Important, Scary News for All New Yorkers – Please Share

Unfortunately, this is not some wacko conspiracy theory. It’s a real bill which has been introduced in the New York State Assembly which gives Andrew Cuomo unlimited authority to detain any individual, or any group, indefinitely for any reason.

The bill is #A416, introduced by Assemblyman N. Nick Perry of Brooklyn. The pretext, as you may have guessed, is any health situation that the Governor believes is an emergency. What’s scariest is that the bill bypasses the legislature and puts enforcement exclusively in the hands of the Governor’s office.

The wording is extremely vague, which is just as troubling. Beyond indefinite detention (read the fine print), it mandates forcible vaccination and any other “treatment” the Governor deems necessary, for anyone “suspected” of having contact with an individual presumed infected with any disease.

Lots of crazy bills get introduced in the Assembly every year and almost all of them die before they get to committee. But we need to nip this one in the bud before it gets any further – and it’s already gone to committee. This New York State Assembly page will direct you to your representative. Please contact them immediately. If you don’t live in New York State, it couldn’t hurt to contact Perry himself and show him how much opposition to this insanity there is around the world. Most importantly, please share this with everyone you know. The New York State Assembly works for us. We elected them. They know we can vote them out of office and if they see a huge groundswell against this, they’ll get the message loud and clear.

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Help Save a Beloved NYU Professor’s Job

Mark Crispin Miller is a tenured professor at New York University, where he teaches about film and propaganda. And he needs our help, for all of us to raise our voices for academic freedom and freedom of speech. There’s a petition that you should sign on his behalf. Here’s why.

In addition to his work in academia, Miller publishes an invaluable news feed, News From Underground, which for years has successfully and colorfully debunked corporate media propaganda on innumerable topics, from the environment, to medicine, to the lockdown. For the last several months, News From Underground has been a primary source of information for this blog, and, one suspects, scores of others. Miller also serves as series editor for the Forbidden Bookshelf, which brings banned or censored books about history or politics back into print.

Miller is currently under fire for an incident during an online class earlier this fall where he suggested that students might want to question the effectiveness of wearing muzzles to combat COVID-19. Most of us who’ve looked into the science behind the current pandemic of muzzling are aware, at the very least, that surgical masks are too porous to keep out the tiny COVID-19 virions.

A single student in Miller’s class, Julia Jackson, took exception to Miller’s encouragement to his students to question the corporate media narrative about muzzles. In an egregious act of cowardice, she didn’t engage with her professor during class or afterward; instead, she took to Twitter to demand his resignation. A small handful of corporate media outlets picked up the thread; two sided with the student. Miller’s ability to continue to teach his wildly popular propaganda course next semester is now in jeopardy since the school administration has asked him to cancel it and replace it with a second course on film.

If Miller were to lose his job, or the ability to teach, because of a single student’s complaint about the curriculum of a class, it would be a devastating blow to academic freedom in this country, never mind to one of the most reliably inquisitive and articulate minds currently questioning the scientific validity and justifications behind the lockdown. At such a pivotal point in history, we can’t afford to lose Professor Miller. Please sign the petition – and if you’re interested in the latest on the lockdown, and the growing tidal wave of resistance, sign up for News From Underground while you’re at it. 

Four Years of Celebrating Howard Zinn and Freedom Fighters at Lincoln Center

This past evening was the fourth annual Lincoln Center celebration of freedom fighters from across the decades, inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. A partnership with Manhattan’s High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry, the night featured an all-star cast from years past along with some new high-profile artists lending their names to the festival, a mix of readings plus soaring oldschool soul and gospel staples delivered by mighty crooner Zeshan B.

It was a way “To continue to think about way to hope and improve and make our own impact… I think we saw that on Tuesday with so many people coming out and voting,” Lincoln Center’s Jordana Leigh reaffirmed, introducing Staceyann Chin’s defiant reading of Marge Piercy’s colorful arithmetic concerning how to start a movement. Chin brought the night full circle at the end with Angela Davis’ remarks at the first Women’s March on Washington, reminding that “History cannot be deleted like webpages.”

