Radical media, politics and culture.

Culture

July 26, 2006 - 9:59am -- autonomedia
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Interview with Gore Vidal

David Barsamian, The Progressive

Gore Vidal is a gold mine of quips and zingers. And his vast knowledge of literature and history—particularly American—makes for an impressive figure. His razor-sharp tongue lacerates the powerful. He does it with aplomb, saying, “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” He has a wry sense of noblesse oblige: “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”


Now eighty, he lives in the Hollywood hills in a modest mansion with immodest artwork. I felt I was entering a museum of Renaissance art. A stern painting of the Emperor Constantine was looking down upon us as we sat in his majestic living room. A Buddha statue from Thailand stood nearby. But all was not somber. He had a Bush doll with a 9/11 bill sticking out of it on a table behind us.


His aristocratic pedigree is evident not just in his artistic sophistication but also in his locution. In a war of words, few can contend with Vidal.


“I’m a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place,” he declares.

July 24, 2006 - 3:41am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Dorothy Day: A true Christian, a ‘dangerous radical’

Tom Deegan

From The Chronicle

“The impulse to stand up against the state and go to jail, rather than serve, is an instinct for penance; To take on some of the suffering of the world — to share in it.” — Dorothy Day, February 1969.

For many years, I had only a vague knowledge who Dorothy Day was. I knew that in the 1920s she and her spiritual mentor, a French peasant and religious philosopher named Peter Maurin, founded a newspaper called, The Catholic Worker, and that in her time she was viewed by many to be a “dangerous radical.” She was considered such a menace that J. Edgar Hoover, that pillar of goodness and decency (cough!), even kept a file on her. Quite frankly, I’ve come to a point in my life where I’m seriously disappointed in anyone who lived during that period who didn’t have their own little place of honor in Hoover’s file cabinet. Think about it — Charlie Chaplin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, John Lennon — that’s pretty good company to be in!

But other than that basic outline, my knowledge of her life was, to say the least, peripheral. She was always merely a footnote in someone else’s biography.

Late last summer, while browsing through the used book store at the library in Cornwall, I happened upon a copy of the book, “By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day.” After reading it, a whole new world opened up for me and I found myself exploring everything connected to this good and decent woman and her beautiful life. She is, I believe, a saint.

July 22, 2006 - 12:41pm -- stevphen
Reviews
Culture

Pitying Paul Virillio

NOT BORED!

It isn’t particularly easy to read Paul Virilio’s books. He writes in French, and it is difficult to translate his idiosyncratic puns, metaphors and neologisms into English. He doesn’t really write books, though he has certainly published a great many texts. Virilio mainly writes articles and essays; he reads aloud papers he’s written at conferences; and he gives in-depth interviews. Various collections of these furtive texts have been assembled and published as “books” that are often very short and, in the English translations, not illustrated. Finally, Virilio tends to develop his themes slowly, across the span of several “books,” which makes it especially difficult for the newcomer to enter into his discourse, which dates back to the late 1970s (he was born in 1932). But Virilio needs to be read. He is the only post-World War II radical French theorist to write extensively on the inter-related subjects of war, the military, speed, and the acceleration of time, and his writings are uniquely useful in describing and theorizing “terrorism,” militarism, and September 11th.



Most recently, there’s this weird “book” called Art and Fear (Continuum, London/New York, 2003). Composed of two short texts, “A Pitiless Art” and “Silence on Trial,” and only 61 pages long, it was originally published in 2000 by Editions Galilee under the title La Procedure Silence (“The Silence Trial”). In 2002, the book was translated into English by Julie Rose, who had previously translated Virilio’s The Art of the Motor (University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Slender as it is – no price listed, but my copy cost an unmerciful $15 – this volume is also absurdly padded out. Not only does it contain a two-page-long translator’s preface, a bibliography of works cited and an index, but also a completely unnecessary thirteen-page-long “introduction” by John Armitage, who is clearly uncomfortable with the book itself or this particular line of thought in Virilio’s books. And so Armitage feels compelled to offer various defensive responses to what “commentators” on the book “might claim” about it. When all is said and done, Art and Fear contains a mere 35 pages of worthwhile material. But this material is so strong and provocative that it is more than worth the difficulty of obtaining it.

