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Blind Man with a Pistol: The Evolution of the Modern Police State as Seen by Prison Authors
“What started it?” “A blind man with a pistol.” “That don’t make sense.” “Sure don’t.” — Chester Himes Minorities and most poor people in the inner cities have always lived with the knowledge that (for them at least) the forces of unlawful suppression and misuse of power far too often masqueraded as the forces of […]
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The Doctor Makes His Diagnosis*
I have two cities but only one home that is my mother’s womb with one long umbilical cord that reaches across thousands of frequent flyer miles. I have two apartments and one window filled with pleats of light and a sooty curtain that no matter the color is a checkered gray. I have “an abiding […]
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Art, Truth, & Politics
In 1958 I wrote the following: There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do […]
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One Man’s Spirit
An awesome thing So personal, yet universally A peace it brings To all, the seen and unseen A mighty thing So much a part of humanity Divinity in our being That, at all times, must be seen A powerful thing So simple, yet connected to deity The soul that sings One man’s spirit can change […]
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Homage to Nazim Hikmet
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example —
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Nazim Hikmet, “On Living,” 1947 -
My Very Own Cleaning Lady
I always thought I’d do my own cleaning, never forget the working-class way of Italian American women like my mother who kept a broom beside her front door as if it were a sign that read, “we work hard, we clean hard so wipe your damn […]
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The Mysterious Case of WMD; Or, How the BBC Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
“There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using ‘outlawed’ weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.” — U.S. Department of State, 9 December 20041 “But I repeat the point made by my […]
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Mobilization
For the most part, we go along living without thinking much about the world around us. Things just seem to happen without rhyme or reason. My parents knew that people like themselves were not quite the same as people who had a lot more money, but they didn’t reflect very deeply as to why […]
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The Sykes Anthem
“I’ve always loved George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, those kinds of guys,” said Kevin’s smiling, catastrophically Caucasian father from his overstuffed recliner, as I waited for the boy to come down the wide, oak stairway with the sheets of music he had scribbled his ideas down onto, but which he had mistakenly left upstairs in […]
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Astra & Laura Go to Film Festivals
One of the most pleasant (and, for us, unanticipated) consequences of finishing a film is the chance to travel on other people’s tab. In the coming months, we have invitations to travel and screen Zizek! in venues as far flung as Vienna and New York City, Beirut and Columbia (Missouri, that is), primarily at […]
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End Pieces
She sat her husband down made the confession she stole food from the refrigerator You mean our refrigerator? You didn’t steal nothin’. Lou, I ate a sweet pickle and two slices of bread.The end pieces. That food’s yours, Flo! I bought that for you to eat. I didn’t ask first. You don’t have to for […]
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Exhaustion
if she could use her hands to fasten a button twist a knob scribble a letter to tell me she dreams about tailpipes thirteen parts assembled again and over like a broken dance of two palms stroking rubbery backs fingers bowing to partners swollen with gnarled collapse snapping delicate cylinder joints in place for the […]
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Noon Whistle
Leaping from the edge-of-town factory fist, a machinist, buttoned blue sleeves, steps into the autumn noon light. Sits, back to the smokestack, on an old wooden bench opens wax-paper tuna seedless dark rye, a half-sour. A bookkeeper stretches fingers ’round a flat wide thermos, lentil soup, and a welder, unmasked, sips crimson borcht, red confetti […]
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Filiberto*
La hemorragia de América anclada en tu cuerpo como una sangría en tu alma cáncer de espanto quebrada de llanto canto de dolor y muerte pasajeros cautiverios secuestradas las almas y en ti Puerto Rico se proyecta resurge y reclama el faro de luz negado por Halcones de la noche tú como un rayo […]
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Dylan
[The following was delivered, by Paul Buhle, to an audience of 150 Brown undergraduates preparing to watch the first night of the Dylan special directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 26 September 2005.] In my young political lifetime, from being your age to twice your age, there were three great individual singers […]
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Rubber Soul
what does a rubber worker exhale if it’s the same as what she inhales if she complains to management that the label on the primer is a warning with a skull and crossbones and there’s no ventilation in the building to ingest the souls of the antioxidants the activators and bonding agents if she asks […]
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Counting the after-math
People penned to die in our instant concentration camps, just add water, bodies pushed to the side. Thirst hurts worse than hunger. It swells your brain against your skull. it sandpapers your gut from within. But hunger too makes people mad. Shoot the looters who are grabbing from flooded stores survival for hours more. Baby […]
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A Dream and a Nightmare
Two films, Paheli and Matrubhumi: A Nation without Women, hit theatres in India within weeks of each other. Significantly, both the films, directed by Amol Palekar and Manish Jha respectively, have or claim to have women at the centre of their discourse. In the promos of Paheli, the producer-actor Shah Rukh Khan talked of the […]
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The Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
The Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. By Richard Bermack, Introduction by Peter Carroll. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2005. 120pp, oversize. $19.95pbk. This is a photo book with text, and Richard Bermack is the master photographer of veteran political activists on the West Coast. He has been on the job for […]