Occupy Wall Street - 2013 - The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
David Graeber
Spiegel & Grau
2013
326 pages

David Graeber is the former Yale assistant professor of anthropology who was let go from that institution, possibly for his anarchist political views. He currently teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. His anthropological work has been highly praised by others in the field, and as a far-left spokesman, he appears congenial and nonthreatening while expressing his thoughts in accessible language. He probably best known as an author for his excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which investigates the history of debt across time and cultures and provided part of the intellectual grounding for Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to Graeber's career as educator and author, he is also an activist and was a principle organizer for the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book, The Democracy Project, is Graeber's report on the initial stages of Occupy's formation, his own role in the movement, and his perspective on what occured in Liberty park during the fall of 2011. Much like he had in his earlier work, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber combines his two roles in in this book, scholar and activist, to describe what worked about Occupy.

The purpose of Graeber's book is to report on Occupy at a time when everyone believes the movement to have died out. He repeats through his book that social movements take years, decades even, to achieve the changes they seek, leaving the reader with the thought that perhaps the Occupy movement that appears moribund at the time of reading was a dramatic phase of a longer-lasting movement. Besides describing the Occupy movement, Graeber also describes in this book a set of institutions: media, police, financial organizations, government, and outlines how they constitute power in American society and how Occupy constituted a response to that power. At a deeper level of analysis, Graeber discusses how these institutions prevent the practice of real democracy in American society and how the Occupy movement pointed towards such a practice. One chapter, How Change happens, is almost entirely dedicated to a description of how the kind of real democracy envisioned by the Occupy movement was practiced in real life when all of the institutions that make up the existing power structure were doing whatever they could to destroy it.

beats, jack kerouac - 1989 - Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey

Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey
Herménégilde Chiasson
1989
National Film Board of Canada
55 min.

The National Film Board is one of Canada's most important cultural institutions. Important, as far as I'm concerned, because the film board has produced numerous films of relevance to this blog. Several of those films, such as Acts of Defiance and l'Acadie l'Acadie !?! have already been profiled on this blog. Canada as a site of colonial domination and inter-colonial struggle has produced many of the kinds of socio-cultural fractures that countercultures grow from. Herménégilde Chiasson's film about Jack Kerouac's life and family history follows one of those lines of fracture from Quebec into Lowell Massachusetts, an industrial town where many French Canadian's immigrated to in the late 19th century, and it was also the birthplace of seminal Beat author Jack Kerouac, a descendant of those immigrants. The mother of this unabashedly American iconoclast were, in fact, Quebecois.

Chiasson's film is an investigation into the life of Kerouac and his roots in this immigrant Quebecois-American culture, and it is also a look at this community itself. The documentary is a typical mix of interviews with members of the Quebecois community in Lowell and read quotations or old television interview segments from the famous author. Visually, the film shows old photographs juxtaposed against contemporary footage of the city of Lowell during the winter, and this winter aesthetic immediately conjures up ideas of Canadian towns despite the fact that its an American city on display.

This film also goes over many of the known details of Kerouac's life, such as his football scholarship to Columbia, his becoming a writer, and Allen Ginsberg appears to discuss their first meeting. The documentary's main focus however is the connections between its implied subjects, Canadian and American, mother and child, alien and native. Some of the interview subjects talk about growing up in Lowell and developing from their families an intimate knowledge of Canadian/Quebecois politics and society. Many of the Kerouac quotations referred to in the film refer to his mother, and in the context of this film the implication is that to refer to his mother is to refer to Quebec as well.

hippies - 1973 - Godspell

Godspell 
David Greene
Columbia Pictures
1973
103 min.

Godspell is the film that I expected Hair to be. I assumed, before watching, that Hair would be tedious and obnoxious and instead it was actually fun to watch and its music was pretty good. Godspell, a retelling of the Gospel of Matthew, features a group of clowns who are double metaphors: firstly for Hippies and secondly for Christ and his disciples. These clowns wander around an unpopulated lower Manhattan following a charismatic clown christ-figure who imparts his wisdom and sings songs. The clowns clown constantly and almost every line of the film is delivered in a different goofy voice. I'm sure there's some degree of theatrical virtuosity in pulling that off but I found the constant clown routines and cartoony voice switching to be just so unbelievably irritating that I found it difficult to appreciate anything I was watching.

When the clowns were singing heartfelt songs the obnoxiousness was suspended, and a couple other key scenes were okay to watch, such as this film's version of the crucifixion where the Christ figure was lashed to a fence with red scarves. Like Hair, this film depicts Central Park in New York City, what must be the most represented park in the world, as a site of contemporary spiritual awakening.

Following the lamentation scene, the city's population appears, indicating that, just like on the theater stage, the space depicted is removed from real space.

punk - 2003 - I, Shithead: A Life in Punk

I, Shithead: A Life in Punk
Joey Keithley
Arsenal Pulp Press
2003
237 pages

Joey Keithley has served his country as the only constant member of the long-lived Vancouver based band, DOA. DOA is notable for being the first truly original Canadian punk band to have an impact on the punk subculture. Keithley's band was a vanguard of the turn to hardcore punk which emphasized shorter songs, intense lead singers, basic song construction, and the DIY ethic. DOA formed in 1978 (after beginning as 'The Skulls') and has been touring and recording ever since, releasing their most recent studio album, We Come in Peace, in 2012. Since their incarnation, the band has released MANY great albums featuring a shifting lineup that always has Keithley (who went by the name Joe Shithead for much of his early career) at the band's centre.

Keithley has also become one of a small number of punk heroes who has written his memoirs of the scene. I, Shithead contains Keithley's memories of emerging into the punk scene during the mid-70s up to the early 1990s, considering the band's been around for an additional ten years past this book's publication, there's lots of band history left unrecorded by its figurehead.

These recollections of the early years of punk are great to read because of how they describe the emergence of an international punk scene becoming a subculture. Keithley's book is full of all sorts of anecdotes about playing to BC bikers, dealing with slimy promoters and owners, drinking beer, getting rowdy, dealing with cops, fighting with jerks in the audience, and so on, everything that makes a great punk story. The book, as a memoir and as a punk history, is at its best when Keithly talks about his touring stories and playing with, and befriending, some other now historically relevant punk band at a legion hall or divey club with 100 people in the audience. DOA and a large number of other bands mentioned as friends of the author, are still talked about, and knowing the origins and music of classic groups like Husker Du and Flipper is part of what makes up the credibility of newcomers to the scene. It made me happy when Keithley said that he dragged Steven Leickie of the Viletones through a pool of his urine in a Toronto club.

I, Shithead is also relevant for explaining how a group of not very responsible men of working-class origins and limited financial means carry out a complicated undertaking such as a multi-date concert tour. This book answers questions like, how does a man make a living as the lead singer of a punk band (he doesn't - so he holds a side job as a taxi-driver). And it explains Keithley's need to keep politics in music. Close to the end of the book Keithley had estimated that he had done over 200 benefit concerts by about 1990. I'm hoping for another book that covers the band's history up to the present day.