v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Mantana Roberts Solo

Mantana Roberts Solo at Soundcloud

 

solo l train/manhattan 1130pm by Matana Roberts/solo space

Sun Ra

Sun Ra Solo

Ordering Hits

From Stephen Walt's blog:

All told, this has not been a good month for war criminals, international terrorists, and tyrannical despots. To be specific: Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, Ratko Mladic has been captured in Serbia, Muammar Qaddafi's forces are gradually wilting (and it's hard to imagine that the Qaddafi family will ever be regarded as legitimate again), and the protests against the Assad regime in Syria continue despite repeated acts of repression.

Which tells you why it's nice to be the leader(s) of a great power. When you're the head of a relatively weak group like Al Qaeda, you have to stay hidden and hope you don't get found. If you're a fugitive from justice from a weak country like Serbia, you don't have much choice but to hide out. And if you're the ruler of an oil-rich but otherwise weak country like Libya, you have to worry that stronger powers might suddenly decide that it's time to overthrow you.

But if you're the leader of a great power like the United States (or some others), you can order the illegal invasion of other countries, torture suspected terrorists, conduct drone attacks and targeted assassinations on the territory of other sovereign nations, and cause -- directly or indirectly -- the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. And when you leave office, nobody will investigate you for possible war crimes, or interfere with your leisure time (though you might have to alter your travel plans occasionally). You can kick back, write your memoirs, and make the occasional snarky speech criticizing your successors. Being the dominant world power has certain downsides to it, but it's pretty easy to understand why nobody ever campaigns for president saying their goal is to make America #2.  

I just worry that we'll keep doing things that will take us there anyway.

More Stalinist

From CounterPunch:

Seldom has any country been as dependent on another as Israel is on the United States, and never in American history has the United States been as servile towards another country as it is towards this beneficiary of its diplomatic, economic and military largesse. Are geopolitical considerations the decisive factor joining the United States and Israel or is American domestic politics to blame?

These are not mutually exclusive options; the difference is one of degree. It bears mention too that domestic and international considerations interact, and that circumstances are always in flux. This is why there is no simple answer to the question. However, at particular moments in the history of American, Israeli and Palestinian relations, the present one especially, the question becomes more tractable.

For now, it is looking increasingly like the domestic politics hypothesis is the winner; indeed, the Israel lobby now seems so powerful that it gets its way regardless of the demands of empire. That may be so, but I would hazard that the jury is still out and that, for the time being, it will have to remain out, thanks to Barack Obama. Outrage at Israeli depredations, within the Jewish community and in the larger political culture, could have forced his hand. So far, though, despite some heroic efforts, there has not been enough of that forthcoming. But the future remains open; and the forces of justice and peace are gaining strength.

Domestic considerations, real or imagined, were not always as constraining as they now seem to be. There was a Zionist lobby before Israel became a state, but it was hardly a significant factor in American diplomacy until widespread awareness of the extent of the Nazi Judeocide emerged in the final years of the Second World War. Neither was Zionism of much interest to American Jews. That situation changed in the post-War period. Nevertheless, throughout the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and indeed until the 1967 War that brought all that remained of Mandate Palestine under Israeli occupation, U.S.- Israel relations were not qualitatively different from, say, U.S.-Ireland or U.S.-Italy relations -- cases where domestic considerations also weigh heavily.

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Huang Yong Ping

Huang Yong Ping, Leviathanation, 2011

From ArtForum:

Dominating the main part of the gallery is Huang Yong Ping’s Leviathanation, 2011, a life-size train carriage with a gigantic fiberglass fish head mounted on the front, out of which sprout stuffed animals. Adjacent, in a work by Wang Du, a three-wheeled bicycle, of the kind often seen in Beijing loaded with objects to be recycled, has been stacked over twenty-one feet high with full Coca-Cola bottles. It is an absurdist representation of contemporary consumer culture, a spectacle created from the commonplace. The other works are not as gigantic; oddly juxtaposed are a large-scale painting by Yan Peiming in the gray tones he often favors for his work and a video of Yang Jiechang tautly shooting arrows at an oil painting on which the camera is mounted. Viewers have to watch the artist repeatedly reload, aim, and fire as if directly at them. The film shudders as every arrow hits.

Scott-Heron gone but not forgotten

From The Guardian:

The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron – best known for his pioneering rap The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – has died at the age of 62, having fallen ill after a European trip.

Jamie Byng, his UK publisher, announced the news via Twitter: "Just heard the very sad news that my dear friend and one of the most inspiring people I've ever met, the great Gil Scott-Heron, died today."

Scott-Heron's spoken word recordings helped shape the emerging hip-hop culture. Generations of rappers cite his work as an influence.

He was known as the Godfather of Rap but disapproved of the title, preferring to describe what he did as "bluesology" – a fusion of poetry, soul, blues and jazz, all shot through with a piercing social conscience and strong political messages, tackling issues such as apartheid and nuclear arms.

