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1/28/2011
Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
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Bob Dylan, or at least the idea of him, is the lurking, mocking background chorus in this beautiful, bittersweet look at postwar America's foremost agitprop singer/songwriter. For all that Phil Ochs could have achieved in his lauded but still overshadowed career, there stands Dylan, the one who came up through the same West Village coffeehouse folk scene but who had no problem jettisoning its politics once he realized that greater commercial reward was there for the taking without the encumbrance of protest. As Christopher Hitchens points out in the film, there was a difference between those who liked Dylan and those who even knew about Ochs -- anybody could be into Dylan, Ochs's songs were for those who cared.
- an excerpt from the filmcritic.com review of Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune by Chris Barsanti.
Van Dyke Parks: The thing about Phil that made him interesting was he was totally unequivocal. He was determined, precise, literate, but already filled with rage and political purpose in his songs.
Phil Ochs: [singing] He slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side. It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died. Too many martyrs and too many dead...
Dave Van Ronk: Topical song movement evolved out of opposition to segregation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, in general, subsequently the Vietnam War. Without those howling injustices and outrages, there would have been no protest song movement. Probably there would have been no folk song movement.
Phil Ochs: [singing] And then there came the boycotts and then the Freedom Rides. And forgetting what you stood for, you tried to block the tide. Oh, the automation bosses were laughing on the side, as they watched you lose your link on the chain, on the chain, as they watched you lose your link on the chain.
Michael Ochs: Phil would play anywhere. There were the club things. There’d be a multi-artist thing. You’d hear about all these causes that needed help. He would go to the South and do civil rights things.
Phil Ochs: [singing] If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find. Oh, the calendar is lying when it reads the present time. Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of. Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of.
Michael Ochs: It was a great way to reach people through one’s music. Phil would actually turn down a commercial job for a benefit, because the benefit would usually reach more people.
Abbie Hoffman: No matter how small a group or big the group, whenever anybody asked, I can never remember him turning down anybody, any benefit, any chance to sing for a cause he believed in. He really—Phil Ochs was there.
Lucian Truscot IV: Those guys were true believers. Those guys would show up, you know, for the opening of an envelope to give $10 to some guy that was handing out crackers on the Bowery, to sing a song for the cracker-hander-outter guy.
Arthur Gorson: Phil went down to Hazard, Kentucky, because there was a miners’ strike.
Phil Ochs: [singing] Well, some people think that unions are too strong, union leaders should go back where they belong.
Arthur Gorson: We got to sleep in bathtubs, so that when they came and shot up the rooms at night, you wouldn’t have bullets bouncing off. And it was cool.
Phil Ochs: [singing] Well, mining is a hazard in Hazard, Kentucky, and if you ain’t mining there, you’re awful lucky, because if you don’t get silicosis or a pay that’s just atrocious, you’ll be screaming for a union that will care.
Arthur Gorson: There was sort of a very kind of practical moral politics that had to do with a sincere feeling that people should be treated equally.
Phil Ochs: [singing] But if you want to get together and fight, good buddy, that’s what I want to hear.
- An excerpt from Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune taken from a DemocracyNow! interview with
Kenneth Bowser, the director, and Michael Ochs, the produce and brother of Phil Ochs.
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5/12/2010
How the hell did it happen? - Daniel Okrent on how Prohibition democratized drinking and made the income tax possible
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In 1920 could anyone have believed that the Eighteenth Amendment, ostensibly addressing the single subject of intoxicating beverages, would set off an avalanche of change in areas as diverse as international trade, speedboat design, tourism practices, soft-drink marketing, and the English language itself? Or that it would provoke the establishment of the first nationwide criminal syndicate, the idea of home dinner parties, the deep engagement of women in political issues other than suffrage, and the creation of Las Vegas? As interpreted by the Supreme Court and as understood by Congress, Prohibition would also lead indirectly to the eventual guarantee of the American woman's right to abortion and simultaneously dash that same woman's hope for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Prohibition changed the way we live, and it fundamentally redefined the role of the federal government. How the hell did it happen?
- from Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
On how Prohibition democratized drinking
The saloon was a male-only place. That was always the case...Prohibition changes everything. The saloons become speakeasies, and because it is an outlaw operation, it begins to behave in outlaw ways. Women start to come because it's an exciting thing to do. They're accommodated. That means they have to put in tables, because you can't just have the women standing at the bar, so table service begins. Music shows up for the first time. If you have men and women drinking together, you have to have music. Jazz, the outlaw music, is rising at that very same time. There were no bars in the pre-Prohibition era that had live music. It just didn't happen.
On how Prohibition made the income tax posible:
Going back as far as the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s and then the beer tax that was brought in during the Civil War to finance the Civil War, the federal government had been dependent upon the excise tax on alcohol to operate.
