John Godfrey on arbitrariness and Ashbery

“You know, when you use these arbitrary things it's amazing how what you come up with may have the consistency of something that doesn't have that much arbitrariness and that's what the beauty of the arbitrary was. John Ashbery was very effective 35 years ago in his use of the arbitrary. He could make something just come out of infinity into this place that seemed to have had some kind of finiteness about it, something concrete about it. He just pulled in this thing that didn't belong there and made it fit. I mean your mind would make it fit and it would bounce you into this place that just had nothing to do with our conventions of thinking, of logic.” 'An Interview with John Godfrey,' by Lisa Jarnot, Poetry Project Newsletter April/May 1997, #165, reprinted in What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from thePoetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009), ed, Anselm Berrigan, Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2017 , p. 99.

Check out @telesurenglish’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/telesurenglish/status/945281761700995073?s=09

The Politics of Immigration: Next Up: Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parent...

The Politics of Immigration: Next Up: Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parent...: The security threat on our borders?  Photo: Jennifer Whitney/NY Times            The Washington Post reports that the Department of Ho...

snowdens-new-app-uses-your-smartphone-to-physically-guard-your-laptop/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=492698af2d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_12_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-492698af2d-131820337

William S Burroughs - The.Junky's Christmas. Full Version.

On How we Mistook the Map

chris weisman - keyboard gray

Z' EV - elemental music

Spike Jones All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth

No Christmas in Kentucky - Phil Ochs (1963)

Coltrane's epistemology

But what these pieces are, and what is the road to attain the knowledge of them, that I don't know. – John Coltrane

Ed Askew - Red Woman - Letter to England

James Baldwin on Palesine

In a letter from 'Israel' written on October 8, 1961, James Baldwin told his agent, Bob Mills: “I personally cannot help being saddened by the creation, at this late date, of yet another nation – it seems to me that we need fewer nations, not more: the blood that has been spilled for various flags makes me ill [. . .] O perhaps I would not feel this way if I were not painfully – most painfully – ambivalent concerning the status of the Arabs here. I cannot blame them for feeling dispossessed; and in a literal way, they have been. Furthermore, the Jews, who are surrounded by forty million hostile Muslims, are forced to control the very movements of Arabs within the state of Israel. One cannot blame the Jews for this necessity; one cannot blame the Arabs for resenting it. I would – indeed, in my own situation in America, I do, and it has cost me – costs me – a great and continuing effort not to hate the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and diminish me.

Caetano Veloso- De Conversa-Cravo E Canela

Pantera Saint-Montaigne - 4 Little Girls

https://youtu.be/gQRpn-O5YZY

Foucault on history

I would like to distinguish between the “history of ideas” and the “history of thought.” Most of the time a historian of ideas tries to determine when a specific concept appears, and this moment is often identified by the appearance of a new word. But what I am attempting to do as a historian of thought is something different. I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem for people who behave in Specific sorts of ways, who have certain types of habits, who engage in certain kinds of practices, and who put to work specific kinds of institutions. The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and “silent,” out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions. The history of thought, understood in this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that—for example, about madness, about crime, about sex, about themselves, or about truth. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, Semiotext(e), 2001, p. 74.

Guy Maddin (& Isabella) on Rossellini

https://youtu.be/7hMdNihop3c

After watching the wonderful Tony Conrad documentary last night, as part of No Response Fest fun(d)raising, I'm wondering whether anyone in Ohio is working on Beverly Grant's archives? (Could be my new pet project, if no takers.)


Grant left New York in 1973 to move with Conrad to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Conrad taught at Antioch College. During this time, she earned a master's degree from Wright State University, and performed in local theater. After she and Conrad divorced in 1976, Grant remained in Yellow Springs, raising the couple's son, Theodore.


In her later years, Grant worked as a drug- and alcohol-abuse counsellor in London, Ohio, where she died of lung cancer at the age of 54 on July 4, 1990

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZs3H2Wsl7w

Check out this book on Goodreads: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35343348-the-dangerous-case-of-donald-trump

Adam Phillips on the mad

“The mad are people we can’t understand and who do things that are too unacceptable; and so they are people we may be, or feel ourselves to be, endangered by. They expose what an enormous cultural investment we have in understanding people; madness, we could almost say, is what makes us idealize understanding each other, and makes us want to believe that we do.” Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012, p. 187.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany

https://youtu.be/EseSe7IggQc

Tiguini-Tiguini by M'Mah Sylla

Rilke, from Book of Hours

Make me the guardian of your estate,

make me the listener upon the rock,

give me the eye to spread across

your seas of loneliness;

allow me to pair up with the rivers' flow

and flee from the screaming of either side

and drift into the sound of the night.






