Bobby Bridger :
My relationship with Rod Kennedy in four acts

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Kerrville was a great vision that all of us involved in Texas music shared, but — ironically — one that only someone of Rod’s unique talents as an impresario could actualize.

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Rod Kennedy. Photo by Merri Lu Park / Kerrville Folk Festival Staff Photographer.

By Bobby Bridger | The Rag Blog | April 24, 2014

Rod Kennedy, 84, died Monday, April 14, in hospice care in Kerrville, Texas. Kennedy founded the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1972 and, as the Austin Chronicle wrote, “managed to grow his tiny festival into one of the behemoths of the industry, an annual 18-day event that predates most modern music festivals…” Renowned singer/songwriter, author, actor, and playwright Bobby Bridger was with Kennedy from the beginning and performed at Kerrville for 26 straight years.

HOUSTON — In early March 2014, Dr. Kathleen Hudson of Schreiner University in Kerrville sent me a photo of my old friend Rod Kennedy on Facebook. I contacted her immediately and told her I thought Rod looked like the years were finally catching up with him. She agreed and suggested I try to see him as soon as possible. Kathleen was kind enough to arrange a lecture in her creative writing class for me so that I could have an excuse to be in town and “drop in” on Rod rather than have it appear I was rushing to his deathbed for a final visit.
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Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer
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METRO | Exclusive Bruce Melton report on critical sea level rise at Padre Island leading to significant beach loss.
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METRO REPORT | Bruce Melton : Critical sea level rise on Padre Island

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Sea level rise is accelerating. At some point, our barrier islands will cross a disintegration threshold and begin to disappear. Because every mile of every beach is created differently, we will see some beaches begin to suffer sooner than others.

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October 19, 2013, Padre Island National Seashore, low tide, Mile Marker 55 (50 miles beyond the four-wheel drive only sign). The seaweed drift marks the highest extent of the most recent high tide. The beach is basically impassible during high tide. This was the greatest erosion observed on the National Seashore this day. Photos (c) Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

By Bruce Melton | The Rag Blog | April 23, 2014

PADRE ISLAND — For over 30 years I have been visiting Padre Island National Seashore, mostly as an official beach bum. My favorite thing to do on this narrow barrier island that protects the lower third of Texas’ coast is drive the four-wheel drive only beach. This place truly is a wilderness, or at least as close to one as we can get in Texas.

By about 2003 it became painfully obvious that sea level rise was causing the beach to shrink; this wasn’t just another natural cycle. In 2007 I began film work for my first sea level rise documentary that included Greenland, and Matagorda and Padre Islands (Matagorda Island is on the Middle Texas Coast and it too is a barrier island). The film is called The Ice and the Sea and can be seen here.
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Ed Felien :
Rap Brown said it: ‘Violence is as American as cherry pie’

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

The right to armed self-defense of civil rights workers in the 1960s has been parodied by white right-wing racists defending themselves against the ‘tyranny’ of a federal government run by a black man.

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H. Rap Brown: “Americans taught the black people to be violent.”

By Ed Felien | The Rag Blog | April 23, 2014

What H. Rap Brown actually said in that speech in Washington D.C. in 1967 was: “I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie. Americans taught the black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary. We will be free, by any means necessary.”

He was talking about a strategy of self-defense for American blacks. Brown was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, and during a short-lived alliance between SNCC and the Black Panther Party, he served as their Minister of Justice.
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Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer
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FRONT PAGE | Bobby Bridger remembers Rod Kennedy, founder and director of the Kerrville Folk Festival.
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Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer
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METRO EVENT | Rag Blog Highbrow Happy Hour with writers Gregg Barrios and Tom Zigal, Friday, April 25, 5-8 p.m., at El Mercado South in Austin.
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Michael James :
To love we must fight: Serving the people mind, body, and soul, 1969-’76

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Through Rising Up Angry, our message, influence, and notoriety ricocheted from kid to kid in neighborhoods across the city and beyond.

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Educate to liberate: Selling Rising Up Angry, Chicago, 1974. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James’ Pictures from the Long Haul.

By Michael James | The Rag Blog | April 23, 2014

[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.]

