radical economics - television - 2012 - The Currency of Protest

The Stream: The Currency of Protest
Al Jazeera
May 23, 2012


"We look at the rise of micro-currencies and bartering systems as the financial crisis continues."

Discussions with 

• Heloisa Primavera: Brazillian economist and sociologist
• Peter North: Geographer at the University of Liverpool, focuses on Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Globalization movements among other research interests
• Eric Garland: author and speaker 

beats, william s burroughs - book - 2011 - Naked Tea: The Burroughs Bits

Naked Tea: The Burroughs Bits
Philip Willey with George Laughead
illustrations by Lyle Schultze
2011
54 pages

This book is a brief piece of William S. Burroughs fan-fiction, apparently excerpted from a novel-in-progress by Philip Willey.  Although the author is writing a novel, his name only appears online in conjunction with other small publications, or with anecdotes about meeting writers.  Naked Tea is, according to the book’s website, inspired by meetings with Burroughs.  Willey (I believe it to be the same Willey, although I may be mistaken) previously contributed an anecdote about meeting Henry Miller to a 1989 book titled Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Celebrities.  Willey seems to have a knack for turning his run-ins with authors into writing of his own, as exhibited in Naked Tea.

This book is a small and short self-published work featuring a brief narrative of hanging around and talking which includes William S. Burroughs as a character.  The writing itself is more Hunter S. Thompson (who is referenced directly in the text) prose-style than Burroughs, and so is much of the art, which (sorta) evokes a pastiche of Ralph Steadman’s wild illustrations, with one exception being a mixed media image that looks like a modified piece by Jean Dubuffet.  The text is a tribute to Burroughs, more than anything else, as it often reads as a stream of unexplained references to Burroughs fairly large and disjointed body of written works.

Lyle Schultz - 2010 - The Cut Ups (featured in Naked Tea)

Jean Dubuffet - similar to an image in Naked Tea!

The pieces written by Willey are imaginary conversations with the great American author, and this book thus makes an odd and fictional companion to other collections of Burroughs interviews such as the Semiotext(e) publication Burroughs Live, and the RE/Search books on Burroughs.  After two such imagined encounters between Willey (presumably) and Burroughs, the first at a tea shop (hence the title) the second at a rock concert, the book segues to a candid sketch of Burroughs in his final months contributed by George Laughead, the manager of the Kansas Heritage Group virtual library.  Laughead was a personal friend to Burroughs while the author lived in Laurence Kansas, and his online resource includes a Burroughs photo gallery and a page devoted to the Beat movement (which features a promotional statement regarding this book).

Apparently this is not the only work of Burroughs/Beats fan fiction out there...

Photo of installation by Marco Perego featuring a sculpted representation of Burroughs titled The Only Good Rock Star is a Dead Rock Star

secessionist, neo-confederacy - book - 2008 - Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction

Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction
Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta (eds.)
The University of Texas Press
2008
338 pages

“This is a book written by two well known opponents of anything to do with confederate history.” Stephen D. Echard

“The authors of this book are all well-known to have a pronounced bias against all things Southern and all things conservative. One cannot expect their book to do anythin else but reflect the biases of the authors.” Michael R. Bradley.

The above quotations are cut and pasted from two ‘one-star’ reviews of Hague’s, Beirich’s, and Sebesta’s collection of essays on the secessionist social and cultural phenomena they refer to as the ‘Neo-Confederacy.’  The above quotations are interesting to me because they presume the exhibition of editorial bias is synonymous with ‘bad book’.  This is not true, of course, but I’m somewhat fascinated by how pervasive and common it is to find this sort of sentiment expressed in regards to critical literature and documentary films.  I’m curious to know what the permitted perspective is on such subjects according to the authors of these ‘one-star’ reviews.  Should all writing be devoid of opinion and just aspire to describe things?  Is this attitude reflective of a facebook-style imposition of a ‘like’ function on all things that fosters an expectation that the public expression of opinion should only be oriented towards approving things?

Heidi Beirich is the current director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which draws a lot of negative attention from the radical right-wing in the United States.  Edward H. Sebesta is an independent scholar who runs the Anti-Neo-Confederacy blog and has done research work for the Southern Poverty Law Center in the past.  He has also maintained a web archive of a newspaper called The Citizens’ Council (the publication of the Citizen’s Council of Mississippi) and has edited another volume of Neo-Confederate literature.  I’m sure that these two editors are the individuals the above reviewers were referring to.  Euen Hauge is current chair of the Department of Geography at DePaul University in Chicago, where he specializes in teaching urban and cultural geography.  Many of his publications take the points where race intersects with place as their focus.

