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The bitter tears of Johnny Cash November 9, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Political Commentary.
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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009 17:07 PST
The untold story of Johnny Cash, protest singer and Native American activist, and his feud with the music industry


By Antonino D’Ambrosio
Research assistance for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

Courtesy of John L. Smith

Johnny Cash touring Wounded Knee with the descendants of those who survived the 1890 massacre in December of 1968.

In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House’s Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America’s “silent majority.” “Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us,” Nixon asked Cash. “I like Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and Guy Drake’s ‘Welfare Cadillac.’” The architect of the GOP’s Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.

“I don’t know those songs,” replied Cash, “but I got a few of my own I can play for you.” Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of “Okie From Muskogee.” With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer’s rendition of the explicitly antiwar “What Is Truth?” and “Man in Black” (“Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”) and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash’s fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself — a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

Years later, “Man in Black” is remembered as a sartorial statement, and “What Is Truth?” as a period piece, if at all. Of the three songs that Cash played for Nixon, the most enduring, and the truest to his vision, was “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The song was based on the tragic tale of the Pima Indian war hero who was immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, and in Washington’s Iwo Jima monument, but who died a lonely death brought on by the toxic mixture of alcohol and indifference and alcoholism. The song became part of an album of protest music that his record label didn’t want to promote and that radio stations didn’t want to play, but that Cash would always count among his personal favorites.

The story of Cash and “Ira Hayes” began a decade before the meeting with Nixon. On the night of May 10, 1962, Cash made a much-anticipated New York debut at Carnegie Hall. But instead of impressing the cognoscenti, Cash, who had begun struggling with drug addiction, bombed. His voice was hoarse and hard to hear, and he left the stage in what he described as a “deep depression.” Afterward, he consoled himself by heading downtown with a folksinger friend to hear some music at Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Café.

Onstage was protest balladeer Peter La Farge, performing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” A former rodeo cowboy, playwright, actor and Navy intelligence operative, La Farge was also the son of longtime Native activist and novelist Oliver La Farge, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1930 Navajo love story, “Laughing Boy.” The younger La Farge had carved out an intriguing niche in the New York folk revival scene by devoting himself to a single issue. “Pete was doing something special and important,” recalls folksinger Pete Seeger. “His heart was so devoted to the Native American cause at a time that no one was really saying anything about it. I think he went deeper than anyone before or since.”

Cash never pretended that music could stay immune from social, but he tried his best to “not mix in politics.” Instead he talked about the things that unite us like the dignity of honest work. “If you were a baker,” he told writer Christopher Wren in 1970, “and you baked a loaf of bread and it fed somebody, then your life has been worthwhile. And if you were a weaver, and you wove some cloth and your cloth kept somebody warm, your life has been worthwhile.”

Raised in rural poverty on the margins of America, Cash empathized with outsiders like convicts, the poor and Native Americans. But his identification with Indians was especially deep — even delusional. During the depths of his early ’60s drug abuse, he convinced himself, and told others, that he was Native American himself, with both Cherokee and Mohawk blood. (He would later recant this claim.)

At the Gaslight, once he had listened to “Ira Hayes’ and La Farge’s other Indian protest tunes, including “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” and “Custer,” Cash was hooked. “Johnny wanted more than the hillbilly jangle,” Peter La Farge would write later about meeting Cash at the Gaslight. “He was hungry for the depth and truth heard only in the folk field (at least until Johnny came along). The secret is simple, Johnny has the heart of a folksinger in the purest sense.” In fact, Cash had written an Indian folk protest ballad of his own in 1957. “I wrote ‘Old Apache Squaw,’” Cash later explained to Seeger. “Then I forgot the so-called protest song for a while. No one else seemed to speak up for the Indian with any volume or voice [until Peter La Farge].”

Cash, like many in the 1960s, could see that everything that was certain, rigid and hard was breaking apart. Social movements were blossoming. But the thunderous American choir that was singing “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall All Be Free” drowned out the cry of the loose-knit Native movement. As Martin Luther King and other leaders steered their people toward legislative victories that would further integrate them into a society they were locked out of, the rising tide of Native youth activists wanted something different.

“In my mind, Native people could not have a civil rights movement,” American Indian Movement activist and musician John Trudell says. “The civil rights issue was between the blacks and the whites and I never viewed it as a civil rights issue for us. They’ve been trying to trick us into accepting civil rights but America has a legal responsibility to fulfill those treaty law agreements. If you’re looking at civil rights, you’re basically saying ‘all right treat us like the way you treat the rest of your citizens’. I don’t look at that as a climb up.” Rather than pursue assimilation into the American system, Native American activists wanted to maintain their slipping grip on sovereignty and the little land they still possessed.

By the early ’60s, the burgeoning National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was attempting to stake its own claim for their equal share of justice. With the expansion of fishing treaty violations and the breach of two major land treaties that led to the loss of thousands of acres of tribal land in upstate New York for the Tuscarora and Allegany Seneca (the story behind La Farge’s “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”), the NIYC, led by Native activists like Hank Adams, responded by adapting the sit-in protest. Rechristened as the “fish-in,” the NIYC disputed the denial of treaty rights by fishing in defiance of state law. Fish-ins were held in New York and the Pacific Northwest.

The fish-in tactic worked in helping build some public support, but it did little to stop the treaty violations. Instead, the U.S. government ramped up its efforts to crush any momentum the Native movement was building. Oftentimes their tactics were brutal and violent. “This was the time of Selma and there was a lot of unrest in the nation,” remembers Bill Frank Jr. of Washington state’s Nisqually tribe. “Congress had funded some big law enforcement programs and they got all kinds of training and riot gear-shields, helmets. And they got fancy new boats. These guys had a budget. This was a war.”

By 1964, the Native American cause had attracted the interest of another celebrity. On March 2 the NIYC gained national attention as actor Marlon Brando joined a Washington state fish-in. Already an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement, Brando’s very public support and subsequent arrest for catching salmon “illegally” in Puyallup River helped to boost the Native movement. Brando’s involvement with the Native cause had begun when he contacted D’Arcy McNickle after reading the Flathead Indian’s book “The Surrounded,” a powerful novel depicting reservation life in 1936. Brando’s involvement in Native issues led to government surveillance that lasted decades. His FBI file, bursting with memos detailing possible means of silencing the actor, quickly grew to more than 100 pages.

Three days after Brando’s arrest in Washington, Cash, fresh off the biggest chart success of his career, the single “Ring of Fire,” and having just finished recording a very commercial album called “I Walk the Line,” began recording another, very different album. When Cash left Sun Studios for Columbia in the late 1950s, he believed his rising star would give him the creative capital to produce and record something a little outside the pop and country mainstream — albums of folk music and live prison concerts. He was alternating folky albums like “Blood Sweat and Tears,” a celebration of the working man, with commercial discs laden with radio-ready singles. “Ring of Fire,” which had reached No. 1 on the country charts and had crossed over to pop, had bought him the permission of Columbia to make an album of what he called “Indian protest songs.”

