Mother Said...
I still have not been able to figure out the scheduling functionality—this was supposed to go live on Sunday, but didn't...
May 13, 2008
May 07, 2008
"...so you’d find out about things that way"
Where I was, as a young teenager back in the early 80s, you’d hear a band like Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV and they’d start talking about William Burroughs, and you’d wonder who that was so you’d find out about things that way.—Jack Sargeant, describing the impulse behind the two books of his we're re-issuing this year, Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression and Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, an impulse that reminds of what animates so many people working in "indie" culture, you follow what you like, and sooner or later, you're doing what we do.
April 06, 2008
Tom McCarthy keeps track of Tintin developments so you don't have to...
March was an eventful month in Tintin Land. On the 21st Raymond Leblanc, founder of the magazine that brought out the cartoon adventures of Hergé's tufted boy reporter in weekly installments for three decades, died aged 92. The debonair, sport-loving publisher had played a vital role in Tintin's destiny: a wartime Resistance hero, he had single-handedly rehabilitated after World War Two the career and reputation of Hergé the "incivile" - indeed, some would say "collaborator".
Tom's Tintin and the Secret of Literature publishes in a couple of weeks. Holler for a review copy.
March 22, 2008
The Other Book about White People
While a gone-viral website about whiteness has just generated its Canadian author a substantial six-figure advance, this gone-viral essay by Tim Wise is forthcoming in a book about whiteness—Speaking Treason Fluently—that did not generate such an advance, but will have a greater impact on posterity (and might even actually sell more copies, if the success of White Like Me is anything to go by.)
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
March 09, 2008
"I love to know that it will change the landscape of political graphics for decades to come."
Favianna Rodriguez, on why her labor-of-love book, Reproduce and Revolt, co-authored by Josh McPhee, is worth it.
February 17, 2008
Ames on Limonov & Kazmierczak
Mark Ames is a versatile guy—right now he's got a piece on Alternet "Northern Ill. University: Was the Killer Crazy, or the Campus Hopeless?" and on Radar "Of Russian Dissent—Radar's March issue investigates how cult Russian novelist Eduard Limonov, backed by an army of punked-out teens, is taking on Vladimir Putin." For those of you who enjoyed Ames's Going Postal we've another coming from the eXile's stable—War Nerd. Who dat, you ask, sans dipthong? Here's the War Nerd on the US Navy's aircraft carriers, aka USS Sitting Duck, the world's most expensive raft.
December 13, 2007
Every gesture is gloved...
A no-slouch-himself writer of sentences appreciates Elizabeth Hardwick's sentences. Via Jenny.
November 27, 2007
When Rudy met Hillary...
In today's lead item on Salon, our man Rob Polner, editor of America's Mayor, America's President? casts doubt on Rudy's claims that he's the only Republican who can beat Hillary.
October 05, 2007
While in Frankfurt...
...I thought I'd leave you with an excerpt from a book we're publishing in the late Spring of 2008. It's the autobiography of Alex Cox, who made Repo Man, and Sid & Nancy and it's called X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker. But as you can tell from the below, it's way more than just an autobiography, it's a bloody manifesto. And I thought I'd make sure, while doing all my pimpin' and ho-in' at the Frankfurt Book Fair, that the blog is reminding me that there's serious business to be working on, in the world of independent culture making...
From X-FILMS by Alex Cox.
This book is about ten films I made. It’s called X FILMS because I like the Roman numeral, because I have two Xs in my name, and because it reminds me of the banned, adults-only films of my childhood - mainly horror films and Spaghetti Westerns. Not all of these were revolutionary films. But some were.
I grew up with a passion for the pictures, and for weird, marginal, independent films. The ninety-minute form is the length of our dream cycle, we’re told. As Buñuel and Dalí knew, there’s something particularly empowering and exciting about telling stories that resemble dreams. The cinemas I was raised in were real buildings: often huge, with vast, nicotine-yellow screens, and I would head upstairs to the circle, or down to the stalls, and watch two films - a double feature - through rising trails of cigarette smoke.
