Round 1: Having acknowledged the futile challenge of having to write an original introductory sentence for an essay about a man who is literally the most exhaustively written-about figure of our lifetimes, I refuse to step forward and take it on.
Nation
Something Happened to Us
This has to stop. It can’t continue to happen like this. Never again. But it never stops…
Trump and the “Mexican”
First off, it’s, no surprise, an ad-hominem attack. Before you tell me why the other guy’s wrong, you should show me that he’s wrong. Is Curiel ese making bum calls? Who knows? I wouldn’t take Trump’s word for it. But let’s say he is. Where does “Mexican” come into it? He is an American, certainly, whatever Trump says. But he is connected to some Chicano law associations. If his connections are pro forma, just social niceties, they’re all irrelevant. But if he’s very active, holds high positions, or has an interesting paper trail, it starts to matter.
Why the Verizon Strike Matters
I’m a 1946 baby boomer. As a birthday present a friend once gave me a copy of LIFE magazine published the week I was born, a peek into the new world of post-war prosperity I would grow up in. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby dance across the cover, while inside Winston Churchill ponders and Rita Hayworth lounges amidst the ads for whiskey, toothpaste, gas stoves and a full page promise from the Bell Telephone System: “We are short of Long Distance telephone circuits now but we plan to add 2,100,000 miles of them to the Bell System in the next twelve months.”
And one surprise: a seven page section titled The Great Steel Strike Begins with a full page profiling the strikers, including the president of Local 1397 and his retired steelworker immigrant father across from a full page photo of a surviving participant in the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike at “the monument to his old friends who lost their lives.” No pictures of frustrated managers, no pictures of angry consumers, no pictures of resolute right-wing politicians. All this in LIFE magazine, the network news of ‘46.
Sixties Trips II
Part two of an essay that begins here.
Richard Goldstein’s approach to the sixties was shaped by his sense “race was at the core of nearly everything.” But his lucidity about race matters is most evident when he’s writing about “revolution.” As rock ‘n’ roll turned into rock, Goldstein’s pop life got whiter.
The Message
Some months ago, the way others take up double-crossticks, I decided to figure out who killed Kennedy. My approach was to take the arguments in two books which believed his murder resulted from a vast, insidious conspiracy and compare them with the arguments in two books which believed a solitary madman responsible.
Connections: America’s First Mass Killer
The horror in the Orlando night club brought to mind when I was 11 years old in the leafy Camden suburb of Collingswood, New Jersey. It was September 6, 1949, and in the Cramer Hill section of Camden a World War Two vet, Howard Unruh, 28, left his house at 9:20 in the morning for what became known as “The Walk of Death,” a stroll of 12 minutes during which he killed 13 people – three of them children – with a souvenir Luger.
Albuquerque Girl (Show Me All Around the World)
The author of the following sweet treatment of an anti-Trump protestor realized she needed to fill in the surreal background from which a very real girl had emerged:
Black night in the city and police water hoses and smoke backlit. But almost lazily done by cops, just as any breakage by bare chest kids was momentary and quick. But it was a funny setting for her, so lively so in her life…
Judging the Candidates for the Presidency
Not the happiest lot to choose from, Hillary Clinton is the best of the lot.
The Greatest Gone…Ali in Four Movements
I can’t remember when I first heard of Muhammad Ali. It seems like he’d always been a part of my life. I knew this: my father loved him so therefore I did as well. (The same went for Frank Sinatra, Afro-Cuban music, jazz, the New York Mets and our home borough of Brooklyn.)
White Like Me
What follows is an excerpt from Richard Goldstein’s memoir, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s. This chapter of the book centers on his experience of the civil rights movement in the Bronx.
Race was at the core of nearly everything in the sixties. Even more than sitars and exotic beats, it shaped the structure of rock. Even more than the war in Vietnam, it dominated politics. Even more than LSD, it defined the consciousness of my generation.
