Kabir Jayanti

Today, June 15, is Kabir Jayanti, the birthday of the mystic poet Kabir. It’s an official holiday in the state of Himachal Pradesh in India. Kabir was born in 1440 and brought up in a family of Musalman weavers. Stories about his upbringing abound, some claiming that he was born from a bouquet of flowers, and some that say he was born from a boil on his mother's hand. However he came into the world the child was named Kabir and was known to have all manner of mysterious powers. Upon his death in 1518, his body turned back into flowers. Kabir is best known as a poet, and is generally celebrated as a literary, than a religious celebrity. His writings remain well known and widely taught among Sikh educated classes. The Kabir Panth ("Path of Kabir"), a religious community that recognizes him as its founder, numbers nearly 10 million people over north and central India.
Go read some Kabir poems! Why not? Or, you could always listen to Paul Auster read them to you.  

Friend, Wake Up! Why Do You Go On Sleeping?

Friend, wake up! Why do you go on sleeping?
The night is over— do you want to lose the day
the same way? Other women
who managed to get up early have
already found an elephant or a jewel...
so much was lost already while you slept... and that was so unnecessary!

The one who loves you understood, but you did not.
You forgot to make a place in your bed next to you.
Instead you spent your life playing.
In your twenties you did not grow because you did not know who your Lord was.
Wake up! Wake up! There's no one in your bed— 
He left you during the long night.

Kabir says: The only woman awake is the woman
who has heard the flute!

Scale of the Universe

This is beyond cool: the Homunculus Nebula and Quantum Foam together again. Scale of the Universe created by Cary and Michael Huang. Open it when you've got some time to kill.

Billboards

Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss has teamed up with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to present her photography in a uniquely powerful way. The Museum has rented more than fifty commercial billboards throughout Philadelphia to serve as exhibitions of Strauss’ photographs, primarily photos of poor and working class people throughout the United States.

Commuters exiting the West Entrance at 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia see a billboard with no corporate logos, no slogans, nothing to sell, just a photo of a homemade plywood sign that reads “Don’t Forget Us” in red spray paint, made by a Louisiana resident living through the after effects of the BP oil spill.

Another billboard shows a shabby alleyway between the row homes of the 6200 block of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia where more than 60 homes were destroyed during a famously violent confrontation between the MOVE organization and the Philadelphia City Police. Hard to imagine, but the city is currently full of these stirring images.

It's a fascinating and timely project. You must read more.

Haymarket

Hard to believe that the timing is a coincidence. Today, November 11th, marks the 123rd anniversary of the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs - eight anarchists and labor organizers who took part in the struggle for the 8 hour work day and the May Day uprising in Chicago in 1886.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (Now the AFL) began loudly calling for a great movement to win a national 8-hour workday. The plan was to spend two years urging all American employers to adopt a standard 8-hour day, instead of the 10- to 16-hour days that were then prevalent. Beginning May 1886, all workers not yet on an 8-hour schedule were to cease work in a nation-wide strike until their employers met the demand.

Accordingly, on May 1 of that year great demonstrations erupted across the country. The largest was in Chicago, where 80,000 people marched, much to the alarm of Chicago's business leaders who saw it as a foreshadowing of "revolution," and demanded a police crackdown.

A mass meeting was called for the night of May 4, 1886 in the city haymarket. A large force of police arrived to demand that the meeting disperse, and someone, unknown to this day, threw a bomb. In their confusion, the police began firing their weapons in the dark, killing at least four in the crowd and wounding many more.

In the aftermath of the event, unions were raided all across the country. The Eight-Hour Movement was derailed and it was not until passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1935 that the 8-hour workday became the national standard, as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal.

Albert Parsons and seven others associated with radical organizations were prosecuted in a show trial. None were linked to the bomb thrower, and some were not even present at the time, but the charges against them alleged that their public criticism of corporate America, the political structure, and the use of police power against the working people, inspired the bomber.