Akema Kochiyama – daughter of Japanese-American activist Yuri Kochiyama – read fifteen-year-old telephone operator Michiko Yamaoka’s harrowing account of the Hiroshima bombings: “People couldn’t scream, even when they were onfire…I wonder what kind of education there is in America about atomic bombs. They’re still making them, aren’t they?” Kochiyama’s mom’s account of Japanese-Americans sent to concentration camps during World War II was just as insightful if less outright chilling: “How little you learn about American history: you learn only what they want you to know.” 

Brian Jones delivered Jermain Wesley Loguen’s famously dismissive letter to his former slavemaster, whose demand that he return to the plantation set the bar Bushwick-level high as far as entitlement is concerned. Later Jones recounted Martin Luther King’s 1967 remarks to the SCLC on the inevitability of taking the Civil Rights Movement to the ne xt level, fighting economic injustice.

Trisha Johnson brought plenty of fire to Frederick Douglass’s 1852 anti-slavery address to a group of upstate New York ladies. Leta Renee-Allen channeled righteous rage in Susan B. Anthony’s address to the court who convicted her of illegally voting, Jones relishing the role of the clueless sentencing judge who constantly interrupted her. The correlation between the civil disobedience of Underground Railroad freedom fighters and the women’s suffrage movement went over big with the crowd.

Imogen Poots got the part of Lowell Mills striker Harriet Hanson Robinson, in her account of how many decades of struggle and resistance preceded the eventual workers’ hard-earned victory. “Whoever heard of these eight-hour days? No one expected decent wages,” Poots reminded later, in the words of Depression-era organizer Rose Chernin, whose battle against ruthless landlords and profiteer shopkeepers resonates mightily today. After fighting fire with fire, metaphorically at least, “Within two years we had rent control in the Bronx.”

“If there’s any national anthem we should stand for, it’s this one, Zeshan B said, introducing his soaring solo vocal-and-harmonium take of James Weldon Johnson’s Raise Every Voice and Sing: the crowd agreed. Later he raised the roof with a Sam Cooke Civli Rights-era staple. Another calmer but no less rousing musical piece was Eva Davis‘ take of a popular, starkly gospel-infused Bernice Johnson Reagon protest song.

Renee-Allen returned to the mic for Genora Dolinger’s gutsy, plainspoken account of the 1930s General Motors sitdown strikes. Wallace Shawn was aptly cast as a perplexed Howard Zinn contemplating cognitive dissonance in late 1960s politics: Daniel Berrigan behind bars while J. Edgar Hoover got to roam free, the National Guard firing on students at Kent State who were subsequently arrested.

Jessica Pimentel brought a straightforward articulacy to Assata Shakur’s description of life on Rikers Island: “American capitalism is in no way threatened by the women on Rikers,” eighty percent of who were there because of drugs. “They have taken away our gardens and our sweet potato pies and have given us McDonalds, dope and televisions as culture.” 

And in somewhat more recent developments, she voiced Standing Rock activist Julian Brave Noisecat’s sardonic insight as to how much the project continues an ugly tradition of American colonialism.

The atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just north of 62nd St. is pretty much unrivalled in midtown for relevant programming. The multimedia performance by catchy, anthemic janglerock band No-No Boy – who explore the history and aftereffects of Japanese-American internment during World War II – on Nov 15 at 7:30 PM promises to be especially insightful. The show is free; get there early if you’re going.

Feras Fayyad’s Documentary, Last Men in Aleppo: A Shoah for Our Time

Aleppo, Syria was once one of the world’s great cities. Home to an astonishingly diverse number of communities comprising cultures from across the Middle East and beyond, its population peaked at close to five million before dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy movement  After years of bombing by Syrian helicopters and the Russian air force, this formerly thriving center of arts and culture, its centuries-old historic sites and housing stock have been reduced to rubble; only about two to three hundred inhabitants remain. Everyone else living there at the start of the previous decade has either become a refugee or been killed.

That’s the backdrop of Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad’s shattering, heartbreaking, Sundance Award-winning documentary Last Men in Aleppo, which continues to show in theatres and is available on the various VOD platforms. Starting in 2015, Fayyad began filming groups of White Helmets, the volunteer emergency responders rushing to civilian sites hit by bombs and missiles. His work was interrupted when he was imprisoned and tortured for almost a year by Assad’s secret police. Eventually, he was forced to flee the country: some of the film’s footage ended up being taken by the White Helmets themselves.

