prior to the intermission – in the first 6 blocks’ of the portentous ‘Real.’  After intermission, during the next 10 blocks, many denizens of the Camino Real jump on the ‘il fugitivo’ plane and escape.  The soldiers disappear.  What remains are two love stories between Casanova and the Courtesan and Kilroy and the Gypsy’s daughter, Esmeralda.  The street cleaners lose their political nature and take on the nature of ‘death’ itself.  Gutman ultimately just becomes a ‘devil’ figure, disconnected from politics.  Kilroy and Quixote eventually leave the Street together through a one-way exit – suicide - after Kilroy escapes his role as a patsy.  The aging Casanova and his unwilling Courtesan finally embrace, even though Casanova was not known for his allegiance to one woman.  The Gypsy girl falls in love with the honest gringo, but he has been turned into a cat and is dead and gone.  In the end, Williams jettisons allegorical politics and instead timidly embraces ‘love’ as his solution to the problem of death and decay – something we are familiar with from his other plays.  Of course, this is no solution either.  Helplessness is instead the overall feeling the play transmits. 

Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, was gay, and was marked by that birthplace and his sexual orientation. He died in a hotel in New York, some say from an overdose of drugs, others from the effects of his drugged state. 

This play seems to be an attempt to generalize and perhaps modernize his style.  It was written at the beginning of the McCarthy period and some see it as a reaction to the conservatism of the time. After all, writers do not write in a social vacuum.  I’ve seen 6 of his other plays in various forms – “Glass Menagerie,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Night of the Iguana,” “Streetcar Named Desire,” “Summer & Smoke,” and “Suddenly Last Summer” - and this is the weakest.  He worked in Hollywood for a long time, adapting his plays to the screen, and was no doubt familiar with the ‘El Camino Real’ running through California and Los Angeles.  Williams turns that road from a beautiful name into an awful place – ‘perhaps’ his view of America, but a very hazy view at that.  Many commentators attempt to make this Williams' play political.  Even this troupe writes that this play will ‘resonate with the present.”  Personally, anything this oblique will not resonate much at all.  What we really need are direct artistic attacks on oppression and the state, not heavily veiled, self-censored, and ultimately pathetic, attempts.

And I saw it at Theater Garage

Red Frog

July 21, 2013

Night Witches, Soviet Amazons and the Red Venus

“Women in Soviet Art” Exhibition at the Museum of Russian Art (“MORA”), Minneapolis, through November 10, 2013

The MORA has put on another great show of Soviet art, this time centering on feminist and female proletarian themes.  The only museum of its kind in the U.S., MORA is curated by Masha Zavialova, a former top translator in the USSR.  It has the largest collection of Soviet art outside Russia.  This show can lead to a re-evaluation of Soviet art in general – at least to people who completely scoffed at it in the past.  Unlike present bourgeois art, which does not focus on people or work, but perhaps day-glo refrigerators packed in tea leaves, this show does not avoid reality, labor or humanity.

Betsy Rosa Ironing the Flag

The exhibit is structured on a time-line, from the initial revolutionary period, to art under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev – of women during the war, at work, at play, and also painting – as the show includes Soviet women artists too.  Of particular interest are five great paintings by Gely Korzhev, who was born in 1927 and just died last year.  This is one of them – an activist ironing a banner for a celebration of the October revolution, “On the Eve of the October Holiday.” 

Another Korzhev work, “Adam & Eve,” shows a disabled Russian worker and former soldier waiting for his working wife to decide if he should have his vodka apple – the Russian version of the fall.  Another smacks of the grotesques of Goya – ugly Russian politicians gather under the dissected body of a female Russia, though this ‘mother’ Russia still dominates the picture. In another, the paint takes on the feel of the rough skin of an elderly Soviet solider and his daughter.  In another, the working-class “Red Venus” is revealed – head scarf and boots, naked.  (More of his work here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfXHH84GV4c)