Governor John Peter Altgeld subsequently found the trial to be grossly unfair. On June 26, 1894, Altgeld pardoned those defendants still alive and in prison; but five of the martyrs had already been hanged, on November 11, 1887, and one was dead of an apparent suicide.

In July 1889, a delegate from the AFL attending an international labor conference in Paris, urged that May 1 of each year be celebrated as a day of labor solidarity. With the notable exception of the United States, workers throughout the world now celebrate May 1 as "Labor Day."

From Memorial Day 1950

by Frank O'Hara
                                            Look at my room.
Guitar strings hold up pictures. I don’t need
a piano to sing, and naming things is only the intention
to make things. A locomotive is more melodious
than a cello. I dress in oil cloth and read music
by Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra. Now
my father is dead and has found out you must look things
in the belly, not in the eye. If only he had listened
to the men who made us, hollering like stuck pigs!

A Poem Occasioned by the Bitterness of Watching a Pathetic Election Campaign in which Candidates Mouth Only Trivialities While the World Goes to Hell

Have You Killed Your Man for Today?

by Kenneth Patchen

In these hands, the cities; in my weather, the armies
Of better things than die
To the scaly music of war.

The different men, who are dead,
Had cunning; they sought green lives
In a world blacker than your world;
But you have nourished the taste of sickness
Until all other tastes are dull in your mouths;
It is only we who stand outside the steaming tents
Of hypocrisy & murder
Who are "sick" —
This is the health you want.

Yours is the health of the pig which roots up
The vines that would give him food;
Ours is the sickness of the deer which is shot
Because it is the activity of hunters to shoot him.

In your hands, the cities, in my world, the marching
Of nobler feet than walk down a road
Deep with the corpses of every sane & beautiful thing.

Photo by D-K-D. Thanks!

Victor Jara

Today is the birthday of Víctor Jara, the Chilean teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist.

Jara was born in the town of Lonquén, near the city of Santiago. His family was poor and his parents were illiterate. By the age of 6, Jara's father had left the family, leaving his wife to raise the children. Amanda Jara insisted that her children receive an education and taught them to play piano and sing as well as read and write.

Jara's mother died when he was 15. He moved into a seminary, studying to become a priest, but after a couple of years he became disillusioned with the Church and joined the army before returning to his home town to pursue interests in music and theater. Jara was deeply influenced by the folklore of Chile and Latin America and was particularly inspired by the work of Violeta Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and the poet Pablo Neruda.

He became greatly involved in the Nueva Canción movement of Latin American folk music, releasing his first recording in 1966, and by 1970 had become an important musical figure, his songs drawing on a combination of traditional folk music and left-wing political activism. He supported the Unidad Popular coalition candidate Salvador Allende for the presidency of Chile, taking part in the campaign through volunteer political work and playing free concerts. Jara composed "Venceremos," the theme song of the Unidad Popular. He was a key participant in the cultural renaissance that swept Chile after the election of Allende, organizing cultural events that supported the country's new socialist government.

On September 11 1973, Chilean troops under the command of General Augusto Pinochet mounted a coup against the Allende government. Jara was seized and taken to a large sports stadium. He was held for four days, deprived of food and sleep. He was tortured, and his hands were broken by soldiers who ordered him to keep playing the guitar. At some point, probably on September 15, Jara was taken to a deserted area and shot, his body dumped in a road on the outskirts of Santiago. His wife Joan was allowed to retrieve the body and bury it on the condition that she not publicize the event.

Although the military regime destroyed the vast majority of master recordings of Jara's music, Joan Jara managed to sneak recordings out of Chile, which were later copied and distributed worldwide. In June 2008, Chilean judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes re-opened the investigation into Jara's death. José Adolfo Paredes Márquez, a 54-year-old former soldier was formally charged with Jara's murder. On December 3 2009, a massive funeral took place in which thousands of Chilenos filled the streets. His remains were re-buried in the same place he was buried in 1973.

Why We Are Truly a Nation

Just because everything seems to be heading this way...

Why We Are Truly a Nation

by William Matthews

Because we rage inside
the old boundaries,
like a young girl leaving the Church,
scared of her parents.

