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.
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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To love we must fight: Serving the people mind, body, and soul, 1969-’76
Through Rising Up Angry, our message, influence, and notoriety ricocheted from kid to kid in neighborhoods across the city and beyond.
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.
[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
The view from the Mueller hill is the physical and conceptual zenith of this exploration into transitional and illicit spaces.
A view from Mueller. Photo by Brendan V. Wittstruck.
“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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Posted in Metro, RagBlog
Tagged Austin Growth, Brendan Wittstruck, Liminal Space, Metro, Mueller Airport, Public Space, Rag Bloggers, Urban Development
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BOOKS | On leave from imperial war
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.
[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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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Algeria, Anti-War Fiction, Books, David Anselme, Fiction, French Imperialism, On Leave, Rag Bloggers, Ron Jacobs, Vietnam War
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Two decades after Oslo, a look at life in Israel and Palestine
While in the Middle East last October, I saw firsthand why ending occupation is so necessary — and why it will be so difficult.
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.
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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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Israel, Israeli Settlements, Jerusalem, Katz Palestine Series, Marilyn Katz, Middle East, Palestinian Occupation, Rag Bloggers, Rawabi, Tel Aviv, Travel
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People’s History of Egypt, Part 22, 2000-2005
Despite the repressive policies of the Mubarak regime, Egyptians continued to fight for the democratization of their society.
Riots in Cairo, April 2002. Photo from Al-Ahram Weekly.
[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
What we’re doing is a nice, green, eco-conscious bit of ‘walking the walk.’
Photos from the Cherrywood group of farms by Paige Oliverio.
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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Clever Brit series ‘Life on Mars’ combines sci-fi, 1973 police procedural, and comedy
A Manchester cop in 2006 goes into a coma after an auto accident and finds himself in 1973, where crime solving is very different.
The original BBC version of Life on Mars.
[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, and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]
Life on Mars (the original 2006-2007 UK version) was an extremely clever 16-episode TV series that combined Sci-fi, comedy and 1973 police procedural, complete with 70s style, music and attitudes.
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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Alan Waldman, BBC, British Television, Criticism, Life on Mars, Rag Bloggers, Vintage
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METRO EVENT | Rag Blog ‘Highbrow Happy Hour’ features literary hotshots Barrios & Zigal
Event: Rag Blog ‘Highbrow Happy Hour’
Date: Friday, April 25, 2014
Time: 5-8 p.m.
Place: El Mercado
Address: 1302 S. 1st Street, Austin
Special Guests: Writers Gregg Barrios & Thomas Zigal
Sponsor: Friends of New Journalism
Date: Friday, April 25, 2014
Time: 5-8 p.m.
Place: El Mercado
Address: 1302 S. 1st Street, Austin
Special Guests: Writers Gregg Barrios & Thomas Zigal
Sponsor: Friends of New Journalism
AUSTIN — The Rag Blog is having a party and everyone’s invited! Our special guests will be acclaimed writers Gregg Barrios and Thomas Zigal who will sign books and do short readings from their work. (We’ll also hang, hobnob, and consume adult beverages.)
The event will take place from 5-8 p.m., Friday, April 25, at South Austin Mexican restaurant and venue, El Mercado (“World Peace through Tex-Mex”), 1302 S. 1st St. El Mercado’s food and full bar will be available on a cash basis. Admission is free, though donations to the New Journalism Project will be welcome and Rag Blog t-shirts with original Jim Franklin art will be available.
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Posted in Metro, RagBlurb
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METRO | Life goes on at Austin’s Death Café
Death Cafés are a community-based response to a mass media-plagued modern American culture that has no place for end-of-life discussion.
Image from Death Café Austin / Facebook.
AUSTIN — Death Café is a nation-wide salon movement where local people provide pleasant places and spaces where anyone who has anything to say about any issue related to the last stage of life is welcome to say it.
In Austin on a recent mild Thursday evening it took the form of a small group of interesting, nonjudgmental folks passing a talking stick (actually a bone in this instance… and not a human bone it was pointed out to me) among themselves as they shared food and drink at a coffee shop on North Lamar. Any story, concern, statement or question about passing from this world to whatever was welcome.
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Posted in Metro, RagBlog
Tagged American Society, Austin Community, Beverly Baker Moore, Death and Dying, Death Cafes, End of Life, Metro, Rag Bloggers
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Crimea, Obama, and the nostalgia for World War I
The poet Wilfred Owen had the courage to look reality in the face. What can he tell us?
The poet Wilfred Owen’s World War I regiment. Image from Voices Compassionate Education.
It is fitting that President Obama should quote the poem “In Flanders Fields” while visiting Belgium and invoking World War I history in seeking to rally Europe into a united front against Russia.
There is something thrilling, almost comforting, for the West to return to the rhetoric and certainties of the Cold War – the evil Russian bear against the peace-loving democracies of the West. Suddenly millions of people in America are passionate about a place they had not heard of a few months ago and they still cannot find on a map.
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VERSE | Stronger and More Dangerous
Image from Phawker.
Stronger and More Dangerous:
April 20, 2014
I read it in the newsfeeds,
I hear it all the time:
the marijuana grown today
is not the same as in my prime!
They say it’s much more potent,
with such a heady buzz,
it’s got to be real dangerous…
Well, let me tell you, Cuz,
I hope the stuff is stronger!
Yes, and much more ‘potent,’ too!
The kids are gonna need it
if they’re gonna make it through
the balled-up mess we’ve made of things
from sea to shining sea!
Too long we’ve trod on other lives –
now they’ll grow reefers tall as trees!
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged 4/20, American Society, Mariann G. Wizard, Marijuana, National Weed Day, Poetry, Rag Bloggers, Verse
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