The Daily Bleed: Chumbawamba, Ed Abbey, Billy-club Grappin, Germaine Greer, José Marti, Arturo Giovannitti, Maurice Joyeux, Joseph Ettor, Gérard Duverge, Gustavo López; Timeline, Almanac of Radicalism, Arts, Literature, Authors, Poets, Anarchists... a radical annotated chronology, almanac, anarchist CALENDAR, anarchisten, anarchism, anarchico, anarchiste, anarquista, anarsizm, anarþizme, Anarþist, Anarquismo, Anarchismus, anarchia, anarchisme, anarchizm, anarkisme, libertarian, What Happened on this day, in recovered history January 29
Sing me of wars, sing me of breadlines,
Tell me of front page news,
Sing me of strikes & last minute headlines,
Dress your observations in syncopation
Sing me a song with social significance,
There's nothing else that will do.
It must get hot with what is what
Or I won't love you.
Sing me a song with social significance,
All other tunes are taboo...
— "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance" by Harold Rome (1937)
JANUARY 29
True "Founding Father" of the American Revolution.
FEAST OF OVERDUE EXPECTATIONS.
1527 -- Venice: Printing any book without prior governmental permission is banned.
1688 -- Mystic religious writer Emanuel Swedenbourg lives. Devoted the first half of his life to scientific investigations & then started to explore mystical experience. Among Swedenbourg's most popular books are Heaven & Hell & Earths in Universe. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sweden.htm
1728 -- John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opens. It was the longest running play in British theatrical history before the 20th century. Kurt Weill & Berthold Brecht adapted it as The Three-Penny Opera.
1737 -- True American revolutionist Thomas Paine lives, Thetford, England. Unlike the so-called "Founding Fathers", he dies in obscurity, still a revolutionary.
“Let them call me rebel & welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”
Poet-laureate Robert Southey penned a shamelessly adulatory elegy, "A Vision of Judgment," not only envisioning the King's triumphal entry into Glory but in the Preface condemned Lord Byron as the leader of what Southey deemed a "Satanic" school of poetry.
Byron retaliated in his masterpiece, "The Vision of Judgment," in which George's soul goes on trial at the Pearly Gates. Southey is the real & deserving butt of the satire.
1834 -- US: Chesapeake & Ohio Canal workers riot. Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Jackson sends troops, the first use of American troops to suppress a labor dispute. Posse Comitatus be damned. http://www.strawberryfieldsinc.com/
1845 -- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" first appears, in the New York Evening Mirror. It can be viewed as a comic masterpiece. Imagine a despondent man sitting on a cold December night, lamenting his lost Lenore. A bird trained to talk, or at least to say one word, comes in. Every question that the narrator asks can be answered tragically by that one word.
1860 -- Anton Chekhov lives, Taganrog, Russia (Jan 17 Old Style). In 1904, the year he dies, his last play, The Cherry Orchard, opens at the Moscow Art Theater (his 44th birthday).
"It is hard at first to believe a playwright who comes to us & says, "the schoolteacher & the two stenographers next door to where you live in Fort Dodge — these are the real archetypes."
But until we have learned this — & most of us will never learn it, however many Chekhov plays we see; not really, not deep in the bowels of compassion, but only as we learn things in books — we will never learn to approach life with the beginnings of wisdom: with that wisdom so characteristic of Sophocles."
1862 -- British composer of tone poems Frederick Delius lives, Yorkshire. As a young man he worked for a while as an orange planter in Florida. He is one of the spiritual founders of the "cowflop" school of English impressionist music. http://www.delius.org.uk/
1863 -- US: Quota? Col. P.E. Connor surprises Bannock & Shoshone Indians in camp on Bear River, Utah; Bear Hunter, leader of a Shoshone band, & 224 (or upward to 400) others massacred in four hours, village on Bear River near Great Salt Lick, U-Tah.
The dead include 90 women & children. After the slaughter, some soldiers went through the Indian village raping women & using axes to bash in the heads of women & children who were already dying of wounds.
Of the six major Indian massacres in the Far West, from Bear River in 1863 to Wounded Knee in 1890, the Bear River Massacre resulted in the most victims.
1880 -- Film comedian W.C. Fields (William Claude Dukenfield) lives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We also show him born on 4/9/1879.
"Taint a fit night out for man nor beast..."
1884 -- Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda?: After over 25 years in preparation, the first part of the massive Oxford English Dictionary is published, misleadingly titled ‘A-ANT’. It should, of course have been "an" ant.
1885 -- US: Congress rejects Central American canal treaty with Nicaragua.
1886 -- First successful gasoline-driven car patented, Karl Benz, Karlsruhe.
