Echoes of a past life: New Moon

New Moon New York was an open Pagan circle in New York City in the early 1990s. This footage has surfaced, bringing back some memories, a surprising memory hole, and a bit of personal embarassment. This video includes footage of several events, only one of which I attended, the probable “Lughnassadh” ritual that begins about at the 11 min. mark, held in either NYC's Central Park or Inwood Park. Yours truly may be seen at heard about 16:35, bearing that fuzzy red wheel. Yeah, we took ourselves pretty seriously, but we also had lots of fun. As silly as this looks to me 20+ years later, I learned a lot about myself and the world in that period. I'm pretty glad I graduated from this sort of Cosplay/LARP scene, now in my mid-50s I'm sort of mortified by the trappings of that chapter of my spirituality. That said, that moment of spirituality healed me of some fundamental life hurt and I wouldn't want to erase that chapter of my life even if it seems so curiously foreign to me now.

But these were good people. I note with sadness several faces no longer among the living, not least the legendary Alexei Kondratiev and his partner Len. I see my dear magical partner C, and my incredibly handsome but deeply conflicted and closeted boyfriend W, nicknamed by C “Mr. Outdoors.” It's good to remember my friends from New Moon. I'm surprised at how little of this event I remember, it all seems just out of reach. Which is okay, it was a really long time ago and I have moved far far away from that moment in my life.

And now, back to life as a 21st-century communist.

Anti-War Anthems: Has the Bombing Begun?

It's been a couple years, but sadly it's time to break out a new entry in the "Anti-War Anthems" feature here at The Cahokian. Today, it's a video I've seen floating around Facebook. "Has the Bombing Begun?" by David Rovics. I don't know anything about this guy, but this song captures something about this moment: the sad resignation that once again, the world has to go through this, because of the willful evil of people who once claimed better.

Anti-Americana: Common Interests

Dating from the 1960s, when the Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea) was a little more self-identified with the socialist camp, this poster shows an armed Korean and and a very Che-looking armed Cuban bayoneting a cowering American figure in the corner who seems to look a lot like U.S. President Lyndon Baynes Johnson (LBJ). The flags are those of North Korea and Cuba, and sadly, once again my ignorance of Korean means I have no idea what the caption says. It's a classic distillation of the North Korean anti-American propaganda style.

North Korea and Cuba have of course both defied the presence of the strongest anti-Communist military power camped out right on their borders for decades. The threat to the Cuban and North Korean governments is evident every day still in 2013. Solidarity apparently actually helps!

In 1960, Che Guevara actually visited the DPRK on behalf of revolutionary Cuba, and here is a brief clip of him sitting down with DPRK leader Kim Il Sung. 

Anti-Americana: You Don't Scare Us

"You Don't Scare Us" reads this Russian-language Soviet poster, vintage 1984. It shows a burly Soviet worker, with hammer and sickle on his hardhat, getting his job done, while a wormy looking American politician threatens to push "the button" while military jets labelled "US" scramble in the background. "Pushing the button" was of course shorthand for launching an apocalyptic nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.

The occasion for this poster was no doubt the disturbing "joke" played by the senile U.S. president at the time. On August 11, 1984, cold warrior Ronald Reagan made this quip during a soundcheck before his weekly radio address: "My fellow Americans I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." The audio was subsequently leaked. While it had no apparent effect on his landslide reelection in a few short months, some of us were shocked.

In time-honored tradition, President Reagan joked about committing nuclear genocide. Some of us didn't find it so funny. The poster below (I had a copy) was soon popular on the left. This was the climactic height of the cold war, an era of renewed nuclear terror when the threat of apocalypse seized the popular imagination. Check out the films "Threads" (viewable on Youtube!) and "The Day After" (Youtube link) for a taste of what it was like to live with that terror.

 

The cold war and threat of nuclear destruction were even repeating themes of popular music. There was Nena's "99 Luftballons" (English or original German versions) which speculated about a war being triggered by misunderstanding, or the brutally cynical "Two Tribes" (when two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score) by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Different versions of the Frankie song were released, but here's one video version from 1983:

This all seems timely with mildly-renewed tensions between the United States and the now post-Soviet, utterly de-socialized Russian Federation. Authoritarian (elected) strongman Vladimir Putin seems to relish posturing against western imperialism, despite the fact that Russia is now far from the twin superpower it once was. One wonders whether tension over Iran and Syria, or Russia's granting of temporary asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden are markers of a sort of renewed cold-war style tension. Obama and the U.S. are pretty clear that they're holding the stronger hand of cards and so have reacted at least publically temperately, but it's also clear that the U.S. won't suffer real competition for world hegemony.