Anyways... Hague, Beirich, and Sebesta have collected a set of scholarly critiques of various aspects of what they call ‘Neo-Confederacy’, which is the persistent assertion that the Southern United States is home to a distinct social and cultural formation which is incompatible with the rest of modern America.  Over the course of 10 essays, this distinct cultural and its ideological supports are investigated by the book’s authors.  Seven of the ten essays were written by the editors, so that accounts for the editorial bias of this book, and they seem quite sharp in their critique of the statements issued by ‘Neo-Confederate’ commentators and writers.  

Many of the Neo-Confederate quotations used by the authors of this book are explicitly racist, or, for example, call for violence as a means of keeping social order.  The authors uncover many tensions amongst Neo-Conservative rhetoric that indicate that the purveyors of a return to the pre-civil war way of living in the American south desire an authoritarian rule for the benefit of white protestant men.  More specifically, the authors identify the white, hot-blooded, southern male as the pinnacle of human evolution, and for this specimen to properly express his values, he must be permitted to engage in violence against any offense to his honor.  Of course, the authors also identify Neo-Confederate voices that consider the perceived propensity for violence among non-whites as indicators of their inferiority.  What they truly call for, then, is a renewed Southern social order where the use of violence is legitimately exercised by white men to keep everyone else “in their place”.  This is a small example of the expressions of southern nationalism critiqued by this book’s authors, who discuss a full range of cultural forms and attitudes found in literature (such as the writings of the Southern Agrarians) and music and in small social groups (such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans) to define and affirm a desire to return to the Antebellum south.

The essays combine to form a critical cultural survey of Neo-Confederate forms, from their attitudes towards race, to the literature and music that expresses their ideals.  The views that Sebestra, Beirich, Hauge, and company critique fall within the far side of conservatism.  Some Neo-Confederate commentators, for example, note that the abolition of slavery was part of an elaborate plot to eradicate Christianity from the south, and furthermore that slavery was sanctioned by the Christian God.  The term ‘Neo-Confederacy’ sounds like a name, created by the editors of this book given to a broad range of Southern-nationalist expressions by the editors of this text.  If we take this to be a secessionist movement, then it is clearly different from the secessionist movement Thomas H. Naylor leads in Vermont.  Naylor suggests that Vermont must seceed because his state is uniquely progressive among the Union.  The Neo-Confederates, however, appear to want to leave the Union and leave the modern era behind.

PS: there is a mockumentary film that imagines that the Confederacy won the civil war titled the Confederate States of America viewable in its entirety on youtube:


 

hippies - film - 1979 - Hair

Hair

Milos Forman
CIP Filmproduktion GmbH
1979
121 minutes

Milos Forman, a director of films about the recent past (minus Amadeus), created this 1979 film based on a 1967 musical of the same name , written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni.  The film focuses on the friendship of two archetypes of the American 1960s: the free-spirited flower-child and the conservative army recruit.  Clean-cut country-boy Claude Bukowski, on his way to army army training, stops in Central Park in New York City (for some reason), where he meets John Burger and his group of hippie friends who end up becoming his surrogate family while he stays in the city.  Shortly after Bukowsky befriends Burger and company, they meet Shelia, a debutante from an upper-crust family who becomes another unlikely associate to the hippie gang.


This is what Bukowski sees when he arrives at Central Park:

The film explores a number of hippie tropes, mostly through the songs that now echo through various appropriations in other forms of popular culture, for example this: 

And this:  

These songs cover topics such as new age spirituality, destruction of racial boundaries, hallucinogenics, free love, war, sunshine, and non-conformity - which is symbolized by hair: 

John Burger is a tough NY hippie, recalling Abbie Hoffman in his attitude and appearance and fast-talking demeanor. Here's Burger singing "I Got Life" as he ruins dinner:

 He might also be a prefiguration of Ferris Bueller, whose antics bring his his friends to unlikely places where they are unwelcome (such as a posh garden party hosted by Sheila’s family) and, following Bukowski’s enlistment, into the army base.  Ultimately, Bukowski and Burger essentially switch places, as Burger is inadvertently sent to Vietnam while posing as Bukowski on the army base so that Claude can visit his hippie friends off-base.  The final turn of the film shows Burger’s headstone as Let the Sun Shine blasts.  This final scene includes the most visually striking (and haunting) shot of the film (seen from 2:32 in the video clip below), a show which shows the perspective of the soldiers walking in pairs into the absolutely dark interior of the cargo-plane that carries Burger into oblivion.  The shot provides the viewer with the perspective of being just above the soldiers of shoulders, giving the viewer the point of view of a protective spirit about to abandon its ward.