--


Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans.


Annemarie S. Kidder (Evanston: Northwestern




UP, 2001). p. 167.

The golf links lie so near the mill

That almost very day

The laboring children can look out

And see the men at play.

• Sarah N. Cleghorn

Martin Amis on Supreme Court

“The American publisher of Mein Kampf sued another publisher who printed unauthorized extracts of those books. And it didn’t go to the Supreme Court, it went to some district court, but the court found in favor of Hitler. That’s a good metaphor for what the Supreme Court is always doing—finding in favor of Hitler. Cute legalism, pedantry, anti–common sense.” Martin Amis

Lorrie and Larry Collins - Whistle Bait

Dream Syndicate - Halloween

Ohio: Achievement Gaps Widen More in Charter Schools Compared to Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: Achievement Gaps Widen More in Charter Schools Compared to Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Flowers - (Life) After Dark (Original single A side, 1979)

Tariq Ali & Oliver Stone "Untold History of the US" (May, 2013)

The Phaetons I Love My Baby VIN 1015

Porter Ricks - Shoal Beat

Porter Ricks - Shoal Beat

ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH Address to the Woman’s Rights Convention at Syracuse, NY (1852)

ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH
Address to the Woman’s Rights
Convention at Syracuse, NY (1852)

Do we fully understand that we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the existing order of society, a dissolution of the whole existing social compact? Do we see that it is not an error of to-day, nor of yesterday, against which we are lifting up the voice of dissent; but it is against hoary-headed error of all times; error borne onward from the first footprints of the first pair ejected from Paradise—intermingled in every aspect of civilization, down to our own times?

(803) Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucú paloma | Tomás Méndez - YouTube

(803) Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucú paloma | Tomás Méndez - YouTube

Luna - Night Nurse

Roky Erickson - True Love Cast Out All Evil

This is what American fascism looks like: the Lyndon LaRouche story (part one) | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

This is what American fascism looks like: the Lyndon LaRouche story (part one) | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Burroughs final journal entry

“The sorriest thing to be said about the United States, as we sidle up to fascism (which can become our fate if we plunge into a major depression, or suffer a set of dirty-bomb catastrophes), is that we expect disasters. We await them. We have become a guilty nation. Somewhere in the moil of the national conscience is the knowledge that we are caught in the little contradiction of loving Jesus on Sunday, while lusting the rest of the week for megamoney. How can we not be in need of someone to tell us that we are good and pure and he will seek to make us secure?” – Normal Mailer, 'The Election and America's Future' (2004)

RIP Grant Hart, 1961-2017

"There You Are" Flipthrough

Rain Parade - You are My Friend

Dukes God Bar

EPIGRAM by Tomas Transtromer

EPIGRAM


Capital's buildings, hives of the killer bees, honey for the few.
Where he served.  But in a dark tunnel unfolded his wings
and flew when no one was looking.  He had to live his life again.



-- Tomas Transtromer

ANDROIDS OF MU bored housewives 1980 - YouTube

ANDROIDS OF MU bored housewives 1980 - YouTube

In "Dangerous" Move, Republicans Push to Strip Healthcare from Millions Without Holding Any Hearings | Democracy Now!

In "Dangerous" Move, Republicans Push to Strip Healthcare from Millions Without Holding Any Hearings | Democracy Now!

War, Profiteering Push Over 2 Billion To Lack Safe Drinking Water

War, Profiteering Push Over 2 Billion To Lack Safe Drinking Water

‘Gaza has to live in order for Palestine to live’ – Middle East Monitor

‘Gaza has to live in order for Palestine to live’ – Middle East Monitor

Mailer on Black Power

“[T]hose well-ordered epochs of capitalism which flushed the white wastes down into the black heart are gone — the pipes of civilization are backing up. The irony is that we may even yet need a black vision of existence if civilization is to survive the death chamber it has built for itself. So let us at least recognize the real ground of Black Power — it is ambitious, beautiful, awesome, terrifying, and has to do with nothing so much as the most important questions of us all — What is man? Why are we here? Will we survive?” – Norman Mailer, 'Black Power' (1968)

(661) Gavin Friday - Lord I'm Coming - YouTube

(661) Gavin Friday - Lord I'm Coming - YouTube

Solanas on the couple

Valerie Solanas heeds the atomizing function of the couple: “Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she is exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids.” Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (New York: Verso Books, 2004), p. 48.

(660) Jeff Buckley "Vancouver" Album Version - YouTube

(660) Jeff Buckley "Vancouver" Album Version - YouTube





Heart. Still. Throbs.

