Happy New Year 2013!

Self-organize - conflict - revolution from almasri.altervista.org

I don't know anything about the Italian website behind this beautiful poster but it seems like an auspicious way to start the new year. "Self-organization" check. "Conflict" check. "Revolution" check. And that's Lenin, who despite all the valid critiques that might be made, still led the world's first successful overthrow of capitalism.

As I wrote to friends, "I am grateful for a life-changing year, especially for rediscovering the hope of a better world, and for the joy in meeting comrades along the way. I've certainly felt challenges, limitations, and bumps in the road — not to mention my old-man knees — and I expect plenty of these in the future as well. If I have worries for my own future — the usual necessary distractions of money, employment and health — I enter the new year with profound optimism for the struggle for that new world. Not because our enemies are weak, they are most assuredly anything but that, but because we are finding our collective strength. The world might look like it's going all to hell, but that is still reversible. I know much about 2013 will be difficult, but I intend to spend more time organizing than mourning. How about you?

Oh and because some things really need to be said: fuck capitalism. fuck the republicans. fuck the democrats. fuck barack obama. fuck mayor bloomberg. fuck hilary clinton. fuck christine quinn. fuck the nypd. fuck the state. fuck bigotry. fuck racism. fuck rape. fuck every lying, murdering oppressive government in the whole world. fuck drones. fuck the entire machinery of state repression. and not in a good way. #revolution."

Happy new year! Hasta la victoria siempre!

Rise & Root

This image, Rise & Root, is from The Hermitage blog, which I know nothing about, via my blog friend Annie of This & That with Artichoke Annie. Something about it really speaks to me even though as vaguely political images go it's earthier and less specific than my usual idea of good propaganda. But who hasn't pondered the magic of majestic trees rising above, their equally majestic root systems remaining secret and unseen below? As Annie says, "perhaps [it's] a symbol that this new year 2012 will be one of change, perhaps a year where fights will be won, a year where growth in the humaneness of humankind will be seen."

There's bound to be lots of ugliness this year, but this mandala-like artwork speaks to the possibilities that have been revealed for changing that ugliness. I've been continuing to work with my local Brooklyn "Occupy" chapter — a longer report here soon, I promise — and the one thing that keeps sticking with me is how what can easily be dismissed as the same old community activism is actually something profoundly deeper, like the roots on these trees, something much more sophisticated than the political activism I have witnessed before. In rejecting easy ideology in favor of a profoundly revolutionary sense of autonomous optimism and determination, the movement being created is something more organic and more radical than anything that has taken root in years. I'm meeting young people with a sophisticated grasp of, well, class warfare in a way that disarms many of the ideological arguments I've seen the left waste its time on for decades.

So yes, against blandness and conformity...otherness, black earth and imagination.

Happy New Year 2012: The Beginning Is Near

Happy New Year to all the readers of The Cahokian!

2011 had its ups and downs for sure, but for me it will be the year when the possibilities of the future suddenly realigned. For a long time I felt like that long-haired crazyman wearing a "The End Is Near" sandwich-board; I am happy to report that I have traded in my nay-saying, doom-saying ways for a sense of optimism, despite the challenges ahead. As #OWs people say now, "The Beginning Is Near."

For sure there's a rocky path ahead. Among other things there's an election full of crazy and or dangerous people on the way, and my own thinking doesn't have me promising a vote to anybody right about now. I'm remembering the signs I've seen round-about OWS saying "If elections could change anything they'd be illegal." There's sabre-rattling all over the place, crazy weather to be avoided, and the endless struggle to make ends meet. But I'm also remembering how surprising things seem to just happen. Did you notice how the powers that be absolutely FREAKED OUT this year at a few thousand demonstrators talking class warfare? May we live in interesting times, indeed. The last thing anybody should be doing right now is saying that radical change is impossible. It's incumbent on us to make sure the changes are good ones.

Peace, love, happiness, abundance, good health, joy, laughter. I wish these things for me, and for you.

Happy New Year 2011!

May the new year bring us more peace and less war, more clarity and less confusion, more justice and less outrage. May the year be filled with health, love, happiness, abundance, creativity, inspiration, fulfillment and progress.

(Art is a Korean-war era Chinese propaganda postcard of a wintertime celebration among the Chinese volunteers.)