In some years, domestic revenue, as much as 50 percent of it came from excise taxes. So the Prohibitionists realized that they couldn't get rid of liquor so long as the federal government was dependent upon liquor to get its revenue and to operate. So they supported the income tax movement, and in exchange, many of the populists who were behind the income tax movement supported Prohibition.
In 1913, the 16th Amendment is passed. The income tax comes in. The federal government has another means of supporting itself. And at that point, the Prohibitionists who had been operating state by state by state decided we can now have an amendment to the federal Constitution because the government is no longer dependent. There's another source of revenue.
- two excerpts from Prohibition Life: Politics, Loopholes And Bathtub Gin, a Terry Gross, Fresh Air interview with Daniel Okrent.
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1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti
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Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted.
- from the New York Times, Country Without a Net, by Tracy Kidder.
The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
- from the Guardian, Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward.
January 17 2010: See also from Common Dreams, Why the US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History by Bill Quigley.
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8/8/2009
Daniel Ellsberg on the 64th Aniversary of Hiroshima Day
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For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.
Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.
To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.
Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I’m convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I’m not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public’s ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.
Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. (I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last 50 years.
Our popular image of nuclear war—from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon. - two selections from Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years by Daniel Ellsberg.
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6/22/2009
J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye Inspires Possible Swedish Copycat
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The Associated Press is reporting that a newbook written by Swedish author Fredrik Colting is being scrutinized by a U.S. District Judge who is concerned about copyright infringement of J.D. Salinger’s iconic novel Catcher in the Rye. Colting’s book, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,was written to poke fun at Salinger’s “God-Author” public persona, according to Colting, but Judge Deborah Batts noted that she sees only close similarities between the stories, and not a clear separation or criticism, as Colting claims to have made of Salinger. In Colting’s version, a “Mr. C” escapes from a retirement home and goes on a journey that Judge Batts believes mirrors too closely the events that unfold for Holden Caufield in Salinger’s original work. Colting also published the book under a pseudonym that is undeniably close to Salinger’s real name: J.D. California.
Ironically, the Associated Press reports, Colting’s lawyer is accusing Judge Batts of banning the new book as she considers blocking its publication – it was slated to be released in the U.S. on September 15 – due to a copyright infringement. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which was published in 1951, has also been banned over the years.
J.D. Salinger is collaborating with Judge Batts, and according to The AP, his literary agent referred to 60 Years Later as “wholesale piracy.” Colting’s lawyer, however, considers the new work a valid sequel to the original.
The Catcher in the Rye has reportedly sold between 10 million and 35 million copies and is still considered to be one of the most iconic portraits of American literature. Time declared it one of the top English-language novels from 1923-2005, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush credits it with being one of the books that has inspired him over the years. According to Wikipedia, Catcher in the Rye was the most censored books in high schools and libraries between 1961 and 1982, but it has also become one of the most treasured and most widely taught books in the U.S.
This post was contributed by Caitlin Smith, who writes about online colleges. She welcomes your feedback at CaitlinSmith1117 at gmail.com.
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6/13/2009
Ralph Nader on master woodworker Sam Maloof, 1916 - 2009
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You can't help but stroke the darn things - Jeremy Adamson,
curator a 2001 exhibition of Sam Maloof's work at the Renwick Gallery
of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Described by the Smithsonian Institution as "America's most renowned
contemporary furniture craftsman" and dubbed by People magazine as
the"The Hemingway of Hardwood," master woodworker and furniture
designer Sam Maloof died last month at the age of 93. Maloof called
himself a "woodworker". "I like the word," he once told a Los Angeles
Times. "It's an honest word.
"A measure of the man's spirit, writes Ralph Nader on Maloof, "is
reflected in these words about his work:
Craftsmen in any media know the satisfaction that comes in
designing and making an object from raw material. Mine comes from
working in wood. Once you have breathed, smelled, and tasted the
tanginess of wood and have handled it in the process of giving it
form, there is nothing, I believe, that can replace the complete
satisfaction granted.
Working a rough piece of wood into a complete, useful object is the
welding together of man and material.
The exquisite manual workmanship of Mr. Maloof is further stimulating
the questioning of the remoteness that modern technology visits on so
many people who spend hours in virtual reality, separated from nature
and its materials. Our country was built by craftsmen, artisans and
other workers who designed and made real things. High Schools offered
Shop Class, where students learned skills and the joy of creating.
These classes opened doors to a source of livelihood and pride for
budding artisans.
With the nineteenth century industrial revolution and mass production
employing masses of workers, these independent craftsmen tried to
remain independent contractors and not become what they called "wage
slaves" in giant, often dangerous, factories...