I spent from 1966 to 1975 working as a radical community organizer. In 1969 I co-founded Rising Up Angry, a newspaper designed to build an organization. And what an organization it built — Rising Up Angry came on the scene with a burst of energy and enthusiasm, with a style that captured imaginations.
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METRO ESSAY | Brendan V. Wittstruck : A view from Mueller

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

The view from the Mueller hill is the physical and conceptual zenith of this exploration into transitional and illicit spaces.

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A view from Mueller. Photo by Brendan V. Wittstruck.

By Brendan V. Wittstruck | The Rag Blog | April 22, 2014

“Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.”

— Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

AUSTIN — By the time I first set foot on the quieted runways of the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, the jets crossed overhead, unconcerned, going about their now customary business at the Bergstrom Airport to the southeast. It was 2005, and Mueller had succumbed some six years earlier to the demands of the jet age and the solidarity of nearly two decades of neighborhood voices. Now its runways lay silent, dark and inviting.
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Ron Jacobs :
BOOKS | On leave from imperial war

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Plainspoken but eloquent, David Anselme’s ‘On Leave,’ is a novel about war; about the soldiers who fight them and the civilians who send them.

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By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | March 22, 2014

[On Leave: A Novel by David Anselme; translated by David Bellos (2014: Faber & Faber); Hardcover; 224 pp; $24.]

For those who were in the military and even those whose friends or family members were, the idea of going on leave brings forth thoughts of drunken revelry, family, friends, and an almost certain regret when the leave is over.

For most soldiers, sailors and the like, the regret is tied to the fact they must go back to their barracks, ship or whatever. During times of war, that regret is usually greater, given that the place the military members must return to is often in the middle of a war.
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Marilyn Katz :
Two decades after Oslo, a look at life in Israel and Palestine

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

While in the Middle East last October, I saw firsthand why ending occupation is so necessary — and why it will be so difficult.

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Until recently, a house for a Palestinian family stood on the roof of this building in Jerusalem. Last summer, the Israeli Defense Force used the city’s strict permit requirements to justify the home’s demolition. Photo by Marilyn Katz.

By Marilyn Katz | The Rag Blog | April 22, 2014

Part one of two.

With the United States-instigated Israeli-Palestinian talks beginning to collapse, pundits left and right are recommending that representatives from all three nations withdraw from the efforts before the situation worsens further.

I have to disagree.

The drama of boardroom negotiations may have dominated front-page real estate. But Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank has consequences regardless of leaders’ next moves — to the lives and livelihood of Palestinians, to Israel’s ability to be “of the Middle East” and a “Jewish, democratic state,” and to America. And these costs won’t just emerge in future conflicts; they also affect our current political processes.
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Bob Feldman :
People’s History of Egypt, Part 22, 2000-2005

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Despite the repressive policies of the Mubarak regime, Egyptians continued to fight for the democratization of their society.

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Riots in Cairo, April 2002. Photo from Al-Ahram Weekly.

By Bob Feldman | The Rag Blog | April 21, 2014

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman’s Rag Blog “people’s history” series, “The Movement to Democratize Egypt,” could not be more timely. Also see Feldman’s “Hidden History of Texas” series on The Rag Blog.]

Despite the politically repressive policies of the dictatorial Mubarak regime during the 1990s, at the beginning of the 21st-century people in Egypt continued to organize and fight for the democratization of Egyptian society.
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METRO | Terry Dyke : Resilience and cooperative urban farming in Austin

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

What we’re doing is a nice, green, eco-conscious bit of ‘walking the walk.’

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Photos from the Cherrywood group of farms by Paige Oliverio.

By Terry Dyke | The Rag Blog | April 21, 2014

AUSTIN — We grow food in our neighborhood. It’s not a huge amount, and there aren’t many of us yet, but we’re learning how to feed each other. For the long term, it is a bid for sustainability, healthy food, community, and local empowerment. Cherrywood Farm is urban agriculture for the people.

At the very least, what we’re doing is a nice, green, eco-conscious bit of “walking the walk” after so much talk about resource limits and chronic mistreatment of Mama Gaia at the hands of industrial capitalism. But it’s also a political act, in the best tradition of lefty liberation. The proposition is this: the more that real people grow real food for each other, the less dependent we are on the food industry, on the petroleum that drives it, and on the wage system that monopolizes our most basic economic activity — the getting of food.
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