The result is a landmark work of mise-en-scene filmmaking, literally capturing the frantic rescue efforts through the first responders’ eyes. The viewer feels every bump of the ambulance on the potholed streets, the terror of the survivors hoping that their loved ones are still alive somewhere in the rubble, the soul-crushing shellshock of the ambulance crew after those with a chance of survival have been pulled from beneath the rubble and concrete and the dead have been counted.

Fayyad made the film to document Assad’s crimes against humanity, but at a press screening late last week affirmed that every wars is like this. This film is not for the squeamish: you will see a lot of dead infants, grieving parents and emergency workers grimly speculating on which body parts might be a match.

Yet amidst this relentless horror, there is extraordinary compassion and hope. In an audience !Q&A, Fayyad explained that he was stunned to see a “human experiment” in progress. Where conventional wisdom predicts savagery and a battle over dwindling resources, he found solidarity and love that defied all odds.

Most of the film centers around the White Helmets’ round-the-clock rescue runs, but the off-duty footage is just as revealing. Three main protagonists emerge. Khaled, the big, irrepressible family man whose kids’ health is failing due to malnutrition, is the most charismatic and expressive, whether making up his own blackly humorous lyrics to folk songs, or quixotically building a fishpond: if he survives, he asserts, he’s going to breed goldfish.

Mahmoud, in his early twenties, worries constantly about his younger brother in the crew and wishes in vain for an upgrade from the battered ambulance he drives. Subhi is the least talkative but most visually expressive member and seems to be the most shellshocked. We eventually find out that he has good reason to look that way.

We all know how this story ends. Everybody leaves, whether by smuggler’s route out of what’s left of the city, or by bomb attack: there’s more than one hastily organized funeral in this film. Meanwhile, the neighborhood kids are stoked to the max to finally be able to venture outside for a trip their ghetto playground, there’s produce at a small farmer’s market, and there’s even a wedding. Meanwhile, pharmacies are running out of medicine and a steady stream of Aleppians head for the Turkish border. As predictably as this film ends, it is no less shocking and heartwrenching, amplified by the White Helmets’ heroism. In total, Khaled ends up saving over two hundred lives, and the others are probably right behind. If there’s any film this year that deserves a Nobel Prize, this is is.

A Corrosively Hilarious New Spoken-Word Album from Anthony Haden-Guest

Back in the early 80s, legendary journalist and gadfly Anthony Haden-Guest ran into Island Records honcho Chris Blackwell at a party in Cannes. Haden-Guest asserted that the hip-hop fad, as he called it, had run its course. That opinion might have been colored by having missed the opportunity to run up to the South Bronx with his buddy Malcolm McLaren to witness the birth of what McLaren called “scratch.”

Whatever the case, Blackwell’s response was, “Anthony, you are absolutely mad.” Thirty-five years later, Haden-Guest has released his debut hip-hop song,.“I always assumed you had to be in a studio up to your neck in hi-tech to do this,” he explains, over a wry faux Wu-Tang synth backdrop assembled by film composer Keith Patchel. “If this won’t kill hip-hop, nothing will.”

That number appears on Haden-Guest’s hilarious new spoken-word album The Further Chronicles of Now, streaming at Bandcamp. When he’s at the top of his game, his relentless, spot-on skewering of the ruling classes ranks with Michael M. Thomas’ Midas Watch, in its glory days in the pre-Jared Kushner era New York Observer. With a total of 24 tracks, a handful of them set to spare, surreal, quietly carnivalesque 80s synthesized organ or piano, Haden-Guest’s commentary is as grim as it is funny.

The apocalypse is a recurrent theme, as is art-world skullduggery. Haden-Guest doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has a bullshit detector set to stun. “So I’m siting in a Starbucks, listening to the blues, sound peculiar enough for you?” he poses early on, in his proper blueblood London accent.