In a new book titled Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford,
the author bemoaned the closing at high schools all over the United
States of shop classes that taught the mechanical arts like carpentry,
woodworking, welding and other skills. They were closed to allow more
funding of computer labs. And because our throw-away society no longer
properly values the fruits of artisan labor.
Crawford goes on to argue and demonstrate what our society loses when
we make joining the paper economy the chief aspiration of the younger
generations or to use Robert Reich?s phrase to become "symbolic
analysts." Somebody has to keep the real world running maintained,
repaired and replaced?something we realize very quickly when things
don?t work in our households.
The draining of gratification from work in a techno-computerized
environment is a widespread condition for millions of people, apart
from the automated severance of their judgment and discretion by
command and control positions." -- from The
Craft of Sam Maloof
A Visionary Woodworker.
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11/23/2008
Haruki Murakami on running and dreaming
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"What compelled you to write a memoir?" asked Heidi Benson speaking to Haruki Murakami last month about his most recent book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
"I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me."
"Readers are very passionate about your work. Why do you think fiction matters to people so much"
"That's a big question. I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake." - excerpted from
What Haruki Murakami talks about.
Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat. As long as he can beat that time, a runner will feel he's accomplished what he set out to do, and if he can't, then he'll feel he hasn't. Even if he doesn't break the time he'd hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best--and, possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process--then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can carry over to the next race.
The same can be said about my profession. In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't seek validation in the outwardly visible. - from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.
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11/6/2008
Predicting the quality of a Barack Obama presidency by his ability with the pen
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Like many politicians Barack Obama is also an author. What makes him different is he's also a good writer. Most books by today's policies are glossy, self-serving, sometimes ghost-written puffery, which are designed to be sold as throwaway literature. Obama has written a couple of these books, and the best that can be said about them is that they're a cut above the usual tripe politicians slap between two covers. Earlier, however, way back in 1995, Barack Obama penned another book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years.
As its subtitle implies, this is not a book about politics per se, but Obama's struggle to find his racial identity and to understand the role of race in American culture and beyond. As the son of a Kenyan man and a white American woman, whose spent his earliest years in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, Obama's take on race is both personal and sadly universal. Equally as impressive is the fact that he doesn't disguise the book's more controversial and revealing aspects, as most politicians instinctively would have done.
Had Obama elected to be a full-time author instead of a politician I don't doubt that he would have become highly accomplished. Dreams from My Father is Obama's first attempt at a serious sustained narrative and it has many of the flaws one would expect from an emerging author, including some awkward transitions and, as he himself has admitted, a bit of long-windedness. These are minor flaws, however, in a work that
easily could have been the first piece of a very worthwhile literary life.
Attempting to predict the quality of an Obama presidency by his ability with the pen may seem a bit far-fetched to some. But in American politics there is a great deal of support for this. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most revered of all American leaders, was also one his century's greatest writers...
- from Presidents who write well, lead well by Rob Woodard.
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10/29/2008
Paul Auster on writing and his latest novel, Man in the Dark
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I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle with another bout of insomnia, another white night in the American wilderness. - the opening sentence of Man in the Dark
"It's a dark night for Brill. But I think that most people when they have these bouts of insomnia - I think we've all had them - usually your thoughts turn to the darker moments of your life. It's not a cheery time, the experience of cataloguing your regrets, making lists of all the rotten things you've done in life, things you wish you haven't done, basically just examining the futility of your own existence. It usually gets better when morning comes, and I try to imply that at the end of the book."
"For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity."..."I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK then I type it up, because sometimes it's almost illegible and if I wait I might not be able to read it the next day. So I immediately type up the paragraph, see what it looks like on a clean sheet of paper, and then attack that sheet of paper with my pencil again."
- two excerpts from the Guardian's Paul Auster talks to Alsion Ford.
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9/16/2008
Jane Ciabattari on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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DARE you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire’s common tint;
But when the vivid ore
Has sated flame’s conditions,
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.
Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil’s even din
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,
Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light
Repudiate the forge. - Emily Dickinson
"How many know that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the radical abolitionist who was one of the "Secret Six" who supported John Brown's bold raid on Harpers Ferry, later became the literary confidant of the reclusive apolitical poet Emily Dickinson?" The question is asked by Jane Ciabattari, author of the brilliant short story collection Stealing the Fire, in her review of Brenda Wineapple's book White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Higginson is the question mark in this equation. Dickinson has been the target of more than a century of obsessive scholarly excavation...Wineapple makes a case for a parallel sensibility, iconoclasm, fanaticism and courage. She captures the intellectual and political climate of New England in the last half of the 19th century and sheds light on Higginson’s radicalism. “Braced by the righteousness of his cause—the unequivocal emancipation of slaves—this Massachusetts gentleman of the white and learned class had earned a reputation among his own as a lunatic,” she notes. - excerpted from book review published in truthdig by Jane Ciabattari.
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