Sixties Trips
“WHERE CAN I GET MY COCK SUCKED? WHERE CAN I GET MY ASS FUCKED?” Mick Jagger’s second pass at the chorus of “Cocksucker Blues”—and the feral moan that launches the track—“I’m a looooooonesome schoolboy…” seem to echo Richard Goldstein’s line in his new memoir on why he identified with rock stars (and girl groups) who started out with him in the 60s: “they were as hungry as me.”
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
The Phenomenology of Everyday Life, the unbranded brand of impromptu activity, proto-YouTube, beginning around 1960, of documenting anything and everything, the less obviously consequential the better, extended from a disposition toward collecting oddments (from baseball cards to bottle caps) gathered before, in the 50s, and likewise had a lot to do with recording devices. Somehow the record keepers have never gathered the strands––and no one yet knows the full import––of the sundry manifestations, in visual art, writing and general culture, of this passion to look, listen and record.
Counter-Insurgency Preceding the End of the World
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. –Walter Benjamin
Paul Feyerabend—a half-forgotten Calibanal apostle straddling the right-wing Vienna side of European modernism and California anti/pseudo-science counterculture—was shot three times by the Red Army while retreating from the Eastern Front. His injuries left him neuralgic, prone to a particularly (in/post-)fertile depression, and impotent.
Primary Wallow
Slightly compacted familial e-mails on the Campaign Trail.
First Thought, Best Thought
Here’s the first thing about Bill to remember:
He betrayed Hillary (I’m not just talking the once-licking and future pig). And he CONTINUES to betray her daily–by defending a regime of shit (welfare “reform,” tax “reform,” SEC rules “reform,” prison “reform,” drug penalties “reform,” why stop here?) that she has outright rejected.
And he calls publicly defending his shit that she has rejected, as Senator and as Mme Secretary for Obama, and that she publicly rejects everyday,
“campaigning for her.”
Donald Trump & Professional Wrestling: How the Billionaire Body-Slammed the G.O.P.
Chauncey DeVega’s account of Trump’s ties to professional wrestling manages to be both shocking and predictable. (Try the footage of Trump with Vince McMahon in “The Battle of the Billionaires” above.) DeVega grew up watching pro wrestling and his piece melds his clarities about the American version of that spectacle with Roland Barthes’ classic analysis of the French form.
The Politics of Anger
Mario Cuomo’s often quoted adage, “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose,” neglects to say that the poetry more often than not is bad poetry. Campaign speeches are cliché ridden, repetitious, rarely inspired by genuine conviction and filled with promises that the speakers know can’t be kept. It is an insult to poetry to associate it with the banality of campaigning. The election of 2016 so far is singularly devoid of the semblance of poetry.
Posts from el Barrio
Trump & Mi Gente
I’m still “Seeing Red” after reading all the Moronic comments on Trump….There are an incredible number of fucking Closet Nazis out there.
George Ohr: A Free Man in Biloxi
“I love George Ohr. More freedom in his head then in just about anyone’s.
Ohr was a 19th century ceramic futurist. Looking at his work rubbing my fingers together, thinking about the feel of wet clay. his mind must have moved like clay moves when you throw it on a wheel or pinch it…it always seeks freedom…the potter seeks control…the dance is between the authority of the material and the will of the potter. It can be a discussion or a debate. A lot of talking.”—Michael Brod
Brod’s musings prompted your editor to ask him to say more on George Ohr, “mad potter of Biloxi,” (who surely looked the part—see the photo at the bottom of this post). Ohr, himself, was more than willing to think out loud about his works and days: “I brood over [each pot] with the same tenderness a mortal child awakens in its parent.”[1] A few of Ohr’s numberless creations were exhibited in NYC last year at the Craig F. Starr gallery. These three were in that show. (You can find many more examples of Ohr’s art pots here.)
Double Trouble: Dramas of American Communism
News an Oxford don has bought into b.s. about Alger Hiss’s innocence sent your editor back to Aram Saroyan’s play, UNAMERICAN, which is based on the public record of the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Hiss. UNAMERICAN is posted below along with the second act of My Confession, Saroyan’s “solo performance play” based on Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her encounters with Stalinists in the 30s (which she published in Encounter in 1954).