These monumental canvases capture Soviet women – Russian, Armenian, Uzbek – working as loggers, machinists, road workers, plasterers and painters, engineers, child-care workers, military pilots, astronauts, fishmongers, human plow animals, soldiers, young girls and students.  Two depict giant women wielding log spikes, aptly called ‘Soviet Amazons” by Zavialova.  One, Razdrogin’s “Worker,” done in 1970, shows a somber young woman in front of a wall of fish – wearing the same white uniform and wings as the headless white fish behind her.  Anyone who has read “The Jungle” will see the symbolism here.  (“The Jungle,” reviewed below.) Other paintings are of the 'Night Witches’ – young Soviet women pilots who flew bi-planes at night over Nazi lines to drop bombs, sometimes 10 sorties a night – with just maps, no radar, no high speeds, just guts.  There are also lighter pictures of private families at the beach, nervous schoolgirls frolicking in the snow in Moscow or reading by a window or listening to the words of their grandmother.  The pictures show women not to just be ‘workers’ but to also have a personal, private side – even at work.  Of course, work is not as glamorous in real life as it is in a painting – it is much harder, dirtier and more dangerous.  Though NOT being pictured at all is hardly an improvement – yet that is the tack bourgeois and petit-bourgeois artists take.   The working classes in capitalist countries are truly the invisible men and women.  This art, at least, makes them 'present.'

The text, written by Zavialova, is a mini-history of Russia, explaining the role of women in the USSR. (See also “Soviet Women – Walking The Tightrope,” reviewed below.)  In 1917 the new Soviet Constitution allowed the vote, divorce, abortion, the right of women to work, to education, to be in the military – in effect a complete ERA - an ERA that does not yet exist even in the U.S.  It details the efforts of Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai in setting up communal crèches, kitchens and laundries.  These steps led to a doubling of female life expectancy and 90% reduction in child mortality. 

The texts also detail the work of the “Zhenotdel” – the womens' section of the Communist Party.  Elected women went to work-sites, hospitals, schools and other institutions and weighed in on issues from a working-class feminist point of view.

The text details the later backwards steps taken by Stalin, who declared the womens' question ‘solved.’  The state began sending women back to the kitchen and home, reintroducing sex segregation, banning abortion - a sort of Soviet Victorianism.  Pictures of working women were less and less frequent.  Yet women had to flood into the workforce, partly because so many men died during the Civil War and especially during and after World War II.  Eventually, at a certain point in the ‘50s, 100% of new workers were women, and with it, more depictions of women workers as someone worthwhile.  However, this new-found freedom carried a cost for women: working both at home and at work, the double-shift.  Exhaustion, anger, alcoholism and unhappiness came in its wake.  This caused the first Soviet feminists to begin to organize in 1979.  Later, the great ‘liberal’ Gorbachev was quoted as saying that the ‘excesses’ of womens' liberation in the USSR had to be corrected, and so the USSR should ‘return women to their womanly mission.' Perhaps he was anticipating bourgeois restoration.

The exhibit is especially interesting because it includes more than paintings.  There are displays of Constructivist and other fabrics, original Russian feminist Samizdat printings on onion paper, posters about ending “Kitchen Slavery” commissioned by Kollontai, the first and very popular color Soviet cookbook, Constructivist wallpaper, the legend of Baba Yaga, photos of female Soviet self defense units, even a rather bad bust of Angela Davis in wood!

Putting this art next to desiccated American ‘post-modernism’ is instructive.  One speaks to and of the majority of people in the country.  The other ignores them.

Red Frog

July 16, 2013

I visited the MORA on Bastille Day, a celebration of the victory of the French People over monarchy, the church and the army.

"God is the Better Story ...? "

“Life of Pi,” film by Ang Lee, 2012

I heard this film once described as a very long screen-saver and I had to see it.  After all, what could be more beguiling than the artificially bright colors of an exotic and long computer visual?  Well, this movie for one.

The visuals in "Pi" are OK, but just as the overwhelming awareness of computer technology dampens even a visually better film like ‘Avatar,’ this one can’t seem to escape the cute animal syndrome, bathed in phosphorescent luminosity and whaleness as it is.  Zoos are actually not cute, nor is taking wild animals to be sold. (see review of “In Fear of an Animal Planet,” below)

This film concerns a bright and likable Indian boy named “Piscine” Patel (the story was written by a Catholic French Canadian evidently) who changed his name to “Pi” to avoid being called ‘Pissing.”  He lives in Pondicherry, a Tamil town in India on the western tip of the country, a town once dominated by the French.  Since “Slumdog Millionaire,” India has slowly grown its own presence in Western film outside Bollywood – ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,’ ‘Darjeeling Ltd,’ ‘Eat Pray Love’  – mostly depicting it as a charming, funky place.  However, 'Slumdog' was a virtual piece of Soviet propaganda about poverty compared to the rest.