The bullying foreign policy of the U.S. is one of the reasons I've been slow to make a public stand on the developing Stoli Vodka/Olympics boycott over outrageously repressive anti-gay laws being passed by the Russian government. I'm heartened to see clarity on the part of New Zealand revolutionary queers organizing support for the boycott under the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but international queer liberation." Homonationalism is a real threat in the U.S., especially given the Obama government's pro-gay posture. The Wellington Queer Avengers slogan makes it really clear that cheering on imperialism isn't a road to liberation. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this subject later.

Anyway, cold war 2? Fun times ahead, again?

Anti-Americana is a regular feature of Anti-American art from around the world here at The Cahokian.

Hands (and Drones) Off Assata Shakur!

Crossposted from Kasama. Since I wrote this last night, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has already reported that a giant "wanted" billboard has gone up in Newark, New Jersey. What an obscenity! Assata has been living peacefully in Cuba for THIRTY YEARS. What does it mean that she has now been labeled a "terrorist"?

Today the Obama administration's FBI added black liberation fighter Assata Shakur to its list of "Most Wanted Terrorists." They doubled the million-dollar price on her head; and she becomes the first woman on the list. Fortunately Assata Shakur is living free in Cuba after being liberated from a federal penitentiary in 1979, but it's clear her life is in mortal danger. Labeling Shakur a "terrorist" is a declaration of war against all dissenters and revolutionaries, and sets her up for murder at the hands of the state with complete impunity. It's also evidence of the continued bullying relationship between the United States and its anti-imperialist Caribbean neighbor, Cuba.

If Assata Shakur can be labelled a terrorist, so can anyone who has raised their fist against the empire.

Assata Shakur is a survivor of the vicious COINTELPRO campaign that attempted to smash the Black Panther Party and its offshoots in the 1960s and 1970s. Dozens of heroic black liberation fighters were murdered outright or sent away to prison for long sentences: the U.S. government was determined at any cost to smash a movement that refused to play by liberal rules. She was repeatedly framed with apolitical crimes she had nothing to do with; she went underground but was arrested in 1973 when the car she was a passenger in was attacked by New Jersey State police; and was very seriously wounded while trying to surrender.Democracy Now quotes a letter Shakur wrote to the Pope on the occasion of his visit to Cuba in 1998:

"At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the U.S. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty."

But what Shakur is not guilty of is terrorism. Indicted ten times by the government for supposed crimes ranging from bank robbery to murder and kidnapping, Shakur's only conviction was her final one, by an all-white jury, stacked with family members of cops, who ignored the copious medical evidence that showed she was shot while she had her hands held up high. This accusation of "terrorism" reflects the new reality of U.S. imperialism under Bush and Obama: with drone technology it's a license to kill.
In Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, we closed each of our General Assemblies by linking hands and reciting Assata's words from her 1973 statement, "To My People":
"It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains."
Assata is our hero. We must be vigilant, and protect her and the freedom-fighter legacy she represents.
Check out Common's "Song for Assata" on youtube:


HANDS AND DRONES OFF ASSATA SHAKUR!

Compañero Hugo Chavez: ¡Presente!

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, 1954-2013, Rest In Power!

Via a friend on facebook:

POEM FOR HUGO CHAVEZ

Because you know
That pain is not
Our motherland

That suffering
Is not our
Divine right
That heaven is
What we make
On earth

Like houses
Love
And bread

Because you come
From the heart
Of the soil

And do not sprinkle us
With holy water
Pie-in-the-sky lies and
Ashes to ashes dust to dust

Because you know
That your big mouth
And your curly hair

Is African
And your brown skin
And dark eyes is Indian

Because you don’t point
To Europe for
Beauty or salvation

Because you know
As Che and Fidel and
Maurice Bishop and Roque Dalton
And Walter Rodney
And Neruda and Allende
And Patrice Lamumba

That life is what
We make with our
Hands

Because you know as Jesus
That it is not difficult to
Multiply bread and fish

That oil is not
The lifeblood
Of the earth

That it should not
Run through our veins
Like fear

Because you are David
In the shadow
Of Goliath

And know that
The price of freedom
Is love

—Tony Medina::

Design celebrating the "Perfect Victory" of Chavez in the recent presidential election

Comandante Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela and master instigator of the Bolivarian revolution, died today. I read the news sitting at my computer at work: I was caught by surprise at the tears that welled up in my eyes.