In the two years since Cash had first met La Farge and listened to “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” Cash had educated himself about Native American issues. “John had really researched a lot of the history,” Cash’s longtime emcee Johnny Western recalled. “It started with Ira Hayes.”

As Cash explained, “I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage.”

But Cash felt a special kinship with Ira Hayes. Both men had served in the military as a way to escape their lives of rural poverty longing to create new opportunities. Plus, both suffered from addiction problems; Cash and his pills and Hayes with alcohol. He decided to anchor the album with “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” And since the song had provided the spark for Cash’s vision, it just felt right that he should learn more about the song’s subject.

Cash contacted Ira Hayes’ mother and then visited her and her family at the Pima reservation in Arizona. Before Cash left the Pima Reservation, Hayes’ mother presented him with a gift, a smooth black translucent stone. The Pima call it an “Apache tear.” The legend behind the opaque volcanic black glass is rooted in the last U.S. cavalry attack on Native people, which took place on Apaches in the state of Arizona. After the slaughter, the soldiers refused to allow the Apache women to put the dead up on stilts, a sacred Apache tradition. Legend says that overcome by intense grief, Apache women shed tears for the first time ever, and the tears that fell to the earth turned black. Cash, moved by the gift, polished the stone and mounted it on a gold chain.

With the Apache tear draped around his neck, Cash cut his protest album. He recorded five of La Farge’s songs, two of his own, and one he’d co-written with Johnny Horton. All were Native American themed. “When we went back into the studio to record what became ‘Bitter Tears,’” Cash bassist Marshall Grant says, “we could see that John really had a special feeling for this record and these songs.”

Yet the album’s first single, “Ira Hayes,” went nowhere. Few radio stations would play the song. Was the length of the song, four minutes and seven seconds, the problem? Radio stations liked three-minute tracks. Or maybe disc jockeys wanted Cash to “entertain, not educate,” as one Columbia exec put it.

“I know that a lot of people into Johnny Cash weren’t into ‘Bitter Tears,’ ” explains Dick Weissman, a folksinger, ex-member of the Journeymen and friend of La Farge. “They wanted a ‘Ballad of Teenage Queen’ not ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’ They wanted ‘Folsom Prison.’ They didn’t want songs about how American’s mistreated Indians.”

The stations wouldn’t play the song and Columbia Records refused to promote it. According to John Hammond, the legendary producer and Cash champion who worked at Columbia, executives at the label just didn’t think it had commercial potential. Billboard, the music industry trade magazine, wouldn’t review it, even though Cash was at the height of his fame, and had just scored another No. 1 country single with “Understand Your Man” and No. 1 country album with “I Walk the Line.”

One editor of a country music magazine demanded that Cash resign from the Country Music Association because “you and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs.” Johnny Western, a DJ, singer and actor who for many years was part of Cash’s road show, recalls a conversation with “a very popular and powerful DJ.” According to Western, the DJ was “connected to many of the music associations and other influential recording industry groups. He had always been incredibly supportive of John.” Western and the DJ started discussing Cash’s new album and the “Ira Hayes” single. “He asked me why John did this record. I told him that John and all of us had a great feeling for the American Indian cause. He responded that he felt that the music, in his mind, was un-American and that he would never play the record on air and had strongly advised other DJs and radio stations to do the same. Just ignore it until John came back to his senses, is what he told me.”

“When John was attacked for ‘Ira Hayes’ and then ‘Bitter Tears,’” explains Marshall Grant, “it just ripped him apart. Hayes was forced to drink by the abuse and treatment of white people who used and abandoned him. To us, it meant Hayes was being tortured and that’s the story we told and it’s true.”

When “Bitter Tears” and its single did not get the attention he felt they deserved, Cash insisted on having the last word. He composed a letter to the entire record industry and placed it in Billboard as a full-page ad on Aug. 22, 1964.

“D.J.’s — station managers — owners, etc.,” demanded Cash, “Where are your guts?” He referred to his own supposed half Cherokee and Mohawk heritage and spoke of the record as unvarnished truth. “These lyrics take us back to the truth … you’re right! Teenage girls and Beatle record buyers don’t want to hear this sad story of Ira Hayes … This song is not of an unsung hero.” Cash slammed the record industry for its cowardice, “Regardless of the trade charts — the categorizing, classifying and restrictions of air play, this not a country song, not as it is being sold. It is a fine reason though for the gutless [Cash's emphasis] to give it a thumbs down.”

Cash demanded that the industry explain its resistance to his single. “I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes. Just one question: WHY???” And then Cash answered for them. “‘Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine … So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam.”

As Cash later explained, “I talked about them wanting to wallow in meaninglessness and their lack of vision for our music. Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on.” In reality, however, as Cash noted in his letter, “Ira Hayes” was already outselling many country hits. Ultimately, thanks in part to aggressive promotion by Cash, who personally promoted the song to disc jockeys he knew, “Ira Hayes” reached No. 3 on the country singles charts, and “Bitter Tears” peaked at 2 on the album charts.

Later, long after “Bitter Tears,” and after he’d won his battle with drugs, Cash would dial back his claims of Indian ancestry. But he never wavered from his support for the Native cause. He went on to perform benefit shows on reservations — including the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee in 1968, five years before the armed standoff there between the FBI and the American Indian Movement — to help raise money for schools, hospitals and other critical resources denied by the government. In 1980, Cash told a reporter: “We went to Wounded Knee before Wounded Knee II [the 1973 standoff] to do a show to raise money to build a school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation” and do a movie for “Public Broadcasting System called ‘Trail of Tears.’” He joined with fellow musicians Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Robbie Robertson to call for the release of jailed AIM leader Leonard Peltier.

Since Cash first recorded “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” in 1964, many musicians have recorded their own versions. Kris Kristofferson is one of those musicians. He summed up the spirit behind Cash’s now nearly forgotten protest album in his eulogy for Cash, who died in 2003. Cash, he said, was a “holy terror … a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings.” Four years before his famous concert at Folsom Prison, four years before the American Indian Movement formed, and at the pinnacle of his commercial success, Cash insisted on producing an uncommercial, deeply personal protest record that was a close as he could come to truth. He would always cherish it. “I’m still particularly proud of ‘Bitter Tears,’” Cash would say near the end of his life, while talking about the topical music he recorded in the 1960s. “Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making any moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.”

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Antonino D’Ambrosio is the author of “A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears.”

Golpe de Desgracia: Poesia de Váscones y Benedetti July 2, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Chile, Honduras, Latin America.
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VIOLENCIA, S.A. (Sociedad Anónima)

Poema de Carmen Váscones (1 de julio de 2009) 

para vencer al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que afiliarse siempre a la muerte
matar y matar mas para seguir matando
y condenarse a la blindada soledad,
para matar al hombre que era un pueblo
tuvieron que quedarse sin el pueblo.

