"A Visit with John Holloway:

How to Change the World Without Taking Power"

John Ross, Counterpunch

Puebla de Los Angeles, Mexico — One evening recently, a U.S. correspondent with a lengthy left-wing lineage sat down to dinner with two old comrades. Luis Cota had been a charter member of the long-defunct Mexican Communist Party and visited Moscow several times where he was enrolled at Patrice Lamumba University during the Brezhnev years. Pedro P. is a 40-year veteran of the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina whose travels on the left are encyclopedic. He had visited with Lenin's mummy four times (once each with Mao's and the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov's), he recounted.

"Philip Lamantia, 1928–2005:

Literary Prodigy Influenced Beats"

Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle

Philip Lamantia, the blazing San Francisco poet whose embrace of
Surrealism and the free flow of the imagination had a major influence on
the Beats and many other American poets, died Monday of heart failure at
his North Beach apartment. He was 77.

A San Francisco native born to Sicilian immigrants, Mr. Lamantia was a
widely read, largely self-taught literary prodigy whose visionary poems —
ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic — explored the subconscious world of
dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.

"Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a
grain of sand," said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Books
published four of Mr. Lamantia's nine books from 1967 to 1997.

The Yellow House of Cinema

Russian Film Symposium 2005
May 2-7, 2005

University of Pittsburgh

What feast is in the Yellow House afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging??
— Boris Pil'niak, Mahogany

"Yellow house," a Russian colloquialism, means "insane asylum." Russia's film union and its principal screening venue is Moscow's famous House of Cinema. This year Pittsburgh's annual Russian Film Symposium invites you to visit the Yellow House of Cinema, a selection of Russia's newest and most interesting films.

"The Yellow House of Cinema" examines the themes, visual practices, and cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd.

Kim Paice writes:

"Art, State, Sabotage"

Kim Paice

In recent years, government has tended to see an ever-narrowing line between art and threats to the state.

When, on February 8th, Austrian artist Robert Jelinek — founder of the artists collective Sabotage — flew from Vienna to Cincinnati via Amsterdam and Detroit, he was carrying art and literature for the exhibition "Incorporated: a recent (incomplete) history of infiltrations, actions and propositions utilizing contemporary art" at the Contemporary Arts Center.

Between Detroit and Cincinnati, Homeland Security confiscated 33 passport-works by artist Heimo Zobernig, educational leaflets, and personal items from Jelinek’s belongings. Officials left an incomplete receipt for items in one suitcase.

They later explained seizing the art because it was “produced by an anarchy group called Sabotage which does not believe in international borders.” After a period of what one participant called “civil” negotiation, authorities returned the passports and literature to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati on March 2. They are on view in Incorporated until May 8th.

CNN and other media outlets quickly compared the seizure to controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition in Cincinnati. Yet, the recent incident has new markings. Seizure of a foreign national’s property amounts to an international incident and fosters cultural isolationism.

While hardly comparable to criminal actions in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, this event also occurs on the world stage. It tells us that 15 years since the Mapplethorpe scandal, federal authorities have yet to learn that crusades against pornological and political art generate an audience and demand for such art.