Third Annual Hip Hop Labor Cultural Festival

September 4th, 2006 - Schenectady, NY

On Labor Day, Sept. 4th, 2006 the Capital District Area Labor Federation (CDALF) will host the third annual “Hip-Hop Movement Meets Labor Movement” Cultural Festival. This event is co-sponsored by Schenectady Mayor Brian U. Stratton. The purpose of the event is to connect the labor movement with the hip-hop movement and to open a dialogue between these two movements that are rooted in collective action.

The festival will showcase local artists exclusively: dance troupes, poets and local emcees will share the stage with local labor leaders. Performers include Albany’s own Broadcast Live, Origin, JB!!, and many more. Stencil artists Chris Stain and Josh MacPhee will be painting murals live.

Circus Amok Is Coming to Town!

September Performances

*CITIZEN*SHIP*: AN IMMIGRANT RIGHTS FANTASIA IN 10
SHORT ACTS

1st – Riverside Park, Manhattan (6pm)

2nd – Sunset Park, Brooklyn (4pm)

3rd – T.B.A.

4th – Coney Island, Brooklyn (2pm & 5pm)

7th – Union Square, Manhattan (1pm & 4pm)

8th – Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan (6pm)

9th – Prospect Park, Brooklyn (1pm & 4pm)

10th – Red Hook, Brooklyn (4pm)

14th – Columbus Park, Manhattan (1pm & 5pm)

15th – Ft. Greene Park, Brooklyn (5pm)

16th – Socrates Sculpture Garden, Long Island City
(1pm)

17th – Tompkins Square Park, East Village (1pm & 4pm)

20th – Battery Park, Manhattan (1pm & 4pm)

21st – Rufus King Park, Queens (5pm)

22nd – St. Mary's Park, Bronx (5pm)

24th – Washington Square Park, Manhattan (1pm & 4pm)

for updates and more details: www.circusamok.org

A Proposal for the Adoption of the Blackout as a Holiday

J. Sinopoli

Care of The New York Ministry of Unofficial Popular Holidays

In Berlin there is a blown up church you drive by everyday, still
there from World War 2. They kept it there as a reminder of the time
we bombed Berlin. It is a powerful, lucid monument to a complicated
era of history.

The reason we can reach no satisfying solution as to how to
memorialize Ground Zero is because we tore it down already. The
shards were beautiful, like a tree struck by lightning, a natural and
perfect horribly sordid shape. We should have kept it. Had we been
braver, or more honest, we would have. Instead we treated it like
vandalism, and cleaned it off. Any memorial at Ground Zero will never
quite satisfy without it. Anyway, we feel we do not memorialize
enough and it is in this spirit we call to formalize, as a holiday,
the August 14 Blackout.

It could be our version of Carnival, and we could use one. It
requires no municipal support. We as a people could simply do it. A
harmless ritual: You come home from work, or wherever, switch off
your circuit breakers, and that's all, it begins. It is not a
debauchery, not a wild night, but perhaps a free one. Free of the
system, free of the machine, free of the exhaustive burdens of
ambition. Free of electricity, and the 24 hours a day you-don't-stop
that goes with it. There was a time, before electricity, when people
simply retired at night. What else could you do? It was dark. Not
anymore. Progress has its compromise. The blackout took us back to
the basics, of who we are as human beings, with none of this shine
and polish to distract us from the truth.

As with anything good, the blackout as a holiday would be optional;
none of the hospitals must shut down, no vital services would close.
No one must do anything. But for those who can do it, and wish to,
the blackout offers a pre-existing holiday so simple to celebrate
there is almost no reason not to. Every August 14 we could easily
stage a re-enactment of the largest-known naturally-occurring party
in the history of the human race. The city went dark that night and
10 million people did not flip out or riot, or conduct themselves in
any way sinister or foul. Newscasters were amazed at how peaceful it
was. What we did do is get giddily drunk; we danced in the streets,
we opened the hydrants, we made love on rooftops, we handed out sushi
and ice cream. Enterprising restaurants will repeat this last aspect;
bars will sell dollar beers, and those that do will remain beloved
for their unnecessary generosity. Kindness, we have seen, is good
business. The blackout instinctively reminded us, for it was in
living memory, of our city's experience during the weeks following
9/11. Everyone was kind to each other, thoughtful, considerate. You
didn't know which stranger passing by had had someone close to them
die, and all normal modes of self segregation collapsed. With no real
alternative, we were just kind to everyone. We were beautiful. We
were as we would want to be, and as we would want others to be to us,
if there weren't so much wearying over-complicated bullshit to wear
down our decency. We were not competitive; we all pulled together,
looked out for each other, reached out. We held communion. This is a
worthwhile sentiment to exercise, periodically.


