Radical media, politics and culture.

Culture

August 24, 2005 - 12:50pm -- hydrarchist
Announcements
Culture

People may have noticed thjat we are under a spam attack, this article was posted by a registered user, sylvia, but I inadverntentl;y deledeted it, apologies]

I am sylvia from greece and currently sponsored by the programme YOUTH to independently work on researching cultural houses in Europe. I have been reading a lot through the internet and am mainly interested in free spaces, like the Rote Fabrik in Zuerich, Switzerland, which poped up after radical youth movements. I have been reading a lot about Italy and Holland, the Squatters and so on and it is all so fascinating, but it is difficult to find out whether there were cultural places that survived and are still functioning, like in Switzerland, since I am in the other end of the world and all this took place when I wasn't even born! But I have the chance now to know more about it and share the information with so many other people.. Can anyone help me? Information about such free independet cultural houses, or links to people that could give me more specific information? the page http://av-produktionen.ch/80/home.html is very helpful, but unfortunately only referring to Switzerland. And anything else I have managed to find has more to do with the history and less with the results. I would so much appreciate any help. Just point out a couple of places you like and hang out in. Thanx a bunch!!! sylvia"

August 18, 2005 - 10:28pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Aesthetic and Political Avant-Gardes

George Katsiaficas, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest

The term “avant-garde” as used in popular discourse as well as in the more specialized worlds of art and politics has a variety of meanings. Sometimes it is overlooked—treated as having no special importance. There is no entry for it in the 32 volume Macmillan Dictionary of Art (1996), the New Encyclopedia Britannica (1995), or even in Raymond Williams’s highly regarded Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Yet for most of the 20th century—and the 19th as well—the term avant-garde was widely used to define attempts to forge new dimensions to our aesthetic and political definitions of reality. At the intersection of art and politics is where the term originated, and it is there that its most explosive interpretations can be found. In its 1973 edition the now-defunct Great Soviet Encyclopedia stridently attacked “avant-gardism” as “saturated with capitalist and petty bourgeois individualism.” More recently, feminists and post-modernists have attacked the avant-garde as a concept that fosters elitism.

If we were to attempt to give a brief definition to “avant-garde” as it has evolved over the last two centuries, it would refer to people seeking to transform aesthetic and political developments in society. Sometimes entwined together in complementary relationships, and at other moments separate and even antagonistic strands, aesthetic innovation and political engagement are both embedded in the core of the meaning of avant-garde. In what follows, I will trace the development of avant-garde movements from their origin in 19th century France to the contemporary period. In my view, the tension between the political and the aesthetic in avant gardes is significant and valuable; political activists can learn a great deal from the impact of aesthetic movements.

August 13, 2005 - 2:36pm -- nolympics
Reviews
Culture

"Looking Back at 'The Battle of Algiers'"
Louis Proyect, Monthly Review

Challenged by terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare in Iraq, the Pentagon recently held a screening of "The Battle of Algiers," the film that in the late 1960's was required viewing and something of a teaching tool for radicalized Americans and revolutionary wannabes opposing the Vietnam War.

Back in those days the young audiences that often sat through several showings of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 re-enactment of the urban struggle between French troops and Algerian nationalists, shared the director's sympathies for the guerrillas of the F.L.N., Algeria's National Liberation Front. Those viewers identified with and even cheered for Ali La Pointe, the streetwise operator who drew on his underworld connections to organize a network of terrorist cells and entrenched it within the Casbah, the city's old Muslim section. In the same way they would hiss Colonel Mathieu, the character based on Jacques Massu, the actual commander of the French forces.



The Pentagon's showing drew a more professionally detached audience of about 40 officers and civilian experts who were urged to consider and discuss the implicit issues at the core of the film — the problematic but alluring efficacy of brutal and repressive means in fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq. Or more specifically, the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans.

— Michael T. Kaufman, "What Does the Pentagon See in 'Battle of Algiers'?" (New York Times, September 7, 2003)

At a press conference dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, the captive FLN leader Larbi Ben M'Hidi is asked what chance he has of defeating the French. He answers that it has a better chance than the French have of defeating history. M’Hidi’s reply was probably lost on the Pentagon audience since every imperial power in history seems utterly convinced of its own invulnerability. The film has an entirely different significance for the left. We watch it to become inspired, all the more so at a time when Americans are facing our own version of the battle of Algiers.

August 10, 2005 - 2:05pm -- stevphen
Events
Culture

Dalton Trumbo's JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN

Adapted for the Stage by Bradley Rand Smith

Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun tells of a young soldier wounded in WWI. Through an intimate one-man performance, we explore the mind of a boy rendered blind, deaf, and quadriplegic who still dares to ask the question "why?"