1888 -- Edward Lear dies in San Remo, Italy, where he traveled to live with his celebrated cat "Foss." http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/
1889 -- US: 6,000 railway workers strike for union & end of 18-hour day.
1895 -- Key West:
FREEDOM TRAVELS IN A CIGAR
He never sleeps, eats little.
José Marti collects people & money, writes articles & letters, gives speeches, poetry readings, & lectures; discusses organizes, buys weapons. More than 20-years of exile have not been able to put out his light...
The workshops are like labor universities. It is the tradition that someone reads books or articles while the others work in silence, & thus the tobacco workers daily receive ideas & news, & daily travel through the world & history & the wonderful regions of the imagination. Through the mouth of the "reader" the human word shoots out & penetrates the women who strip tobacco & the men who twist the leaves & shape cigars on thigh or table.
By agreement with generals Maximo Gomez & Antonio Maceo, Marti gives the order to rise. The order travels from these Florida workshops & reaches Cuba concealed within a Havana cigar.
In a short interview, Cuban anarquista Gustavo López talks about what went wrong in his homeland.
"The Cuban Revolution started out as a libertarian revolution, as in Russia. Castro's own father was an anarchist, & there were many anarchists in his movement, some of whom took part on the famous assault on the fortress. Castro himself was a rebel & in close touch with the anarchists. But when he took power he didn't know what to do with it."
1900 -- US: American Baseball League forms, consisting of Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, & Minneapolis.
1904 -- US: AlphaRalpha, first college "letterman's club" started... hmmmmmmmm...guess which letter we favor....
1905 -- US: Trunk murderess Winnie Ruth Judd, who shot two women friends & chopped the bodies up to transport them to Los Angeles by train in 1931 only to be tripped up by a nosy baggage clerk, lives, Oxford, Indiana. Sent to a mental hospital, from which she escapes at least six times. Probably looking for her baggage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie_Ruth_Judd
1905 -- Viña Delmar lives. American novelist, best known for Bad Girl, a good book according to Bleedster Robert Braunwart.
So now she is not just obscure, but three kinds of obscure. That's quite an accomplishment, for someone who, once upon a time, was one of the symbols of her time....
"I never learned how Viña Delmar's Bad Girl came out, but the title more or less gave it away. The heroine had to decide whether to sleep with her fiancé before they got married, & I am sure that she did, or the novel would have been called Good Girl."
— Charles Willeford, I Was Looking For A Street (1988)
1907 -- US: America leads the world! Forced sterilisation legislation introduced for eugenic & punitive reasons, Indiana State. Source: [Calendar Riots]
1910 -- France: Maurice Joyeux, outstanding figure of French anarchism, lives. Constantly in & out of prison for his militant activities, he opened a bookshop in Paris, "Le Château des brouillards" &, in 1953, Joyeux founded the newspaper Le monde libertaire.
The town of Mexicali is taken, under control of Simon Berthold & Jose Maria Leyva. Tijuana falls next, & the revolution extends to the other provinces.
This libertarian revolution remains little-known, being eclipsed by the exploits of Villa & Zapata.
1912 -- US: During the Bread & Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, police kill Anna LoPizzo.
Nineteen witnesses see an officer named Benoit fire the fatal shot, but strike leaders Joseph Ettor & the poet/anarchist Arturo Giovannitti, three miles away at the time, are arrested & held for eight months as accessories. The city will declare martial law & bring in 22 extra militia companies.
For more than nine weeks, strikers will not waver, even when 18-year-old Syrian worker John Rami is killed, when Annie Welzenbach & her two teenage sisters are arrested & dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, or when 200 police draw their clubs on February 19th & go after 100 women pickets, knocking them to the ground & beating them.
...I want a song that's satirical,
& putting the mere into miracle.
Sing me a song with social significance,
Or you can sing till you're blue,
It must be packed with social fact
Or I won't love you...
Sing me a song with social significance,
There's nothing else that will do.
It must be dense with common sense
Or I won't love you.
— "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance" by Harold Rome (1937) From the 1937 hit musical revue, "Pins & Needles," performed by rank & file members of the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union); "Pins & Needles" was Broadway's longest-running show until "Oklahoma."
1920 -- Italy: Uno sciopero generale è proclamato a Torino. Il governo invia nella città circa 50.000 uomini tra carabinieri, soldati e guardie regie a controllare e reprimere. Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]
1923 -- Film & TV writer Paddy Chayevsky lives. He did a teleplay called "The Man Who Loved Dickens," based on a section of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, about a illiterate man in a South American jungle who holds a lost explorer captive so the latter can read Dickens to him.
1925 -- England: Emma Goldman lectures on "The Bolshevik Myth & the Condition of the Political Prisoners" at South Place Institute, London, her first public meeting in England at which she denounces the Bolsheviks, prompting vocal protests from some members of the audience.
