Author: jameswagner

Jam Master Jay

Jam Master Jay, the DJ of the rap group Run-DMC, was shot in the head and killed last night in a Queens recording studio.

“He has a little soul, to rock n’ roll
Every record that he touches turns to gold
He’s well conducted, self-instructed
His styles were plied, heavily constructed
Mechanically inclined, and if you don’t mind
We add spice to your life, time after time
And think about times, where he’s a long laster
We rock our rhymes for the Jam-Master.”
“Jam Master Jammin'” (1985)

From the Run-DMC site:

Hey, Sad day. Of all the people to get caught in that sh*t. What a shame.
It’s like Rap has lost their Beatle.
Mark

Harry Hay and all the other queer outsiders

Michael Bronski has written a sharp essay on the real Harry Hay and his “uneasy relationship with the gay movement.”
Hay believed that “queer sexuality had an essential outsider quality that made the outcast homosexual the perfect prophet for a heterosexual world lost in strict gender roles, enforced reproductive sexuality, and numbingly straitjacketed social personae.”

During [the seventies], Hay spoke out against what he saw as the increasing conservatism of the gay-and-lesbian movement. As he saw it, the gay — and now, lesbian — movement was far more interested in electing homosexuals to government positions than in making the government responsible to the needs of its people. It was more interested in making sure that gay people were represented in commercial television and films than in critiquing the ways mass culture destroyed the human spirit. It was too interested in making strategic alliances with conservative politicians, rather than exposing how most politicians were working hand in glove with bloodless, destructive corporations.

After he founded the Radical Faeries in 1979 (“something of a cross between born-again queers and in-your-face frontline shock troops practicing gender-fuck drag”), the movement as a whole treated him as a “benign crackpot,” when it did not ignore him altogether. Gays, no less than all other Americans, could stomach his long history of involvement with the American Communist Party and political radicalism in general, but he seemed to irritate everyone with his persistent support of the right of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to be represented in the movement.

Even many of Hay’s more dedicated supporters could not side with him on this. But from Hay’s point of view, silencing any part of the movement because it was disliked or hated by mainstream culture was both a moral failing and a seriously mistaken political strategy. In Harry’s eyes, such a stance failed to grapple seriously with the reality that there would always be some aspect of the gay movement to which mainstream culture would object.
….
In death, though, Harry Hay’s critics have finally been able to do what they couldn’t do when he was alive: make him presentable [witness the laudatory press releases and eulogies even from the institutions most antithetical to his life’s work]. . . . But it’s important to remember Hay — with all his contradictions, his sometimes crackpot notions, and his radiant, ecstatic, vision of the holiness of being queer — as he lived. For in his death, Harry Hay is becoming everything he would have raged against.

“Gay History is Still in the Closet”

Richard Goldstein made it onto the NYTimes Op-Ed page again today, this time using Harry Hay’s death to remind us all of the American blackout of queer history.

Why are the gay movement’s roots so obscured? The reason is the invisibility of gay history. With rare exceptions, schools fail to acknowledge that there even is such a thing. Only university students who opt for elective courses — if they are offered — learn that, in the 1920’s, gay liberation was an important part of Emma Goldman’s radical agenda. You won’t find that mentioned in the film “Reds,” in which Goldman was a prominent character. Nor can you deduce from “Cabaret” (film or play) that gay people in the Weimar Republic did more than patronize kinky nightclubs. The gay community was a very visible part of Berlin’s political landscape, and its leader Magnus Hirschfeld was an emblem of the liberal society that the Nazis smashed. The famous photo of storm troopers burning books is widely thought to have been taken at Mr. Hirschfeld’s library.

Vatican extolls Vatican charity

Oh sure, they’re gonna “open their files.” Actually, it’s simply a continuing coverup of Vatican complicity in the Holocaust, and a transparent propaganda move, to show historians “the great works of charity and assistance” undertaken by Pius XII for prisoners and other victims during World War II.

VATICAN CITY – Some 3.5 million files on World War II prisoners of war will be made public by the Vatican in January as part of a promised release of documents intended to counter criticism of the papacy during the Holocaust.

The Daily News story continues with a cautionary note.

The files are believed to deal exclusively with the treatment of POWs during the conflict and not directly with issues surrounding the Holocaust.
Critics of Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope, argue that he failed to raise his voice and use his position to head off the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. Defenders insist he made every effort possible to help Jews and others.
Jewish groups and others have been seeking a complete opening of the Vatican archives.

the Halloween “truth” man

Boondocks’ Huey really says it best, and it makes a great sound bite, should any of us find ourselves under a microphone in the near future:

Just a reminder that the economy is in the toilet, we’re on the brink of global war, our government has been hijacked bycorporate crooks, teachers still don’t make money, and because you haven’t done anything to stop this, you’re a pathetic excuse for an American.

“Woyzeck” for the ages

We sat in the first row for the Robert Wilson/Tom Waits “Woyzeck” last night. We’re both getting impatient (at the least) with Wilson, but Waits’ raw super-noir keeps him interesting. (This is their third collaboration, after “Black Rider” and “Alice.”)

Misery’s the River of the World
Misery’s the River of the World
Everybody Row! Everybody Row!
Misery’s the River of the World
Misery’s the River of the World
Everybody Row! Everybody Row!
Everybody Row!