Mario Benedetti: “ALLENDE”

 

 

1

Un golpe otro golpe

Uno tras otro

Golpe más golpe otro

 

Las puertas caen

Ninguna de pie

Nadie asoma

 

Solo se ve un montón

Como un esqueleto gigante

Y una sombra hinchada

A punto de reventar

 Una voz desconocida

-En ese estado quedó-

 

2

Hay que derribar el golpe

Quitarle la capucha

Hacer un paro a tanto horror

Hacerle saber del miedo

Enfilar la marcha

Y no sentirse solo

-acompáñame-

 

3

No hay tumba para el desaparecido

 

 Podrán derribar casa

Podrán quemarlo todo

Podrán cortar el recuerdo

Podrán dejarme sin mí

Podrán  poner y oponer

 

Pero los pasos avanzan

No puedes cogerlos

¡Ay de ti!

 

No soporta más

El espanto ordenado y dirigido

-Apunte y calle-

 

El sonido no se incinera

Alguien lo continua …

 

4

Que no se les ocurra quitarle su nombre

Que no lo manchen

Que no estoy con ganas de aguantar

Que no callaré hasta morir

 

Y este momento no es suficiente

 

No solo estamos hechos de intentos

Hay que atreverse

Pero eso sí ni héroe ni martir

En la jugarreta del opositor

Que arremete sin pena

 

 

La urna la estatua y el que se impone con trampa

Un protagonista sospechoso de la mudanza

Que te fuerza que te lleva que te detiene

Que te intimida que te allana que te usurpa

Que te toma que te secuestra

Que te desaparece

Que te toca y queda

Que te apaga el alba

Que te desecha como un papel

Que te quiebra el deseo

Que te deja sin madrugada

Que te destroza la memoria

Que desconoce el respeto

Que te pone condiciones

Que te tapa la boca

 

Que te quiere dejar sin palabras

Que te dice retrocede o no respondo por nada

 

 

Aún así

-“Soy inconforme”-

 

 

Los manifestantes dan la cara

A esa lucha constante

 

Barreras y máquinas

Consignas y moneda

Constitución y agresión

 

Tierra saqueada

 

¿Quién soy?

¿Quién soy para tí?

 

Manoseas mi identidad

Para violar mi voluntad

Aún así no me apagarás

 

 Impide la opresión

Hace barricada

Comanda resistencia

Rechaza

 

¿Quién despeja el camino?

 

 ¿Quién está con el pueblo?

-Estamos indignados-

 

“Qué cosa fuera la masa sin frontera”

 

Que no se detenga la huelga

Vencer para jamás no ser vencido

 

¿La lluvia cae igual para todos?

¿Por qué achicas el río?

¿Por qué me desconoces?

¿Si dices soy tu semejante?

 

 

Ningún golpe es diálogo

 

Y sin embargo

Quien calla otorga o es cómplice

Del derrumbamiento y la devastación

 

Sácate el temor de encima

 

Tan fácil resulta matar

Hacer a un lado

Arrastrar con todo

¡Golpe de estado!

 

(Un estado embarazoso)

 

Parto: una partida de defunción

 

¡NO!

 

www.carmenvascones.wordpress.com

 

 

 

 

 

 


Poema de Benedetti: “ALLENDE”

Para matar al hombre de la paz
para golpear su frente limpia de pesadillas
tuvieron que convertirse en pesadilla,
para vencer al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que congregar todos los odios
y además los aviones y los tanques,
para batir al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que bombardearlo hacerlo llama,
porque el hombre de la paz era una fortaleza

 
Para matar al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que desatar la guerra turbia,
para vencer al hombre de la paz
y acallar su voz modesta y taladrante
tuvieron que empujar el terror hasta el abismo
y matar mas para seguir matando,
para batir al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que asesinarlo muchas veces
porque el hombre de la paz era una fortaleza,

 

Para matar al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que imaginar que era una tropa,
una armada, una hueste, una brigada,
tuvieron que creer que era otro ejercito,
pero el hombre de la paz era tan solo un pueblo
y tenia en sus manos un fusil y un mandato
y eran necesarios mas tanques mas rencores
mas bombas mas aviones mas oprobios
porque el hombre de la paz era una fortaleza

Para matar al hombre de la paz
para golpear su frente limpia de pesadillas
tuvieron que convertirse en pesadilla,
para vencer al hombre de la paz
tuvieron que afiliarse siempre a la muerte
matar y matar más para seguir matando
y condenarse a la blindada soledad,
para matar al hombre que era un pueblo
tuvieron que quedarse sin el pueblo.

Mario Benedetti  (http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2008/06/27/poema-de-benedetti-allende/)

 

The Bard of Berkeley June 27, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, War.
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Published on Saturday, June 27, 2009 by The Wall Street Journal by Michael Judge

One benefit of being a poet — as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host — is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.

The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city’s finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi’s) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.

Last year alone the 68-year-old Berkeley professor won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection of poems “Time and Materials.” From 1995-97 he was America’s poet laureate, and he used the post in innovative ways to promote literacy. From 1997-2000 he wrote the popular “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post, introducing readers to his favorite poets each week. His translations of Japanese haiku and the works of Czeslaw Milosz — the late, great Polish poet, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature — are read the world over.

Former poet laureate Robert Hass

Still, for the life of me, I can’t remember what he looks like. So, after approaching a few slightly startled gentlemen in his age bracket, I’m relieved when a pleasant man with a warm countenance, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker, extends his hand and says simply, “I’m Bob.”

After snuffing out my cigarette, I tell him my wife Masae awaits us inside and is holding what we hope will be a quiet booth where we can talk. Alas, there’s a speaker above us blaring jazz, and adjacent diners are shouting above the din. Undaunted, we peruse the wine list. “Buttery and oaky is the classic California chardonnay that everyone’s gotten sick of,” says the poet, with a slight grin. “But I haven’t!” And with that we order a bottle from California’s Santa Rita Hills and begin.

He’s just flown in from Toronto, he tells us, where he attended the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony, and asks that we please forgive him if he “fades early.” The Griffin Prize, Mr. Hass explains, was founded by Canadian philanthropist Scott Griffin, who annually awards an impressive $50,000 to one Canadian poet (this year’s winner is A.F. Moritz) and one non-Canadian poet (C.D. Wright). After the ceremony, there’s a gala bash. “It’s the kind of party where there’s a flowing chocolate fountain and an open bar where poets don’t do very well.” He says I should write a story about it, and offers to put me in touch with the Griffin folks.

But before I can ask him for details, he’s on to another topic: a Berkeley-based nonprofit called the International Rivers Network. “I’m the only poet on the board,” he says. “It’s an environmental organization that thinks about the ecological consequences of big dams” and provides “real life estimates of the damage done by these big boondoggle projects to the people who are trying to resist them.” The group has worked in some 60 countries, he says, to help prevent the kind of cultural and environmental devastation caused by projects like the Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River.