There is surely much to be said about the inadequacies of Chavez's revolution. I'm a person who believes in the need for the people themselves to create vehicles of people's power that can challenge state power: I'm for broad, mass, horizontal organizing not condescending saviors. I'm for revolutions that are unequivocal when it comes to tossing out old regimes and corporate structures and state powers. But somehow, despite all that, I came to love and admire Hugo Chavez.

I read the paper. I follow the news. I remember when the CIA tried to overthrow him, nearly successfully, and it's been impossible to miss how much every institution of capitalist power from the government to the liberal media have despised him for dodging that bullet ever since. But I regretfully confess I haven't studied the Bolivarian revolution, and I'm only peripherally aware of how deep the institutions of popular power run; how integral the Venezuelan people are to their revolution.

But I remember when Chavez visited the United Nations in 2006. Alone among the leaders of the world he told the truth about George Bush and the American reign of terror across the globe. With wit, humor, and gentle bravado he won my heart when he told the truth about the reek of sulfur left over from the U.S. delegation.

This world is mad. This carnivorous monster of neoliberalism and imperialism, the United States of America, steals from the entire planet so that its corporations can acquire obscene quantities of cash. Armed to the teeth with obscene invisible weapons that deal random death from the skies abroad, and lined wall to wall with prisons that beat its poor black and brown citizens into fine filaments of submission; this so-called free world is the great beast that Chavez dared challenge. Obscenely, the liberal echo chamber in this country yells "Dictator!" at Chavez while tightly closing their memory to the thousands of people arrested during the mass coordinated repression of the Occupy movement. While pretending not to wonder where all those African-American men might be since they know there are no jobs for them. While averting their eyes to the pictures, not so hard to find, of dead children killed by American drones in an ever lengthening list of countries. (Yes, there's drone base in Africa, in Niger, now. shutupidon'twanttohearabout that). ICBMs tucked safely out of sight at their backs, the liberals rattle off the list, larger now than George Bush's axis of evil, of all the little countries bullying the poor United States. It begins to sound desperate. Chavez....dictator. ...terrorists....Hezbollah is active in Venezuela! A mantra for all occasions requiring neocolonial reassurance. Paranoid fantasism from the most powerful, dangerously aggressive nation on earth.

Calmly, coolly, Chavez faced that beast down. "Like Allende, we're pacifists and democrats. Unlike Allende, we're armed," he said.

I hate that we have lost him now. It's our duty to prove him right, that the world doesn't have to be this way, that people have the power to right the wrongs of this world. I don't know what would have happened in Venezuela had he stayed in power. And I don't know what will happen in the whole world, or even here in Brooklyn, now that he's gone. Whatever the faults of who he was, the limitations of what he tried to do, the realpolitik that all too often clouded his message, his loss to the world revolutionary struggle is immense. But the struggle is not lost, and what inspires us about him will continue to do so. All we have to do is...the right thing. As Assata says. "It is our duty to fight, it is our duty to win."

If you've not seen it, watch this absolutely incredible film about the rightwing/CIA coup that Chavez defeated in 2002. It's more exciting than any fictional political thriller. Watch this film and know right from wrong.

One final thought: Under Chavez' leadership, this statue of Christopher Columbus, architect of genocide, was pulled down in Caracas as Columbus Day was renamed "Day of Indigenous Resistance." Pretty much says it all.

Bronco Bamma & Mitt Romney

I tried to hold it together. But it got too much for me. My tears are captured here on film. Only another week!

Annual Candy Samples Video Break!

Yes it's that time of year again! A new video from my favorite drag queen, the immortal Candy Samples, actress. This year's video is a tribute to the gay "bear" world, with a new song entitled "Bear Season." Once again yours truly has several background color roles, though my adorable boyfriend may be seen here as the guitar player. The videos are always a hoot to make, and this one was no different, though the extensive "green screen" filming meant that those of us in the cast had no idea whatsoever what the final product would look like. Bonus points to Candy for the Sarah Palin references!