2010 Year's End Navel-Gazing

The end of the year is rightly a time for looking back. A year ago I resolved to make The Cahokian a major focus of my creative energy: I would post every day. I had started this blog in July, 2006, without any particular goals other than an occasional excuse to rant about politics or share some bit of news or passed along internet phenomenon. In January 2008 I branched out to my tremendously successful music blog Ile Oxumare (580,000 visits, over 1,300,000 page views, 144 blog followers) which soon became not just an excuse to share music but a forum for music and occasional social criticism. Music blogging proved to be a bit of land-mined turf, and I've cut that back to semi-comatose levels.

But here we are a year into my commitment to The Cahokian and I'm proud to say I only missed two or three days. The big challenge for a blog like this is, of course, not only coming up with something to say every day but drumming up readership. I've tried to post links to my blog at other blogs and on facebook in a reasoned fashion: but nobody loves an endlessly self-promoting blogwhore. My results are modest but encouraging. Since I installed sitemeter in November of 2009 I've had over 14,000 visits with over 22,000 page views; and fourteen of you are blog followers. The daily average readership has most definitely crept up over the course of the year. I've had spikes in readership when I've successfully drawn attention to a post that strikes a nerve or where somebody else has highlighted a blog entry on a forum or another blog. Google analytics give me somewhat higher statistics. They also tell me that my most successful posts -- from a popularity point of view -- remain my music-related posts, with "The Terror and Beauty of Difficult Music" being my all-time pageview high. My post about gay life in Nicaragua is a big winner. My "Fun Facts About Yemen" post was apparently well-titled because it's a perennial hit. Not shocking is the popularity of my piece about working at Juggs Magazine in the porn industry. Internet viewers are, apparently, always looking for a little titilation. I apologize to those of you looking in vain here for information about the ancient Cahokian civilization; for what it's worth making a pilgrimage to the Cahokian site near St. Louis is high on my travel plans. Most of my readers are Americans. The shocking statistic (according to google, I didn't notice it on sitemeter) is that my second largest audience is in Saudi Arabia. Salaam to you; I'd love to know who you are. The UK and Canada bring up third and fourth place.

I'm proud of what I've written and of the images I've curated this past year. I am occasionally disappointed to realize how completely an unseen engine controls the topic of discourse in society: my own responses to the issues of the day are clearly as subject to that manipulation as every other voice in the blogosphere. Sometimes we think we're having original thoughts on original subjects when it turns out we're just being drawn along by the pulse and beat of what used to be called a news cycle. And yet I think my voice and perspective has deepened and clarified. Writing this blog has certainly kept me creatively and intellectually stimulated all year in the face of challenging political and economic times: I hope some of you readers have found it rewarding. I recognize there's not necessarily a huge audience for an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-zionist, pro-socialist, pro-spirituality, pro-gay, nostalgically late-boomer, urban-based, jazz-centric personal blog, but heck, that's the beauty of the internet. To those of you reading this, especially my loyal regulars, you have my profound thanks for following along.

So what does the future hold for The Cahokian? I'm not promising to keep up daily posts at quite such a religious level of commitment. My archive of anti-American art has only a few scraps lying around: I'd like to develop a new graphic series for the new year. I have files to go through for more old writings and many many photographs I'd like to scan. Having finally braved the world of digital photography (the first few times I downloaded pictures from my camera to the computer I had to reassure myself I didn't need to turn the lights off to safely do so), there are a number of photography assignments I'd like to realize. The first one of those is likely to be "Botanica windows of New York." Stay tuned. The handover of the house of representatives to Republicans is sure to provide heaping helpings of outrage. The teabaggers aren't going anywhere, a new presidential election cycle begins soon (so early!) and there is the small matter of the world at low-level war. The balancing act President Obama will have to walk this year will be interesting, to say the least. All of which means there will be plenty to write about.

It's been a good year for this blog, on to the next one. Thanks to Skynet (Google!) for the free platform. Thanks to you for reading. Thanks to God for my voice.

Peace!

Fun Facts About Yemen!

On Christmas Day an apparently inept spoiled brat from a rich Nigerian family attempted to blow up an airplane in Detroit. According to all sources, including officially now according to President Obama, the would-be assassin was trained by "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," the local affiliate of the Al Qaeda network of fundamentalist militants. Obama announced that government and military officials were meeting with the Yemeni government to coordinate action against the "terrorists." While I'm sympathetic to preventing criminal attacks on innocent civilians, these developments should be of great concern to peace-loving people worried about the widening scope of military confrontation in the Middle East.

