ContraTexts: June 2018

Friday, June 29, 2018

2018.06.27: Thinking Allowed: Gangs and Spirituality, BBC [1]

Begins with a clip from West Side Story and plays other clips through the episode as a way of including a dramatic misconception of street gangs.
Three academic criminologists Discussing street gangs and try to challenge some of the illusions (which are often hysterically generated) that produce the popular concept of a gang.
Talk about the critical issue with criminality being persistence in crime beyond a certain age - the teenage years - when breaking the rules is almost a normative behavior. It’s the career criminal which is of interest.
Available to listeners here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7hbc0

2018.06.18: Arts and Ideas: Sarah Scott and the Dream of a Female Utopia, BBC [1]

Brief radio broadcast and podcast of a talk by Lucy Powell about an 18th century English writer named Sarah Scott who explored the “radical power of female friendship”
Sarah Scott also imagined a female-only utopian community that included charitable activities as well as rugs manufacturing
This utopian community was first imagined in literature by Scott and then she tried to make it a reality in 1765.
Available to listeners here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06btwsz

2018.06.23 The Forum: The Life and Works of William Blake, BBC [1]

Radio Discussion of English romantic poet/illustrator William Blake’s career and life
Can be heard at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswps4
Discusses is fall into obscurity and his renewed influence during the 1960s
Includes a discussion of some of the Proverbs of Hell and their renewal as political slogans during the 1960s

Memoir of a Bulgarian anarchist named Alexander Nakov. This memoir was originally published in Bulgaria, in the Bulgarian language, in 2006.

Nakov was a lifelong anarchist but he wasn’t a career anarchist the way figures like Emma Goldman were, whose every action seemed to serve her causes in some way. Therefore Nakov’s story is often one of facing persuction and social exclusion, denial of employment, etc, due to his political views.

Was imprisoned for a time, but speaks of a ‘genocide’ of the anarchist movement in Bulgaria.

Speaks of the persecution of anarchists in a Communist/Soviet context, rather than a capitalist/democratic one.

Anarchist podcast put out by Its Going Down crew - new episodes are released every few days

Episodes began releasing about a month after the release of Donald Glover’s This is America video.

Episodes are less than half an hour. Format consists of a headline news reading for anarchists followed by a brief interview with someone involved with one of the events discussed in the news segment.

Swearing is bleeped out - part of a trend in anarchist podcasting to make them ready for radio broadcasting. Other podcasts to do this are The Final Straw Radio and The Hotwire.
Also promoted on the Channel Zero Podcast Network. https://channelzeronetwork.com/

2003: Noah Levine: Dharma Punx: HarperCollins [1]

Memoir by Noah Levine, a lifelong street punk turned buddhist teacher.
spent most of his life in California with some time spent in Arizona after his parents split up.
Like so many disaffected youth emerging from broken homes, he found meaning and power in the punk scene.
Noah became an addict of hard drugs as an adolescent. His path to buddhism came out of his recovery and following the twelve steps but also out of his experiences in prison. His father is a well known Buddhist author named Stephen Levine who gave Noah advice on how to meditate when he was trying to cope with a possibly long prison stretch.
The book is primarily about drug and alcohol recovery however there is a constant undercurrent of finding the synthesis between punk attitude and the practices of first the twelve step program and then Buddhism.