If Communism Is Dead, Why Are They Still Afraid of It?

Jodi Dean discusses the "Communist Horizon." From New York City's Brecht Forum. This is some dense Marxist philosophy but stay with it.

Welcome to Police State America

Some people are worried about disturbed individuals firing guns into movie theaters. I'm worried about a disturbed government firing guns against unarmed protesters including women and children. If you haven't been following the events in Anaheim, California, you're not looking in the right direction. Watch the above video soon as some versions have been pulled down from the internet as local California forces of repression try to suppress the story. Yes, that is black-clad stormtroopers firing rubber bullets into a crown of families and then setting the dogs after them. Yes, California, post-racial America, 2012.


Protests in Anaheim have been ongoing. Here from a couple days after that first video, well-known liveblogger Tim Pool wanders around Anaheim after a protest. This "dangerous armed (with an iphone) revolutionary" is then... fired on unprovoked and unannounced by the local stormtroopers. Yes, an unarmed member of the press fired on. Yes, California, post-racial America, 2012.

Now you can go back to paying attention to the sideshow freakfest that is the elections. When it's just as bad in 2013, no matter who wins, don't say I didn't warn you.

Don't Fall for Kony 2012: Slickest Neocolonial Propaganda Vehicle Ever

Something stinks on the internet.

Yesterday the video "Kony 2012" produced by the organization "Invisible Children" reached a bizarre critical mass on the internet. It was inescapable on facebook: if you're like me, seemingly all your friends who have a social conscience shared it earnestly with heartfelt calls to spread its message. It gathered millions and millions of pageviews overnight.

Kony 2012 is slick. It's got extraordinary production values for an internet meme sensation.

It's got a narrator who is likable and earnest. It's got a beautiful little blonde toddler who makes just the right faces when confronted by the illogical and outrageous monstrosity of adults doing horrible things for seemingly inexplicable reasons. It's got a beautiful young Ugandan boy whose ready smile belies a past haunted by horror. It's got a vision of people working together to do the right thing, of people power transcending political boundaries. It's got a nightmarish and uncomplicated villain.

It also has a message of mobilizing popular support behind American military intervention across a swath of Central Africa. It's got rightwing pig Senator James Inhofe ("he wanted to assure people that lifting the ban on gays in the military has not led to the legalization of bestiality..."). It's got religious fundamentalist backers. It's got a dubious financial record as a charitable institution. It's got a hypothetically sinister role in the new cold war between the U.S. and China over Africa's resources.

After reading various pros and cons over Kony 2012, I finally watched the video. I found it creepy and disturbing. It is slickly manipulative, leading the viewer through an argument full of flawed logic, questionable assertions and sleights of hand, referencing just enough plausibility to make its emotional resonance seem legitimate. It even uses some of the messaging of the Occupy movement, almost as if its makers are hoping to siphon off the energy from the social justice cause du jour to their absolutely manufactured crusade.

Of course the warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (no longer actually in Uganda) are thoroughly unsavory characters. But it is not possible to look at Kony's anarchic warlordism — or at civil unrest across Africa general — in isolation from the story of classic colonialism, imperialism, and today's neocolonialism. Africa's vast natural resources are the battleground of the future. Western humanitarian intervention in Africa is always more complicated than it looks; it is never a simple story of saving lives.

Like many countries in Africa, Uganda is the playground of American evangelical fundamentalists. Using charitable assistance as a kind of Trojan horse, this right-wing political movement has insinuated itself in local culture. It's responsible for the rise of legal repression and brutality against gay, lesbian and transgendered Africans in several countries. The Ugandan parliamentary bill that has been on the verge of passing for a couple years now that promises the death penalty for homosexuality is the documented brainchild of American Christian fundamentalists working with local right-wingers. This movement is similarly responsible for harnessing AIDS prevention and family planning to conservative Christian ideology. It strikes me as highly unlikely that the ever-so-likeable "Invisible Children" of Kony 2012 are not utterly intertwined with these modern missionaries of hate.

There's much about the video that just seems questionable. Like how self-referential it is, suggesting somehow that the video had impact before it was even made. It's classic propaganda designed to tug the heartstrings and deflect scrutiny from its assertions. But it also strikes me as tragically familiar, hence my choice of illustrations for this essay. "The White Man's Burden" is the deeply racist notion, from the height of the colonialist era, that civilized white people had the duty to rescue the black and yellow "savages" from their state of barbarism and bring them to civilization. From Rudyard Kipling's poem:

"Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought."