July 20, 2006 - 11:13am -- autonomedia
Announcements
Culture

John Duda writes:

Fluxus Reader

John Duda


Thanks to editor Ken Friedman, the Fluxus Reader (currently and for the forseeable future out of print) is now available online as a freely-redistributable PDF.

THE FLUXUS READER: SYNOPSIS

Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists,
architects, composers, and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus had become a
laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic experimentation in Europe,
Asia, and the United States. Described as "the most radical and
experimental art movement of the 1960s," Fluxus challenged conventional
thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role
in the birth of such key contemporary forms as concept art, installation,
performance art, intermedia, and video. Despite this influence, the scope
and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain
Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms. The Fluxus Reader
offers the first comprehensive overview on the challenging and
controversial group.

July 18, 2006 - 11:02pm -- autonomedia
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Marxist Literary Critics Are Following Me!

How Philip K. Dick Betrayed His Academic Admirers To The FBI

Jeet Heer, Lingua Franca

[From Volume 11, No. 4—May/June 2001]

WHEN THE NOVELIST PHILIP K. DICK DIED IN 1982, THE INFLUENTIAL literary theorist Fredric Jameson eulogized him as "the Shakespeare of science fiction." At the time of this encomium, Dick was hardly famous. The author of more than fifty books, he had an enthusiastic following among science fiction fans. But he was rarely read by anyone else.


These days, Dick is far better known. Vintage publishes his fiction in a uniform paperback edition. Hollywood filmmakers transform his stories of imaginary worlds and conspiratorial cartels into movies like Screamers and Total Recall. Meanwhile, academic critics laud him as a postmodernist visionary, a canny prophet of virtual reality, corporate espionage, and the schizoid nature of identity in a digitized world. Indeed, beginning in the last years of his life and continuing to the present, these critics have played a key role in the canonization of Philip K. Dick.


But did Dick return the favor? Not exactly. To their considerable anguish, Dick's academic champions have had to contend with the revelation that their hero wrote letters to the Federal Bureau of Investigation denouncing them. In these letters, Dick claimed that Jameson and other literary theorists were agents of a KGB conspiracy to take over American science fiction.

July 13, 2006 - 6:37pm -- stevphen
Events
Culture

OPPOSING ANTISEMITISM IN THE MOVEMENT:
A WORKSHOP FOR ACTIVISTS

When: Sunday, July 23, 6:30 p.m.

Where: Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, between
Stanton and Rivington Streets, Manhattan (directions
below).

Antiauthoritarians and social justice activists often
think they're immune from racism and prejudice. But
many Jewish activists' experience shows that forms of
antisemitism are alive and well in the social justice
movement. This not only drives away many Jewish
activists, but profoundly affects our work as a
movement. This workshop brings together two longtime
activists who have studied how the left responds to
antisemitism for an evening of instruction and
experience-sharing that will help us understand and
combat its effects in the activist community.

Antisemitism is more than a "prejudice." It's a
political worldview that can creep into the work of
even dedicated fighters against oppression and
injustice. This workshop will begin with the
essentials: What is antisemitism? How is it different
from what we've been taught it is? We will then
explore the ways that antisemitism manifests itself
today within movements against capitalism, the state,
corporate globalization, and other forms of
oppression, and what problems have kept the left from
tackling antisemitism historically. We will look at
how antisemitism damages the struggle for justice.
Finally, we will discuss how we as activists can get
better at seeing and fighting antisemitism where it
arises.

July 12, 2006 - 2:04pm -- autonomedia
Announcements
Culture

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Male Bodies / Global Cinema"

Call For Papers


Contributions are sought for a new volume on the representation of the male body in global cinema.

Essays on any nationalities or ethnicities are welcome, but the following will take priority:


Australian cinema;
Chinese cinema;
Cinemas of Western and Southern European countries (especially France, Germany and Italy);
Post 1989 Eastern European cinemas;
Cinemas of the states of the former Soviet Union;
Cinema from the Indian subcontinent;
Latin American cinemas (especially Argentinean, Brazilian, Cuban and Mexican);
Middle Eastern cinema.