Suddenly, like a guest who feels he’s gone on too long, Mr. Hass apologizes and peppers us with questions. “How long are we here?” “Where are we from?” “How did we meet?” When he discovers my wife is from Japan and we met in Tokyo the conversation turns to his love for haiku, particularly the poems of the 17th century master Matsuo Basho.

In the early 1970s, he says, “I tried to teach myself something about how to make images from working on haiku . . . I had this real paradisiacal period in my life where I would teach, come home, get out the Japanese dictionary, work on haiku, then go swim laps for an hour, then have dinner and put my kids to bed. . . .”

Just then our waitress brings the “Fisherman Carpaccio,” a flower-like assemblage of raw fish marinated in soy with a dash of karashi hot mustard and sesame oil. We order another bottle of chardonnay, and I attempt to ask another question. “That’s a really pretty presentation, don’t you think?” says Mr. Hass, admiring the dish that’s just arrived. “Can we stop?” He then turns to my wife, who’s a potter and chef, and asks, “What do you think about this presentation? And about saying this is carpaccio rather than sashimi?”

Right about now I begin to feel as if we’re inside a Robert Hass poem. They are known for their playfulness with language, love of long, sprawling sentences, and, above all, a kind of unquenchable honesty, a wrestling with memory and the world as it is. Yet listening to him talk it strikes me that he isn’t self-absorbed. He is, in fact, other-absorbed. His conversation, like his poetry, is full of wonder and horror, two wholly appropriate reactions to human history — or a plate of sashimi-cum-carpaccio.

In “Time and Materials,” published in 2007, Mr. Hass addresses everything from “Poor Nietzsche in Turin . . . Dying of syphilis . . . in love with the opera of Bizet” to an early memory of his father grinding up the antidrinking drug Antabuse (“It makes you sick if you drink alcohol,” he writes) and forcing his long-suffering, alcoholic mother to swallow it. Later, he watched as she sat down with a bottle of booze and “gagged and drank, Drank and gagged.” In another poem, he writes of his father’s death and his feelings of “love and anger and dismay and relief at the sudden peacefulness / of his face. . . .”

In a poem for his friend and longtime collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz — who died in Krakow in 2005 at the age of 93 after living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rise and fall of communism — Mr. Hass writes how Milosz “never accepted the cruelty in the frame / Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster, / And the smell of summer grasses in the world / That can hardly be named or remembered / Past the moment of our wading through them, / And the world’s poor salvation in the word.”

This idea, this lament — “the world’s poor salvation in the word,” that language often fails us, yet it’s our only hope for redemption — permeates Mr. Hass’s latest book, which was completed in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war. In a poem titled “Bush’s War,” he conflates 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the brutal history of the 20th century, when the slaughter of civilians and the “firebombing” of entire cities was commonplace. “Forty-five million, all told, in World War II,” he writes. “Why do we do it?” Certainly there’s a rage / To injure what’s injured us.”

To Mr. Hass, who’s married to the poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, terms like “collateral damage” and “soft targets” are not merely euphemisms but sacrilege. In another poem, written after visiting the demilitarized zone that separates South and North Korea, he writes: “The human imagination does not do well with large numbers. / More than two and a half million people died during the Korean / War. It seems it ought to have taken more time to wreck so many / bodies.”

Raised in a Catholic household, Mr. Hass attended parochial school not far from here in the Marin County suburb of San Rafael and had, like his friend Milosz, a “relentlessly moral upbringing.” His first book, “Field Guide,” earned him the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973. In it, he writes lovingly of the lush California coast, but he also questions the relevance of romantic or elevated poetry in a violent age. Responding to Baudelaire he writes, “Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. / He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, / over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century / while Marx in the library gloom / studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit / and that gentle man Bakunin . . . applies his numb hands / to the making of bombs.”

I mention how his first book and his most recent were both written when America was at war and, in a way, deal with similar subjects. “The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that,” he says. And yet, “In this really violent, imperfect world where you’re not just a writer but you’re a writer writing in one of the languages of the rich and developed world . . . [you have] some responsibility for the world . . . [because] the way the world is seen gets framed in those languages.”

He pauses, takes a drink of wine, then continues: “I have a Libyan poet friend who thinks that part of the big problem with the Arabic world is Arabic poetry, that . . . there’s a certain level of elevation of the language that doesn’t make a description of reality possible. Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?

“And part of the answer is, artists don’t really have a choice. You don’t get to pick how you see the world. A lot of my appetite is for a kind of pure poetry . . . and one of the things I identified with and felt like I understood about Czeslaw was that he was raised with an appetite for pure poetry in a world in which he thought it was not available to him as an option . . . after living through the underground in Warsaw seeing the entire Jewish community hauled off and killed, and seeing 250,000 Polish kids go out in the street and get mowed down by the Germans.”

In his 1980 Nobel acceptance speech, Milosz said something similar: “Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends.”

This is the work of the poet. And this, it seems to me, is the work that our dinner guest has undertaken.

 

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Mr. Judge is a contributing editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review

Whitewashed World June 12, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Foreign Policy, Iraq and Afghanistan, Race, War.
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(Note: this poem was posted as a comment on my Blog in response to an article I had posted entitled “Poets Mirror Feelings of Afghans Caught in Conflict.”  The Poet identifies her or himself as “halfbreed,” and can be reached at endline@qnet.com)

there are no heroes in american might,
just lowly soldiers who cannot read or write.
just hollywood movies depicting america’s blight,
overpaid killers with no respect for life.

my daughters have the blood of the afghans,
mingled with the blood of apache americans
add some irish roots from the IRA
and moorish lines from south of spain.

my daughters are often asked
what country they are from?
by the unlearned white folks
that call themselves americans
ignorant educated simpletons

are you a mexican, or indian?
are you from the middle east?
they never answer those questions
from colonizing folks, who see war as peace.
american infidels, who truely believe
that they are number 1, and war is really peace.

whitewashed world, june 11 2009

Poets Mirror Feelings of Afghans Caught in Conflict May 25, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Iraq and Afghanistan, War.
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Published on Monday, May 25, 2009 by Reuters by Hanan Habibzai

Intellectuals and poets have a commanding presence in Afghan  society. It is the poets who often mirror the feelings of  ordinary people, revealing much about the mindset of Afghans in  the face of occupation and civil war.

Now, it is the smell of fresh blood rather than the delights  of Afghanistan’s mountains and fields that occupies the poets.  As an Afghan, when I read their works, I am shocked by the state  of my country, and see in that state the failures of my  government and the international community.

When Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election last  year, many Afghans, intellectuals included, believed the end of  the Bush era meant a let-up in their suffering.

But after the U.S. bombardments on the western province of  Farah on May 4/5, the latest of many in which scores of  civilians have been killed, most have lost faith.