Because we all dream of saving
the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,
shielding the herd with our bodies.

Because grief unites us,
like the locked antlers of moose
who die on their knees in pairs.

Caution!!

Designer Nicolas Lampert and printer Dan S. Wang recently collaborated on a print to voice their opposition to the Arizona Immigration Bill SB-1070. The print references the look and the phrasing of a 1851 broadside that was created in resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 alerting fugitive slaves and citizens to have a “Top Eye” open for the police who were empowered to detain all “suspected” escaped slaves.

Prints are free if you live in Arizona and are available for sale here if you live elsewhere, though most of the edition has already been hung in the streets of AZ.

The poster reads:

CAUTION!!
MIGRANT WORKERS Of ARIZONA, one & all,

You are respectfully CAUTIONED and advised, to avoid conversing with the Watchmen, Police Officers, and INS Agents of ARIZONA, For since the recent order of Governor Brewer who signed SB-1070, they are empowered to act as

KIDNAPPERS,
JAILERS,
AND
DEPORTERS,

And they have made it a crime to be undocumented in Arizona. They have also been empowered to stop and interrogate every individual in the state regardless of their citizenship status to check for documents. Therefore, if you value your LIBERTY, and the welfare of migrant workers, Shun them in every possible manner and resist the climate of xenophobia in Arizona and beyond.

Keep a Sharp Look Out for
KIDNAPPERS, and have
TOP EYE open.

Make Art Anyway

Arts Corps has been described as the biggest school in Seattle without a building. The non-profit network employs about 30 teachers who bring arts education to kids in underserved neighborhoods. In 2009 they brought arts classes to more than 3,000 students in 35 locations. This year Arts Corps was one of two established organizations selected to run the national pilot project MusicianCorps that has hired 21 teaching fellows to bring music classes to public schools, community centers, parks, and low-income housing across the country.

In Seattle, individual schools have been hacking away at their arts programs for 30 years. A 2009 district-wide survey of how much art instruction kids actually get revealed that local elementary students are lucky to get 10 hours of classes annually. Art and music are taught most, with theater a distant third. Yet there are dozens of studies which demonstrate that with arts education dropouts decrease, kids are more engaged in learning, and students develop learning skills that become habits that they are able to transfer into other aspects of their life.

Musician Corps is a kind of domestic Peace Corps for artists. It hires musicians to teach music, and then uses music as an avenue for civic engagement, community building, and making connections across culture, race and so on. According to Carla Moreno, the Honduran-born musician who is leading the Musician Corps program at Meadowbrook View Apartments in Lake City, “this is what it really looks like when you're serious about arts education for 'underserved' kids. It's the opposite of the classic, quick field trip—this is an immersion, and not just for kids, but for teachers who adjust to make it work, and adjust again, and again.”

The program's national administrators will study and assess its effectiveness in Seattle and the other participating cities - Chicago, San Francisco and New Orleans. They hope to show Congress that an Artist Corps deserves a fully funded place along with such service programs as Teach for America and the Peace Corps.

The Stranger had a terrific article last week about the program, including profiles of the four teachers running programs around the city. The full story is here.

E-Waste

E-Waste is a series of tragic but beautifully shot images from photographer Andrew McConnell. The photos were shot in Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Ghana's capitol city Accra, which has become a dumping ground for computers and electronic goods from Europe and the U.S. The hundreds of tons of waste that wind up here each month become the raw materials for impoverished people to salvage and live on. In places like the U.S., properly disposing of computers is hazardous and costly. Simply dumping them in poor countries like Ghana poses fewer legal problems, but results in all manner of toxic materials being released in the water, the air, and into the bodies of the people who work with them. The photos are eye-opening.

Will Allen

This week, food and gardening visionary Will Allen pays a visit to Seattle. Allen is the CEO of Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based non-profit organization that promotes urban agriculture as a pathway to both physical health and social justice. Early in his career as a farmer within the city limits of Milwaukee, Allen recognized that the health problems of urban populations are a direct result of limited access to safe and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. He pioneered a novel approach to urban farming, using low-cost production and distribution technologies. His two-acre site in central Milwaukee now produces vast amounts of food, both produce and livestock, which feeds more than 10,000 people. Allen won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2008.