‘Life of Pi” is the most conservative film of the bunch.  It is saturated in religion and visual unreality.  It is the story of a titanic Ark shipwreck and the Ark lifeboat that survives – with Pi and a Bengal tiger on-board, as told to a reporter in Montreal.  Lets go to the CGI tiger, exhibit number 1, named ‘Richard Parker.’  Pi and 'Parker' live on a lifeboat that never shows the blood or bones of a dead orangutan, a zebra or a hyena; no tiger shit or fish bones or scratches.  A tiger that can’t seem to get up on the slipperiest canvas cover in history, even from a bench a foot below it.  A boat that gets half-filled with water and never sinks lower.  Pi falls in a seething ocean a number of times and always manages to come up right next to it. Meer Kats inhabit venus-flytrap islands shaped like Egyptian sarcophaguses full of taro root.  And yes, this tiny boat floats all the way from the Marianas Trench above the Philippines to Mexico.  This is truly a children’s story, and Pi a modern Gunga Din.  So be it.  Let it join ‘The Jungle Book’ or “The Lion King.”

Yet it is structured as some kind of profound pop philosophy masterpiece.   You see Pi is an interfaith fan of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam.  Unlike his rational father (who drowned), Pi loves Christ and Vishnu and prays to Mecca.  He wants to be baptized.  He tells the reporter – and this is the line that is repeated several times – that his story of survival on the boat will ‘make you believe in God.’  And the key line of dialog at the end – which the religious reviewers try to ignore, is “So it goes with God.”  As in, which story of life do you prefer – the miserable, sad one – or the magnificent heroic one?  As one person joked, “This movie will make you believe in God the same way that Skittles will make you believe in rainbows.” (Skittles, if you don't know, is a many-colored candy that features rainbows in its advertising.)

The movie is a saccharine failure as a religious film, although religious or 'spiritual' people might miss that.  Perhaps instead of God the tiger is the real central character.  Parker walks away from Pi into the Mexican jungle at the end of the film without looking back.  Pi thought he’d made a connection with the tiger, which he says, “kept him alive.”  Pi gave him fish and fresh water.  But according to the tiger, he hadn’t made a connection.  After all, the tiger had been stuck in a zoo, then shoved in the hold of a cargo ship to be sold, then dumped into the ocean to starve.  I’d say getting into the jungle as fast as he could would make sense, Gunga Din or no Gunga Din.

So who or what is the tiger – because obviously it is not a real tiger.  Nature?    Some people take it as such.  Nature doesn’t give a shit about humans, as this CGI tiger indicates.  And humans don’t really give a shit about nature, as the real treatment of Bengal tigers shows.  But since it is a CGI tiger, I don’t know.  Real tigers don’t dance - they just go extinct.  In fact, the Bengal tiger is now down to 1,400 in India; 1,850 world-wide.  Perhaps CGI tigers are all we will have left.  That and cute animal screen-savers. This film will not have changed that one whit – in fact it will have just ignored it.

And I saw this movie at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis, USA

Red Frog

July 10, 2013

P.S. – The Department of Natural Resource Extraction (DNR) in Minnesota just announced a 25% decline in our ‘tiger’ – the grey wolf.  This after 500 were shot or trapped out of a population of 3,000 in the hunting season last November, after the U.S. (under Obama) took the wolf off the endangered species list.  The bastards running the DNR, who are merely fronts for the lumber, mining and hunting industries, say this is ‘no problem.’  However, killing lead members of a pack, or pregnant females can lead to pack decimation BEYOND the mere number killed in the hunt, which could account for the other 250 - as a total of 750 wolves died last year.  The criminal killers at the DNR and the Democratic / Republican parties have decreed another wolf season this November. 

Perhaps we can turn wolves into screen savers?  Or silk screen them on sweat shirts?  Save the wolves!

The Village Anarchist

“The Five Stages of Collapse – Survivor’s Toolkit,” by Dimitri Orlov, 2013. 

Orlov is the village anarchist. At least that’s the solution this book comes up with.  Financial, commercial, political, social and cultural collapse coming? Get back to small hunter/gatherer or farming communities based on family and gift economics.  Orlov disregards the working class and socialism, which is understandable for many people burned by Stalinism / bureaucratism.  But he’s not naïve enough to suck up to capital, which he criticizes throughout the book.  He does see some benefits in the workers state economies, which were not based on the ‘market’ but on earlier forms of cooperation.  Yet his enemy is not profit or the capitalist class but industrialism itself, ‘largeness’ itself, the state itself (as if the state or an armed force can never represent the majority) and hierarchy itself – mostly centrist-anarchist concerns. 