Going to the cinema today is a more ordered affair. The cinemagoer is forced to undergo a shopping experience, sees only one film instead of two, pays a lot more for it, and endures a barrage of loud, assaultive ads before the film begins. It’s this advertising, along with sales of highly-salted, shit-smelling popcorn, and sugared water, that makes the cinema chains their money. Only the studio-distributors make money from the films themselves.
Talking to students and younger people now, I get the impression that they think a film is “given” to a filmmaker - by a studio, or a production company. This is not so. If you’re a real filmmaker, a film is something which you personally conceive, and then, in partnership with similarly-minded colleagues, make yourself. It might be shot on film, or digital video. It might be 19 minutes or 370 minutes in duration (I’d recommend 80-95). It is entirely within your power to make an independent feature film, as long as you belong to one of two groups. To pull it off, you must be either:
1) a vocational filmmaker, affronted by Hollywood and its power, caring little about money or rewards, determined to tell your own tale;
2) a computer (or other) hacker, because hackers are brave and curious, and not afraid of acquiring, applying, and sharing information.
I include hackers because I suspect that feature film is dead, or dying, and that new blood and brains are needed to bring the twitching corpse-thing back to life. In the last few years I’ve learned a great deal from hackers: from 2600, from Richard Stallman, from Lawrence Lessig, from The Cathedral & The Bazaar - and I believe we’re hoeing the same row. Most of what I know about the loss of my civil liberties I’ve learned from computer magazines: only here, on a monthly basis, can the general reader learn about the destruction of the fair use doctrine, about abuse of patent and copyright law, about the monopoly power-grabs of Microsoft and other corporations, whose stupidity and cupidity rival the Pentagon’s. Patents and copyrights are complex things, far too difficult for Guardian or New York Times reporters, so it’s a good thing we still have Computer Shopper to remind us that we’re being screwed.
Today, an independent filmmaker is a revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war. This is the same war that Free Software and GNU/Linux activists fight against Microsoft; that the Slow Food movement fights against McDonalds; that independent musicians fight against the RIAA and the Apple Music Store; that Fair Trade activists fight against WalMart and the WTO; that the Zapatistas fight against patriarchal systems of control in Mexico. There are no spoils to be had on this battlefield, and no prospect of a quick and easy victory. Yet, buoyed by belief, and by the lack of a sustainable or sane alternative, the guerrilla soldiers on. In the case of feature films, the battle for an independent, personal art form is already won (thanks to the Mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the studios and their admirers), and irrelevant, anyway.
Irrelevant, because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can’t be the original art form of the twenty-first, as well. Something that goes beyond it will displace it - some medium equally visual and visceral, but interactive, with multiple narrative possibilities. It’s already being born: out in the same uncharted territory as the computer game, the “readjusted” corporate website, and the home-made CD of “illegal” MP3s. But the birth won’t be easy, and the new form is destined for a long and hard-fought war.
Lined up against the development of new art forms are the financial beneficiaries of the old: the studios and record companies, and the politicians, academics and media who work for them. Their world is already dying. Soon it will be gone. In the meantime, there are still a few jobs to be had there. This is the filmmaker’s choice – dependency, and the money which comes with it, or independence, which may involve lean times.
At the same time, as the studios retrench, consolidate, and fight for dominance in a diminishing market, it becomes even more important for them to suppress the individual, or the regional, voice. In some countries, the idea of film as a distinctive, national art form has been abandoned.
The British and the Mexicans face the most acute cultural challenge. Mexico suffers from its military and economic weakness and geographical proximity to the US; Britain suffers from a common language and from a ruling class which is scared to defy the biggest bully in town. As a result, our governments and cultural classes invariably bow to American influence. Instead of encouraging regional voices, and developing new creative forms, they gather in secure redoubts in the capital city, and assist in the creation of amnesia, in the effort to wash away our feelings, and our brains.
Rather than encouraging new forms to develop - in film, in art, in science, in copyright law - our leaders, cultural and political, seek to enshrine the old. In film and television, the entire panoply of human emotion is carved up into bite-size segments - serving a massive, antiquated, violence-fixated Hollywood fast-food chain which Peter Watkins has called the Monoform.