"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks', which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," Scott-Heron wrote in the introduction to his 1990 Now and Then collection of poems.

He was best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the critically acclaimed recording from his first album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, and for his collaborations with jazz/funk pianist and flautist Brian Jackson.

In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, first recorded in 1970, he issued a fierce critique of the role of race in the mass media and advertising age. "The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people," he sang.

He performed at the No Nukes concerts, held in 1979 at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organised by a group called Musicians United for Safe Energy and protested against the use of nuclear energy following the meltdown at Three Mile Island. The group included singer-songwriters such as Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt.

From the NYT:

But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.

Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.

That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”

Headless

Vallejo Nocturno 2011- decapitated in NYC

Obstinate stance-Israeli expansionism

From Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog:

The reason Israel has to go back to 1967 borders is that the annexation of territory from a neighbor through warfare is illegal according to the United Nations Charter, which is a treaty to which Israel and the United States are both signatories. ‘Greater Israel’ apologists attempt to get out of this difficulty by saying that countries used to conquer land away from their neighbors all the time. This is a bogus argument, since countries used to do a lot of things, including sponsor the slave trade; Britain even insisted on China allowing the sale of opium in the early 19th century. The world changed when World War II ended and the countries of the world established the United Nations to forestall any recrudescence of Axis techniques of conquest and rule. If Israel does not believe in the UN Charter, it should renounce its UN membership.

It is not just the UN Charter. The Hague Agreement of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949 forbid a power occupying enemy territory in war time from annexing it or in any way changing the life ways of its people.

Another bogus argument the Greater Israel expansionists trot out is that the UN Charter only forbids the acquisition of territory from other countries, and the Palestinians did not have a country, and so they are fair game. This argument is morally despicable, since the Israelis made the Palestinians stateless, thwarting the intention of the League of Nations that Palestine become a state; and now they are using the abjectness and statelessness as an argument that Palestinians can be stolen from at will. But the argument is also incorrect. Both the League of Nations and the UN made it perfectly clear that they intended that the Palestinians have a state in the future, so in preventing this from happening the Israelis are defying international law. The 1947 UN Partition Plan, the legitimacy of which the Israeli government says it recognizes, awarded Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians. So it is not true that these territories are no-man’s land or that there is no legal framework for their people’s existence, such that anyone could enslave them or expropriate them at will.

Netanyahu’s argument for not going back to 1967 borders is that it is inconvenient. He says that the 1967 borders are indefensible. This assertion is a logical fallacy, known as special pleading. You can’t launch a war and annex your neighbor’s territory because you fear that your own presents security challenges. Lots of countries are unhappy with their borders. Saddam Hussein annexed Kuwait in 1990 in part because he felt that the British had erred in not giving modern Iraq a deep water port, which made Iraq ‘indefensible’ and put it at an economic disadvantage. Pakistan believes that its failure to secure the headwaters of the Indus Valley rivers in Kashmir in 1947 puts it at a permanent disadvantage vis-a-vis India and makes the country overly vulnerable (‘indefensible’). Netanyahu’s immoral argument that a country just has to take by main force whatever it feels will make it more secure is astonishing and is a standing danger to world peace if it were taken seriously by other countries.

A Choice

From Stephen Walt's blog:

But the important part of the speech was when he told AIPAC what everyone knows: Israel and its die-hard supporters here in the United States have a choice. Down one road is a viable two-state solution that will guarantee Israel's democratic and Jewish character, satisfy Palestinian national aspirations, remove the stigma of looming apartheid, turn the 2007 Arab Peace Plan into a reality and ensure Israel's acceptance in the region, facilitate efforts to contain Iran, and ultimately preserve the Zionist dream. Down another road lies the folly of a "greater Israel," in which a minority Jewish population tries to permanently subjugate an eventual Arab majority, thereby guaranteeing endless conflict, accelerating the gradual delegitimization of Israel in the eyes of the rest of the world, handing Iran a potent wedge issue, and making the United States look deeply hypocritical whenever it talks about self-determination and human rights.

The speech also tells you how much Obama has learned since taking office. After being repeatedly humiliated by Netanyahu and the lobby ever since the June 2009 Cairo speech, Obama has learned that he can't take them on directly. By necessity, therefore, he's now relying on the indirect approach. His strategy is to keep pointing out what is palpably obvious: the alternative that Netanyahu and AIPAC propose is simply not going to work, and the costs of trying to pursue it will only increase with time. And because this argument has the merit of being true, more and more people are going to be convinced by it.

It would be better, of course, if a great power like the United States could use its considerable leverage directly, in order to bring the parties to an agreement.  Indeed, it would have been far, far better had the U.S. done so during the Oslo peace process, instead of acting like "Israel's lawyer."  But given political realities in the region and the lobby's continued influence here in the United States, what Obama did yesterday was probably the best one could hope for.   I doubt it will be enough, but it was better than I expected.

 

David Zhai and Alexis Burson

David Zhai and Alexis Burson