Local elders say the strikes took 147 lives. If true, that  makes the strikes the bloodiest since the war began in 2001,  though the U.S. military accuse civilians of inflating the  numbers.

But focusing on the numbers misses the point. The situation  has devastated Afghans, and perhaps removed the last shred of  faith they may have had in the coalition forces. Farah resident  Hamidullah says: “We got it wrong. Americans came to kill us. We  thought that they were here to make our future better. But no,  they kill children, women, elders and any type of villager as if  they are all Taliban.”

Another local, Khan Wali, who lost his sister-in-law and  another female relative in the air strike, says: “The American  military is trying to prove itself as a hero back in America by  killing innocents.”

One Afghan poet, 28-year-old Samiullah Taroon, was born just  after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and grew up between  decades of war. Once famous for pretty verse about valleys in  the Kunar region, he has now, like his fellow artists, turned to  war and oppression, both foreign and domestic, for his subject  matter:

We have heard these anecdotes
That control will be again in the hands of the killer
Some will be chanting the slogans of death
And some will be chanting the slogans of life
The white and sacred pages of the history
Remind one of some people
In white clothes, they are the snakes in the sleeves
They capture Kabul and they capture Baghdad.

Taroon says the government is a puppet of foreign powers,  and in thrall to warlords and corruption:

A fraud with the name of reconstruction
Takes power and gold from me

As a popular poet, reciting his poetry at rallies where  thousands gather, he is a threat to those in power, and those  who want it. Taroon says he is being followed by an Afghan  intelligence agency, which opened a file on him last year, and  fears for his life.

So what does the government or the Taliban have to fear from  a poet? In Afghanistan, poetry is often recited or sung, and is  hugely accessible to ordinary people, despite high illiteracy.  Poetry contests are attended by thousands.

Poetry has for centuries reflected traditions, history and  the mood of the moment in Afghanistan.

At the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, legend has it that a young  girl named Malalai inspired Afghan fighters to defeat the  British army. When the soldiers grew disheartened and the  British looked like winning, Malalai, tending wounded troops,  recited poetry: 

Young love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand,
By God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame!

The Afghans turned the tables and drove the British all the  way back to Kandahar. True or not, many Afghans believe the  tale.

Pashtun poets have a long history of protest. According to  Afghan historian Habibullah Rafi, 19th-century editor Alama  Mahmood Tarzi infuriated the British with protest poems that  were read throughout the Pashtu speaking world.

When the Russians arrived in 1979, the poetry once again  changed with the fortunes of the people. Ishaq Nangyal’s poems,  written during the 80s and 90s, are a good example of the  resilience shown by Afghans towards their oppressors, be they  foreign invaders or religious extremists:

Even if my head is cut down from my body
If my heart is taken out of my cage with the hands
For the honour of the country I accept all these
I am an Afghan, I fulfil my intentions.

When international forces defeated the Taliban in 2001, many  poets reflected hopes that they would finally bring peace and  prosperity after years of suffering under the Soviet-backed  communist government, the Mujahadeen and the Taliban.

But the suffering of ordinary Afghans continued: poverty  grew, corruption grew and the government’s actions began to wear  down its people. The poets became angry and directed their anger  at the coalition forces.

Following a U.S. military air strike last summer in the  Shindand district of the Herat province, 47-year-old Nader Jan  lost his faith. “We voted for the kingdom of Hamid Karzai to  have a peaceful life,” he says. “Instead we got death. I saw how  Nawabad village came under American attack and more than 100  civilians died, 70 of them children and women. Are the children  also fighting against America? No. I ask, what did they do  wrong?”

A veteran Afghan poet, Pir Muhammad Karwan, mourns a bride and groom killed at a wedding party that was bombed.

Here the girls with the language of bangles
Brought the songs of wedding to the ceremony
With the rockets of America
The songs of the hearts were holed 

 

© 2009 Reuters

Hanan Habibzai is an Afghan writer who has reported from  his country for Reuters and the BBC, and has recently moved to  London.

Koffler Centre persecutes Jewish artist May 10, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Canada, Israel, Gaza & Middle East, Religion.
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Sunday, May 10, 2009

http://canadian-firebrand.blogspot.com

On May 8, the Koffler Centre for the Arts issued a press release announcing that they are “disassociating themselves” from an art exhibition by Toronto artist Reena Katz which is being installed at Kensington Market later this month. They are rejecting Katz not for the content of her work but because of her personal political beliefs, namely “Reena Katz’s public support for and association with Israel Apartheid Week.” This is nothing less than blacklisting and the Koffler Centre should be ashamed of itself, particularly when one considers not only the number of Jewish artists and performers who suffered due to McCarthyist blacklisting in the 1950s but also the generations of Jews, in the arts as well as in the professions and various trades, who were denied employment not because of the quality or content of their work but because of their personal beliefs.

According to the Koffler Centre’s press release “As a Jewish cultural institution, an agency of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, the Koffler Centre of the Arts will not associate with an artist who publicly advocates the extinction of Israel as a Jewish state. The Koffler considers the existence and well-being of Israel as a Jewish state to be one of its core values.” Katz replies in an article in today’s Toronto Star saying, “I have said that I’m an anti-Zionist Jew. So they are conflating the state of Israel with Zionism. I’m speaking to an ideology when I speak about Zionism. They’re speaking about a Jewish state.”

Partisans of the UJA, CJC and B’nai Brith like pretend that Jewish critics of Israel are either assimilated Jews who reject their heritage and only speak out against Zionism so they can gain acceptance from the non-Jewish left or are, worse, apostates, the fact is that opposition to Zionism within the Jewish community is as old and as established as Zionism itself and that the most adamant of Zionism’s Jewish opponents base their opposition on religious grounds. Others do so based on Jewish philisophical traditions of humanitarianism and universalism.

Reena Katz is one of the most Jewish people I’ve met. Her work is infused with Jewish sensibilities and themes. She is not only a visual and sonic artist but a musician who fronted the Klemzer band Promegranate for a number of years. She describes her upcoming exhibit as a(n) homage to my Jewish roots and the Jewish roots of Kensington Market.” The Koffler Centre recognized this as well. According to their now removed write up of the event (still available online thank’s to Google’s cache feature):

each hand as they are called reflects on Toronto’s Kensington Market as the vibrant site of multiple public cultural histories, layered with personal stories and fragmented by the movement of time. Katz approaches the culture of the Market through the lens of her own memory and experience of Kensington, coming out as a young, politically engaged, queer woman. Taking the ephemeral nature of experience in urban space to heart, through a series of solo and collaborative performances, temporary installations, community projects and public posters, Katz works with the notion of transition and movement. each hand as they are called captures the spirit of the Market on any given day, filled with passing but memorable vignettes.