Contributions can focus on specific countries or ethnicities and can analyse key actors, directors or films or offer a more diverse overview, but the emphasis will be on cinema produced in the last twenty years.


Please send proposals including title, 500-word abstract, provisional bibliography and short bio by 1 December 2006. Accepted contributions (of around 7,000 words) will be expected by July 2007 for publication with a well-established publishers in the field in late 2008/early 2009.


santiago.fouz@durham.ac.uk

July 11, 2006 - 10:00am -- autonomedia
Reviews
Culture

The Filmmaker and the Protest Singer

Joan Anderman,
Boston Globe

Peter Frumkin's PBS documentary blows the dust off Woody Guthrie's legend to find the man and his legacy

"A lot of people know Woody Guthrie as the guy in dungarees with a guitar on his back who played three-chord songs," says Peter Frumkin. "But there's a lot more to him than that."


That's why Frumkin, a Cambridge-based filmmaker, devoted the last seven years to making the PBS "American Masters" documentary "Woody Guthrie: Ain't Got No Home." The film, which premieres tomorrow on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), is a painstakingly crafted portrait of the folk icon's life, the roots of his music, and Guthrie's political and artistic legacy.

July 10, 2006 - 10:21am -- autonomedia
Announcements
Culture

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Launch Art Groups Networking Project

Temporary Services


The widely known Chicago-based artists' group Temporary Services has launched a new historical networking project. Here is the pitch:


Dear enthusiasts of group work and collaboration:


Please help us build a database of people working in arts and
arts-related groups, collectives and movements.


Temporary Services has worked as a group since late in 1998. We are
interested in the cultures of collaboration and collectivity within group
practice.


While much recent attention has been given to these ways of working,
few substantial documents have been produced that reflect the amount of
work that has been accomplished. There is also a need for more writing
on the inner dynamics of the group process: how collaborations are
formed, how decisions are made, how conflict is resolved, and so on.


We are compiling the names, locations, and dates (when available) of
art and arts-related groups, which can include those who work as
curatorial collectives. We would like your help!


The list will be published in a book we are working on titled Group
Work. The book will include interviews, quotes about working together,
lists of words used to describe the numerous ways in which we group
ourselves, and a list of historic and currently active groups.


The list will also be a part of a larger initiative called Groups and
Spaces that several people have contributed to. Groups and Spaces
includes groups of one person (who still chooses to work under a group name),
couples who work as a group, groups of three or more people, and open
networks that are named, but aren't necessarily a collective or more
circumscribed group.


We would like your help to develop this list and make it as
comprehensive as possible. Please visit http://www.groupsandspaces.net to see the
list of groups and to submit names of groups not listed, corrections to
information already posted, or any suggestions you have to make the
list better.


The list is still under construction, but is public and accessible to
all. A more sophisticated, searchable database and sets of research
tools are planned for the site after this preliminary list making is over.


Thank you,

Temporary Services

(Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer)

http://www.temporaryservices.org

http://www.groupsandspaces.net

July 7, 2006 - 3:27am -- stevphen
Announcements
Culture

ABC No Rio Acquires the Property at 156 Rivington Street

On June 29 ABC No Rio took ownership of the property at 156 Rivington Street from the City of New York, following several years of planning and negotiations.

While the purchase price was $1, ABC No Rio must raise the funds necessary to renovate the building. To date we've raised over $290,000, enough to begin and complete the first phase of construction.

Envisioned for the site is a multi-use community arts center with darkroom, silk-screen printing facility, small press resource center, computer center, expanded space for art, music, performance, educational and community activities, and meeting and office space.

We achieved this great milestone through the efforts, participation and support of many, many hundreds of artists, activists, musicians, performers, patrons and supporters, yet our future fundraising challenges remain.

ABC No Rio's 'culture of opposition' goes back over twenty-six years to our founding. We'll need your help to continue this tradition.

Thank you for your support.

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