Month: June 2024

Breathless (Danny Lyon’s “SNCC” & “The Bikeriders”)

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Watch “SNCC” (with a quick and dirty review) below. A short film on “The Bikeriders” back story follows…

SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)

Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.

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Stormy Weather (Redux)

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I Love You, Stormy Daniels
(a tanka)

Sweet the cuffs will close
due to a porn star he said
looks like his daughter.

Cops got Capone for taxes,
too. Who’s grabbed by the crotch now?

[Originally posted on April 1, 2023.]

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Battle Cry of Freedom

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Here’s a comprehensive take on Mercedes from Jane McAlevey–someone with way more organizing chops than I’ll ever have.

For my part, I woke up on May 17 thinking, “Brace yourself, they’re probably going to lose.” In my experience, the “Baby, just give me one more chance…” angle is highly effective. Mercedes implemented substantial improvements in the wage structure while still retaining a somewhat reduced version of the “Alabama discount”.  Then they fired the plant manager and the new guy asked for some time to set things right.  They intimated that, if people were still discontented, they could come back in a year and vote the union in.  Of course, Mercedes will spend the next year systematically undermining union support, harassing union leaders, etc. (though they may be somewhat constrained by German and U.S. labor investigations).

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Fathers of Our Country (A Truscott Twofer)

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This is the “law and order” Donald Trump is running on

May 24, 2024

Donald Trump invited two rappers who are members of the 8 Trey Crips gang onstage with him at his rally in the Bronx yesterday.  Tegan “Sleepy Hallow” Chambers did eight months in prison on charges of gun possession and criminal conspiracy.  Michael “Sheff G” Williams served two years in prison for criminal possession of a firearm.  Both men were arrested last year along with 32 other gang members in a 140-count indictment for gang activity, murder, and conspiracy.

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Wild Lies

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Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness by Robert Aquinas McNally. University of Nebraska Press May 1, 2024

“Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infected’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people.”  — Luther Standing Bear

Recent events in Gaza have animated current discussions about “genocide” and what it has meant and still does mean. Those who want to understand it might look back at the history of the frontier in America and on the life of John Muir who is so firmly lodged in California lore and legend that he seems as impregnable as El Capitan, the huge granite monolith in Yosemite National Park which Muir helped to create in 1890 and then aimed to protect with help from our jingoist big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt. Muir’s name is written all over the state of California: John Muir Wilderness, John Muir National Monument, John Muir National Monument, John Muir College, John Muir High School, and more.

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Itamar the Monster

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This long investigative report (published in the Sunday Times Magazine on May 16) by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti should become the most consequential piece of magazine journalism since Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic ten years ago. May it be read in Israel where the public has become ever more impervious to crimes committed against Arabs. One of Israel’s extreme right-wing pols has condemned the Times piece as a “blood libel.” But Itamar Ben-Gvir — the ultra-settler who’s been Israel’s Minster of National Security since 2022 — seems to be in avoidant mode. This swatch from the article, detailing Ben-Givr’s support for mass murder and assassination, suggests why he might be betting evasion is his best option…

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American Prism (Campus Diary)

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The morning after the night raid, I woke up and checked my phone to see University security service’s automated message sent at 7:02 A.M.: “Quad cleanup.” I cringed. I texted a friend who had been involved from the start with the Encampment and checked the school’s paper The Maroon. Their live updated coverage had been one way of keeping up with goings on at the Quad. Like most students, I went in, and out, of the Encampment: meeting friends; nodding to acquaintances; hearing about campers’ fears and strategy; attending a Palestine-activist professor’s teach-in (“genocide isn’t complicated”); taking in kids’ play and an inter-faith call to prayer. Only snippets, perhaps, compared to those who stayed for the week and kept up chanting all night against the university police raid, but it was enough to give me a sense of the moment, and place.

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Every Picture Tells a Story

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“The artist is someone who makes something called art.”

                                                                               Marcel Duchamp[1]

Not too long ago, I delivered a Zoom talk in which I detailed how I came to find myself  frequently writing about transgressive cartoonists. My friend Malcolm, a visual artist of impeccable credentials but sometimes stodgy mien, commented that he found himself enlightened as to my “fascination with the obscene, the perverse, and the tasteless,” adjectives I would not have come to on my own.

At this time, I was also preparing for a podcast on which I would be discussing the Air Pirates, a band of underground cartoonists who, in 1970, took it upon themselves to further the revolution by creating comic books in which Disney characters conducted themselves in an unDisney-like manner, and which, in the ensuing litigation, Disney’s lawyers termed “perverted,” “obscene,” “cancerous,” and “grotesque.” I was struck not only by the similarities of language between Malcolm and Disney’s counsel but how it seemed to say as much about the beholder as the beheld.

In my Zoom talk, I had mentioned a book which I had known about for 50-years but had never had an inclination to acquire. I decided to pick one up.
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There was a time when pornography pushed as many buttons as uni-sex bathrooms do today.[2]

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David Swan: A Fantasy

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R.H. Blyth loved American Renaissance writers. Thoreau, in particular, but he also appreciated Emerson and Hawthorne… 

This is the sabishisa of senryu, the loneliness of every human being, and the feeling of awe which we have, as Hawthorne says in “David Swan,” at the sight of any human being asleep.

Blyth’s lines steered your editor to Hawthorne’s story which is posted below.

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The Humor of Senryu

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The bulk of what follows comes from Chapter 18 of R.H. Blyth’s “Japanese Life and Character in Senryu,” though these excerpts may also be found in the posthumous best-of Blyth, “The Genius of Haiku.” (A book with a title that has a double-meaning.) The opening is from Blyth’s introduction to “Japanese Life.”

The fundamental thing in the Japanese character is a peculiar combination of poetry and humour, using both words in a wide and profound yet specific sense. ‘Poetry’ means the ability to see, to know by intuition what is interesting, what is really valuable in things and persons. More exactly, it is the creating of interest, of value. ‘Humour’ means joyful, unsentimental pathos that arises from the paradox inherent in the nature of things. Poetry and humour are thus very close; we may say that they are two different aspects of the same thing; Poetry is satori; it is seeing all things as good. Humour is laughing at all things; in Buddhist parlance, seeing that ‘all things are empty in their self-nature’, and rejoicing in this truth.

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Goodbye, Bill Walton

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I wrote plenty about Bill Walton when he was alive (alive as you and me) but, damn, even more so.  I don’t want to let him go.  Ever!

In our country’s battle to preserve what soul it had, there was no greater weapon and stronger voice than that of antic Bill Walton.  He rarely dribbled, and never shut up.  He truly mattered.

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(Forever) Young Walton

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An indelible passage from David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game:

It was funny, [Lionel] Hollins said, we were so young and so cocky. Not just the championship year, but even more the year after. We didn’t think there was anyone who could beat us, and we didn’t think it would ever end. We walked out on the court before every game and we couldn’t wait for it to start.

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The Commons, the Castle, the Witch, and the Lynx

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One day at Crottorf we eat mouthwatering strawberries and yogurt for our lunchtime sweet.

Crottorf is the name of a castle, or schloss, in Westphalia, Germany. Twenty­ one of us are assembled from around the world to discuss the commons. We come from India and Australia, Thailand and South Africa, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Austria, France, England, Greece, California and the Great Lakes. It is midsummer. Surrounded by green meadows and cool forests, the castle seems sprung from a German fairytale, a piece of paradise. Indeed the Italian plasterer said as much in 1661 carving onto the hallway ceiling the words,

Un pezzo del paradiso Caduto
de cielo in terra

For three days we sit in a circle, twenty-one of us, discussing, if not heaven on earth, then the commons.

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