Will Allen arrives in Seattle on Feb 3. He will be at the Yesler Terrace Community Center as a special guest for a “Peoples’ Roundtable," a daylong series of events designed to help brainstorm ways that Seattle neighborhoods can improve their health, empower their residents and create access to healthy food. He later visits the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center to speak with youth leaders involved in the Food Empowerment Education & Sustainabilty Team (aka. FEEST). In the evening, Allen speaks for free at the Mercer Middle School Auditorium in Beacon Hill, leading a discussion on food, urban farming and food policy.

More info on Allen and the Seattle events here.

A Dream

A poem for today from Sean Hill.

The State House Aflame 1833

Fire can burn brands
on a slave's skin
as he changes hands
like cattle. And chattel slavery
in a capital city
is as old as fire and man.
Milledgeville's no different.
It's twelve noon,
and the assembly's just adjourned;
the State House is aflame,
and water won't reach the heights
a slave can. Sam's a bondsman.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire…

Without a word from his master, Sam fights the flames.
The townsfolk fearing Sam might slip and fall
from that tremendous height
look on with agonizing solicitude.
As he tears flaming shingles from the steep pitch
white folks move official records, furniture, and money
from under that roof
to a safer place, safer than any
Sam and his issue yet know.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,
We don't need no water…

We cannot pass in silence
over the exemplary conduct
of a negro man named Sam,
the slave
of Mr. Marlow, of this place.
And the legislature
will reward Sam's fast action,
heedless of his own safety, by appropriating
$1,600 for the purchase
of his freedom
from John Marlow.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,
We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn

From the book Blood Ties and Brown Liquor. Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Dr. Gabor Maté

Since the late 1970's Dr. Gabor Maté has worked a staff physician at a clinic in Vancouver British Columbia's Eastside, treating the chemically addicted residents of one of Canada’s poorest urban areas. Maté's detox program Insite was designed to be accessible to injection drug users who are not well connected to health care services – people with mental illness; people with a history of trauma; people who are homeless, live in shelters or live in substandard housing; men and women of Aboriginal descent and people who have tried unsuccessfully in the past to beat their drug addiction. Insite is widely known as a safe place where people can go to inject drugs and connect to health care services.

For years, Maté has loudly and publicly called for a new drug policy paradigm that is grounded in both science and compassion. His stance has gained him a fair number of enemies in Canadian politics, but his program has been unarguably successful, leading to the creation of similar programs in other Canadian cities.

Dr. Maté recently published In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a memoir of his experiences working with addicts. The book is a Canadian bestseller, earning him an invitation to speak to the Canadian Senate, and the undying enmity of the current conservative government in Canada who have launched a legal battle to close the center.

The current issue of Real Change News features an interview with Maté. On Thursday Jan. 14, Dr. Maté will speak at Seattle’s Town Hall. The talk begins at 7:30pm Tickets are just $5 and will be available at the door.

St. Augustine School Chicken Project

I'm DETERMINED to start this year on an optimistic note.

St. Augustine Elementary School in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, NYC, has started their own chicken coop behind the four-story brick school building. 15 hens lay large brown eggs across the street from the community garden where students grow beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and broccoli. It’s all part of a new sustainability program created by the faculty at St. Augustine. What makes St. Augustine’s experiment in urban agriculture stand out is that it’s taking place in an impoverished, highly urban area. The South Bronx, of course, was the poster child of urban blight in the late 20th century. Even today Morrisania, which is in the southwest part of the Bronx, lies in the poorest congressional district in the United States. The population is largely black and Hispanic. All of the school’s students receive free federal lunch; 87 percent live at or below the poverty level.