The New York International Fringe Festival - FringeNYC

A Production of The Present Company

& Sleepless Theatre Company:

the New York division of LOOKOUT! Players

Performance dates and times:

Sunday, August 14 at 12pm

Thursday, August 18 at 8pm

Sunday, August 21 at 4:30pm

Thursday, August 25 at 5:45pm

Saturday, August 27 at 7:15pm

Playing at:

Ace of Clubs

9 Great Jones Street

(3rd Street between Broadway and Lafayette)

Subway: B,D,F to Broadway/Lafayette stop

W,R to 8th street stop

6 to Bleecker Street stop

212.677.6963

August 9, 2005 - 1:13pm -- stevphen
Events
Culture

Enrollment info for Continental Drift Seminar with Brian Holmes

Part I -- Sept, (12) and (15-18)

Part II -- Oct (20-24).

at 16 Beaver

Continental Drift is a modular and experimental seminar that will attempt to embark upon the "impossible" task of articulating the immense
geopolitical and economic shifts which took place between 1989-2001, the effects of those changes on the emerging bodies of governance (i.e., the formation of economic blocs like EU or NAFTA) and in turn the effects on subjectivity. Having witnessed the incredible vibrancy of social
movements which took hold in that same period, the seminar acknowledges that new modes of control and channeling of various flows have merited a shift in tactics and strategies. The question of "what now?" is precisely at the core of our study. "The goal, then, is to map out the majority models of self and group within each of the emerging continental systems, to see how they function within the megamachines of production and conquest – and at the same time, to cross the normative borders they put into effect, in order to trace microcartographies of difference, dissent, deviance and refusal.

July 30, 2005 - 1:55pm -- nolympics
Announcements
Culture

Tom Rascal writes

Globalised cinema presents very few opportunities to working men and women to see films that portray the lives and struggles of those individuals who take on the rich and powerful so as to lift ordinary people out of poverty and oppression. Too often, cinema presents a fantasy world in which glamour and celebrity are elevated and in which the interests of the elite are served against the best interest of workers and the marginalised.


But the stories that come out of those heroic struggles by ordinary people often contain all of the elements necessary for compelling drama on screen, and in the life of James Connolly those elements are there in abundance.

July 26, 2005 - 9:03am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

"The $256 Question"

Stan Cox, AlterNet

By prosecuting Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, is the Justice Department trying
to clamp a lid on political art or looking to chalk up a win by exploiting fears
of bioterrorism?

S. marcescens: Dangerous Bacteria or Harmless Art Material?


The way William Hochul sees it, the situation couldn't be simpler: "We take an
oath to follow the Constitution and enforce the law. The law says you can't
acquire any property by fraud — whether it's a gun or an automobile or
something biological, it doesn't matter."


As an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, based in
Buffalo, Hochul is leading the prosecution of Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell,
who were indicted a little over a year ago for mail and wire fraud. Kurtz, a
professor of art at the University of Buffalo and co-founder of the
internationally acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), is accused of obtaining
bacterial cultures illegally through the mail.


Ferrell, a geneticist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, allegedly
provided Kurtz the organisms for use in an artwork, rather than using them in
his own research, thereby violating an agreement he had signed when he
purchased the cultures for $256 from the American Type Culture Collection
(ATCC).


Although Hochul doesn't say so, this has to be a frustrating time for him. Last
spring, he and the Terrorism Division that he heads appeared to be setting
their sights on a big-time conviction. Federal agents in biohazard suits had
confiscated laboratory equipment and bacterial cultures from Kurtz's home. And
they had served subpoenas — under the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism
Act — on several of Kurtz's colleagues and a company [Autonomedia] that publishes CAE's
books.

July 15, 2005 - 11:33pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Hacking Public Spaces in Vilnius: Politics of a new media space inside the Lietuva (soviet) cinema

Interview with Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
by Geert Lovink

Ever since I met Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas in 1999, two contemporary artists from Lithuania, they have been in search for an art space where they could establish a media lab, host talks and exhibit new media related art works. In August 2004 their organization, Vilma, hosted the RAM 6 workshop in Vilnius--yet another example which showed how well organized they were, and how desperate in need of their own infrastructure to do critical and innovative projects. This spring, Nomeda and Gediminas suddenly saw a chance--and grabbed it. They occupied the huge voyer of the privatized Lietuva cinema, over which a controversy had arisen. In May 2005 Nomeda and Gediminas were in Amsterdam briefly for the opening of the Populism show at the Stedelijk Museum, a moment we used to catch up and prepare for the following interview, which was done through email over the past few weeks. The situation of their exciting projects is changing on a daily basis and we'll hope to keep you informed. In the meanwhile, if you would like to support them, for instance by sending them taping which they could screen, please contact them (information below).

July 13, 2005 - 2:49pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

"The Making of the Counterculture"

Kenneth Rexroth, Bureau of Public Secrets


I


In the winter of 1954–55 America was in an economic, social, and cultural interregnum. One style of life, one mood — like Victorianism or Edwardianism — was giving way to another. The industrial age based on the mechanical exploitation of coal and iron was giving way to electronics, computers, automation — with all the social and intellectual results such a basic revolution implies — but as yet few indeed understood what was happening.

June 27, 2005 - 9:21am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Anonymous Comrade writes

Drowning in Filth

John Chuckman

"We are all drowning in filth…I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth." — George Orwell (diary entry for 27 April, 1942)

I've given the date of Orwell's words lest someone think they were written by a contemporary bearing the writer's name. Recent events surely qualify the United States to claim some sort of title from the Guinness Book of Records such as the world's largest moral and intellectual open sewer.


A man by the name of Ed Klein has written a vile book called The Truth about Hillary. Perceptive readers may require no more information about this book than the fact that Klein is a former editor for The New York Times. The Times reputation as a newspaper upholding genuine liberal values exists only in the minds of those who regard rolling on the floor and babbling in tongues as divine inspiration. For decades, the Times has demonstrated enough dissembling, unwarranted personal attacks, subtle omissions, and tweaking of words to qualify many times over for a J. Edgar Hoover Official G-Man Helper Award. So what would you expect from a former editor?

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