What I’m Reading and Listening to

“We love only heroes. Glorious
death in battle. Scaling walls, burning bridges behind us, destroying
all ways back. All retreat. As if
some things were fixed. As if the moon
would come to us each night (&
we could watch
from the battlements). As if
there were anything certain
or lovely
in our lives.”

— excerpt from “THE DEATH OF NICK CHARLES” by Amiri Baraka (available in the great anthology BLACK VOICES)

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I have been listening all day to an old time radio program called CRIME CLASSICS. From the 1950s it is absolutely riveting half hour based shows, that dramatize infamous places in history. It dramatizes our crimes. From Lizzie Borden to Billy the Kid to others who I have never heard of. It tells of places deep and dark and devious, that can only accurately be called the human heart. It is brilliantly directed/produced by Elliot Lewis, written by Morton Fine and David Freemen, and captivatingly introduced by Lou Merrill portraying Thomas Hyland and performed by some of the best radio actors of the day, from Paul Frees to William Conrad to Bill Johnstone.

I don’t know how to sell someone on audio dramas, anymore than I know how to sell someone on reading. To me it’s analogous to having to sell someone on breathing or sex. It is something people should be, of their own volition, racing toward… racing to do, racing to consume.

Audio dramas, the best of them, are such a pure medium. Such an interactive one, while still being a completely solid vision/narrative.

And Old Time Radio is a very reflective medium, it can teach, by that distance of time, of old oaths that we have turned our back on, and old follies that we have embraced.

I highly recommend this show. And you can find it here. I recommend getting it quickly as the shows have a tendency to disappear as greedy corporations and venal lawyers and their lobbying… erodes the concept of Public Domain… erodes the concept of The Public. It is a great show. Enjoy.

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“His name is…

Will it ever come to me? There is a grand lapse of memory that may be the only thing to save us from ultimate horror. Perhaps they know the truth who preach the passing of one life into another, vowing that between a certain death and a certain birth there is an interval in which an old name is forgotten before a new one is learned. And to remember the name of a former life is to begin the backward slide into that great blackness in which all names have their source, becoming incarnate in a succession of bodies like numberless verses of an infinite scripture.

To find that you have had so many names is to lose the claim to any one of them. To gain the memory of so many lives is to lose them all.”
—From Thomas Ligotti’s GRIMSCRIBE short story collection

I find Ligotti an acquired taste. I’ve read several of the stories in GRIMSCRIBE in his more comprehensive collection, THE SHADOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, and I wasn’t particularly taken by them there. I thought the GRIMSCRIBE selections were the weakest part of THE SHADOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD (an uneven, but worth having anthology, because the stories that do work, four come to mind, are worth the price of admission). But I found the above excerpt from Ligotti’s introduction to GRIMSCRIBE quite compelling.

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“Formal business has certainly decayed in the city centre, with empty shops, boarded-up office blocks. Maybe a Black guy will buy a shop and start selling pap, the local food, but there’s been no boom of Black businesses- prices are still high, and because of the Group Areas Act it’s mainly Asians who own the shops and warehouses. There are plenty of traders and hawkers in the streets now, ladies doing other ladies’ hair for money and services like that. There are big working-class taxi ranks because the public transport is so bad. But the general economic trend is very clear: the rich have got richer and the poor poorer. Under the ANC, South Africa has now surpassed Brazil as the most unequal country in the world. According to Statistics South Africa, the average African household has got 19 percent poorer in the past five years, and the average White household 15 percent richer.”
—Trevor Ngwane discussing the current conditions of South Africa, from Tom Mertes’ A MOVEMENT OF MOVEMENTS.

A few true Words

Profound things I’ve recently read or reread:

“If we live all our life with lies, it becomes hard to see anything if it has nothing to do with those lies.”
– Amiri Baraka (writing as Leroi Jones at the time)

I met him today. Went to hear him speak. It is rare when the fact of a man, lives up to the myth. Mr. Baraka is such a rarity.

He spoke on many things, in his 70s, he spoke on many things, with wit and grace and humor, and something very few people fractions of his age have… with passion.

He was very much still, that young man who sought to, and to great degrees did… change worlds.