Roaming, live vocal performances insert an experimental soundtrack of assimilation, anachronism and hybridity into the urban landscape of the Market. Based on the jazz-fusion music of Yiddish speaking sister duos from the 60s, Katz’s haunting compositions are a combination of popular music, Yiddish classics and jazz, composed backwards for female duets. The resulting absurdist vocals create a hybrid language of calls and beckoning within the Market streetscape.

A community-based component of the project involves Katz working with residents from the Terraces at Baycrest and grade eight students from Ryerson Community Public School. Together, their working process will highlight Kensington as the important meeting point of Jewish and Chinese culture through the game of Mah Jongg, a game originating in East Asian communities which migrated and was popularized with North American Jewish women during the 1920s. The project culminates in a public day of inter-generational Mah Jongg in the Market’s Bellevue Park on June 7 (rain date: June 14).

In addition, Katz performs solo against the backdrop of Kensington Market’s tense relationship to urban development. At odd and unexpected hours, she will be seen working on temporary structures, building and deconstructing scaffolding in previously undisclosed locations. Katz’s scaffold performances gesture to the incredible labour history of the area, positioning the act of construction as obstruction and to memory itself as construct.

While each of Katz’s performative and social gestures are ephemeral, each hand as they are called will have a constant presence in the market through a series of interrelated street posters, designed by Katz in collaboration with award winning designer and artist Cecilia Berkovic. The posters provide additional context for the project while inserting a distinct visual presence amongst the eclectic mix of band-posters, announcements about lost pets, and other posted ephemera populating the Market.

Reena Katz isn’t being blacklisted because her views on Israel somehow make her anti-Semitic (they don’t), she’s being blacklisted because she is too Jewish for the Koffler Centre and the United Jewish Appeal.

To complain about this outrage email the following people: lstarr@kofflerarts.org, ceckert@kofflerarts.org, thewer@kofflerarts.org, tliederman@kofflerarts.org, ishohat@kofflerarts.org, etauben@kofflerarts.org,

This is what Reena has to say on the matter:

Dear friends, family, comrades and colleagues;

Most of you know that I’ve been working on a site-specific commission for the Koffler Gallery in Kensington Market, set to open on May 20th. Kim Simon is an independent curator, who found me and proposed my work to the Koffler last year. She has been my main creative (and now political) ally in the process.

Today, at 9am Kim and I were informed by Lori Starr (Koffler executive director) and Mona Philip (Koffler curator) that the Koffler is disassociating from the exhibition: removing their name and URL’s from any further outreach materials, exhibition posters and press.

Why?
Their Board of Directors, along with their major funder – The UJA of Greater Toronto – has decided that they “will not associate with an artist who publicly advocates the extinction of Israel as a Jewish state”.

In our meeting with Lori and Mona this morning, it was made clear that their decision is based on my involvement specifically with Israeli Apartheid Week. Lori was explicit that it isn’t me they object to, but the public statements I’ve made on behalf of specific organizations. Seeing this as a moment of potential change, I proposed a meeting with their Board, in which I would explain the true mandate of Israeli Apartheid Week, CAIA, and the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation – now known as Women in Solidarity with Palestine.

Why now?
A year ago, Kim asked Mona directly if Koffler would have a problem showing my work considering my solidarity with Palestine. Mona was clear that since the project didn’t deal with the issue, Koffler would stand behind it. Indeed, after a year of having access to my website, CV, Facebook page and any Google search results, it wasn’t until this week that they chose to look at my Facebook page, and found a link to Israel Apartheid Week.

What the?
This weekend, I am working with Kim Simon, the independent curator on the project to respond to Koffler’s press release (click on it to link there) with our own press release in response. It’s evident they are acting out of fear. Fear of critique of Israel from within the Jewish community, fear of the repercussions of standing by an artist who is affiliated with justice for Palestinians.

Nu, so, what now?
They have offered to continue the project’s $20,000 funding – without attaching to it institutionally in any way. An interesting proposal indeed. The project is quite extensive, and involves youth from Ryerson Community Public School, Seniors from Baycrest Centre, The Element Choir, solo vocalists and a number of stores, homes and cultural institutions in Kensington Market. Of course, I don’t want to cancel the project but feel very uncertain at this time of how I want to proceed with it. Kim and I are putting thought to this, and plan to have a decision on Sunday. I am interested in taking this up politically, and strategizing around the best way to do that.

Until then, I would greatly appreciate your support in sending the Koffler messages. This is clearly an attempt by a mainstream Jewish institutions to stifle dissent within our community, and the art world in general. Please cc me on anything you send. Also, talk about it to anyone you know – especially arts organizations and their members. I’ll be in touch soon with our press release.

With love and justice,
Reena

And here is an excellent letter from activist Henry Lowi:

To: lstarr@kofflerarts.org
Subject: Reena Katz unfairly targetted by Koffler Centre
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 22:28:12 +0000

Lori Starr,

Executive Director, Koffler Centre of the Arts

Dear Ms Starr:

I read your announcement about the Reena Katz exhibition.[i]

I have known Reena Katz since she was a teacher in a Jewish Sunday School. I consulted her many years ago about violin lessons for my daughter. She referred us to the best violin teacher in Toronto.

I am well aware of Reena’s activism in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine. I know that Reena is motivated by an acute consciousness of the history of Jewish suffering and persecution (and culture!), and a commitment that “Never Again!”, to anyone, anywhere.

Despite the Koffler mandate, [ii] you are taking sides in a political issue. Your position is symptomatic of a kind of panic that is overtaking pro-Zionist organizations. Your panic is based on the painful awareness that you have placed yourselves on the side of injustice and oppression, an uncomfortable position for a Jew to inhabit.

The atrocity committed recently by the State of Israel against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has drawn the attention of the whole world. It is well documented. [iii] It has been compared to the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa.[iv] The whole world has seen how the Palestinians — virtually unarmed, isolated, and poorly led — are being systematically massacred by a well-armed military power that enjoys unlimited military, political and economic support.[v] Strong feelings of solidarity have been aroused.

You are untouched by those feelings of solidarity.

Most Jewish community organizations remained silent in the face of the atrocities and the ongoing blockade of Gaza. Unfortunately for you, all decent people, all lovers of humanity noticed the silence of the Jewish organizations. Fortunately, all also noticed that Jewish dissidents — Righteous Jews, upholders of our traditions of struggle against injustice — spoke out.[vi][vi(b)]

Reena Katz is one of those Jewish dissidents.

The Jewish community is split. The split will deepen. On one side, you will find those who uphold the values of solidarity, decency, culture, and human rights. On the other side will be the supporters of murder, racism, and apartheid. All will have to choose their side,

You have chosen your side.