Here's a few things I know about Yemen.

Yemen was an isolated kingdom under the nominal rule of the Ottoman Empire until the First World War. Its ruling kings--called imams--were corrupt. In 1962, military officers under the influence of Egyptian nationalist Gamal Nasser overthrew the kingdom, and established the Yemen Arab Republic. A civil war ensued, the royalist faction appealing to Western, Saudi and, allegedly, Israeli help against the republicans, who were heavily backed by Egypt. In some circles Yemen was called Egypt's Vietnam, as Egyptian troops were widely involved in the fighting. Above is a royalist propaganda postage stamp showing royalist fighters attacking an hammer-and-sickle-bearing Egyptian tank. Do click on it to see it bigger; it's epic.

By the end of the 1960s the civil war was over, the royalists defeated. The Yemen Arab Republic -- commonly called "North Yemen" -- was a more or less secular, more or less authoritarian entity more or less in the model of Egypt and Syria. By all accounts the country is very poor. I've read the country's state blamed on the national addiction to qat, a mildy narcotic leaf the chewing of which inspires the entire nation to while away their afternoons chewing and spitting and getting slightly stoned. It sounds lovely, if a little disgusting. It also sounds a little condescending on the part of the writers who have made this claim; I have no way to judge.

Meanwhile, to the south of Yemen, the British colonialists who had seized control of Aden and some neighboring tribal realms, granted independence to "South Arabia," under the leadership of some docile locals including local princes. Who were promptly overthrown by radical nationalists widely believed to be aided by the Chinese communists. Eventually these nationalists established the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen--commonly called South Yemen, and after many internecine factional struggles, established a one-party state under the Yemeni Socialist Party. It was the Arab world's only avowedly communist state (we'll set aside, for the moment, any discussion of whether this was "real" socialism: it certainly wasn't a "workers" state). Here's a stamp issued by the PDR Yemen honoring the Soviet Union.

When the USSR collapsed, the PDR Yemen merged with North Yemen. This act of reunification involved more civil war, and among the winners of that war was today's President Ali Abdullah Saleh. According to the awesome Angry Arab Website, "Relying on the Yemeni dictator to fight terrorism is like relying on Hamid Karzai to fight corruption." Today Yemen is involved in another civil war with rebels in its north, and there is renewed discontent in the south of the country.

During the first Gulf war, when Iraq seized Kuwait and the US counter-attacked, many of the small groceries in my Prospect Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn were owned by Yemeni emigres. All had portraits of Saddam Hussen pinned behind the cash registers. One is reminded that Saddam Hussein had quite a bit of support in the Arab world: his overthrow of the Kuwaiti royals and his militancy against Israel made him many friends, and Palestinians in post-Saddam Iraq have suffered for that friendship from what I hear. Anyway, the weakness and corruption of the Yemeni government seems to have made the place fertile ground for the Salafists. Well, kind of like how Israel and its carte blanche from the United States have made the Middle East fertile ground for general outrage against the US. The failure of leadership among secular Arab nationalist revolutionaries has had its consequences. The interwoven webs of fifty years of misery in Yemen should be evidence, like the decades of misery in Afghanistan, that perhaps military solutions aren't really solutions after all. One can only hope, probably futilely, that cooler heads will prevail in searching for a solution to the problem of criminals who would murder innocents, whether they call themselves religious freedom fighters or democratic nation builders.

Well, now that we're acquainted with the next target of US military attention, here's one last fun fact about Yemen: it's the perfect place to go to get out of bad relationship! Chandler Bing (played by Matthew Perry), from the "Friends" TV show announced he was being transferred to Yemen to get away from the ever-annoying Janice. She followed him to the airport which meant he actually had to get on a plane. Which gives us the perfect thing to say when we find out about what will happen in Yemen next: "Ohhh Myyy God!"

Update: I recommend the article "Obama in Aden" on Lenin's Tomb for spelling all of this out in greater detail than I knew when I wrote this post.

Farewell 2009!

