Allen Van Newkirk

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BM - I am convinced that the overthrow of Capitalism and government is not enough, rather, what is needed is a complete annihilation of Materialism – both Capitalism and Marxism. Living must replace consumption.

Why you don’t like to show your face? I heard you mention in another interview that you think it would undermine your message. But had you had a more public persona, perhaps your message would have been heard/spread more widely.

BM - First, obviously in my days of activism the last thing I wanted was a clear familiarity with my image. Second, creating a visual target is never desirable. The system needs symbols to attack. Then there is my discomfort with the “cult of the personality”. Some indigenous people felt the capturing of an image is analogous to the capture of the “spirit”, to which I concur. Then there is the real threat of a face replacing a message.

What do you think of “selfie” culture then?

BM - The “selfie” is the ultimate conceit. A clear indication of the depth of the problem. Fifteen minutes of fame becomes a lifetime of delusion. We can only work for its demise but it will be a long and arduous journey. You can see with its absurdity the extreme outgrowth of this fascination with the image over essence.

Ben Morea: Behind Black Mask

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Black Panthers 
Agnes Varda 1968

Brassai, A Man dies in the Street, Boulevard de la Glacière, Paris, 1932

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Would You Please Fucking Stop?

March 2011

I KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally.

There was one novel I read where the novelist didn’t only make all the fucking characters say fuck and shit all the time but she got into the fucking act herself, for shit sake. So it was full of deeply moving shit like “The sunset was just too fucking beautiful to fucking believe.”

I guess what’s happened is that what used to be a shockword has become a noise that’s supposed to intensify the emotion in what you’re saying. Or maybe it occurs just to bridge the gap between words, so that actual words become the shit that happens in between saying fucking?

Swearwords and shockwords used to mostly come out of religion. Damn, damn it, hell, God, God-damned, God damn it to hell, Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ Almighty, etc. etc. A few of them appeared, rarely, in nineteenth-century novels, usually as —— or more bravely as By G—! or d—n! (Archaic or dialect oaths such as swounds, egad, gorblimey were printed out in full.) With the twentieth century the religious-blasphemy oaths began to creep, and then swarm, into print. Censorship of words perceived as “sexually explicit” was active far longer. Lewis Gannett, the book reviewer for the old New York Herald Tribune, had a top-secret list of words the publisher had had to eliminate from The Grapes of Wrath before they could print it; after dinner one night Lewis read the list out loud to his family and mine with great relish. It couldn’t have shocked me much, because I recall only a boring litany of boring words, mostly spoken by the Joads no doubt, on the general shock level of titty.

I remember my brothers coming home on leave in the Second World War and never once swearing in front of us homebodies: a remarkable achievement. Only later, when I was helping my brother Karl clean out the spring, in which a dead skunk had languished all winter, did I learn my first real cusswords, seven or eight of them in one magnificent, unforgettable lesson. Soldiers and sailors have always cursed—what else can they do? But Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn’t miss, of cooing at him, “Oh, are you the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck?”

And then came the sixties, when a whole lot of people started saying shit, even if they hadn’t had lessons from their brother. And before long all the shits and fucks were bounding forth in print. And finally we began to hear them from the lips of the stars of Hollywood. So now the only place to get away from them is movies before 1990 or books before 1970 or way, way out in the wilderness. But make sure there aren’t any hunters out in the wilderness about to come up to your bleeding body and say, Aw, shit, man, I thought you was a fucking moose.

I remember when swearing, though tame by modern standards, was quite varied and often highly characteristic. There were people who swore as an art form—performing a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected. It seems weird to me that only two words are now used as cusswords, and by many people used so constantly that they can’t talk or even write without them.

Of our two swearwords, one has to do with elimination, the other (apparently) with sex. Both are sanctioned domains, areas like religion where there are rigid limits and things may be absolutely off-limits except at certain specific times or places.

So little kids shout caca and doo-doo, and big ones shout shit. Put the feces where they don’t belong!

This principle, getting it out of place, off-limits, the basic principle of swearing, I understand and approve. And though I really would like to stop saying Oh shit when annoyed, having got on fine without it till I was thirty-five or so, I’m not yet having much success in regressing to Oh hell or Damn it. There is something about the shh beginning, and the explosive t! ending, and that quick little ih sound in between . . .

But fuck and fucking? I don’t know. Oh, they sound good as curses too. It’s really hard to make the word fuck sound pleasant or kindly. But what is it saying?

I don’t think there are meaningless swearwords; they wouldn’t work if they were meaningless. Does fuck have to do with sex primarily? Or sex as male aggression? Or just aggression?

Until maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago, as far as I know, fucking only meant one kind of sex: what the man does to the woman, with or without consent. Now both men and women use it to mean coitus, and it’s become (as it were) ungendered, so that a woman can talk about fucking her boyfriend. So the strong connotations of penetration and of rape should have fallen away from it. But they haven’t. Not to my ear, anyhow. Fuck is an aggressive word, a domineering word. When the guy in the Porsche shouts Fuck you, asshole! he isn’t inviting you to an evening at his flat. When people say Oh shit, we’re fucked! they don’t mean they’re having a consensual good time. The word has huge overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.