By dissociating yourselves from Reena Katz’s artistic work, for political reasons, you are engaging in a form of cultural boycott. As you know, progressive Palestinian grassroots popular organizations have called for a boycott of Israeli cultural and academic institutions.[vii] Peace-seeking Israelis support the boycott.[viii][viii(b)] Solidarity-minded Canadians, like author Naomi Klein, support the boycott.[ix] Faced with the boycott, Zionist apologists howl about “singling out Israelis because they are Israelis”, “anti-Semitism”, and the like.[x] They lie.

The Zionists lie, but they are in a panic. Fewer and fewer people are impressed by Zionist lies. More and more are impressed by the inevitable parallels between Israel’s genocidal conduct and the conduct of other oppressive regimes.

Solidarity with Palestine will grow, while disdain for Zionism and its supporters will grow.

You are singling out Reena Katz because she is a decent human being who speaks out against the oppression of fellow human beings. You have done so very publicly, making it very clear where you stand, and with whom you stand.

Reena Katz’s Israeli and Palestinian comrades pay a heavy price for their activism.[xi],[xii],[xiii],[xiv] They know that justice is on their side. They will win. Palestine will be free. Arts and culture will flourish. Jews and Arabs will live together, in peace, as equals.

Regards,

Henry Lowi

And go see the show at Kensington Market beginning May 20!

Pete Seeger Carries Us On May 6, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Peace.
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seegergoodman_300

Published on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 by TruthDig.com

by Amy Goodman

It was some garden party. Eighteen-thousand people packed into Madison Square Garden Sunday night to celebrate the first 90 years of Pete Seeger’s life.

The legendary folk singer is a living history of the 20th century’s grass-roots struggles for worker rights, civil rights, the environment and peace. Powerful, passionate performances and tributes rang out from the stage, highlighting Seeger’s enduring imprint on our society.

Bruce Springsteen opened his set with a tribute to Pete, saying, “As Pete and I traveled to Washington for President Obama’s inaugural celebration, he told me the entire story of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ how it moved from a labor-movement song and, with Pete’s inspiration, had been adopted by the civil rights movement. And that day, as we sang ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ I looked at Pete. The first black president of the United States was seated to his right. I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. … He was so happy that day. It was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man.”

Springsteen recalled Pete’s only request for the inaugural: “ ‘Well, I know I want to sing all the verses [of ‘This Land Is Your Land']. You know, I want to sing all the ones that Woody [Guthrie] wrote, especially the two that get left out … about private property and the relief office.’ … That’s what Pete’s done his whole life: He sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people.”

The oft-censored verses, for the record: 

“In the squares of the city, under shadow of the steeple,       
at the relief office, I saw my people.        
As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling,        
this land was made for you and me.  

A great high wall there tried to stop me.        
A great big sign there said private property,        
but on the other side it didn’t say nothing.        
That side was made for you and me.”

Seeger’s unflinching commitment to social justice landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He told HUAC, “I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours, that I am any less of an American than anyone else.” Seeger was blacklisted and didn’t appear on television for close to 15 years until he sang on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”

Seeger told me: “The Smothers Brothers were a big, big success on the CBS television. And … in the spring of ‘67, CBS says, ‘What can we do to make you happier?’ And they said, ‘Let us have Seeger on.’ And CBS said, ‘Well, we’ll think about it.’ Finally, in October they said, ‘OK, you can have him on.’ And I sang this song ‘Waist deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool says to push on.’ … In New York, they scissored the song out. The Smothers Brothers took to the print media and said, ‘CBS … censored Seeger’s best song.’  … Finally, in late January of ‘68, CBS said, ‘OK, OK, he can sing the song.’ ” The song tells of an Army captain who drowned while ordering his troops deeper and deeper into a river-an obvious metaphor for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

In 1949, Pete Seeger and the great “whitelisted” black opera singer and actor Paul Robeson held a concert in Peekskill, N.Y., an upstate village with an active Ku Klux Klan. A vigilante mob stoned the crowd. Hundreds were injured. Pete took rocks from that assault and incorporated them into his fireplace-so that the stones meant to maim now just protect the flame.

Dear to Pete for his life has been the Hudson River, said to be one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world. In 1966, Pete co-founded the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which uses a beautiful wooden boat and an annual celebration to engage and educate people on the need to clean the Hudson and protect the environment. There is a movement to nominate Pete Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At Madison Square Garden, Pete was center stage, playing his banjo. His singing voice is faint now, after 70 years of singing truth to power. He mouthed the words to the songs, but what came out were the voices of the 18,000 people in the audience, singing out. That’s Pete’s legacy. That’s what will carry on.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Pete Seeger at 90 May 3, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Peace.
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pete-seeger

by Peter Rothberg

Sunday, May 3, 2009,  The Nation

In January, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Pete Seeger was the oldest person to perform as part of Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities. 

Singing the “greatest song about America ever written” (Bruce Springsteen’s words) before 500,000 people live and tens of millions more on television, the then-89-year old legend crooned two little-known verses of his friend Woody Guthrie’s 1940 patriotic standard, “This Land is Your Land” — both about Depression-era poverty — restoring the song to its former glory over the sanitized version that ruled for too many years.

Over the course of a remarkable lifetime, Seeger has been an ambassador for peace, social justice and the best kind of patriotism. A uniquely American mix of blueblood and bluegrass — a product of Harvard University and the son of a violinist mother and musicologist father — Seeger has lived the story of the American left in the 20th century. The celebrations of his 90th birthday on Sunday offer a good opportunity to showcase and celebrate the causes to which he’s devoted his great life.

Defiantly leftist, pacifist–and for a decade or so, Communist–Seeger has embraced and supported virtually every major progressive advance of the 20th century. He’s sung and spoken out for organized labor, against McCarthyism, in support of racial justice, on behalf of nuclear abolition and against the Vietnam War; his voice put early wind into the sails of the environmental movement.

The right to dissent in a democracy has been a cornerstone of Seeger’s activism. In the fourth episode of the video series This Brave Nation Seeger talked about the infamous 1949 riot in Peekskill, NY, and the impact it made on his political development and commitment to free speech.

 

Seeger’s songs have engaged people, particularly the youth, to question the value of war, to ban nuclear weapons, to work for international solidarity and against racism wherever it is practiced, and to assume ecological responsibility.

A particular hero to the civil rights movement on whose behalf he’s worked so tirelessly, Seeger made his first trip south at the invitation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, and returned in ‘65, again at King’s personal invitation, to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Amid the tension and heat, Seeger went from campfire to campfire when the marchers stopped for the night, raising morale with rollicking sing-alongs of new freedom songs.

Seeger also vigorously joined protests against the Vietnam war, playing countless benefits and protests and recording “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” the lyrics of which have renewed relevance today: “But every time I read the papers/That old feeling comes on/We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says push on.”

Sometime soon after King’s assassination in 1968, Seeger began to focus his energies locally around the town of Beacon, New York and the notoriously polluted Hudson River. Gathering together friends and colleagues, he picked up a literal hammer, this time to build the sort of sailing ship that hadn’t been seen on the river in decades to raise consciousness of environmental issues. They named it the Clearwater. Seeger also established Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a group which sponsors annual eco-festivals and acts as a bulwark against polluters in the area. Today, people can swim in the Hudson again.

