This is the transcript of a talk Gar Alperovitz gave last fall at the Schumacher Institute. You can see/hear the speech here.
Blood Dread
Novelist Jesymn Ward first posted this short meditation on what Obama’s rise meant in the deep South in 2008.
Porn Theater: On Houellebecq & Bolaño
An oasis of whore in a desert of boredom: “La carte et le territoire”
Houellebecq, in the end, will probably be remembered as the kind of writer who never forgot to tell us how much an upscale prostitute charged extra for anal sex in the third millennium
Matinees and Memories
When I was a boy, my father took me to westerns (Whispering Smith, Red River) and my mother to musicals and Disneys (Easter Parade, So Dear to My Heart).
But once I entered fourth grade (1951), my parents decided I was old enough to attend Saturday matinees alone.
Hard Call & Wise Responses
Historian – and longtime First contributor – Wesley Hogan was sparked by The Help’s spin on the Southern turn toward freedom in the 60s. Her piece on the book and movie starts our mini-roundtable on this cultural phenomenon. Hogan’s Call generated a response from a reading group of retired black women who had their own opinions about The Help. Ancella Bickley recorded their views for First and her summary follows Hogan’s piece. After that, Hogan returns with a quick review of recent historical writing related to the subject of black domestics.
First Thoughts on OWS
First writers and readers – Amiri Baraka, Jeremy Brecher, Benj DeMott, Diane di Prima, Mark Dudzic, John Fullerton, Dr. Donna Gaines, Ty Geltmaker, Lawrence Goodwyn, Adam Hochschild, Staughton Lynd, Greil Marcus, Deborah Meier, Dennis Myers, (AKA) Nolemonomelon, Jedediah Purdy, Aram Saroyan, Fredric Smoler, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer & Richard Torres – comment on OWS.
A View from the Villa
THE KILLING of Muammar Gaddafi and his son Muatasim was not a pretty sight. After seeing it once, I looked away when it was shown again and again on TV – literally ad nauseam.
Marcel Mauss (& OWS)
Anarchist and ethnographer David Graeber – author of (among other timely works) Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011) – doesn’t want to be known as the idea man behind OWS, but his vision of direct economic and political democracy is one key to the movement. Graeber helped organize the group that occupied Zuccotti Square. But, according to a report in Chronicle of Higher Education:
Three days after the protests began, Mr. Graeber left. Since then, he has kept a low profile because he wants to avoid what he calls an “intellectual vanguard model” of leadership. “We don’t want to create a leadership structure,” he says. “The fact I was being promoted as a celebrity is a danger. It’s the kids who made this happen.”
Solidarity
Staughton Lynd intended to read this speech at NYC’s Left Forum in 2008. He wasn’t able to deliver it then but First is honored to reprint his words here.
Another Dead Man
For a few minutes he was just another dead man. That was the easiest way for me.
For me? Strange.
He’s dead, and somehow the focus is on me.
It all happened so fast. I was in Cite Soleil. Waiting for Nebez, Raphael and Conan. We were about to meet with the community leaders to make three community centers, in three different parts of Cite Soleil, with cybercafé, adult education, clinic and housing.
Nat Tate
Some of you know the story. It was briefly the rage in New York and London in 1998. But in my cultural backwater of Berkeley, where people were still plotting the revolution, I had never heard it. So when Robert the K, noted glass artist and critic, told me about a book he had just finished, I asked to borrow it. This book, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 was by William Boyd
From Obamaphilia to Obamaphobia
“I know the Duke’s faults,” said Phineas [Finn], “but these men know nothing of his virtues and when I hear them abuse him I cannot stand it.” Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
B-Side
What follows is not a review of the new collection of the late Ellen Willis’s rock criticism,Out of the Vinyl Deeps[1], but a sort of answer record remixed from old and new episodes in my own pop life. Hope it reads half as well as, say, Mouse and the Traps’ “Public Execution” sounded after “Like A Rolling Stone.” (Or did that Dylan imitation follow “Positively 4th Street”? Ellen—Mother of all Dylan critics—would’ve known!)
Mission Impossible
Henry Czerny, confident that he has the situation well in hand, sits at table and says, “I can understand you’re very upset.” Tom Cruise, sitting opposite, bares teeth, says, “You’ve never seen me very upset.” And he pulls from his pocket exploding bubble gum, which he hurls at the glass wall of a giant fish tank, and
Don’t ask.
Michael Berube, I gather, is upset. He complains that Benj DeMott read his book carelessly. It’s a wonder he read it at all. DeMott owned up promptly to a mistake, My bad, he said. He forgot to add, Your worse. What DeMott did was overlook a footnote. As bad goes, it isn’t much. Berube wrote the book, It isn’t much. Who would feel obliged to sift through the footnotes?
Strange Gods
Pop star can’t resist pop quiz. Everybody knows Lady Gaga’s been flirting with Slavoj Zizek, but, hang on—as per Vanity Fair‘s kiss and tell column—Ke$ha is dating “radical” professor Fredric Jameson. This is an academic tycoon who knows how to $pend his time. The way he lives now sent First back to a passage where Robert Hullot-Kentor paused to wonder at Jameson’s knack for finding the green back not just of all things libidinal but of all things conceptual as well. Hullot-Kentor quoted—then queried—Jameson’s invocation of the investment values of “Adorno’s stock:”
“As for the current ratings of Adorno’s stock.”…Adorno’s stock? Its ratings? While these words beat about the ears, read also a few pages later that Adorno wants concepts “cashed at face value”. Cashed? Adorno wants cash for concepts?