Since the Washington Post decided to kiss Trump’s ass before the election – and is trying to hand the election to him – I did a search of the Washington Post archive for “Hitler” + “election” for the crucial period of 1932. The WaPo does not shame itself in this […]
Articles / Book reports
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Robinson Crusoe Instructs and Civilizes His Man Friday and Endeavors to Give Him an Idea of Christianity
The title of this article is almost verbatim the title of chapter 23 of Robinson Crusoe. No doubt untold numbers of scholars and writers have detailed the racism in this classic novel; have explained Crusoe’s white-European understanding of his “servant” Friday as “the noble savage” who accepts European culture without […]
Articles / Movies / Music
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Milli Vanilli: all our grievances are connected
Milli Vanilli, the new documentary, was surprisingly powerful, and lets them reclaim their agency, and at least tries to place responsibility where it belongs: with the talentless executives and producers who made all the decisions and money, and faced none of the consequences. The film reclaims the famous hit lyrics […]
American History / Articles / Election 2024
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Conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership – Jack Smith/DOJ damning brief
“The lapse of time does not change guilt to innocence; it does not change murder into innocent pastime, nor treason into patriotism! Civilization can find no apology for such guilt and depravity.” – Col. I. Winslow Ayer Below are excerpts from the DOJ filing from Jack Smith, laying out the […]
American History / Articles / Election 2024 / Prison
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The damage is immeasurable: election saboteur has ass handed to them by Judge
This judge’s sentencing of election-denier election-saboteur Tina Peters is brilliant and shockingly humane – the way he compares this privileged defendant to the usual people who sit in the defendant’s chair – that the judge sees that there’s a difference – feels tremendously empowering and sadly surprising. If you know […]
American History / Articles / Book reports
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Red Famine by Anne Applebaum: The Ukrainian Holodomor and Journalists Competing For Dictators
Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine, by Anne Applebaum, details the Holodomor, a famine imposed by USSR/Stalin on Ukraine that killed millions of people in the early 1930s. Applebaum explains that the “term [is] derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger – holod – and extermination – mor.” Citing experts, […]
Articles / Music
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Dandelion: Disregard But Don’t Ignore
Part 1I Think I’m Gonna Be Sickand the 2024 Remembrance Show Whenever I joined Columbia House again, back in the 90s, I would use 8 or 9 of my dozen catalogue selections for bands I knew I wanted; and then use 3 or 4 for bands I’d never heard of […]
Articles / Movies / Zines
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Riot Girls: Itty Bitty Titty Comittee
Released in 2007, Jaime Babbitt’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee is a riot-grrl movie that represents the hopeful feminist causes of the 1990s keeping the flame alive in the era of George Bush’s 2nd term full of torture and terror and war and resistance. In the 1990s, our culture’s hatred of […]
Uncategorized
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Ulysses cut-up
Across the world for a motion and her presence: the Admiring step backward a sinkapace on footpaths. Runs, she runs to wife. admonition of her craters, the solemn floor. If others have their will She laughed on the wind. Blind friendship, woman, the void of incertitude, familiar to him. They […]
American History / Articles / Early American History
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Marooned On Newtown Creek
The young man in this article about a hermit living on Newtown Creek, was living like a maroon. During slavery, many enslaved people would escape captivity – sometimes for a few days, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. The accounts of enslaved people relate many times that a person escaped, dug […]
American History / Exploding Brooklyn
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Barren Island, New York City
In 1691, Governor Ingoldesby’s “Humble Address” to the King described New York as “situate upon a barren island.” And that, “The middle of the Island [is] altogether barren… All the rest of the Province, West Chester, Staten Island and Martin’s Vineyard excepted, consist of barren mountain hills not improveable by […]
American History / Articles / Exploding Brooklyn
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Vassar Students, Gum, and 19th Century Misogyny in Humor Columns
The article “Where Stenches Abound” mentions the curious creation of chewing-gum – and also the very strange mention that it is specifically sent to Vassar College. Quote: ‘The basis of the fertilizers here manufactured is what is called Charleston rock, a deposit found in the beds of the Ashley and […]
American History / Exploding Brooklyn / Railroads
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How US Railroads From China Ended Up In Greenpoint
One stray sentence from an article about a Lumberyard fire struck me strangely: “The bark Tiber was the last to leave. She had just brought from China the rails of the road which the Chinese Government ordered torn up some time ago.” I wondered, what rails? Why didn’t China want […]
Articles
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Some Campus Protests in the 1930s: Students Against Nazis, Universities not so much.
In 1932 City College New York caused student protests by dismissing a popular instructor, Oakely Johnson. After four students were arrested, 1,000 students “marched to the court and staged another demonstration outside.” The judge closed the court, “and sent sixteen policemen … to disperse the mob.” Then “the students crossed […]
Articles / Book reports
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The Folklore of Capitalism
For people deeply indoctrinated, like USians, it is difficult to fight your way from the Right to the Left, or out of the Right, without the emotional energy and restorative peace of works of art. Some of us only make it out of families, or churches, or schools, because we […]
Articles
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Gaza Solidarity Encampments, and When Those Schools Divested From South African Apartheid
For the most up to date list, see Students 4 Gaza: A Global Map of Encampments and Demands. Brown University students were demanding divestment by 1978. In 1985 Jimmy Carter’s daughter was protesting on campus, and in 1986 Brown acceded to limited divestment, although it also suspended 4 students for […]
Articles / Movies
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The Drag and The Padlock: Queer Representation and Fascist Repression in 1927
1927 was a banner year for queer representation in cinema and theater – and also the year that the progressive momentum was met with increased institutional repression, arguably commensurate with the success of LGBTQ+ rights in the era. In particular, 1927 saw the production and theatrical debut – and repression – of a play called The Drag, written by playwright and film star Mae West, a proponent of gay rights and women’s liberation.
Articles / Book reports
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Poisoning the Public Heart: the treason of the Confederacy and January 6
“The Great Treason Plot in the North During the War” By Col. I. Winslow Ayer and January 6: There’s no time like our time for a visit to the post-Civil War accounting of and accountability for the actions of traitors and their movements.
sports
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The Detroit Lions, the beginning of the NFL, American Fascists, and the New York Public Library
Recently, at the New York Public Library, looking for obscure literary needles in huge periodical haystacks – their immense Crowell-Collier collection, innumerable boxes stacked with rejection letters and internal reference docs and cc’s – I came across this 1934 letter from Lions Vice-President and General-Manager Cy Huston, to writer Kyle Crichton, featuring the brilliant early Lions logo.
GIFs / Movies
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It Can’t Happen Here
from Ingmar Bergman’sThis Can’t Happen Here(Sånt händer inte här)
Cut Ups / Fiction
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100 Years of Ulysses
Blind friendship, woman, the void of incertitude, familiar to him. They talked seriously of invading. corporation emergency production of semen by extinction of that beam of I you he they. pouring gushes. Flood, gush, touch you dead. dustbuckets, Roman distillation: the futility of heaven. ecclesiastical triumph or protest or Language […]