Haiku (after Brecht)

after Brecht

Sitting by the roadside.

The driver changes the wheel.

I am impatient.

Dirty Projectors + Björk - On and Ever Onward

Massive Iceberg Finally Breaks Off: Antarctic Landscape 'Changed Forever'

Massive Iceberg Finally Breaks Off: Antarctic Landscape 'Changed Forever'

https://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/peep-show.gif

the cure - how beautifull you are (1987) stereo

Toxic Narcissism in Relationships: Identifying PTSD and C-PTSD - QueenBeeing

Toxic Narcissism in Relationships: Identifying PTSD and C-PTSD - QueenBeeing

Did You Used to be R D Laing?

Thich Nhat Hanh on love

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.

[…]

When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of his suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if she doesn’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief.

[…]

The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.

--

Thich Nhat Hanh

The Church-Columbus

Billy Walker Sings 'My Last Cigarette.'

BLMC Podcast Episode 3: Vigilante Racism – Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati

BLMC Podcast Episode 3: Vigilante Racism – Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati

Certainly a prolonged threat can undermine the mental health of anyone, and,

as I have tried to state, the essence of cruelty is to destroy in an individual

that degree of hope which makes sense of the creative impulse and of creative

thinking and living. – D.W. Winnicott

Enzensberger on (im)migration

Almost all other nations justify their existence by a firm self-ascription. The distinction between 'our own' people and 'strangers' appears quite natural to them, even if it is questionable historically. Whoever wishes to hold on to the distinction would need to maintain, according to his own logic, that he has always been there – a thesis which can all too easily be disproved. To that extent, a proper national history assumes the ability to forget everything that doesn't fit.

However, it is not only one's own motley origin that is denied. Movements of migration on a large scale always lead to struggles over the distribution of resources. National feeling prefers to reinterpret these inevitable conflicts as though the dispute had more to do with imaginary than with material resources. The struggle is then over the difference between self- and external ascriptions, a field that offers demagogy ideal possibilities fro development.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. To Bosnia, NY: New Press, 1994 p. 108.

Zizek on love

https://youtu.be/OabTK7y7d6E

Jeremy Corbyn Changes the Face of British Politics, Shows Socialism Is Appealing to Voters - Larry's List - Truthdig

Jeremy Corbyn Changes the Face of British Politics, Shows Socialism Is Appealing to Voters - Larry's List - Truthdig

Big Train : Hall and Oates "Bigger than Both of Us"

Between July 16, 1945 to November 4, 1962, the United States conducted 216 nuclear tests in the atmosphere and oceans, and the Soviet Union conducted 217. After both countries signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963, the United States performed a total of 1054 nuclear tests, involving 1149 separate explosions, until September 23, 1992.

Standing up for Freedom Cities

Watch The Cure's First TV Appearance in 1979 ... Before The Band Acquired Its Signature Goth Look | Open Culture

Watch The Cure's First TV Appearance in 1979 ... Before The Band Acquired Its Signature Goth Look | Open Culture

Johann Johannsson - An Injury To One Is The Concern Of All [The Miners' ...

from Edward Bond, THE ACTIVIST PAPERS

“[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.” Edward Bond, The Activist Papers

Brecht on suicide...

BILL FAY - BE NOT SO FEARFUL

from the end of Edward Bond, The Worlds

…[I]f you know what sort of world you're in you have to change it.


Well what world is it? The poor are starving. The rich are getting ready to blow it up. Terrorists threaten with guns? We do it with bombs. One well-heeled American with his finger on the button. That's sick. And there's worse than that. The ignorance we live in. We don't understand what we are or what we do. That's more dangerous than bombs. We're all terrorists. Everyone of us. We live by terror. Not even to make a new world: just to keep one that's already dead. In the end we'll pay for that as much as the lot whore starvin now.


– Edward Bond, The Worlds

SAFTU - This Is What We Stand For | The Bullet No. 1401

SAFTU - This Is What We Stand For | The Bullet No. 1401

letter to Jefferson on the Indians and forests....

The inhabitants of your country districts regard—wrongfully, it is true— Indians and forests as natural enemies which must be exterminated by fire and sword and brandy, in order that they may seize their territory. They regard themselves, themselves and their posterity, as collateral heirs to all the magnificent portion of land which God has created from Cumberland and Ohio to the Pacific Ocean.

—Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours letter to Thomas Jefferson,

December 17, 1801

The Wild Swans - Bringing Home The Ashes (1988)

Tobin Sprout

https://youtu.be/2bi4lkLaJCM

Jenny Erpenbeck, from The End of Days

when she's asleep he likes to sit down beside her bed and make one further attempt to get to the bottom of what has seemed to him the greatest riddle in all the history of mankind: how processes, circumstances, or events of a general nature – such as war, famine, or even a civil servant's salary that fails to increase along with the galloping inflation – can infiltrate a private face. Here they turn a few hairs gray, there devour a pair of lovely cheeks until the skin is stretched taut across singular jawbones; the secession of Hungary, say, might result in a pair of lips bitten raw in the case of one particular woman, perhaps even his own wife. In other words, there is a constant translation between far outside and deep within, it's just that a different vocabulary exists for each of us, which no doubt explains why it's never been noticed that this is a language in the first place – and in fact, the only language valid across the world and for all time.

-- Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days (2012), trans. Susan Bernofsky, 2014, p. 73.

Bongwater - His Old Look

Don't Take Your Love From Me...♪Jimmy Scott♪

Chat écoutant la musique - Chris Marker

tindersticks-Can we start again

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - City of Refuge

Documental sobre Berta Cáceres: «Berta Vive» - YouTube

Documental sobre Berta Cáceres: «Berta Vive» - YouTube

My Afternoons With Margueritte - Official Trailer

Superb and heartwarming tale that achieves the rare task of conveying the importance of universal literacy and ongoing free education for all. Another world is possible.....

Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser - All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun

FCWA_NoPieceOfThePie_P.pdf

FCWA_NoPieceOfThePie_P.pdf

Mad Tea Party Scene from Dreamchild (1985)

Frank O'Hara, "The chair of poetry.....

“The chair of poetry must remain empty, for poetry does not collaborate with society, but with life” (Frank O'Hara, 'About Zhivago and His Poems').

Carl Sagan on the truth

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - 'I Need You' (Official Video)

Wage Theft Caught on Video

Noël Coward & Margaret Leighton / Bernard Shaw - The Apple Cart [Full Al...

Zinn on freedom and liberties

"The freedom of working people, the freedom of black people has always depended on the struggles of people themselves against the government. So, if we look at it historically, we certainly cannot depend on governments to maintain our liberties. We have to depend on our own organized efforts."
-Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War 

Robert Wyatt "At Last I Am Free" - YouTube

Robert Wyatt "At Last I Am Free" - YouTube

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The origins and ideology of the Alternative Right | Political Research Associates

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The origins and ideology of the Alternative Right | Political Research Associates

Angela Davis speaking at Belfast City Hall for International Women's Day - YouTube

Angela Davis speaking at Belfast City Hall for International Women's Day - YouTube

Lay Me Low (Live in Munich) - YouTube

Lay Me Low (Live in Munich) - YouTube

Dennis Potter's 'Pennies From Heaven' - 'The Glory Of Love' - YouTube

Dennis Potter's 'Pennies From Heaven' - 'The Glory Of Love' - YouTube

John Lennon - Woman

Women of the World: Take Over (Jim O'Rourke)

R.I.P Philip K. Dick

“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous

realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly.”