I started this blog on a lark over three years ago. Originally I thought I would just have an outlet to vent my frustration over the state of politics in the US of George W. Bush. Some of my posts have been off the cuff and poorly conceived, some well-composed and thoughtful. After spending considerably more energy on music blogging than here, a few months ago I decided to focus a bit more on this blog and on writing. I've been posting new essays, creative writing, and a bunch of essays from my past. I've enjoyed the chance for creative expression, and the opportunity to reexamine my own beliefs about politics, spirituality, and music, which seem to drive my internet consumption as well as expression. I'm grateful to those of you who read this blog: people I know and mysterious internet drive-by-ers all. But I'm mostly just grateful for a having a forum to organize my own thoughts and challenge myself to refine and express my own views. In this respect, 2009 was productive and promising.

In the face of terrible economic woes in the world and in my own life, too many wars and conflicts, a rising tide of right-wing idiocy, global warming, political corruption, and future uncertainty, it's nice to have a place to gather my thoughts.

I wish the same for you and yours that I wish for me and mine: a new year full of life, love, happiness, health, abundance, joy, peace and justice.

(The illustration here is the six of swords from the iconic Rider-Waite Tarot deck. A card I have always loved, it tells of a journey from rough waters to calm, from sorrows present but overcome, a journey full of danger but also hope.)

A little optimism for the New Year

It's been quite a year. Here my favorite drag queen reminds us that the new year should be full of promise! Amen to that. There's a lot that could stand to get better. This one is very sweet and uplifting...a nice side to Candy.

Of course, my career as a Candy Samples video extra continues. And that's my cute boyfriend playing the guitar...he's a star!

Happy New Year?

Mojuba Olorun
Mojuba Olodumare
Mojuba Olofi
Mojuba gbogbo egungun
Mojuba my ancestors
Mojuba Dorothy Scott Horst Holden ibaye
Mojuba George Horst ibaye
Mojuba Olivia Ashcroft Fitzgerald ibaye
Mojuba Thomas Fitzgerald ibaye
Mojuba Quentin Fitzgerald ibaye
Mojuba Conrad Horst ibaye
Mojuba Lisbeth Horst ibaye
Mojuba Bertha Menzies ibaye
Mojuba gbogbo Horsts, Fitzgeralds, O'Neills, Ashcrofts, Scotts, Menzies, and others
Mojuba to those who have passed on this past year
--Mojuba Elsa Izquierdo Ade Doyin ibaye baye tonu
--Mojuba Swami Turiya Sangitananda Alice Coltrane ibaye baye tonu
Mojuba to the spirits of the old world and the new
Mojuba to the Indian spirits
Mojuba to the African spirits
Mojuba to the European spirits
Mojuba to the American spirits
Mojuba to the spirits of light and guidance
Mojuba to the animal world
Mojuba to the animals we eat
Mojuba to the animals we care for
Mojuba to the animals who care for us
Mojuba to my pets Henry and Jimmy
Mojuba Asheda
Mojuba Akoda
Mojuba gbogbo elders who have passed on to Ile Olorun
Mojuba Iyami
Mojuba Babami
Mojuba Baba Tobi Asinyabi Olo Yemaya
Mojuba Ayubona Okan Ara Bi Olo Obatala
Mojuba gbogbo Iworo
Mojuba my godbrothers and sisters
Mojuba my godchildren
Mojuba my partner Jesse
Mojuba my friends and relatives
Mojuba the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars
Mojuba the earth, the air, the fire and the water
Mojuba science and music and art and medicine
Mojuba ori mi
Mojuba ade mi
Mojuba gbogbo Orisha
Mojuba Elegba
Mojuba Ogun
Mojuba Ochosi
Mojuba Osun
Mojuba Ifa
Mojuba Babalu Aiye
Mojuba Ibeji
Mojuba Olokun
Mojuba Oge
Mojuba Shango, kawo kabiosile
Mojuba Oya, hekua hey Iansa
Mojuba Yemaya, iya mi ile
Mojuba Oshun Ibu Kole, ye ye o
Mojuba Oke
Mojuba Obatala Yeku Yeku, Hekua Baba
Ago lona
Bring health and balance and wisdom to me and all those I love
Bring love and happiness and abundance to me and all those I love
Bring peace to the world and keep us safe from war
Kosi iku kosi arun kosi eyo kosi ofo kosi araye
May the new year be filled with peace and light and love
May the evil works of evil men be no more
May justice triumph
May the new year be filled with music
May the new year be filled with joy
May I find better employment and purpose
May I find good health
Thanks to God above and below
Ashe Ashe Ashe

Happy new year 2008