On Paul Robeson’s tombstone are the words, “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I made my choice. I had no alternative.” What this great actor said applies to directors, to writers, to journalists, and indeed to almost everybody. But not everyone is in the fortunate position of the artist, able to weigh the political implications of each possible job, and to accept or to reject the work accordingly. The choices that we make, as artists, hackers, filmmakers, are visible in our work. No one is forced to make a film.
Slavery is profitable. Freedom is difficult. Money is plentiful for those who promote obedience; it’s in short supply for those who disobey. And yet, all over the world, people refuse to be slaves, and give up careers and even lives, because their sense of self-worth, or their community’s survival, obliges them to.
Another world is possible.
September 27, 2007
Daily Shvitz
David Silverman guest-blogging at Jewcy...
September 06, 2007
The Typo Guy
David Silverman is a hard-working author.
August 06, 2007
Letter from Buenos Aires: Jillian Weise is a boring American
Time for the fourth incarnation of A Public Space, the asskickingest new journal on the Brooklyn nay global block. Therein, amongst other greatness, Soft Skull's own Jillian Weise writes from Buenos Aires...
Dear Big Logos,I’m alive in tango central! I have my own apartment! Suddenly I am full of exclamation points! This place is more dashing than I ever imagined. For a city that declared its autonomy in 1994, and proceeded to suffer a catastrophic depression in 2002, things seem to be running smoothly. Slight chance of an energy crisis. The word on the street is gasoline. Instead of a White House there is a Pink House. A plaza. A cathedral. Traffic lights change from red to yellow to green. It is okay to put the pedal to the metal on a yellow. The question of what to do with dog poop on the streets is a common and controversial topic of conversation. Most of the streets are named after famous men: Alvear, Calvo, Peña, Roca. The newest neighborhood, Puerto Madera, named their streets after famous women. And many of these famous women are—guess—poets! Increiblemente. I bought an anthology of poetry out of a cardboard box marked two pesos. The poets in the anthology call themselves The Elephant School. So far, no elephants in the poems.
July 17, 2007
Tintin and the Outrage
Given the hue-and-cry over Tintin in the Congo, we here at Soft Skull thought some context might be in order...herewith a short excerpt from our forthcoming Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy
Tintin’s political origins lie on the right, to put it mildly. The Petit Vingtième was a strict Catholic newspaper and, as Hergé himself told Numa Sadoul, ‘“Catholic” at that time meant “anti-Bolchevik”.’ It also meant anti-Semitic. The paper’s editor, the Abbé Norbert Wallez, kept a signed photograph of Mussolini on his desk. Many of the journalists who wrote for him had links to the more-or-less fascist Belgian party Rex.
This political orientation not only found its way into the strips; it was their raison d’être. Tintin’s first outing is primarily a piece of propaganda, ‘exposing’ the evils of Communism. His second, to the Congo (which appeared in book form in French in 1931 but has never been deemed acceptable for translation into English– although, much to the exasperation of European liberals, it remains hugely popular in Africa) [this was at the time of writing, Little Brown is finally publishing in the US this coming Fall], depicts Africans as good at heart but backwards and lazy, in need of European mastery. In The Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus, both of which appeared in the mid-thirties, we have villains who are typical enemies of the right, key players in the great global conspiracy of its imagination: freemasons, financiers and, behind it all, thinly veiled by a Greek name, the blatantly Semitic Rastapopoulos. The rightwing strain in Hergé’s work reaches its apex when, writing the original newspaper version of The Shooting Star at the height of the Nazi era, he invents a Jewish villain (the New York banker Blumenstein) and has a shopkeeper named Isaac rub his hands with glee when it seems the world will end. Why? Because, as he explains to his friend Solomon, ‘I owe 50,000 francs to my suppliers, and this way I won’t have to pay them.’
But almost as soon as this right-wing tendency gets going it becomes shadowed by a left-wing counter-tendency. In Tintin in America, which he published in book form in 1932, Hergé bitingly satirises capitalist mass-production and American racism (the English translation has been softened: what the small-town bank clerk really tells the police who turn up after a heist is: ‘We immediately lynched seven Negroes’ – not ‘hoboes’ – ‘but the culprit got away.’). In The Blue Lotus Tintin snaps the cane with which an American oil magnate has been beating a Chinese rickshaw driver, exclaiming ‘Brute! Your conduct is disgraceful, Sir!’