Orlov wrote “Reinventing Collapse” (reviewed below) about the destruction of the Russian economy in the 90s under the tender bourgeois tutelage of Jeffrey Sachs and George Soros.  That book had the benefit of a specific and factual focus.  Now he’s attempted to synthesize that experience to global dimensions – and produced an idiosyncratic, contradictory and somewhat derivative account.  Just the anthropological studies he chooses to highlight are odd.  Iceland’s premier in the face of the 2008 financial collapse; the Russian Mafia; the Pashtuns; the Roma; and a tribe in Africa called the “Ik.”  Many right-wing anarchists have a fascination with lumpenism, thieves and crime.  His inclusion of the Russian Mafia, the Roma and the Pashtuns as examples of solid family structures that are enduring and perhaps enviable in the coming collapse reflects this.  Iceland makes sense, but the Icelandic right just triumphed in recent elections, reflecting that the anti-financial consensus in that tiny nation was very fragile.  And not the occasion for 'smallness' to overcome.  The mass struggles in Greece, Spain and Egypt?  The restiveness of the massive Chinese and Indian working classes?  Invisible.  In fact, the majority of people in this world are invisible to the great cooperator, Orlov.

Right-wing anarchists dislike the working class and here Orlov agrees.  His theory is that the working class was born of industrialism and will die as it decays, due to peak commodities, financial collapse and climate change.  This certainly has some truth – although even the working class of Marx’s time, small as it was, was able to impact events.  Witness the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune.  As he well knows, the small Russian working class led the Russian revolution and later the Chinese revolution.  Now that the working class is the largest it has ever been in history world-wide, Orlov wants to hasten it off the stage of history quickly – to be supplanted by nomadic hunter-gatherers, without written languages but a splendid oral tradition.  This he calls ‘survival.’  I call it petit-bourgeois romanticism.

Unfortunately for Orlov, the working class outnumbers the Pashtuns, the Roma and the Russian Mafia now and will, even after a financial, economic or political collapse.  That is OUR mob. The possibility of world-wide global revolution is now more possible than it was even during Lenin and Trotsky's time.  It can result in a steady-state economy that is sustainable and is not based on chaotic markets or growth.

Orlov does support cooperation as the answer to collapse, and that is progressive.  Like Kropotkin he understands that humans succeed when they help each other, not when they fight. Yet he pictures the pyramid of people to cooperate with like this.  First, family and clan; second, friends; third, strangers.  Now you will notice there is no room here for ‘co-workers’ or even ‘neighbors,’ let alone something like ‘class.’ Given Orlov is an isolated writer, he has no co-workers.  His only co-worker is his cup of tea or perhaps a liter of vodka.  Instead he advocates ‘de-proletarianization,’ which to him means the wonders of avoiding industrial and white-collar work.  I suspect he has been highly successful in that regard.  He highlights lumpens who proudly avoid work or rip off those who do. His vision of the future under a collapse of all industrial life seems to be a very luxurious life.  No one evidently has to hunt or farm or work much.  Just create cultural artifacts and socialize.  Agricultural work in the hot sun without many machines?  No problem.  Hunting for small game?  Always a dead shot!  Fishing without a fish finder in the wide ocean?  No problem.  The perspective is somewhat ridiculous and starry-eyed, but then, we have to look forward to something other than the abyss.

Contradictions abound in this book.  He slights the survivalists who are making money off fear.  Yet his books are selling based on the fear of collapse.  He denigrates literacy and the internet while writing a popular blog.  He denigrates the nation-state while promoting the ‘city-state’ of yore.  He claims atheism, while promoting the enduring quality of religious institutions.  He opposes theocracy and then tells us how ‘together’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ the Pashtuns are.  He predicts world collapse by 2050 at the latest, but then delineates how the present European financial crisis is leading to near economic collapse.  Certainly, this particular collapse will not take 38 years.  He stigmatizes the U.S. for its high prison population, then claims it is a result of illiteracy, not the war on drugs.  He is encouraged by the increasing number of ‘failed states’ – glorying in the fall of the state apparatuses.  Yet he ostensibly opposes their replacement – war-lordism.  He insists there is a space for anarchic cooperation to develop in Mogadishu and the upper Congo instead.  This paradise of cooperation has not occurred yet.  Misery by itself usually does not produce progressive social change.  Oppression, instead, oppresses. 

Orlov, unfortunately, has become adept at lazy, sweeping generalizations and general bloviating.  There are certainly some nuggets of usefulness here, but submerged in a sea of romanticism.