It's amazing that this video seems to successfully convince millions of do-gooders, many of whom you would think would know better, that if only American military forces were tromping across the African countryside that things would actually get better for long-suffering Ugandans! White people, Americans and Europeans all, need to stop meddling in Africa. The real truth must be told: seemingly senseless civil conflicts like the one around Joseph Kony are the rotten fruit of neocolonialism. All these private armies have their origins in the halls of America and Africa's former colonial masters. Kony's brutality dwarfs before the ruthlessness of direct American meddling around the world and the shockwaves it unleashes.

One can look at a nightmare like Somalia and make valid criticisms of local and regional factions and forces. But if you step back and take a long enough view, you realize that what happened to Somalia was that it got in the way of the cold war. Somalia is like it is today because of neocolonialism, tossed aside like a dried husk when the cold war ended.

Honestly I never heard of the Invisible Children and the Kony 2012 campaign before this week. Some people I know claim to have heard of it before. But I smell a big fat rat. People who should know better are being had by this video. I predict that when the truth comes out about this "spontaneous viral explosion" of concern over Kony and Uganda it won't be pretty. Its oh-so-innocent call for military intervention in Africa will prove to be no accident. And it's cast of concerned "bipartisan" government figures will prove to be a gallery of rogues. Beware.

The main enemy is at home.

(Highly offensive racist cartoon "The White Man's Burden" above from the mainstream New York World of 1899 courtesy of YesterYear Once More blog). If you're living in a tree and haven't seen the original Kony 2012 video, here it is:


UPDATE: My friend Jon reminds me of Mark Twain's bitter 1901 essay "To The Person Sitting in Darkness." A kind of reply to "The White Man's Burden," it's a must read and totally relevant to the Kony 2012 phenomenon. Read it here.

"How To Survive a Plague" Going to Sundance!

My friend David France's documentary "How To Survive a Plague" is being premiered at Sundance film festival this month! In the interview above, David talks a little about why he wanted to tell this story, and how difficult it was to document a not-so-long-ago time that in many ways already feels like ancient history.

I've seen a rough cut of the film and it's really terrific. It's also really relevant: because while it tells the story of a handful of heroes trying to fight AIDS on the streets, in the halls of government and in the nation's science labs, what it really tells is a story of activism. Activism that happened, in fact, to change the world. It's fascinating to see footage of political protests in the 1980s at some of the same locations of today's Occupy Wall Street actions. When this film makes it to general distribution, as it is bound to do, it's going to be a must-see not only for people who lived through the worst of the AIDS crisis, but for activists of the present looking for inspiration.

Read about it at the Sundance website. The film has a "like" page on Facebook. Good luck, David!

An Invitation to Ethnic Cleansing

“Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” — Republican presidential candidate, serial adulterer and alleged intellectual Newt Gingrich in an interview with The Jewish Channel.

I wish I could say I was shocked by Gingrich's comments, which have received pretty wide coverage. But I've had many many arguments over the years with supporters of Israel who have said pretty much the same thing. Forget any logical response to this outrage, like does he therefore suggest Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan are equally undeserving of statehood since they share a similar historical pedigree as Palestine? Nevermind his glossing over of the fact that whatever he chooses to call them the indigenous inhabitants of the land occupied by Israeli military force are currently violently besieged, suppressed, and deprived of their civil and human rights. Nevermind that not so long ago people of his political ilk were blaming the Jews for the evils of the world not fantasizing about the money they could earn by pantomiming prostration before the agenda of a foreign country's entirely questionable political policy.

What game are these politicians playing? Even George W. Bush, for crissake, paid lip-service to the idea that Palestinians deserved recognition of their personhood. The Republican presidential lineup have every last one of them (except far-right nutjob libertarian Ron Paul) been stumbling over each other to be the greatest supporter of Israeli Apartheid of all the rest. It's hard not to see it as a certain extension of the Republicans' formerly blatant anti-Semitism, this cartoonish courtship of a small country and a small American demographic which they imagine to require such outrageous genuflection. It's made even more odd by the fact that notwithstanding a little bit of rhetoric here or there, the Obama administration has proved itself a loyal lapdog of the rightwing Netanyahu government.