Mark, US-based knower of things Tintin, also offers perspective.
UPDATE: Josh Glenn, at the Boston Globe's great Brianiac blog, has yet more perspective.
May 30, 2007
Giuliani: The Anti Democracy Candidate
Robert Polner, editor of America's Mayor, America's President? is back blogging the Giuliani Watch for the Huffington Post.
The book is, as regular readers of this blog might already know, on sale on the Soft Skull website at a 50%, along with virtually every other Soft Skull book...
May 09, 2007
"You can't stop a tidal wave with a fork,"
says David Silverman, in the current lead article on Salon right now. And the publishing biz doesn't come out of it looking so nice...(Permalink)
(The article is adapted from his book TYPO which we're publishing next month...)
Our real problem came from our customers, the publishers. We offered to charge them as little as the Indian firms did, but most of them wouldn't even let us bid, preferring to squeeze as much profit as possible out of typesetting.In the '90s, publishers had merged and merged and then merged some more. What had been hundreds of educational publishers was now just a few. Harcourt bought Mosby, Saunders, Academic Press and the Psychological Corp. Then Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt. The three top companies represented about 80 percent of our business and the pressures on us to maintain those customers were terrible. If Reed said, "Put an employee on site in our office in Texas," we did it, even though it cost us $100,000 a year, which was just about all of our profits on that account. If we said no, we'd have no business at all. It would have been like saying no to Wal-Mart. And just as it is at Wal-Mart, the mantra of our newly merged customers was: "Lower your prices."
April 20, 2007
"A culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre—one that doesn't implicate it in the crime."
I've been struggling these past few days with how to deal with the fact that A. 33 are dead in Virginia and B. we publish a book that deals with why these things happen.
For the first few days (during which I was on London at the London Intl Book Fair), I decided to lay low. But when I got back, and started to hear the US media, rather than the UK media, I got progressively more pissed off, and decided that, since this book is a necessary polemical and astringent corrective amidst the sanctimonious pabulum of what passes for analysis, I'm drawing to try to draw people's attention to it, and damn the torpedoes.
Jan Frel at Alternet just had the author in question, Mark Ames, do a piece on the shootings. When I checked it out at 10:10am it has 63 comments; when I went back 15 minutes later to get the URL for this post, it had 77, a few seconds ago I refreshed as I was writing this, there were 86...so some folks out there care to have this perspective.
Media: "Cho Seung-Hui did it because he was crazy and evil." History: "Schoolyard massacres are rebellions against oppressive and bullying environments by students who can't take it anymore."Another rampage massacre, this time the worst ever. Which means another fake attempt at trying to understand this uniquely American crime—these interminable rage killing sprees in our workplaces and our schoolyards.
What makes the Virginia Tech massacre more horrifying isn't just the body count but the reaction of the living: The official fake soul-searching is more idiotic than ever, revealing, if anything, a culture that is so insanely delusional and incapable of self-reflection that it almost makes these rampage massacres seem relatively natural.
The footage from Seung-Hui's "media manifesto" has played on cable news on an endless loop for days now, and no one has considered the merits of his grievances—except to cast them as proof positive that Cho Seung-Hui was one sick guy.
Of all the idiotic reactions, so far none tops an article posted on MSNBC.com, written by an "investigative reporter" with the ill-begotten name of "Bill Dedman." His investigation allegedly revealed that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter, displayed alleged classic warning signs of a rampage shooting. Citing a landmark Secret Service study of schoolyard rampage massacre, Dedman observed, "In more than three out of four school shootings, the attacker had made no threat against the schoolteachers or students. But most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. The attackers posed a threat even though they hadn't made a threat."
In other words, if you think someone's weird, but he hasn't threatened anyone, he's a threat.
There are two very serious flaws in Dedman's investigation. First, if the profile of a schoolyard rampager is someone who doesn't threaten anyone but who raises suspicions, then America will have to open up a new GULAG archipelago to hold all of the millions of kids who fit this description. But the second flaw is even more serious: the Secret Service study Dedman cites draws exactly the opposite conclusion: There is no way to profile a potential schoolyard killer. That was what was so shocking about the report. Everyone who has studied these rage massacres knows it. Everyone but journalists like Dedman, that is.