In London, Emma Goldman continues her efforts to expose the Bolsheviks as betrayers of the revolution & violators of civil liberties, a task made more difficult & more urgent by the return of a British trade union delegation that reports favorably on conditions in the Soviet Union.
1927 -- US: Cactus Ed Abbey, American xenophobic anarchist / ecologist / writer lives, Home, Pennsylvania. His uncompromising works include The Monkey Wrench Gang; Desert Solitaire; Hayduke Lives.
"I am a redneck myself, born & bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe & the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors."
1927 -- Second movement of Charles Ives' "Symphony No. 4" premiers, NYC.
1928 -- Canada: Family members visit from the US to see Emma Goldman before she departs for France; a farewell banquet is held in her honor today. As she anticipates writing her autobiography, Emma asks a wider circle of friends to loan her her past correspondence to refresh her memory.
1929 -- Seeing Eye Guide Dog Organization forms. By acclamation the eyes have it.
1933 -- Germany: Mass demonstrations throughout the country as workers protest Adolf Hitler's nomination as German Chancellor. He assumes office tomorrow.
1936 -- US: Sit-down strike helps establish United Rubber Workers as a national union, Akron, Ohio.
1939 -- Australia: Feminist Germaine Greer, the "Untamed Shrew," a ratbag (‘being tuppence in the quid’) lives.
Greer was associated with the Sydney Libertarians till 1966, then went to England.
The Female Eunuch was published in 1970. In an interview published in the literary magazine, Overland, in 1972 she says
"I'm an anarchist still, but I'd say now I am an anarchist communist which I wasn't then."
1944 -- France: Death of the anarchiste Gérard Duverge, aka Fred Durtain, aka Chevalier, following his arrest & torture yesterday by the Gestapo. http://www.ephemanar.net/juin15.html#duverge
1944 -- Germany: The bricklayer, Wilhelm Schmitz dies in prison; the circumstances of his death have never been properly clarified.
Militants in Germany were being arrested & killed by the Nazi's. Michael Delissen from Munchengladbach was beaten to death by the Gestapo in December 1936. Anton Rosinke from Dusseldorf was murdered in February 1937.
Arrests in 1937 brought the number of members of the outlawed FAUD (anarcho-syndicalist Free Union of German Workers) in Gestapo clutches to 89.
It took a year to build the case against them. These male & female comrades were charged with "preparing acts of high treason" & were brought before the courts in January & February of 1938.
The Duisburg lathe-operator, Emil Mahnert, according to the testimony of four other inmates, was hurled from two stories up by a police torturer. Ernst Holtznagel was dispatched to the notorious 999 punishment battalion, where he was killed.
1947 -- Arthur Miller play "All My Sons" opens, NYC (328 performances).
1947 -- Thomas Mann completes his novel Doctor Faustus. (Also on this day, in 1984, Bleedster Bob finishes reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain for the first time.)
1948 -- Chile: Poet Pablo Neruda is granted asylum in the Mexican embassy, Santiago.
"We are Stalinists!
There is our pride! Stalinists!
There is the Legion of Honor of our time!"
1951 -- Scottish playwright, James Bridie, dies in Edinburgh. Among his thought-provoking plays are "Marriage Is No Joke" (1934) & "One Way of Living" (1939).
1952 -- American author Rachel Carson receives the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us.
1954 -- The queen of American TV, & the richest woman in America, Oprah Winfrey lives. She has her own small modest Book Club.
1955 -- Today's issue of The Learned Hand declares, "All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question, & in consequence to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose & its justification." Source: [Calendar Riots]
1956 -- H. L. Mencken dies at 75, Baltimore.
The Arkansas state legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of H. L. Mencken after he calls the state "the apex of moronia."
Mencken got one right, just missed a bunch of others.
1962 -- Filming starts on Luis Bunuel movie "El angel exterminador", Mexico.
1963 -- After giving the world such memorable works such as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Road Not Taken," "The Death of the Hired Man," & "Mending Wall," Robert Frost dies in the heart of his adopted New England, Boston. http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/frost/home.html
1965 -- Split Finger Goofball?: During a concert in London, pop-rock singer P.J. Proby splits his pants on stage, increasing his "naughty" reputation. Next month, he's banned by Britain's ABC theater chain for his new habit of purposely splitting his trousers on stage for dramatic effect.
1966 -- US: Dissidents bomb the Yugoslav embassy & five consulates.
1966 -- US: First Los Angeles Acid Test, sponsored by Paul Sawyer, a Unitarian Minister who provided his church as the stage for the event, with the condition that no LSD be served, as members of his congregation were likely to attend. Sawyer met & became firends with Ken Kesey in 1965 at a talk Kesey gave at San Francisco State University about Sometimes a Great Notion, & later visited him in La Honda; the two spoke together later that year at a new age center in Monterey. Sawyer was on the fringe of the Merry Pranksters, although never part of the inner circle. Author of For My Birthday: Collected Poems 1960-1965.