R.I.P. Philip K Dick

16th December 1928 – 2nd March 1982

Out of the Trees (1976) Full Comedy Movie | Graham Chapman Movie

The Orwell Lecture 2016: Ian Hislop

Excerpt on Trump from Joseph Burgo, The Narcissist You Know

Fred Trump, Donald’s father, expected his sons to be ruthless competitors who showed their opponents no mercy. “Be a killer,” he told them. Like Tiger Woods’s father, Fred Trump believed there were only two classes of people in the world—winners and losers; every Trump would of course be a winner. As a real estate developer in the Bronx, Fred had already made millions of dollars, following in the footsteps of his own highly successful father. He expected nothing less from his sons, Fred Jr. (Freddy), Donald, and Robert.
Though the oldest son was groomed to step into his father’s shoes, Freddy didn’t seem to fit the mold. An old school chum describes him as “a real pussycat, not mean and aggressive, kind of pathetic, really.”  Once Freddy entered the family business, his father would publicly chew him out when he made mistakes and withhold praise when he did well. If Freddy showed vulnerability or fear in his presence, it would send his father into a contemptuous rage. Fred also viewed his son as a “wimp” because of his intellectual interests. Freddy began to smoke and drink heavily, eventually dying at the age of forty-two “from “a massive heart attack caused by alcoholism so acute that it verged on the suicidal.”
Donald might have suffered a similar fate had he not turned out to be the killer that Fred expected. From an early age, Donald was hypercompetitive and always needed to be the best at whatever he did. He also displayed a defiant attitude toward authority so troubling his parents finally sent him away to New York Military Academy (NYMA), an institution renowned for its ability to “curb unruly young spirits.”There, Donald shaped up and threw himself into sport with a competitive fervor, though he had no close friends. “I think it was because he was too competitive, and with a friend you don’t always compete,” says Ted Levin, Donald’s roommate at NYMA. “It was like he had this defensive wall around him, and he wouldn’t let anyone get close.”
“Unlike Fred, who made a fortune constructing middle-income housing in the Bronx, Donald had his eyes on Manhattan. Unlike Fred, who eschewed publicity and quietly forged political alliances behind the scenes, Donald wanted to be famous. And unlike Fred, who was “shy and uncomfortable in person,”Donald was brash and expansive. “He seemed like an epic character, straight out of Stendhal,” recalls Ned Eichler, a former business school professor who negotiated with Donald on one of his earliest deals. “An ambitious boy from the provinces, full of his own ego, wanting to make his way in the city.”
From the outset of his career, Trump was flagrantly grandiose, with a tendency to exaggerate so marked that he often discarded truth in order to create the impression he preferred. He would invariably describe his latest projects in superlative terms—the tallest building in the world, the biggest development in New York, the largest real estate acquisition ever recorded in the city, the most “glamorous, luxurious, expensive apartments available, and on and on. “No matter the occasion, he was always competing, always concentrating on how to make whatever he was doing seem bigger and better than what anyone else had ever done. When he lost, he would say he won; when he won, he would say he won more.”
The actual truth didn’t matter, and if anyone challenged his version of events, he would go on the attack. Donald Trump always had to be right. In the early 1990s, as the real estate market collapsed and his empire seemed about to implode under the weight of excessive debt, he blamed many of his closest advisors and employees, including those who had strongly advised against his riskier ventures. “He could not acknowledge his refusal to heed their warnings or accept responsibility for the problems that had resulted from his own actions.”  One by one, he fired them or pushed them out. He refused to pay their bills.”
“Exploiting media access, he heaped scorn upon his enemies—that is, those people who disagreed with him or didn’t do what he wanted. Early in his career, when Mayor Ed Koch declined to give him enormous tax concessions to build a megaproject called Television City, Trump “blasted the mayor as a ‘moron,’ called for his impeachment, and demanded an investigation of Koch’s involvement in his appointees’ misdeeds.”At a public hearing for approval of another development, when a local resident argued that Trump was playing the taxpayers of New York “for small-town suckers,” he erupted in rage. “That’s all bullshit!” he said loudly. “That woman is a fat pig who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s a pack of lies!”
Those who have worked closely with Trump are familiar with his blaming, self-righteous, and contemptuous management style. When things weren’t going as Donald thought they should, he would erupt like a volcano, screaming, yelling profanities, hurling accusations of laziness and incompetence.During the construction of an exclusive lounge for preferred customers at Trump Plaza, manager Steve Hyde had repeatedly explained to his boss that the ceiling would have to be lowered in some areas in order to accommodate plumbing for those luxury suites directly above. Because he knew Trump loathed low ceilings, he made sure his boss understood. On the day when Trump and other executives toured the new club with Hyde, he reacted with shock and indignation, as if Hyde had never said a word.
“What the fuck is this?” Trump said. “Who said to make this ceiling so low?”
“You knew about this, Donald,” Hyde replied. “We talked about it, if you remember, and the plans—“
Abruptly Donald leaped up and punched his fist through the tile. Then he turned on Hyde in a rage. “You cocksucker! Motherfucker! Where the fuck were you? Where was your fucking head?” The tirade went on at great length as Trump “humiliated [Hyde] in front of twenty people, colleagues and professionals.
“Jack O’Donnell, Hyde’s successor at Trump Plaza, experienced similar treatment. In the beginning of his tenure, he became accustomed to Trump’s “brusque manner, which, like the characteristic smirk he always wore, was etched in his face.”For years, he swallowed hard and accepted the way Trump would ignore his advice and then blame him for the consequences. O’Donnell endured his contempt, his abusive rages, and his ingratitude. He listened as Trump dismissed one dissenter after another as an idiot, an asshole, a fucking moron, a little shit who had no idea what he was talking about.
O’Donnell finally reached his limit when Trump began to blame him for a series of crises that occurred around the opening of his biggest casino in Atlantic City, the Trump Taj Mahal. With rising “indignation, Trump first accused him of negotiating a poor contract for a concert by the Rolling Stones against which O’Donnell had previously advised him. Trump went on to blame the bad Stones deal on O’Donnell’s close friend and former co-worker Mark Etess, who had died not long before in a tragic helicopter accident. O’Donnell at last was fed up and rose to the defense of his friend.
Trump responded with a full-throated attack on O’Donnell’s performance at the most profitable of his assets. “I’m fucking sick of the results down there, and I’m fucking sick of looking at bad numbers . . . and you telling me you can’t do this, you can’t do that . . . and I’m sick and fucking tired of you telling me no!”  No longer able to endure Trump’s self-righteous contempt and the continuous assaults on his character, O’Donnell resigned that very day.