What Dedman's article reveals isn't just the sloppy work of a typical mainstream hack but, rather, of a culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre—one that doesn't implicate it in the crime.
April 09, 2007
Soha Bechara harassed by Swiss ultra-right
Le Monde reports that our author Soha Bechara (Resistance) is being harassed by the Swiss ultra-right.
(English translation at the Monthly Review website.)
February 28, 2007
A tribute to Martin Scorcese from John S. Hall
John S. Hall in his King Missile guise, paying tribute to Martin Scorsese.
February 24, 2007
“I can’t concentrate,” I said. “All I think about is Eric Szmanda.”
After much prodding, Derek McCormack tells of how his crush on a CSI investigator nearly destroyed his writing career
I was crashed out on the couch.“Why aren’t you writing?” Jason, my roommate, asked.
“I can’t concentrate,” I said. “All I think about is Eric Szmanda.”
“Eric who?” he said. Eric Szmanda, I told him, the star of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the TV series. “Is he the one with the spiky hair?”
“Yes,” I said. “I sent him a copy of The Haunted Hillbilly.” The Haunted Hillbilly was my last novel. It’s about a vampire tailor who rapes and terrorizes country singer Hank Williams. “Do you think he’ll write me back?”
February 19, 2007
Editing Lydia Millet
One of the fun aspects of editing Lydia Millet is that I get e-mails that contain statements like this:
Yes, there's a whimsical colon use, certainly. I will check as you suggest. Society has moved, I feel, too far away from both the colon and the semi-colon. I do what I can to correct the trend. I did not use to feel this way. Writing culture teaches avoidance of both these days.
February 05, 2007
Iran’s attack blowback...
A United States military assault on Iran will fortify not undermine the mullahs' regime, says Nasrin Alavi (We Are Iran).
Here we go again. As Iran becomes increasingly isolated and under pressure from both western powers and its Arab neighbours in the region, the battle-lines are drawn.For many Iranians the signs are both ominous and all too familiar. On 22 September 1980, Iraq attacked western Iran, launching what would become the longest conventional war (1980-88) of the 20th century. Saddam's Iraq had the backing of many western powers during the war. Equally, several Arab monarchies - such as Kuwait - were fearful of their own potential demise in a domino-effect Iran-style revolution, and offered the Iraqi regime financial assistance.
More at OpenDemocracy.
February 04, 2007
“My Name Is Earl” karma...
So we're publishing, in May, this rather remarkable book called Typo: The Last American Typesetter, or, How I Made and Lost Four Million Dollars (An Entrepreneur's Education). Which details, inter alia, the author David Silverman's efforts to buy and save an American type-setting company Clarinda as that kind of work was in the process of being completely outsourced by American textbook publishers to the Philippines and India.
Said efforts were for naught—as the author writes on his blog:
I was so wrong, I decided to write a book...about what happened to me, Dan, and the 200 employees of Clarinda when we got squeezed out of business by market forces beyond our control...And so it is either delicious irony, cruel fate, or “My Name Is Earl” karma that just a few months before my book is due to come out, my publisher, Richard Nash at Soft Skull Press, pulled me aside before our first meeting with a PR firm to tell me, “I don’t want you to get too worried, but our distributor, PGW, has just filed bankruptcy.”
What?
Read more here.
February 03, 2007
Lisa Carver interviews the anthropologist Helen Fisher
Can't wait to read the article itself (and whatever Lisa's next manuscript will be) but for the moment:
December 12, 2006
Hey, When I said Liz Taylor...
Video haiku from Beth Lapides...
For the backstory to this particular hakiu, you can check out Beth's MySpace blog:
This haiku is about speaking clearly. The universe is very literal. A friend of mine recently kept saying I need a break I need a break I need a break. She broke her foot.For years I kept saying I want to be on Conan. I want to be on Conan. Then one day I find myself sitting in the guest chair on Conan..s set. And there he is. Conan O..Brien, right behind the desk. And he is laughing and we are talking. The cameras are running. BUT THERE IS NO ONE IN THE AUDIENCE AND THE INTERVIEW IS NOT BEING BROADCAST! I am interviewing him for my project The Other Network. I wasn..t clear enough about wanting to be on Conan, while it was being televised!
