METRO | Mariann Wizard asks if planning in SE Austin is controlled by bickering special interests & if minority neighborhoods will be prey for the bulldozer?
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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Gifts from the Great Spirit, tripping in NOLA, leaping forward & following a rainbow, 1975-’77
As the rain poured down and we cradled ourselves in the palm of a giant southern oak, Katy and I shook hands and committed to giving this restaurant thing a try.
Heartland Café patio, Chicago, September 1976. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James’ Pictures from the Long Haul.
[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about — and inspired by — those images. These photos will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James’ Pictures from the Long Haul.]
Our lives became intertwined when I met Katy Hogan in October 1975 on the mezzanine at the Midland Hotel and shared a joint during a Holly Near concert. This was a good thing, one of the best things in my life. The Vietnam War was over. So, too, the rigorous day-to-day organizing and politics of life in Rising Up Angry was slowly coming to a close. I was exploring my next moves.
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Tagged Chicago, Food, Heartland Cafe, Katy Hogan, Memoir, Michael James, New Left, Pictures from the Long Haul, Rag Bloggers, Rising Up Angry, Sixties, Travel
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‘Rake’ is an outrageous, bawdy, Australian legal thriller-comedy
Richard Roxborough is a seriously flawed barrister who represents criminals accused of ridiculous crimes, ranging from cannibalism to cutting off a neighbor’s weenie with garden shears.
Rake is an audacious Australian legal comedy-drama.
[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, Australia and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]
Rake is a very clever and audacious Australian legal comedy-drama that ran for four seasons (2010-2014) Down Under. The first two seasons (16 episodes) are available on Netflix Instant streaming, including this one.
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Tagged Alan Waldman, Australian Television, Criticism, Rag Bloggers, Rake, Richard Roxborough
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Celebrating the ‘Grito de Libertad’ in Bolivia
Joining in the patriotic frenzy with Evo Morales, goose-stepping soldiers, lots of white paint… and, oh yes, the marching bands…
Police marching band does a little goose-stepping on Independence Day in Sucre. Photo from La Razon.
SUCRE, Bolivia — Independence Day in Sucre was the most electrifying day in the Andes since Cochabamba doctors — armed with rocks and in full white-coat-stethoscope regalia — hurled themselves into street battle against the police and the police hurled their computers into bonfires and burned down their own stations.
Preparation for the grand event celebrating the Grito de Libertad began weeks in advance when workers of this White City set up scaffolding for the annual re-whitening of the Casa de Libertad in Plaza 25 de mayo. The paint businesses on Avenida Jaime Mendoza then realized their raison d’être as every home-owning Sucreño within 10 blocks joined the effort to repaint their façades white.
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A left solution to climate change
Climate deniers in Congress, exasperating as they are, constitute the farcical sideshow of a much bigger economic and political three-ring circus known as U.S.A. Inc.
System change, not climate change. Image from BostonSocialism.org.
Climate change is occurring with extreme rapidity. Recent news headlines warn us: “Earth Could Warm 11 Degrees by 2100,” “Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Collapsing,” and “Climate Change Risks Security and Wars” — and this is just the beginning.
Had extreme measures been inaugurated worldwide 20 years ago to sharply curtail reliance on fossil fuels, much of what we are now experiencing — unwelcome temperature change, dangerous storms, droughts, floods, etc. — would have been minimized. But to this day Washington is among the tiny minority of countries that have refused to ratify the basic UN document on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol.
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METRO | Roger Baker reports on “The rise and rise of Austin, Texas” – the suburban explosion & the ever-so-tenuous tech bubble.
Posted in RagBlog, RagBlurb
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Obama’s ‘glass is half-empty’ foreign policy
It is the non-military parts of the Obama speech that peace activists should mobilize around, weak as they are.
President Obama: Pitching his foreign policy? Image from RealClearPolitics.