Still that Angry Young Man. And I use that phrase in its finest meaning. Not Anger that destroys, but Anger that motivates, that asks of the world to rise from burning beds. Conviction is perhaps the more accurate term, he had the conviction of that younger age of Panthers and Prophets. Of men who did, rather than discussed.

He had more energy in that 70+ year frame than in a whole city of young, confused , direction-less Black men, being herded, and in many cases running headlong, to the prisons and the graves.

The whole wheel of our society is designed around what DuBois called THE MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO, our schools, and entertainment and churches and urban centers and laws and fractured homes, geared to produce ignorant masses.

Why?

Control. Control has always been the fuel and the feast of the tyrannical.

A ruling class, maintains rule by concepts of supremacy and inferiority. A bigoted system doesn’t just prefer, but needs the stereotype of the thug, the menace to society, because that villain… is inferior and is easily dealt with, easily used, easily enslaved, and easily turned against his own and turned to the needs of the state.

But a Baraka, a Shabazz, this nation has fought internal wars of terrorism against the growth of such men.

Because such men, resist stereotypes. And not only do they give the lie to the concept of White Supremacy, not just by proving themselves the equals of their detractors, but they make a very compelling argument for being their betters.

The 1960s is when America, and the world was on the verge of a real… evolution. When we had in our sights the chance for growth, not of our technology, but our humanity, our conscience, our unity, our art, our peace.

And it all hinged on this idea of self determination, from China to Cuba to America to Senegal… the whole world was fighting to grow out of their fathers’ lives. And perhaps into their own.

From the Black Panthers to the Zapatistas, it was all the same fight. A fight against entrenched colonial evils, entrenched slavery. But more than that, it was a fight for evolution.

Instead of evolution however, powers and principalities won the day in the 60s, and crushed globally, but most notably in America that burgeoning social consciousness. And from that point to now, when the rule of law was put on hold, and assassination of the enemies of empire green lit, going on 50 years, we have not evolved. Our technology yes, but not our humanity, not our art, not our dreams, not our conscience.

We largely are stuck mired in the same entrenched hates, and economic folly, and capitalistic wars, of the 60s. In fact it’s worse, because our technology increasingly allows our hates and our ignorance a greater ability… to harm.

So in the 60s when we put down those Angry Young Men who spoke, before anyone else, of community based health care, and community schools, and self-love, and true community/tribal policing, and pan-national unity, when we stopped them because of their dreams and plans of Camelot… what did we stop them for?

Is the average American, whether white or black, any better than his father? I would say we are worse, sure we have toys, but we also have an America on the verge of economic, cultural and societal collapse. We are Germany, poised before the rise of Hitler.

We are poised again for Fascism. Again for Rome.

We have gone backwards since we turned our back on those young men, who pointed us to the future. We murdered them and caged them for life, and allowed the greed of the few, to condemn the many to failure.

Failure for the dream of America. Failure for the dream of something better for our children.

Your racism is a class construct used to make you a tool, make your children tools, and preserve a decaying power structure of Disney and Time Warner and Sony and Shell, to preserve a decaying, fabricated system of lords and serfs, that should have been demolished and strewn to the four winds, five decades ago.

Your racism keeps you… a slave. A nigger. That’s the war we fight. Not of name calling, or ethnicity, but of reason and ignorance. It is a fight to see the whole chess board, not just the piece you sit on. And ultimately it is a fight to evolve, and that cannot happen in a world run by multinational corporations and robber barons, in a world of unchecked capitalism/fascism.

“If we live all our life with lies, it becomes hard to see anything if it has nothing to do with those lies”

That’s why I go out and listen, and hopefully learn from these women and men who still speak the truth.

I have some hopes, that the word, in an age of orbital nuclear weapons and designer diseases… I have hope… that all of it, all of it, all the lies, all the powers, all the principalities, can begin falling like dominoes. Knocked down by men and women… who will never cease speaking… a few true words.

[p.s. Many of Mr. Baraka’s books and plays have long been out of print. He’s making them available for purchase through his recently setup website. I of course highly recommend supporting him, and owning his books. You can view his site here.]