Stewart Lee - Damned Immigrants

The Snipers - War Song

And now there is no help for it but to be cast adrift in the new month. One plucked from one month to the next; the year is like a fast-moving Ferris wheel; tomorrow all the riders will be under the sign of February and there is no appeal, one will have to get used to living with its qualities and perhaps one will even adjust to them successfully before the next month arrives with a whole string of new implications in its wake. Just to live this way is impossibly difficult, but the strange thing is that no one seems notice it; people sail along quite comfortably and actually seem to enjoy the way the year progresses, and they manage to fill its widening space with multiple activities which apparently mean a lot to them. Of course some are sadder than the others but it doesn't seem to be because of the dictatorship of the months and years, and it goes away after a while. But the few who want order in their lives and a sense of growing and progression toward fixed end suffer terribly. Sometimes they try to dope their consciousness the shifting but ineluctable grid of time that has been arbitrarily imposed on them with alcohol or drugs, but these lead merely to mornings after whose waking is ten times more painful than before, bringing with it a new and more terrible realization of the impossibility of reconciling their own ends with those of the cosmos. If by chance you should be diverted or distracted for a moment from awareness of your imprisonment by some pleasant or interesting occurrence, there is always the shape of the individual day to remind you.  – John Ashbery 'The System'

Hicks quote

“The comic is a flame—like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are. He keeps cutting everything back to the moment.” – Bill Hicks

John Henry Mackay poem

(Mackay was a socialist radical and a great gay activist.)




“Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.

"Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,
"Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage."

0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven
The 'truth that lies behind a word to find, 

To them the word's right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.

But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true,

Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.

I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.

Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?
I cannot tell - but it the earth shall see!

I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will

Not rule, & also ruled I will not be!”



― John Henry Mackay

Hope in Dank Times: Thoughts of a Cincinnati Activist

Hope in Dank Times: Thoughts of a Cincinnati Activist

The naming of the intolerable is itself hope. – John Berger

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said
is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express
themselves as we did. – Sophie Scholl, The White Rose Society

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From Brexit to the success of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, we are witnessing a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics. In recent months the US has moved decisively towards becoming an authoritarian kleptocracy, replete with a violent, vengeful new nationalism, and a renewed war on women and minorities. It is now clear this administration does not care about ordinary working people of any hue and that the administration is peopled by those who caused the 2008 financial crisis, which cost 8.7 million people their jobs and may have destroyed as much as 45 percent of the world's wealth.

And yet... as I write, thousands of people shut down the airports in major cities across the United States to protest the forcible deportation of Muslim citizens from seven nations by executive order of the new president. In Cincinnati, members of Black Lives Matter have joined with immigrant rights actvists, labor organizers, and those who attended the city's women's march to form new, lasting coalitions that not merely defend the most vulnerable members of our communities but also build forward towards alternatives to capitalist society. The fact remains that with the tyrant Trump in power we are seeing the erosion of basic liberal rights that took centuries of struggle to win, yet hope grows in the dark. Resistance is no longer an option, it is a necessity, but we need to put our resistance in a larger perspective.

I suspect we spend too much time worrying about the Presidency and Congress, sites of power we have little or no access to. What we ought to be doing is spending our time focusing on the sites of power we have ready and absolute access to: the street, the workplace, the school, the community, the classroom, the neighborhood. That’s where we ought to go.

We must create combative organizations with prefigured structures, ones that reject hierarchy and practice democracy. Furthermore, they must go beyond the workplace and enter the everyday lives of workers and their kin. Direct democracy is never going to be enough. We’ll still need representative institutions.

The difficulty of even attempting to draft an alternative to the existing system is symptomatic of a general political impasse.Issues of democratic content (what is to be done?) must take precedence over the fetishizing of democratic forms as solutions in their own right (how should we proceed?). As a matter of survival we need a grand collective refusal to conform to the rule of capital and, at the same time, a creation of something else, a self-determination. We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.