"And they had a chance to go many places." Absolutely chilling. Imagine for a moment he's talking about the Jews of prewar Europe, or the Tutsi of Rwanda. Newt Gingrich is an amoral sociopathic monster.

If you have a strong stomach here's a little reality check. Mustafa Tamimi was 28 years old; he attended a nonviolent protest in the occupied West Bank, protesting land seizures by so-called settlers. He was shot point blank in the face with a (US-made?) tear gas cannister. This is video of the aftermath of that shooting. Mondoweiss recounts, "The impact blew off half of Tamimi's face, and when his friends and family cried out in horror, Israeli soldiers laughed and said, "So?".

Musical Interlude: Smile of the Beyond

Something like three years ago I waxed rapturously about my favorite "fusion" album of all time, "Apocalypse" by the second incarnation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra of John McLaughlin. When I stumbled across this video and considered posting it here I realized I had said just about all I had to say about that album back then, but I still love this music. This oddly distorted video is from a mid-1970s live performance at Montreux: it's better than the video or sound quality of a number of other youtube versions, and a bit different than the album cut. But it's cool to see the musicians play, and you get to see spacey Gayle Moran actually sing what is, I guess, an actual fusion ballad: at least it starts out that way. The lyric is vintage early 1970s Sri Chinmoy devotee melding of sacred and profane. Sort of a codependent religious hymn, near as I can tell. God, like all lovers, is difficult sometimes.

Fusion didn't age well. This song displays something of the emotional range of fusion, and the tension between controlled virtuosity and ecstatic chaos that marked the best of the music in its early days. Uncontrolled cock-stroking keyboard and guitar wankery eventually took over leaving the sound sterile and uninteresting, at least to me. By the 1980s, fascination with digital technological effects choked the life out of it. Here the mix of funk and art seems alive and promising.

As a bonus here's the album version below, for contrast, which is heavier on the string orchestra at the beginning. I do recommend the whole album.

Ken Russell Made Me Gay

Well, that's not really true. But exposure to the famous nude wrestling scene from Ken Russell's 1969 film "Women In Love" in my later teens certainly provided my developing prurient mind with much fodder for the imagination, and planted all sorts of romantic and not-so-romantic notions in my young head. This scene featuring Alan Bates and Oliver Reed is one of the most sensuously homoerotic of all-time classic cinema. Neither actor was gay, of course, and Oliver Reed seems to have been anything but a gay icon in his personal life. But the screenwriter of "Women in Love" was none other than decades-later legendary gay activist Larry Kramer, who undoubtedly crafted the slow burn of this scene with his own aesthetic bent in bringing D.H. Lawrence's novel to life. Speaking as anything but a film connoisseur, the whole film is sort of a textbook late 1960s art film: moody and striking and not really the kind of thing you want to watch for light viewing. This one scene, not exactly pornographic but not exactly in the safe for work category either, certainly pushed the edge. Even when I first saw it I appreciated how it derives its homoeroticism from two burly manly men rather than from angular elven blondes like Michael York, whom it seems was featured in every art film of that era with a male character of ambiguous sexuality, and yet who did nothing for my own developing gay identity.

Director Ken Russell has just passed on at the age of 84. On behalf of once-young gay men everywhere who grew up in a time without openly gay role models and without gay reality TV basic cable, let me say "thank you thank you thank you" for these immortal four minutes of cinema. Rest in peace.

What Is Race?

Having had my umpteenth argument on another blog about how Islamophobia is a form of racism, I ran across this clip on the "We Are Respectable Negroes" blog. It's an excerpt from a talk last year by Dr. Charles W. Mills of Northwestern University at the University of King's College.

This fairly short clip is incredibly rich with ideas. I post it here because it addresses how race itself is a social construct and not a biological reality. The identities of race are determined by the lens of cultural dominance: Professor Mills gives an example of how his own mixed national heritage would be determined completely differently depending on who gets to make the rules. This is so key: when I say Islamophobia is racism, those who say "Islam is not a race" are erasing the systems that inform social dominance and prejudice. This becomes easy to see when one considers Hitler-era Germany, where racist laws and racial prejudice were applied by one group of white people sharing overwhelmingly identical genetic makeup with the white victims of their repression. Although religion was the window dressing, be sure that the holocaust was not the product of German Christian theological difference with Rabbinical interpretation of the Old Testament. Anti-Semitism is a clear example of how divorced racism is from actual human biology.