And the blackout brought this out it us, instinctively, collectively,
again. Do you remember how it felt? You could see stars in midtown.
It was giddy and magical, like a snow day. It is in remembrance of
this remarkable spirit that we advocate and endorse the unofficial
popular acceptance of August 14 as the purely optional -- but fucking
beautiful -- New York citywide recreational blackout, an unequaled
holiday opportunity. Flip the switch, and enjoy.

Call for Submissions
Please Post Widely

Advertising Anarchism:
The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Propaganda


For some, the word “propaganda” elicits fear. For others, it suggests a musty sort of nostalgia for the early part of the twentieth century when anarchists and revolutionaries used it to promote alternative visions of social organization. With the rise of advertising and government agencies entirely devoted to shaping public opinion, “propaganda” took on frightening connotations of manipulation and deceit.


With state and corporate appropriation of propaganda, anarchists and revolutionaries shied away from rhetorically superior forms of persuasion. The anti-authoritarian impulse to shun all forms of coercion is fraught with an obvious problem. How can anti-authoritarians persuade their audiences of the virtues of their visions of social transformation without resorting to tried rhetorical methods often dismissed as “propagandistic?”

By negating strategies of advertising, branding, and propaganda, anarchists and revolutionaries have often failed to successfully create winning campaigns in the marketplace of ideas. The sad result is that by waging poorly conceived campaigns, anti-authoritarians have defeated their visions before communicating them to the public at large. Without a viable communication and public relations strategy, anarchism has turned into an anachronism.


In an effort to remedy this perilous defeatism, artists, activists, propagandists, historians, technologists, psychologists, theorists, and cultural critics are hereby invited to submit essays for an upcoming anthology tentatively titled: Advertising Anarchism:The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Propaganda. Starting with the premise that anarchists do have something valuable to communicate, many provocative and vital questions emerge.

Interview with John Sinclair

Interview by Dean Kuipers

From the LA City Beat

The poet, activist, and counterculture impresario on weed,
Black Panthers, and the death throes of America the Beautiful

American culture has closed up around John Sinclair. There's
just not enough freedom in it any more -- not enough free
time, not enough outrage, not enough difference between one
place and the next, not enough high culture or genuine
bohemia, not enough Sun Ra or Dylan. Anyone who didn't live
through his era -- or, more particularly, through his life
-- might not know what he's talking about. Poet, founder of
a 1960s arts collective called the Detroit Artists Workshop,
and manager of the proto-punk rock band MC5, Sinclair
co-founded the White Panther Party in 1968 after one of his
heroes, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, said in an
interview that the best thing white people could do to
support their struggle was to start such a thing. So he did.
And paid the price, serving a couple years of a
nine-and-a-half-to ten-year prison term for marijuana
distribution after police started swarming the group.

He was released after John Lennon and others put on a
concert in his defense, but that probably wouldn't happen
today. The White Panther Party credo of "rock 'n' roll,
dope, and fucking in the streets" is completely impossible
in a world where only millionaires are considered real
artists and Americans happily embrace domestic wiretapping
and corporate spook culture. Well, hell, it was impossible
back then, too. But the difference is: Sinclair and a
million other beautiful dreamers believed it.

NOT BORED! writes:

Two Recent Books from Factory School

NOT BORED!

In fact, the truths set forth or the facts recorded must be endorsed and supported by man’s own experience before man can appreciate or understand them. Words become living agencies as soon as they express the thing we know to be true. The words of the writer may be used to convey a live thought, a spiritual message, but we are unprepared mentally and spiritually, there is no thought exchange or spiritual message transferred to us. Look, observe, think and assimilate and thus create your own book. – Elizabeth Byrne Ferm

Over the course of the last year or so, Factory School has published many interesting books, two of which are closely related: Freedom in Education, by Elizabeth Byrne Ferm (2005), and The Modern School of Stelton: A Sketch, by several different authors (2006). The latter was originally published in 1925 by the Modern School Association of North America, which intended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its founding of the first libertarian school for children in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.