One of the political imperatives today is to break the spell of automatically endorsing the frame we limit ourselves with, to break out of the debilitating alternative of either we just directly endorse free market globalization or we make impossible promises about how to have one's cake and eat it, too, of how to combine globalization with social solidarity. As Martin Luther King pleaded in his letter from a Birmingham jail: if we sit back too long, justice delayed may become justice denied for yet another generation. On February 15, 2003, between 15 and 30 million people too to the streets in 800 cities around the world, representing the largest day of anti-war protests in world history, and all over the world right now many more people are protesting the Trump presidency. There are always simple alternatives at hand, e.g. ‘If this person is hungry and we have bread, we should share” or “If this person does not share their bread we should seize it in order to export it where there is a real need (rather than an ‘entitlement’).” The Bolsheviks were reported to have said in Russia in 1917 that “power was lying about in the streets,” and at recent Black Lives, antiTrump and international womens' protests we see equality made manifest through mobilization. This is what democracy looks like.

What reproduces capitalism in developed countries today is largely the fact that workers can keep most of their achievements if they do not protest or think too much about the suffering of countless others. To understand the world you need to feel like it can be changed. We must exemplify what we say we believe. To this extent we 'pre-figure' a possible future in the insatiable present. A set of words initially formulated by a committee supportive of Polish Solidarity, read: “Start doing the things you think should be done. Start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” It means taking initiative, refusing the safety of cover, and – although it’s taboo – thinking and fighting to win.

The kind of hope I wish to advocate comes when participation begins to generate a kinder public life, built on intrinsic values. As Nancy Fraser writes, “Absent a reinvention of public power, there is no hope of successfully addressing the ecological, economic, or social dimensions of crisis.” Participatory politics creates social solidarity while proposing and implementing a vision of a better world. Most importantly, it can appeal to anyone, whatever their prior affiliations might be. We cannot afford to accept that roughly 62 million Trump supporters are irredeemably bigoted because, if we do, there is no hope. We need to persuade these citizens that if we don’t let race-hatred break us up we can win and improve life for everyone. For this reason concepts like race ought to be a regular topic in every zine, newspaper; at every meeting; and in every organizing conversation. While multi-racial coalitions are best the white part of the coalition must be the responsibility of white organizers.

Already in projects like the McMicken FreeSpace we can see how to develop anti-racist, feminist initiatives into a wider social revival by creating “thick networks”: projects that proliferate, spawning further ventures and ideas that weren’t envisaged when they started.  They then begin to develop a dense, participatory culture – a society in movement – that becomes attractive and relevant to everyone rather than mostly to socially active people with time on their hands.

What makes movements a force is the deployment of a distinctive power that arises from the ability of angry and indignant people to at times defy the rules that usually ensure their cooperation and quiescence. Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to spark a general strike. They are also our best locus of hope. As many Americans are realizing, right now, resistance works. What will you do to fight back?

from John Ashbery, 'The New Spirit'

When one is in one's late thirties, ordinary things – like a pebble or a glass of water – take on an expressive sheen. One wants to know more about them, and one is in turn lived by them. Young people might not envy this kind of situation, perhaps rightly so, yet there is now interleaving the pages and indifference to suffering a prismatic space that cannot be seen, merely felt as the result of an angularity that must have existed from earliest times and is only now succeeding in making its presence felt through the mists of helpless acceptance of everything else projected on our miserable, dank span of days. One is aware of it as an open field of narrative possibilities. Not in the edifying sense of the tales of the past that we are still (however) chained to, but as stories that tell only of themselves, so that one realizes one's self has dwindled and now at last vanished in the diamond light of pure speculation. Collar up, you are lighter than air. The only slightly damaged bundle of receptive nerves is humming again, receiving the colorless emanations from outer space and dispatching dense. Precisely worded messages. There is room to move around in it, which is all that matters. The pain that drained the blood from your cheeks when you were young and turned you into a whitened specter before your time is converted back into a source of energy that peoples this new world of perceived phenomena with wonder. – John Ashbery, 'The New Spirit'

How to Prepare Yourself and Others for Encounters With Immigration Enforcement - National Immigration Law Center

How to Prepare Yourself and Others for Encounters With Immigration Enforcement - National Immigration Law Center

Calvin Johnson - Ode To St. Valentine

Play For Today : Destiny. (David Edgar, 1978)

A small town shopkeeper is conned into standing for an extreme right-wing party at a bye-election. This remarkable play is as relevant now, if not more so, as it ever was.

you know you're making a difference when you get profiled and trolled by far-Right religious extremists all over the internets who, in a pathetic attempt to smear Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati as a 'terrorist' organization, don't seem to understand that my faith (largely in the Judeo-Christian tradition but with plenty of wiggle-room to other religions and secular beliefs) and interfaith work is an integral part of my antiracist, labor and social justice work, as it is for so many of us in the struggle.