Apparently the film adaptation was disappointing to Rando and Ragni for its great reduction of the anti-war stance of the stage musical, rather placing the bulk of its emphasis on the free-spirited lifestyle of the whole hippie thing (“...man”).  Who knows why this happened?  Government-Hollywood conspiracy?  A loss of the sense of urgency as the film production followed the end of the war by a few years?  That there was a deemphasizing of the anti-war aspect of the ‘60s in Forman’s Hair, is surprising, because in the more recent Taking Woodstock, the anti-war attitude of the era is absent, even though the more recent film includes a character that is a Vietnam-vet turned long-haired hippie.  Compared to Taking Woodstock, the final scenes of Hair appear forcefully radical.

Some of the songs have been heavily sampled for music of the 1990s rave culture - here’s one example: 

 

street art, Keith Haring - book - 2008 - Against All Odds: Keith Haring In The Rubell Family Collection

Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection
Mark Coetzee (ed)
2008
287 pages

Keith Haring was one of the major artstars of the downtown NYC art scene of the 1980s.  









He achieved renown when he was quite young for his cartoony drawings and paintings which featured an idiosyncratic set of symbols such as the barking dog:

and his best known symbol, the radiating baby:

Haring’s work was the point of convergence for a number of clear influences, including Andy Warhol’s pop, NYC graffiti, abstract expressionism, and semiotic theory.  Although Haring was not really a part of the NYC graffiti subculture, he is known as one of a small number of artists who emerged out of graffiti practice, as he drew his forms over sheets of black construction paper that were placed by the transit people in blank subway-station advertising space.

Against All Odds is a catalog for an exhibition of works of art by NYC 1980s artstar Keith Haring.  All of the works featured in the exhibition were from the Rubell family, Don and Mara Rubell, who were great collectors of recent American art.  The exhibition was held at the Palm Springs Art Museum, in Palm Springs California, from November 8, 2008 to january 19, 2009 (click here to see some of the images shown), and was curated by Mark Coetzee, then the head curator for that gallery.  This catalog shows how closely Coetzee worked with the Rubell family as it includes a detailed interview between the curator and his benefactors, and it also demonstrates how close the Rubell’s were with Haring, as they express an intimate knowledge of the artist that includes many personal anecdotes.  They also describe owning a scroll that features all of the different symbols Haring uses in his art.  Coetzee also includes Jason Rubell’s (Don and Mara’s son) interview with Haring, recorded a few weeks before Haring died of complications from AIDS in early 1990 where the artist described his philosophies towards his art.

Coetzee’s catalogue also includes an essay about Haring by Robert Hobbs, a visiting professor of art history at Yale University.  Hobbs essay compares Haring to the French artist Fernand Leger in their aesthetics and their populist approaches to art.  Hobbs makes some, to me, uncomfortable observations regarding Haring’s subway drawings that sets it as street art that transcends graffiti, because it compels the viewer to contemplate its meaning... unlike street art which is, according to Hobbs, intended for the admiration of other graffiti artists.  Of course, all graffiti/street art has the potential to provide a viewer with things to think about, so do television commercials or the architecture of public housing or highway interchanges or anything else “cultural”. This kind of observation which reserves for “high art” the capability of setting the viewer into a contemplative state is a pitfall of art-world people who are already committed to the eternal contemplation of high-status objects themselves.  Ignoring Hobbs remarks about graffiti, however, is not difficult, and his main points about Haring, Leger and semiotic theory are quite interesting.


Coetzee's catalog contains full page colour images of all the works featured in the exhibition. Many of the works are self-referential and include photographs of the infant or child Haring. This book also includes images by those artists most closely associated with Haring, including works by Warhol and Haring's fellow 1980s NYC art-star graffiti transcendentalist, Jean-Michel Basquait. The English text in this book is accompanied by a parallel Spanish translation, and the book ends thorough bibliography of written works about Haring as well as an exhibition history of the artist.