The chicken project was sponsored by Heifer International, which funds agricultural ventures in poor areas around the world, and Just Food, a New York City nonprofit whose City Farms program works with community gardeners to increase food grown in NYC, particularly in low-income areas where healthy food is scarce. Owen Taylor, the City Farms Training and Livestock Coordinator, came to the school and helped current and former students, staff and community members build a coop and pen out of timber and chicken wire in the Peace Garden behind the school.

“If we can do it,” says Michael Brady, the school’s director of development, referring to St. Augustine’s sustainability efforts, “anyone can.”

More about this story here.

Gladiator

My very good friends lost their son this weekend. It was a gruesome and senseless death.

The Shield of Achilles

by W. H. Auden

      She looked over his shoulder
            For athletes at their games,
      Men and women in a dance
            Moving their sweet limbs
      Quick, quick, to music,
            But there on the shining shield
      His hands had set no dancing-floor
            But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
      Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
      That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
      Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

      The thin-lipped armorer,
            Hephaestos, hobbled away,
      Thetis of the shining breasts
            Cried out in dismay
      At what the god had wrought
            To please her son, the strong
      Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
            Who would not live long.

Full poem here.

Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz died on this day, November 19, in 1942.

Schulz was a writer, poet and cartoonist, born in Drohobycz, Galicia, now Drogobych, Ukraine. Schulz studied architecture at Lvov University and fine arts in Vienna, specializing in lithography and drawing. After returning to his native town, he worked from 1924 to 1939 as an art teacher in the local gymnasium. Schulz was often considered strange, and spent many hours on his own in his parents' house, writing fiction.

Schulz's literary career began in earnest in the 1930's. His first collection of short stories "Cinnamon Shops" appeared in 1934, and a second collection, The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass was published in 1937. (The two titles are available only as a single volume in English, called "The Street of Crocodiles") With these two collections Schulz became celebrated as one of the most original figures of the Polish avant-garde. In 1938 he was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature.

In 1939 Germany invaded Poland, and the remainder of the country was occupied by the Soviet Union. Between 1939 and 1941 Schulz lived in Soviet occupied territory, but when Germany attacked the U.S.S.R., his town was occupied by the Nazis. A Jew, Schulz garnered the favor of a Gestapo officer who liked his drawings and arranged for him to paint frescoes on the walls of his house. However, Schulz's patron had an argument with another Gestapo officer, and to prove a point the officer shot Schulz dead while he was crossing the street.

It has long been rumored that the manuscript of Schulz's last novel, entitled Messiah, still exists in the KGB archives relating to the Gestapo.

Another Beautiful Goddamn Day in Seattle

Help Val

If you've been riding a bike for any length of time in Seattle then you know Val Kleitz. Val is widely recognized as the best mechanic in town, boasting an encyclopedic knowledge of old bicycle technology and a most impressive mustache. It turns out that the beloved Val is battling cancer.

Aaron’s Bicycle Repair in West Seattle and Redline Bicycles, based in Kent, are selling raffle tickets for a Redline 9-2-5 fixed-gear commuter bike to help pay some of Val's suddenly massive medical expenses. Because of Washington's gambling laws you have to swing by Aaron’s in person to buy a ticket, but far-flung folks who want to help can also make donations through this PayPal account. The drawing will be held at Aaron's on Sunday December 20^th with Val in attendance.

At Length Did Cross an Albatross

Yesterday, I touched on Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which a seaman brings a curse upon himself and his shipmates when he needlessly kills an albatross.

That theme leads directly to this powerful new series of photographs by Seattle photographer Chris Jordan detailing the deaths of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll. On these remote islands, thousands of miles from the nearest continent, albatrosses canvas the pacific ocean looking for food for their chicks. Instead of food, they too often find bits of plastic and metal detritus which they feed to their offspring, poisoning and asphyxiating them. Jordan documents this phenomenon as faithfully as possible by moving nothing in any of these tragic photographs. Not a bone, not a feather, not a bottle cap was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These beautiful and terrible images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries.

Coleridge's Mariner kills a single albatross, and that sin results in damnation for all who stood by and let it happen. What happens when we kill generations of these birds? How much will we all suffer for abnegating so much responsibility?