Wendy's: Unfreeze your frosty heart! - YouTube

Wendy's: Unfreeze your frosty heart! - YouTube

my favourite book from Ohio

The 'Red Bishop' Brown sees the free development of the individual as the moral task given each one of us, unconstrained by ideologies, leaders or trust in higher authority: "No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals." (Communism and Christianism pp. 46-47)

Standing Rock's Last Stand

Noam Chomsky on President Donald Trump

Noam Chomsky - How to Deal with the Trump Presidency

Blade on the bloody feather....

With the recent rise of Trumplandia and neofascism swimming ahead in the futility and banal evils of capitalism, we can all learn from Potter's classic Blade on the Feather, and his theory that the immoral upper class loves only what it owns, and it doesn't own quite enough of any particular nation any more.....  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf9_D095H_E

SST Promo Video Compilation

To an American journalist, Tolstoy said, “No man should have to work for a man like Rockefeller.  One had better die than assist in the prospering of Rockefeller and the like.”

Roger Rosenblatt on terrorism

The airports are closed due to a heightened awareness of lovers worldwide, who are consuming everyone's attention as if it were consummé.  What shall we do about this -- what should one call it -- threat?  Terrorists will be terrorists, the little devils.  The Taliban will be Talibananas.  Lovers will be lovers, that's a given.  The world will always welcome them, etc. etc., but there is such a thing as overabundance, you know.  You can't have too many terrorists, but lovers reproduce like rabbits, and if you're not watching them every second, they will take the attention  of the world away from the bombers and bludgeoners, if you can imagine such a thing.  So, I ask you, comrade, what is to be done?


-- from Roger Rosenblatt, The Book of Love

Academics Against Immigration Executive Order

Academics Against Immigration Executive Order

liberation not deportation!

no human being is illegal

The Sea

Natasha and Andrei's Waltz: War and Peace (Война и мир)

The ever-delightful Lyudmila Savelyeva brings all her ballet skills to the role, and Pierre's facial expression - HALF-glad! -- before the dissolve is quite perfect (one i find myself wearing all too often).

This Dutch video on Trump has gone viral because, well, just watch it

This Dutch video on Trump has gone viral because, well, just watch it

“Not what you see, but what you perceive:/ that’s poetry.  Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement/ of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.”  Terrance Hayes

Ibajekbe (What If) - YouTube

Ibajekbe (What If) - YouTube

Plastic Idols - I.U.D. -

current
mood: #allgonnadie #dietofroadkillinTrumplandia depressor human scum

Black Bloc Participants Rescue Disabled Woman from Police Attack

3 Truths About Trumpism

R.E.M. - Stand (Video)

My very favourite image today. THANK YOUs.

Primo Levi

“WAITING”

This is a time of lightning without thunder,
This is a time of unheard voices,
Of uneasy sleep and useless vigils.
Friends, do not forget the days
Of long easy silences,
Friendly nocturnal streets,
Serene meditations.
Before the leaves fall,
Before the sky closes again,
Before we are awakened again
By the familiar pounding of iron footsteps
In front of our doors.
*************
2 January 1949
by PRIMO LEVI from his COLLECTED POEMS
translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann

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from AFTER RM RILKE (PRIMO LEVI)

The time has come to have a home,
Or to remain for a long time without one.
The time has come not to be alone,
Or else we will stay alone for a long time.

Zappa, Understanding America

WON’T YOU CELEBRATE WITH ME
by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

When the historical process breaks down and armies organize with their embossed debates the ensuing void which they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good to the bar business. -- W. H. Auden, opening lines to The Age of Anxiety

Carlin on Repugs

“The neutron bomb is very Republican; it leaves property alone and concentrates on destroying large numbers of people indiscriminately.” — George Carlin

Riot Squad : Police Power : AUDIO Punk Vinyl.

The Pastels - Wrong Light

Federici

"Witch-hunting did not destroy the resistance of the colonized. Due primarily to the struggle of women, the connection of the American Indians with the land, the local religions and nature survived beyond the persecution providing, for more than five hundred years, a source of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance.This is extremely important for us, at a time when a renewed assault is being made on the resources and mode of existence of indigenous populations across the planet; for we need to rethink how the conquistadors strove to subdue those whom they colonized, and what enabled the latter to subvert this plan and, against the destruction of their social and physical universe, create a new historical reality." Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

As Len Deighton wrote: “When old men decide to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction is called war.” #andweareatwar #Trumplandia