A handful of tracks here were released earlier on Rudely Interrupted, Haden-Guest’s 2012 collaboration with darkly eclectic songwriter Lorraine Leckie. The Everywhere Man revisits the “strangely nihilistic bunch” who made it their job to get past the “clipboard Nazis from outer space” to crash Manhattan parties in the 1970s. Happy City, as Haden-Guest puts it, is his requisite drug song, a step out of character for a guy who “got a bit tipsy at age seven as a kilted pageboy at a wedding, which…unfortunately prefigured much of what was to come.” And Bliss,. the most plainspoken but possibly most harrowing piece here, is as poignant as Leckie’s glimmering remake.

The art world is where Haden-Guest really gets on a roll. The Secret History of Modern Art begins with Gustave Courbet,  “A slap in the face with a fat girl’s bush.” Haden-Guest saves his most venomous critique for Picasso:

Pablo switched styles like a man possessed
As if in some eerie way he’d guessed
The needs and the greed
The hunger he’d feed
Of collectors to come, a predator breed
From Picasso we got the shopping cart
And create a supermarket of art

A Song for Andy, a Seven Days of Christmas rewrite, is just as funny. Even the critics get what’s coming to them here, although “Viveros-Faune cannot be counted on and Roberta Smith should not be tangled with.” The rest are available at the right price – and Haden-Guest names names. And The New Avant-Garde are “the shock troops for developers now.”

The best of the apocalypse scenarios, Yesterday’s Snow is an update on Francois Villon’s famous, elegiac poem:

This may take a little while!
J. Edgar Hoover’s curdled bile
Lee Harvey Oswald’s bulging file
Jayne Mansfield in a speeding motor
Vic Morrow underneath a rotor
Mark Chapman outside the Dakota
Robert Maxwell got a floater…
The way that Enron made that pile
Bernie Madoff’s tiny smile

Frenemies, ex-girlfriends and old colleagues each get what’s coming to them here as well. The Tame Frontier draws its inspiration from a drive back to Manhattan from “an extremely aggressive Hamptons weekend”  where “nobody walks, they cross the street by car, where the city’s a bridge too faraway.” There’s also An Ordinary Day, whose implication is how endless terrorism alerts cry wolf to the point where they’re useless, and A Hymn to Intellectual Property Rights, with its wry allusions to a jazz standard. Now eighty, Haden-Guest shows no sign of slowing down. If there’s anybody who deserves to stay in the game long enough to chronicle the end of the world as it happens, it’s this guy.

Haden-Guest and Leckie celebrate the release of the album tonight, June 8 at around 7 at Anderson Contemporary Art at 180 Maiden Lane in the financial district.

Philip Grossman Risks His Life to Document the Second Worst Disaster in Human History

Over the past several years, photographer/filmmaker Philip Grossman made several trips to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in Pripyat, Ukraine. Notwithstanding the Soviet Union’s bungling attempts to downplay the disaster and evacuate the area during the crucial first few hours of the April 26, 1986 meltdown at Reactor #4 there, considerable documentation of the disaster’s aftermath exists. Filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko took a camera into the disaster site in the days afterward: he was dead within the year. One hopes that Grossman either used an unmanned drone (as film footage he’s taken there seems to indicate), or that he at least had sufficient protective gear, if such a thing even exists. To say that the matter-of-factly haunting and foreboding full-color images he’s assembled are a heroic achievement is an understatement. Many of them, as well as a film of the area as it looked in the spring of 2011, are currently on display at the Wald and Kim Gallery, 417 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor through June 28. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 6 PM; ring the fourth-floor buzzer.

Grossman’s photos both underscore a familiar narrative and open frightening new ones. The army of half a million “liquidators” enlisted by the Soviets to secure the area and clean up the worst of the toxic wreckage may have actually amplified the disaster’s effects many times over by stripping metal from abandoned buildings and vehicles and selling it for scrap, effectively poisoning an unknown and probably significant amount of the Soviet steel and aluminum supply. Grossman’s shots, particularly of the interior of homes and municipal buildings in the area, reconfirm this deadly harvest. The same applies to the random bundles of metal beams and building materials lying around, seemingly for the taking (let’s hope that a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand years from now, when all this material is practically still as deadly as it is today, that people will know to leave it where it is).