His theory is that his stages of collapse – first financial, then commercial, political, social and cultural – can be separately analyzed.  He hopes that social and cultural collapse can be contained, because otherwise human life will descend to below animal culture, as his survey of the “Ik” tribe describes.  The Iks are subject to extreme starvation because the Kenyan government has forbidden them access to their ancestral homelands inside a ‘nature’ park.  The government has chosen animal-animals before human-animals in this case.  As a result, the Ik have no food and live a ‘every person for themselves’ life – throwing children out of the hut at 3 and letting the old die. Their biggest source of humor is the misfortunes of others.  The Ik, however, are not victims of collapse per se, but of bureaucratic state laws, neo-liberalism and the resulting starvation.

Who is Dimitri Orlov?  Well, in this book he mentions that both his father and grandfather were professors in the old USSR.  The family left the USSR in the first wave of dissidents in 1972.  Now he loves sailing and is a self-identified writer and blogger. He lives on a boat at last check.   His hero is Peter Kropotkin, who engaged in the Russian Revolution by doing absolutely nothing while in-country, dying in his bed in 1921.  If the revolution or even social upheaval comes to the U.S. Orlov will probably be invisible, preserving his family in water-world, while fishing for the few remaining species in the ocean. Co-operation?  ‘Group’ survival?  Not unless you are related.  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 4, 2013

Celebrate the 1776 Revolution from British Colonialism, a true revolution of cooperation, not carried out by families, mafia or thieves, but by an army of dedicated small farmers and city workers.  “Our” mob.

Every Musicians’ Connected: 150 Guitars

"Life,” Biography of Keith Richards, 2013

The Rolling Stones are the most long-lived top rock band in the world.  In the U.S. the Dead, the Band and Springsteen give them a run for their money.  The Beatles flared and died too quickly, as did many other monster groups.  Dylan, and perhaps Neil Young are still the kings of the singer-songwriters, but their groups are not a “band” per se, as Young does not always play with Crazy Horse.  It is to be seen if any of the current crop of blues-rock groups like the Black Keys, the Alabama Shakes, Jack White’s various bands, Drive-By Truckers, Kings of Leon or even bands like My Morning Jacket or the Decembrists can reach the same level.  It is doubtful.

Richards was and is key to the Stone's artistic success.  He provided the classic riffs to many Stones songs like "Sympathy for the Devil" and “Honky Tonk Women." And came up with some of the key lyric choruses like “I Can’t Get No – Sa-tis-fact-ion” and "Wild horses - couldn't drag me away," though Jagger was the word-wizard for most Stones songs.  The Stones, if you remember, were the ‘bad boy’ alternative to the Beatle choir boys – at least initially.  This book details many of those problems – drug busts, tax issues, court appearances, many incredibly close scrapes with the law and the cops, rowdy shows, destructive hotel stays, odd hangers-on, groupies, contentious relationships, guns, knives, dealers and drugs.  Lots of drugs.  Keith was a heroin addict for 10 years, kicking it finally in the early 80s.  He’s not proud of it – too much – but he does manage to point out how he could ‘handle it.’  Careful use, good quality, cold turkey, etc. He claims while recording it enabled him to work and record and not fall asleep and ignore all the chaos surrounding the band.

You grow to like Richards in this book as a person – in spite of his clichéd public persona.  He explicitly says he was living the ‘outlaw’ life – though its not sure how much of a role the fans played in that.  But it seems Keith – or “Keef” – in reality IS that non-lethal outlaw.  Clothing was castoffs from his girlfriends sometimes, which grew into his gypsy wardrobe, unlike Charlie Watts, the ex-jazz drummer, who wore Savile Row suits .  Richards tried to live the life of a music pirate, and somehow succeeded in his own estimation, all because of music.  Richards was surrounded by lumpen artists, wealthy patrons, druggies, people who dabbled in criminality and he had perhaps more money than he knew what to do with.  Richards grew to hate the police, of course.  He bought or rented houses in Jamaica, Switzerland, France, Turks & Caicos and the U.S. Anyone else would have spent much more time in jail, but his connections, status and lawyers always kept him out of totally serious trouble.

What is really key to this book is the music – always, for Keith, it was the music.  Richards grew up in a hardscrabble town on the southeast edge of London, along the Thames.  Both he and Jagger came at it as record collectors first.  They studied Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, JL Hooker – all the American greats.  They bought records directly from Chess in Chicago.  They lived in squalor and only thought about music.   If you are a music ‘junkie’ than this book will keep you high.