Seeger birthed a folk revival that remains strong and relevant, and the music he championed is still sung on marches and picket lines coast to coast. As he moves into his tenth decade, it’s worth celebrating the music he has made–and the changes he has helped to bring about.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

Peter Rothberg writes the ActNow column for the The Nation. ActNow aims to put readers in touch with creative ways to register informed dissent. Whether it’s a grassroots political campaign, a progressive film festival, an antiwar candidate, a street march, a Congressional bill needing popular support or a global petition, ActNow will highlight the outpouring of cultural, political and anti-corporate activism sweeping the planet.

Chávez’s Perfect Gift to Obama April 20, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Barack Obama, Latin America, Venezuela.
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Published on Monday, April 20, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

by Richard Gott

Some surprise has been expressed in the Anglo-Saxon world that Hugo Chávez should have presented a book to Barack Obama by Eduardo Galeano. Ignorance can be the only defence, the very fault that the Venezuelan president had earlier accused his US counterpart of suffering from. For Galeano is one of the most well-known and celebrated writers in Latin America, up there with Gabriel García Márquez, and his huge output of fact and fiction, as well as his journalism, has been published all over the continent. His books have been continuously in print since the 1960s, read voraciously by successive generations.

It was a brilliant idea of Chávez’s to give Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America to Obama, since this book, first published in 1971, encapsulates a radical version of the history of Latin America with which most Latin Americans are familiar. Its subtitle, Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, gives a flavour of its contents, which discuss the way in which Latin America has been dominated and exploited by its European invaders (and later by US corporations) for hundreds of years. Written in short episodes, sometimes just paragraphs, it is very characteristic of Galeano’s highly original style, comparable in some ways to that of the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who has a similar capacity to write about history and current affairs in a language that is both poetic and passionate. The late Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski might be mentioned in the same breath.

Some resistance to Galeano’s writings in the mainstream conservative culture of the US may have been caused by the fact that his books were published by the socialist Monthly Review press and translated by Cedric Belfrage, a British-born journalist who emigrated to work in Hollywood and became a member of the US Communist party. Belfrage was deported back to England in 1955, in the waning years of the McCarthy era, before establishing himself as a Spanish translator in Mexico, where he translated many of Galeano’s books.

Galeano was born in Montevideo in Uruguay in 1940 and became the editor in the 1960s of Marcha, Latin America’s best and most influential political and cultural weekly. Galeano took refuge in Buenos Aires in 1973, after a military coup in Uruguay closed down his magazine, and founded a comparable review, Crisis, in Argentina, chronicling the events of the dramatic Peronist years between 1973 and 1976, when another coup sent him into exile in Spain. Galeano then expanded his Open Veins into a three-volume cultural and political history of Latin America, titled Memories of Fire, with thoughts and reflections on the events of almost every year throughout the continent.

Chávez will certainly have read Obama’s own biographical writings and will know that Obama is an intelligent and creative writer himself. He would also have guessed that Obama would enjoy and appreciate the writings of Galeano as he seeks to recast US policy towards Latin America. As a North American, unfamiliar with the Latin American passion for soccer, Obama might also benefit from reading Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow, a wonderful account of the history of the game, published in 1995. The book was written largely to convince leftwing intellectuals (and Cubans obsessed with baseball), some of whom had a supercilious attitude towards the game, of its political and cultural significance. Galeano celebrated soccer’s broad appeal to the great mass of the people of Latin America, an aspect of the southern continent’s culture that North Americans ignore at their peril.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Richard Gott is a writer and historian. He worked for many years at the Guardian as a leader-writer, foreign correspondent and as the features editor

‘1934′: Reflecting On America’s First Big Art Buy March 5, 2009

Posted by rogerhollander in Art, Literature and Culture, Economic Crisis, Labor.
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by Elizabeth Blair

NPR, March 5, 2009

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101275990

 

Ray Strong's 'Golden Gate Bridge'
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Public Works: Ray Strong’s 1934 painting Golden Gate Bridge, a study of the landmark span under construction, is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “1934: A New Deal for Artists” exhibition. Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

 

 

New Deal Gallery
More From ‘1934′ And Its Era

 

 

 

“Looking back on the legacy of the 1930s program … what we see is [that] they gave us back to ourselves.”

Betsy Broun, Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

 

 

Who Was Eligible?

 

 

 

Painting From Life

Earle Richardson, 'Employment of Negroes in Agriculture'
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Earle Richardson, Employment of Negroes in Agriculture Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

 

 

Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother'
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Photographer Dorothea Lange was one of those who benefited from later, expanded government arts-funding programs. She traveled the country, photographing the experience of the Great Depression; her photograph Migrant Mother, taken in 1936, is perhaps her most famous. Library of Congress

 

 

Listen: Lange On Getting Her Subjects To Open Up

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Morning Edition, March 5, 2009 · The economic stimulus package Congress passed last month includes $50 million in emergency funding for the National Endowment for the Arts — money some legislators didn’t think belonged in the bill.

Doubters and supporters both, though, should find food for thought in a timely new show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “1934: A New Deal For Artists.” The show looks at the first time American artists — thousands of them — got direct government support.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like today’s lawmakers, caught some flak for wanting to include artists in his relief program. He justified his decision, as American Art Museum director Betsy Broun explains, by saying, “They’re workers, and they need to eat, too.”

Broun says you can almost tell the artists were thankful, based on the vivid studies of the American experience they produced: a vibrant painting of a nighttime baseball game in West Nyack, N.Y., by Morris Kantor; an almost regal portrait of African-American cotton pickers by Earle Richardson; a wide view of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge by Ray Strong.

“There was a lot of despair … and shame at being on government relief,” says Ann Wagner, one of the curators of the “New Deal” show. For both artists and Americans at large, “these works showed there was plenty to be proud of in their home areas.”

Wagner says the program ultimately produced more than 15,000 works, all of them intended for public spaces such as post offices, libraries and hospitals.

The success of the program led to more government investment in art and artists, with various programs throughout the Depression.

Accomplished photographers, for instance, were sent out specifically to document the effects of the Depression on rural America.

One result was Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph. In a 1964 interview with the Smithsonian, Lange said the people she photographed were often grateful she was there to help record their stories.

“It meant a lot that the government in Washington was aware enough even to send you out,” said Lange.

Broun points out that Roosevelt once said, “A hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not for its relief.” Looking back on the legacy of the ’30s program, Broun says, “what we see is [that] they gave us back to ourselves.”

Today, when it comes to arts money in the economic stimulus, expectations are different. Artists and arts organizations need to prove their work will pump money into the local economy.

But the New Deal did validate the role of artists in American society. Then, as now, the government did give money to artists — just so long as the artists give the country something practical in return.