Be specific. It
helps you clarify. It helps
others understand.
December 01, 2006
McColly on World AIDS Day
Michael McColly, over at Beatrice, has an essay on World AIDS Day. A snippet:
My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC and heard the news from America about a "mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men." I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.My second World AIDS Day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I'd snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, "you weren't expecting this, were you?"
For the next few years I didn't celebrate any World AIDS Days...
Michael's the author of The After-Death Room, which published today.
November 29, 2006
Rich Melo
One of our authors, Rich Melo, has a newly-designed and really lovely author website... 'Tis the season for re-designs...
November 28, 2006
Drugs Are Nice
A blogger sees on a quote in Drugs Are Nice that's so good, I feel compelled to iterate it:
“To protect ourselves, we spun cocoons out of TV, books, video games, early stolen alcohol, and dreams. And then one day we realize we’re grown up yet still all muffled inside what we’ve built around us. We don’t feel real. 'There were often times when he would feel as if he were lifting out of his body and observing himself from above,' Dan Chaon writes in just about every one of his short stories. All the writers my age write about blackouts and floating . We try to get out of these cocoons and make our way down to where our bodies are. We try shoplifting and racist/sexist/ageist humor (trying to offend our way out); we get naked on stage. We try sleep deprivation and razors on our skin. We date creepy, scary sleazes who we half-hope, half-fear might do the cutting for us. But we’re so used to living inside a dream, even cutting feels dreamy. We can’t get out. We can’t wake up.”
November 20, 2006
IF I DID IT! The Musical
In this glasshouse of a publishing operation, I tend to avoid talking about other publishers, but I think I'm safe telling you about this:
FRAGMENTS FROM
IF I DID IT! THE MUSICAL
(Ben Greenman, lyricist for the above musical, is also the author of Superworse. )
November 06, 2006
"Dykes and Fags Want Everything"
Ferd Eggan's essay in the forthcoming revised and updated edition of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimiliation entitled "Dykes and Fags Want Everything" is excerpted at The November 3rd Club... (FYI, November 3rd is "an online literary journal seeking to 'up the ante' of literary political writing"...)
Queers didn’t always salivate at the sound of a wedding bell. I know, because I was there. Well, the truth is that I was around the corner from Christopher Street on the nights of the Stonewall Riots, but I was too afraid to join in. Rioting did not daunt me: I’d been beaten before in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. No, I was scared of the brash and noisy queens who reigned in Sheridan Square. Back then, my gay life was hidden underground. Not well-hidden—I had gotten caught only a month before while having sex in a subway bathroom on the Lexington Ave line of the IRT. I worked as a subway messenger boy for a film company that made Twinkies commercials. The kindly young officer let me off with a warning, since I was cute and ingenuous (and white). But I could not muster the self-acceptance to play a part in the very un-hidden urban theater of fierce fairy boys and muscular dykes. Additional terror loomed two blocks away on Cornelia, where leftist friends shared an apartment; if they saw me fraternizing with the fags and the drags, wouldn’t they reject me? Many an evening that summer I visited the lefties, purloined a novel like Nausea out of the bookstore and read on a bench in the Square. I’d walk over from my apartment-hovel on E 6th Street after my day job and my psychedelic gig doing light shows at the Fillmore East. I wasn’t like the street queens; I saw myself as an artist, exploring higher states of consciousness; needless to say, my acid trips lacked a certain panache—I was strapped in tight to avoid blurting out my queer desires.
November 04, 2006
Peter Rost: Election Creates Panic Among Drug Makers
Peter Rost has a great guest editorial on Buzzflash.com
Few recent elections have been as critical for the drug industry as this one. And that's the reason the Wall Street Journal reports that "Assailed by Democrats, drug companies are pouring millions of dollars into close races, giving some Republicans a financial edge."What is at stake is a financial windfall the size of which has never before been endowed on a single industry, courtesy of the current administration. And that windfall is coming from drugs for poor people.
By some estimates the windfall for the drug industry could be $2 billion or more this year, and it is the result of the transfer of millions of poor people into the new Medicare Part D program. Under this program, the prices paid by the taxpayer, for the medications given to those unable to pay for drugs, are likely to be higher than what was paid under the Medicaid programs.
