DN writes:

"Marching to Nowhere?
Some Thoughts on the San Francisco M20 Demonstration


On March 20th, 2003, as bombs fell on Iraq, I joined with the thousands who took to the streets of Portland, Oregon, to express our rage against the war and to disrupt business as usual. That day, intersections were occupied, some freeways were temporarily blocked, and a couple of ugly businesses got trashed. A mass rally also took place. Surprisingly, we did not stop the war, but our fightback made a difference — we demonstrated to each other that it was possible to go beyond resignation and passivity. The question was how to be more focused and effective from then on. For some of us, San Francisco's actions of the same day hinted at solutions; the shutdown of that city's financial district was an inspiration.

One year on, I decided to travel to the Bay Area to check out the anti-war/anti-occupation demonstration there. What follows is not an attempt at a comprehensive report-back; I will merely describe my own experience, and draw a few general lessons from what I saw. I hope that this exercise will be useful to those already active around the occupation, and perhaps also those who wish to be.

"Magic of the State?"

Michael Taussig

George Bush comes to NYC today. Will he wear a mask?

I see people clapping the police, the firemen, and the construction workers along the West Side Highway down at Christopher Street and outside St. Vincent's Hospital. They have American flags and crudely lettered cardboard signs saying "We Love You," and "The Bravest." There is a feeling of carnival in the air and the cars honk back. Foucault is famous for his idea of bio-power, that the modern state is dedicated not to punishment or violence but to life, that it practices a sort of manipulative altruism. Don't think of the hangman. Think of the fireman. An older wisdom than Foucault's has long maintained that war is the health of the state. A professor of history on NPR says he is encouraged that this will put an end to criticism of the police in NYC. Dawn of a new era.

NOT BORED! writes:

"When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease"

What's being sold here [in the Budweiser radio commercials that use the music of Squeeze and the Dave Edmunds Band] is not name or personality but style. The familiar but chart-poor groups are not announced, and that anonymity provides an aural itch that you scratch when you remember the product with which the style is associated. The spots take the language of a performer and reduce it to two or three constituent elements; the result is that the performer's language — made of incipient cliches that, by means of a confrontation with a specific occasion of performance, are sometimes dissolved into an efflorescence that transcends cliche and extends language — is now reified into a single cliche hard enough to dominate any mere occasion. From now on, this is all the performer will have to say. His performance will communicate in terms of how well it approximates the reification of the commercial, not necessarily because the commercial will have been more widely or intensely heard than any other work by the performer (though it probably will have been), but because the commercial will have completed — in fact, realized — the performer's career. When one hears an old Squeeze or Dave Edmunds record, it will sound like an attempt to formulate a cliche — to produce a style so recognizable and narrow that it can be marketed as an object, as a thing — which is what the record will have been.

Greil Marcus has changed his mind since he wrote these words, back in 1987, when his "Real Life Top Ten" column was published in The Village Voice. He now says, "I think all songs should go up on this block [...] It's a way of finding out if songs that carry people with them, songs that seem tied to a particular time and place, can survive a radical recontextualization, or if that recontectualization dissolves them" (see "Bob Dylan After the 1994 Congressional Elections," in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, published in 2000).

hydrarchist writes: "pinched from the excellent resource endpage".

"Sex, Race and Class"

Selma James

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left.