So God is dead, at least as a swearword, but hate and feces keep going strong. Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters – Dec 5 2017

Ursula K. Le Guin

Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.
Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Left-Handed Commencement Address (Mills College, 1983)

I'd like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls...

J Coltrane

...D'une cruauté implacable, ce conflit n'en favorisa pas moins "un essor remarquable de la connaissance érudite". Surtout, il mit en lumière cette fonction des bagarres intellectuelles : "par elles se découvrent ceux qui ont la grâce et ceux qui ne l'ont pas", ceux qui peuvent s'affranchir des règles établies et ceux qui y resteront à jamais enfermés.

LA FRANCHISE PROSCRITE

De ce type de "grâce", notre société semble ne plus vouloir. D'un côté, elle célèbre les pamphlétaires venimeux, qui ne souhaitent rien d'autre qu'anéantir leur cible, ayant tout autre chose en tête que le triomphe de la Vérité. De l'autre, elle chasse les esprits critiques, ceux qui estiment encore assez leurs contemporains pour tenter de les convaincre, quitte à leur dire les choses en face. De là ce phénomène angoissant : dans les colloques académiques comme sur la scène médiatique, la franchise se trouve désormais proscrite. Exprimez le début d'un désaccord avec tel "cher collègue", l'esquisse d'une divergence avec tel "cher confrère", et vous passerez aussitôt pour une brute.

"Dans l'état actuel des choses, constate le sociologue Bernard Lahire dans sa postface, celui qui exerce son sens critique est souvent soupçonné d'agressivité, de méchanceté ou de dureté, et ce, indépendamment de la justesse de la critique. La rigueur intellectuelle est, pour certains, un simple signe de rigidité morale ou psychique, et l'exercice de la critique est réduit à une entreprise malveillante, voire terroriste."

LE MOT QUI TUE. UNE HISTOIRE DES VIOLENCES INTELLECTUELLES DE L'ANTIQUITÉ À NOS JOURS. 

Sous la direction de Vincent Azoulay et Patrick Boucheron. Champ Vallon, "Epoques"

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Nan Goldin, Self-portrait with eyes turned inward, Boston, 1989

She first publicly revealed that she was recovering from opioid addiction last autumn, when she gave a talk in Brazil; then, in December, she wrote about it for the US periodical Art Forum, saying of the Sacklers: “To get their ear we will target their philanthropy. They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world.”

In a New Yorker exposé of the family ties last year, Allen Frances, the former chair of psychiatry at Duke University school of medicine, told the magazine: “Their name has been pushed forward as the epitome of good works and of the fruits of the capitalist system. But, when it comes down to it, they’ve earned this fortune at the expense of millions of people who are addicted. It’s shocking how they have gotten away with it.”

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Her campaign is “a call to arms, to fans of Prince, fans of mine, directors of art museums, doctors, anyone who has lost someone to opioids or knows someone who is struggling, which includes most people in America now, musicians and artists, a call for solidarity.”

I was watching TV the other night, and they had these guys from Indonesia, and [the anthropologists] said "You guys have a lot of parties and stuff; stay up all night and chew drugs, and dance on logs, and walk in the fire and do all this stuff, you know". And like, the guys said "Of course we have to have decent festivals! We do this so that our souls will be happy; so that our souls dont get mad at us, fly away to the gods and we'll die

Rob Tyner

Hachette, 1866 

I want to be a force for real good. In other words. I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.

john Coltrane

The Song of Hiawatha is a documentary film about the American counterculture (1965-present) as lived by Hiawatha Bailey, a gay African-American and Native-American musician and activist who was a pioneering black hippie and black punk rocker ignored in most accounts of the period. 

It’s a big story about America that begins in the "Jim Crow" South and moves to Detroit in the 1950s to see "Motown" in its glory. The story is set amid race riots, Black Panthers, White Panthers, The MC5 and The Stooges, FBI surveillance, a Supreme Court case, a four-year prison stint, punk rockers, metal kids, jazz and blues musicians, and a troupe of performing transsexuals of color. 

And it needs your support. 

MC5's manager, John Sinclair

MC5 a true testimonial

 

zenguitar.com

I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe.

...the Mouse Grimace Scale, a “standardised behavioural coding system with high accuracy and reliability” (according to the scientific literature) used by experimenters to determine how much pain a mouse is in. 

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amazon

Even now I’m nothing but a thin skin covering a mountain of memories.

The Wall, Marlen Haushofer

Zrób coś, abym rozebrać się mogła jeszcze bardziej

Ostatni listek wstydu już dawno odrzuciłam

I najcieńsze wspomnienie sukienki także zmyłam

I choć kogoś nagiego bardziej ode mnie nagiej

Na pewno mieć nie mogłeś, zrób coś, bym uwierzyła

Zrób coś, abym otworzyć się mogła jeszcze bardziej

Już w ostatni por skóry tak dawno mi wniknąłeś,

Że nie wierzę, iż kiedyś jeszcze nie być tam mogłeś

I choć nie wierzę, by mógł być ktoś bardziej otwarty

Dla Ciebie niż ja jestem, zrób coś, otwórz mnie, rozbierz

Rafał Wojaczek - Prośba