The first row meant we had the wonderful theatre in the pit as well as the fabulous Danish orchestra’s scrowling, pluckering, scrinching, smuthering murooning sounds. Waits’ music and words stuff is absolutely wonderful and worth the price of admission alone, but the cast was right on, as were the magical mechanicals which sometimes bedevil these Wilson things.
The costumes, the sets, the makeup, and the design conception were all diverting, and I suppose I mean that in the best sense (I did love the Drum Major’s devilish red tail/coattails!), and the work was chuck-full of early twentieth-century German theatre references that really work with the 1837 Buechner text. For me, that text seems fresher and less perverse with each visit, whatever the medium.
The choreography (Wilson), especially the trademark stylized limb movements, was absolutely right, when it wasn’t slowed to almost a halt. Barry said it hardly seemed right that even Berg’s grand opera is shorter than Wilson’s production, usually by over forty minutes.
I think there was a moral, but the whole experience was too jaggedly lush to leave any memory of it. Great, great fun.
Oh yes, seen in the audience and again at the reception following the performance: the great Isabella Rossellini and the indescribable (so I’ll do lots of links) Slava Mogutin.

take a hike, scum!

Oh what joy! To be able just once to say to the Bushies, “Take a Hike!” and know that they heard, and that so did everybody else.

WASHINGTON – The sons of the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone said Vice President Cheney wouldn’t be welcome at their father’s memorial service last night, sources confirmed.
“The family thought it wouldn’t be appropriate. They were concerned about the difference in principles between the two men — and believe me it’s principles here, not politics,” a top Democratic operative told the Daily News.

At a certain point, we have to admit it and we have to say it, “those people are evil!”
How far has The Left gotten by being nice, playing it like it was all only a game or a cocktail party?
The Right doesn’t play.

we need no axis for our evil

[Yesterday a Middle East intellectual] suggested that there was a double standard in the extraordinary reaction against Mr. Hussein today compared with the world’s inaction when he turned chemical weapons against Iran and even against Iraqi civilians.
“If chemical weapons are bad, why when they were used against [Iranian] or Iraqi citizens wasn’t Iraq condemned and pressured?” he asked.

The man who posed the question, responding to reporters’ questions while on a visit to Spain, was President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, representative of the “Axis of Evil.”

Mr. Khatami, a midlevel cleric who studied philosophy, is the first Iranian leader to make an official visit to Spain since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1965. He is using the occasion to press his campaign for the “dialogue among civilizations” that he introduced at the United Nations four years ago.
At Complutense University in Madrid, he delivered a speech on Cervantes and his relevance in today’s world. In the course of the speech, he cited Proust, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Kafka and Mann, and criticized modern-day Don Quixotes who lack his “kindhearted, merciful and humanitarian” nature and “ruthlessly assassinate and annihilate people with their huge war machines.”

Although Khatami’s question about chemical weapons went unanswered in Madrid, we should know the answer. In the past, the weapons were only directed toward brown people, and now they are about to be turned on white ones, or so we are told.
The whole answer is too complex for Americans, and for that reason, as well as for what it tells about our greed and hypocrisy, it won’t be put forward by Washington.
More from this notorious evil-doer.

In a sharp criticism of the United States, President Mohammad Khatami of Iran said today that his country opposed a war against neighboring Iraq and charged that Washington’s misguided campaign against terrorism had strengthened support for Osama bin Laden in the Muslim world.
“Have the erroneous policies of the United States made bin Laden more popular or more hated than before in various sectors of the Islamic world?” Mr. Khatami asked in a joint news conference with the Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, during a three-day official visit to Spain. “Have the erroneous policies of the United States weakened Islamic trends that favor wisdom and democracy? The United States with its hegemony has strengthened bin Laden, so we ought to condemn it in some way for supporting terrorism.”

And finally.

Mr. Khatami even likened the logic of Mr. bin Laden to that of President Bush.
“I hear a discourse from two poles,” Mr. Khatami said in his native Persian. “One is the voice raised from Afghanistan by bin Laden that says, `Whoever is not with us must be destroyed.’ The other is the voice from the United States that says, `Whoever is not with us is against us.”‘ He added, “That is a logic which on one side leads to the most atrocious forms of terror and, on the other side, on the pretext of confronting terrorism, creates the worst type of atmosphere for waging war.”

Fanatics madly spin the world and reason is made whoozy.

Vidal still vital, but still no one listens

Gore Vidal is not afraid to offend, bless him.

America’s most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush’s Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda’s plans.
Vidal’s highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled ‘The Enemy Within’ – published in the print edition of The Observer today [JAW–I actually bought the Sunday Observer today, since the full text is not avalable online] – argues that what he calls a ‘Bush junta’ used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.
Vidal writes: ‘We still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.’

Vidal has always seemed to annoy even those who would be expected to agree with his arguments, but I have always thought it is basically because he comes off as an aristocrat (he is) and because he comes off as a faggot (he is), and not enough Americans are comfortable with either.
Actually, I think we should be very grateful for the product of both of his outsider identities.
He represents much of the best of both of these eccentric elements of American society (one waning quietly while the other waxes loudly), and that, after sufficiently crediting his intelligence (and who said real intelligence is valued in America?), his solid position within those unpopular orders explains much of the power of his social and political criticism.
The novels are still a guilty pleasure, but the essays really do it for me.

Israeli zealots sabotaging Israel

Barry has just blogged a great piece on the disaster in Israel and Palestine.

One of today’s Ha’aretz essays, titled “Before Jewish fascism takes over”, discusses interesting similarities between this era and that of the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. Yossi Sarid argues that what caused Jerusalem to collapse was zealotry, and Israel faces the same danger today