But that’s been documented elsewhere. What Grossman has to offer that’s new is the disaster site as it exists today. The concrete “sarcophagus” built to contain the most toxic part of the reactor complex looks like a crack house, as if a good snowstorm would be enough to cave it in. Grossman’s shots of the skeleton structure for a fifth reactor, abandoned in the wake of the meltdown, are chillingly ironic. Even more chilling is a look at what’s left of the control room for Reactor #4, juxtaposed against another control room at the site that wasn’t consumed in the initial blaze. Cheapness and a cynical disregard for maintenance leap from the dust and fading plastic: how many other reactors like this are there in the world, and why haven’t they been shut down yet?

Grossman’s photos of the surrounding area show a ghost town. There are a couple of low-rent memorials; homes where the only things left are old shoes and beer bottles; a preschool full of decaying, murderously radioactive stuffed toys; an abandoned hospital, a recreation center and sleepaway camp for children. The implications are extreme: perish the thought that this could have happened in the summer and subjected even more children to the consequences. The official Soviet report of the health effects of the disaster mirrors the coverup of the early days: we’ll probably never know the full amount of casualties. The World Health Organization estimates that cancers caused by radioactive poisons released at Chernobyl killed a million people worldwide, a shocking number tempered by the WHO’s notoriously alarmist predictions. And yet, for the reliably pro-industry WHO to come up with such a staggering estimate could well indicate that the death toll so far may be even higher.

And will be in the decades and centuries to come. There are two “sons of Chernobyl,” as they’re called in Russia, on the way. The contaminants in the water table inching toward the Black Sea are expected to reach there in thirty years or so. There’s also the threat of forest fires in the area. Over the past decades, fire crews have routinely been sent into the forest there to hose down the soil to help prevent the kind of conflagration that could literally rekindle the catastrophe. Almost thirty years after Chernobyl, more than half of all wild mushrooms in Germany, thousands of miles away, remain too contaminated with nuclear toxins for human consumption. At least the Germans had the sense to make it illegal to harvest those mushrooms, or, for that matter, to sell wild game meat.

Meanwhile, the United States and other nations continue to allow the importation of vehicles and products from Japan. What’s even more troubling, of course, is that the Fukushima disaster released more lethal radioactive contaminants than every previous nuclear meltdown – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, LP-1 in Idaho and Oak Ridge in Tennesee – plus the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs, plus every atom bomb test and nuclear leak in history, COMBINED. In simpler terms, the world became more than twice as deadly on March 11, 2011. Levels of nuclear contamination in Tokyo, a hundred miles from the Fukushima disaster site, are so high that if that the city was in the United States, it would be off limits not only to human habitation but also to human traffic: the danger of spreading those toxins via car and truck tires is considered too high to risk in this country.

The Japanese response to Fukushima in many ways was the same as the Soviets’ was to Chernobyl. According to an official Japanese government website that was abruptly taken down about a week after the Fukushima calamity, only forty people were killed by the meltdowns there. But while high levels of toxins as deadly as those released at Chernobyl continue to drain into the Pacific – whether the result of leakage, deliberate dumping, or both – the carnage left in the wake of Chernobyl may only be a small fraction of the toll Fukushima may ultimately claim. Can anybody say “global extinction event?”

Bad News for Books

In a move straight out of 1984 (the book), Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has just signed into law a bill requiring any bookstore selling “sexually explicit materials” to register with the state. According to Publishers Weekly, stores will have to pay a $250 registration fee. Failure to register is against the law.

According to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the law is so broad that it could be applied to a mainstream novel, for example, the latest Danielle Steele.

Just in case you were wondering, Tipper Gore had nothing to do with this.

And in what looks like a blatant antitrust violation, amazon.com now requires that all print-on-demand books sold on their website be manufactured through their proprietary on-demand printer, whom they recently purchased to compete with Ingram Book Distributors’ popular Lightning Source supply system. This is especially disconcerting since amazon is a major source of sales for small or independent publishers whose books are kept on disc and printed as orders come in, rather than being manufactured and stored in a warehouse.

[postscript – good news on both fronts – the Indiana law was overturned and amazon backed down, allowing freedom of choice for small publishers