They picked up cheap instruments, running them all through one amp, doing covers of American blues, R&B and some country.  Keith liked to record on cassettes, simple 8-track studios, basic equipment using a few mikes in simple rooms even after that initial period.  They only wanted to be a cover band, the best blues band in the UK, until Andrew Loog Oldham locked them up and made them write a song. “As Tears Go By” was the product of that first lockup, but it was so un-bluesy they were embarrassed.  They let Marianne Faithful record it first instead. 

The enduring mystery is why did some working class British boys become so attracted to U.S. blues music that they dragged it out of the racist prison it was locked into in the States?  This was 1962!  Many British bands - Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac, the Moody Blues, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Ten Years After - all started out trained on the blues.  Even today, European visitors to the Mississippi Delta museums and sites equal or outnumber American visitors.  WTF?  (See review of “In Search of the Blues,” below.)  As a kid, our group listened to obscure Delta and Chicago blues in our little house in the southern prairie of Minnesota in the mid to late 60s  Little did we know it was being done in many other places. One of our compadres named himself “Blind Northfield Slim” – even though he could see well enough and was white as the sun.

Richards describes his ‘come to Jesus’ moment when he discovers ‘open tuning’ using 5 strings on the Telecaster guitar, removing the bottom sixth.  I’m not a guitar player, but this tuning allowed him to get a jangle that helped the massive Stone’s riffs sound like they did.  He says he first learned this open tuning on the guitar from Ry Cooder, but just for slide guitar and expanded it to rock guitar.  Later he taught the tuning to Ike Turner, of all people.  The pupil teaching the master, as Richards would put it.

There are great nuggets in this book.  The band name came from Muddy Waters, not Bob Dylan. These guys worked constantly for years – either touring, recording or preparing to do both.  They had very little time off.  Jagger and Richards were on the same wavelength and could write songs quickly, starting with bits and pieces of melodies, riffs or lyrics that just grew like weeds. On an early tour they went straight to Chess’ 2120 South Michigan Avenue to record in Muddy’s studio.  “Street Fighting Man” was written about the May 1968 revolution in France.  When the Stones recorded “Exile on Main Street” in the chateau Nellecote basement in France, Richards worked constantly, many times all night, with a top crew.  Bobby Keys, who’d played on many U.S. R&B records with Delaney & Bonnie and Derek & the Dominoes; Mick Taylor had joined; Jimmy Miller and Andy Johns were doing the producing and recording.  They used a mobile studio, one of the first ever.   They later wrote and recorded the great songs “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar” at the legendary Muscle Shoals Alabama studio on the fly.  Richards lays the fuckup at Altamont primarily at the doors of the San Francisco City Council, who refused the use of Golden Gate park, and then the Hells Angels.

There is the required gossip about Mick Jagger and the constant strife over Jagger’s overweening attitude.  Richards describes Jagger as a brother, but not a friend.  He goes through his side-work with various Jamaican bands, a film he did with and about Chuck Berry; his solo project, the “X-Pensive Winos,” the odd upbringing of his son Marlon; his romance with Anita Pallenberg and eventual marriage to Patti Hansen; relationships with Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ron Wood, his troubled relationship with is father etc.  There is a lot of name-dropping of prominent cultural figures in the 60s, 70s and later, not just in music.  Although it’s not really name-dropping when you are a ‘name’ yourself.  Richards comes off as the loyal ‘band’ member who wanted to keep it together, a true friend and honest partner, in spite of all his fucked-up drug or emotional tantrums – which he does not dwell on, as he can barely remember them, or chooses not to.  

Richards said the Stones didn’t make money until the tours starting in the early 80s.  Like many rock acts, they were being ripped off by various promoters, managers, etc.  He claims record royalties only paid the overhead.  And so those giant stadium tours took off.

As the Kinks sang about in one song, they got out of the ‘factory’ and into music, only to enter another factory, the music industry.  Richards made that factory his own, which is rare.  While this is not a political book, the Stones were key in undermining bourgeois culture for awhile, and even the frozen culture of the Soviet bloc, as his comments on Vaclav Havel and a recent book have noted. (The book is "How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution")  Rock has always had working-class roots and this book certainly shows that.  Long Live Rock & Roll! 

And I bought it as a discount out of Mayday Book’s music section.

Red Frog

July 1, 2013

"Summertime ... and the livin' is easy..."