President Obama has retrenched U.S. global engagement in a way that has shaken the confidence of many U.S. allies and encouraged some adversaries. That conclusion can be heard not just from Republican hawks but also from senior officials from Singapore to France and, more quietly, from some leading congressional Democrats. As he has so often in his political career, Mr. Obama has elected to respond to the critical consensus not by adjusting policy but rather by delivering a big speech — Washington Post editorial, May 28, 2014.
President Obama gave what was framed as a major foreign policy address to a West Point graduating class on Wednesday, May 28, 2014. Many peace activists hoped for a forthright statement on the limits of U.S. power and expressions of humility about the correct role of the country in the world. They should be sorely disappointed.
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The steel hatchet and culturecide
A fable for the unintended consequences of technological diffusion and the many-layered banality of cultural domination.
Cape York rock art. Images from Midnight Oil.
One of my favorite nuggets from an unapologetically liberal arts education turned up in a class in cultural anthropology, which also happened to be my major — one I stuck with even after learning that job prospects in the field were pretty much nil outside of academia and the CIA.
This particular story was even better than the ever-useful “50 words for snow” trope introduced the previous semester. Indeed, it serves as a fable for the unintended consequences of technological diffusion and the many-layered banality of cultural domination.
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Tagged Aboriginal Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Rag Bloggers, Technology, Terry Dyke, Yir Yoront
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PODCAST | Historian, activist & pioneering feminist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Rag Radio
Dunbar-Ortiz wrote the classic ‘Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975,’ recently released in an updated edition.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, May 30, 2014. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.
Our Rag Radio podcast features Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a scholar and memoirist, and a ’60s-’70s activist who played a pioneering role in the early women’s liberation movement.
Listen to or download the podcast of our May 30, 2014, Rag Radio interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz here:
Rag Radio is a weekly hour-long syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist and Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer. The show is recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas. It is broadcast live on KOOP every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) and streamed live on the web.
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Tagged Activists, Authors, Feminists, Historians, Interview, Memoirists, Native Americans, Outlaw Woman, Podcast, Rag Bloggers, Rag Radio, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Sixties, Thorne Dreyer
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BOOKS | A ‘Bohemian’ comic rhapsody
Paul Buhle and David Berger’s graphic history is a fascinating collection of personalities, their lives drawn in a manner equal to the stories they tell.
Bohemians: A Graphic History was edited by Paul Buhle and David Berger.
[Bohemians: A Graphic History edited by Paul Buhle and David Berger (2014: Verso); Paperback; 304 pp.; $16.95.]
Bohemians: A Graphic History is an ideal medium for the history it presents. There is a growing understanding that comics are one of the few art forms considered purely American in origin. Arguably, the other four are the mystery novel, the banjo, jazz, and the musical comedy. I might throw bluegrass music into the mix, but the focus of this review is comics.
The collection of comics appearing in Bohemians is a broad reaching display of the varieties of the art form and the contributors include many new cartoonists along with some well-known artists who began drawing during the 1960s and 1970s underground comics renaissance. Though most is freestyle in form, the artwork in other stories is more linear in form, even using typeset for the word balloons.
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Tagged Bohemians, Books, Comics, David Berger, Graphic Historic, Paul Buhle, Rag Bloggers, Ron Jacobs
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METRO PODCAST | ‘Queen of Austin Weird!’ Thorne Dreyer’s Rag Radio interview with performance artist Aralyn Hughes, editor of ‘Kid Me Not.’
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The negotiated release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl
Public opinion supports Bergdahl but Republicans and neocons are grumbling about his anti-war statements and rumors that he went AWOL.
Still from a video released by the Taliban of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held captive since 2009. Image from TomHayden.com.
After the negotiated release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, I called an old friend who spent years as a POW in Vietnam’s prison camps to ask for his response. Preferring to keep his name out of the papers for the moment, he was following the situation closely. In summary though, here’s what he said:
First, the Pentagon will debrief Bergdahl for as long as two weeks, eight hours per day, assuming they follow protocols used in Vietnam.
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Tagged Afghanistan War, Anti-War GIs, Obama Administration, POWs, Rag Bloggers, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, Taliban, Tom Hayden, Vietnam War
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