October 30, 2006
Capt. Kirk and Abu Ghraib and Hallowe'en.
October 23, 2006
Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore: Now Blogging
The editor of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore has, notwithstanding his fibromyalgia, launched his blog, Nobody Passes, darling.
Mattilda's some beautiful things to say in there, especially a letter to Mattilda's dying father, but here's the most recent post, on Mr. Foley, in which you get a sense to the potent combination of the personal and the political that you'll find on this blog:
I thought I had discovered something that no one else knew about -- the tapping of feet underneath stall walls, notes written on toilet paper and wrapped around pens, the texture of hairs between pants-below-knees and everything above. This was my gay world of desire and loathing, the place I inhabited so many evenings after school -- it's where I learned about men like Mark Foley -- at the urinals, between stalls, in the stairwell, in their cars in the parking lot.I remember this one guy who drove me to my father's office -- it was just one block away, but he really wanted to drive me. He handed me his business card -- Capitol Hill, lobbyist. I wondered about his audacity -- did he know I was 15? I hoped that I was passing as older. I wondered what would happen if I called him, but that was his desire not mine. I wanted so much more.
Here is what I would've wanted that lobbyist -- or Mark Foley -- to say to me, if I'd run into him at Woodie’s department store or Mazza Gallery or Georgetown Park: This is a monstrous world we live in, but your defiant faggotry will take you to places as brilliant as you can imagine -- if you need somewhere to go to talk about your dreams, your hopes and hopelessness, don't hesitate to call -- I will require nothing of you.
Unfortunately, Mark Foley will probably never utter these words, and that is the real tragedy.
September 21, 2006
Abu Ghraib: the Last Great American Movie
Ever so elegant post by David Griffith, author of the forthcoming A Good War is Hard to Find...
...[I]t seems that Abu Ghraib is not so much about state mandated torture (although the boundaries of what is what is not torture do seem to have been intentionally blurry), it is about young people whose moral consciences did not cause them to balk and a citizenry that failed the same test.
Film studies folks have been thinking about the roots of misrepresentating the "other," and "problematically" totalizing the complexity of cultural identity, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. through the deployment of a subtle visual rhetoric, some of which is conscious and some of which is, arguably, subconscious. These scholars hold that film can call attention to such problems. Just look at countries along cultural fault lines, such as Irish and Mexican film: both deal quite literally with borders and the violence that erupts as a result of the tension between perspectives. In these films the violence is understood as symptomatic of deep social undercurrents.
September 01, 2006
Why I'll Be in the Office Saturday and Monday...
Mark Ames (Going Postal) on Americans' refusal to even take the meagre two weeks of vacation time we get a year...Editor's Choice on the Guardian blog.
Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has lately become so frustrated in its inability to force workers to take holiday time that it resorted to shutting down and locking out its 19,000 employees twice a year in order to force them to relax.One can imagine PwC's parking lot the day after forced-vacation lockdown. It would look like the scene outside of the mall in George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead: thousands of starched, dazed yuppies converging on the corporate grounds, clawing at the entrance, growling for the opportunity to just put in one more 70-hour work week.
August 28, 2006
Michael Standaert is busy today...
This is a drum we ain't gonna stop banging:
Standeart on the HuffPo on Johnnie-come-latelies who've noticed that the Left Behind books could be, oh, you know, about "about killing people for their lack of faith in Jesus." Of course, it took the conversion of the books to the video game format for anyone to actually realize this...
And Michael again, on the find UK website, The Nth Position:
So how does the 'Christian' publishing industry get away with misrepresenting not only their message of hope for the future, but also the figure of 'Christ' as perhaps as equally destructive as his polar opposite, the Antichrist? I would argue that there has been little outrage about the books from Christians, at least on a very public level, mainly because the books do serve a purpose for Protestant evangelical Christianity
August 25, 2006
Daily Negation: August 25th
Today, I should take the time to look in the mirror and take note of my flaws. I should observe each one carefully, and think about it for a minute or two. After an hour of cataloging my defects, I will be able to greet the day honestly, without any illusions that I am attractive. —Daily Negations, John S. Hall