Professor Mills concludes with the idea of racism in society being a product of cultural racial dominance not just the race of individuals, another key concept in the age of our first black American president.

"We'll Occupy the Offices of YOU!"

Two musical posts in a row: the above is the extraordinary song "We Are The Many" by Hawaiian singer/songwriter/slack key guitar master Makana. It's a beautiful and relevant song about the #OWS message and movement. The slideshow interspersed with Makana's song is brilliant, and as harsh to a certain party currently in the White House as that other one.

"So take heed of our notice to redress
We have little to lose we must confess
Your empty words do leave us unimpressed
The growing number join us in protest
We occupy the streets
We occupy the courts
We occupy the offices of you
Til you do
The bidding of the many not the few."

What a beautiful song, redolent of Dylan, protest folk music, even Latin American Nueva Trova. Crazily, Makana, was able to perform his song at the APEC economic summit in Hawaii in front of President Obama, who apparently didn't take note of the lyric. Not that it would have mattered if he did.

The words on Makana's website read, There is love. All else is propaganda." Occupy Together!

Anti-War Anthems: Gimme Shelter

Here's one of my favorite Rolling Stone covers, from the forgotten funk-soul group Maxayn, fronted by Maxayn Lewis. It's "Gimme Shelter," from 1972. The Stones original is terrific, as is the version expanded by original backup singer Merry Clayton, and the more recent Patti Smith cover.

How close is danger.

"Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

The floods is threat'ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away"

Previous Anti-War Anthems here on The Cahokian.

Mojuba Olodumare, Mojuba Obatala

Hard to believe that it was fifteen years ago that I began the week-long ceremony that marked my initiation into the religion of Santeria as a priest of Obatala. I was crowned fifteen years ago tomorrow in the Bronx: it was a moment I will never forget, frozen in time. Even those elders who were there in that moment who have since passed on (ibaye) remain sharp in my memory.

As things worked out the Santeria community wasn't to be a great fit for me as a home, but I still have this sense of cosmic gears turning in that moment that blessed me, that changed me, that altered the trajectory and path of my life, and mostly in ways I had no way of anticipating. I gave up a lot: some good, some bad, some things I miss, some things I don't, but as I felt the spiritual mantle I had assumed deepen and internalize I have felt greater inner peace and balance I wouldn't trade for anything. Maybe it's the mellowing of age, or maybe the mysterious gravity of Obatala Himself, but I've found so many of the desperate empty places in my earlier life filled with centered calmness. While I can surely report both good and bad life experiences in the past 15 years, joy and happiness mixed with pain and loss in random succession — such is anyone's life — I feel grateful for a moment of cosmic communion that had so much profound and lasting effect. Even as I find myself less and less a participant in my religion, I can still connect my spiritual being with a sort of dizzying inner bridge to the sacred. I wouldn't have predicted what I would be doing fifteen years later: I know I wouldn't have come even close to a good guess. But I knew I wouldn't be filled with regret and that was about as prescient as one could be.

And I am eternally grateful to my spiritual path for the sharpening and deepening of my creativity as I strive for clarity of expression. This blog, even when I'm writing about subjects seemingly far removed from an obscure religion carried to this continent in the infernal bellies of slave ships, is I hope witness and testament to the power of eternal spiritual truths manifesting themselves in the physical world. To my less spiritually-inclined friends and readers, I don't mean that as magic or superstition or supposed favor from invisible beings, but as a hearty endorsement of connecting with the life force that animates us, a little suspension of disbelief, and a reminder that patterns and symbolism tap the human psyche with good reason.

Anyway I'll conclude with what is an apt lesson for many of life's transformations, courtesy of those high priests of quite a different religion, The Rolling Stones. Because indeed you can't always get what you want but you do get just what you need.

A Cure for Mondays: Al Green

I've been putting in a little overtime at work so my brain is a little fried and incapable of putting together a good juicy rant.... so two days in a row we're taking a little musical breather from the events of the world. I've been rustling through my iTunes and CD collection and this is what I came up with. Here's Al Green's hidden gem "Look What You Done For Me" from his 1972 album I'm Still in Love With You. This could be the dictionary entry for "soul music." What an arrangement!