Paula Panzarella writes:


Outcry for Justice: Poetry In The Struggle For Freedom Of Sacco And Vanzetti

New York City, May 7 and May 14, 2005

Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Sts)
New York City
Saturday, May 7 and May 14

2 PM — $10.

Poetry, music and commentary about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrant anarchists and labor leaders executed by the State of Massachusetts in 1927.

Cast members: Marlene Buchanan, Joan Cavanagh, Stephen Kobasa, Frank Panzarella, Tony Rosso, Sylvia Forges Ryan, Glenn Stevens, Maggie Testa and Shula Ruth Weinstein. With cello, mandolin and guitar. Produced by Paula Panzarella.

Contact Theater for the New City for tickets:
212-254-1109

Critical Art Ensemble Auction Raises $167,000

U.S. Government Intensifies Investigation

On Sunday April 17, an art auction to benefit the CAE Defense Fund
raised $167,700. The auction, held at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York
City, featured over fifty artists who donated their work to the cause.

The amount raised was over three times more than had been raised (and
spent) in the eleven months preceding the auction. Still, two to three
times as much may be needed to successfully defend Steve Kurtz, a
founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and Professor of Art at
the University of Buffalo, and Robert Ferrell, a Professor of Human
Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, throughout the entire trial
process.

"Fourth World War", a lavish production (on a shoestring budget) including footage from Mexico, Canada, Korea, Plaestine, Argentina and South Africa has recently been released on DVD, but is also available for download over the net. You can find a torrent version here, or a copy on FTP here. If you are using FTP make sure to use a client that can restart a download in case of interruption. Subtitles are available in french and italian from the link for the FTP above. Below you'll find an interview with a member of Big Noise Films, Rick Rowley (the other being Jacquie Soohen) which was printed in the NY Indypendent last year.

Indypendent: What is the Fourth World War?

Rick Rowly: We first heard the term ‘Fourth World War’ from the Zapatistas in 1996. It’s a conflict that transcends the logic of states. It is a war without a singular enemy or fixed battlefields. There are not two sides in the Fourth World War. It is a system at work everywhere violently reorganizing our lives.

Mukhin writes:
Capitalism and other Kids’ Stuff

Calling all anti-capitalists. This is to alert you to a new film – “Capitalism and other Kids’ Stuff” – that has recently been uploaded to the www and can be seen at www.socialist-tv.com , and which argues the anti-capitalist case in simple language.

This is not some crappy Lenininst/Trotsykist effort, but a damned good attempt at explaining the revolutionary case against capitalism in non-copnfrontational language.

The film, made by 4 members of The Socialist Party in the UK, is 49 minutes in duration and, beginning with a look at how we treat our children, explains in non-jargonised terms, the insanity of a system that places profit before human need. Please note, this is not some leftie Party political broadcast, just a sane look at an insane world that is very much crying out for real change, change that can only be brought about by a majority, acting in their own interests and without leaders.

(The Socialist Party was formed in 1904 and has not compromised its principles since its formation. It is a leaderless organisation that rejects reformism and has as its object the abolition of the money system, the common ownership and democratic control of the world's natural and industrial resources by and in the interests of all people).

Comradely regards,

Mukhin"

Alan Moore writes:

"Culture Jam 101" at Grassroots Media Conference

Alan Moore

I visited the NYC Grassroots Media Conference, an annual gathering of community-oriented media in New York City (April 9-10, 2005; http://www.nycgrassrootsmedia.org/) at New School University just for the panel called “Culture Jam 101: You Are a Thinly Veiled Threat.” This was William Etundi Jr., of Complacent.org, Swoon who is with Toyshop, and Reverend Billy (Bill Talen) and his partner Savitri D. Promo:

“Here we are in the thick of a culture grown complacent on consumerism, complicity and coercion. A sustainable movement is empowered by confronting and evolving the cultural assumptions of the moment – a goal not easily achieved through traditional protest. Here lies the world of culture jam, of renegade art, of guerrilla actions aimed at shaking the foundation of Apathetic America. This hands-on workshop will ‘teach’ you nothing. Our goal is to awaken the brilliance you already have. Short video introductions and brief anecdotes of our experiences in the street will open to an interactive dialogue on the logistics, challenges and possibilities in cultural evolution. We will explain the tools we use while working with you to build your own seditious solutions – after all you are not a consumer, you are a thinly veiled threat.”

"Poetry as Revolutionary Praxis:

Philip Lamantia & the Surrealist Movement in the United States"

Franklin Rosemont

"Poetry is neither tempest nor tornado.
It is a majestic and fertile river."
— Isidore Ducasse

"The deepest river makes the least noise."
— Jean du Vergier de Hauranne

The recent passing of our close friend and fellow surrealist Philip Lamantia calls to mind the “difficult first steps” of surrealism in the United States sixty years ago. More importantly, it reminds us of Lamantia’s own dynamic, inspired and inspiring role in the current and ongoing struggle for surrealist revolution — that is, for freedom now and poetry made by all.

Back in the early 1940s — shortly after his expulsion from a San Francisco junior high school for “intellectual delinquency” — Lamantia at fifteen was the first major voice of surrealism in the U.S. André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifestoes, then living in New York as a refugee from Nazism, wrote him a letter saluting him as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”

"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.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Hanoi Jane and the City of God"
John Chuckman

A while back Jane Fonda found a new ally in her battle with being a decaying cutie-pie. Injections, face lifts, dye, flaky philosophy, and many hours a day of aerobics were no longer enough to hang on to even an out-of-focus resemblance to the poochy-lipped mannequin of Roger Vadim's "Barbarella."

Jane found Jesus. Not just any Jesus, but America's Jesus, the one who lets you be "born again," becoming a child again, a strong sales point where adults are obsessed with youth and living forever. Jane effectively committed herself to spending eternity with the likes of Franklin Graham, Tammy Faye, and George Bush — punishment enough I should think for far more than all her past errors.

"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.

U. of Colorado Will Investigate Allegations of Misconduct Against
Controversial Professor

Scott Smallwood, Chronicle of Higher Education

Administrators at the University of Colorado at Boulder have affirmed
that the First Amendment protects statements made by Ward Churchill,
the ethnic-studies professor who likened victims of the 2001
terrorist attacks to "little Eichmanns."

But a seven-week review of the professor's work, they said, turned up
allegations of research misconduct that should be investigated by a
faculty committee and could lead to disciplinary action, including
his dismissal.