1967 -- US: Bobby Baker, former secretary to the Senate Democratic Majority, convicted of income tax invasion, theft, & conspiracy to defraud the government.
1967 -- Canada: Terrorists bomb the Yugoslav embassy in Ottawa & consulate in Toronto.
1968 --
Billy-club Grappin
January 29, 1968
France: En attendant la cybernétique, les flics (Waiting for Cybernetics, the Cops), Situationist fly-poster denouncing "Billy-club Grappin" by the Nanterre Enragés.
On the 26th, at the faculty of Nanterre, Dean Grappin sought police to go after anarchist & Enragés demonstators opposing the presence of plain-clothes cops on campus. The police were chased off & cars were torched.
A Union Oil Company drill strikes a deposit of high-pressure natural gas five miles off the Santa Barbara coast.
Millions of gallons of "California crude" are sent spewing over the seaside. Tens of thousands of birds & whole populations of marine life are wiped out before the drilling hole is plugged up with cement, temporarily containing the flow (see also 12 February).
1969 -- Jimi Hendrix & Pete Townshend wage a battle of guitars.
1970 -- William Schuman's "In Praise of [Ben] Shahn" premiers, NY Philharmonic.
1970 -- Movie "The Magic Christian" makes its US premiere, Los Angeles.
1975 -- US: Bomb explosion, set off by the left-wing "Weather Underground" damages 20 rooms in Washington's State Department Building.
1980 -- Schnozzola Jimmy Durante ("Ink-a-dink-a-doo"), dies at 86, New York City.
1980 -- Six Iranian held US hostages escape with help of the Canadians.
1983 -- US: Demonstrators against military aid to El Salvador blockade naval base, Port Chicago, California.
1984 -- US: Variety Club auctions off a dinner with Gloria Steinem & Marlo Thomas. The winning bidder?? Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine.
1987 -- US: No Bang?: William J. Casey, ends term as 13th director of CIA, with a whimper.
1992 -- Blues legend, writer & performer, Willie Dixon dies of heart failure in Burbank, California. Dixon influenced a generation of musicians, including the Rolling Stones, & is known for songs like "Back Door Man" & "Little Red Rooster."
1993 -- Gustav Hasford dies. Vietnam veteran & author of The Short-Timers (filmed by Stanley Kubrick as "Full Metal Jacket").
"Capital punishment for library violations?"
Vietnam War veteran & author of arguably the best book of fiction to emerge from that war, The Short-Timers. Founder of the the Cafe Cafard.
In 1988 Hasford was arrested in San Luis Obispo for grand theft. He was accused of stealing thousands of books from more than 70 libraries throughout the US & England. Hasford ultimately pleaded no contest to reduced charges of possessing stolen property, paid a fine & shipping charges to return 748 books, & served three months of a six-month sentence.
Alabama screenplay writer sought in connection with 10,000 recovered books
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 21, 1988
"...Officers took a weekend break from the mammoth job of cataloging the pile of books, which measures 27 feet long, 5 feet wide & 5 feet tall, police dispatcher Suzi Goodwin said Sunday."
A sampling of headlines from around the country:
WRITER'S BLOCK: HE FAILS TO RETURN LIBRARY BOOKS
OVERDUE FOR QUESTIONING?
BOOK 'EM, DANO!
FULL METAL LOCKERS
WILL THEY THROW THE BOOK AT AUTHOR?
WRITER TO BE IN FULL METAL CELL
[ More Details, click the helmet ...]
1994 -- México: Mexican rights group accuses the army of disappearances & torture in Chiapas.
1994 -- Bolivia: government says its 1980 military coup was financed by drug dealers.
1996 -- France: Bowing to massive international pressure, Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Jacques Chirac orders an early end to a planned series of French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
1996 -- England: Four women Ploughshares activists cause millions in damage in Warton, disarming a British Aerospace F-16 fighter jet destined to be sold to Indonesia for use in its illegal occupation & genocide of East Timor. The women were later acquitted of all charges on the grounds of preventing a greater crime.
1996 -- John Terence Reese, bridge master, dies at 82.
2000 -- Switzerland: Police fire tear gas at World Economic Forum protesters, Davos.
2002 -- England: Chumbawamba's tune turns the tables on US car giant
Anarchist band sell song to General Motors for $70,000 — but give the money to activists' campaign against the firm
It is the world's biggest car-maker, boasting a turnover of £120 billion last year. Sales of Vauxhall & Pontiac cars have propelled General Motors to the top of the auto industry. So when executives heard a song called 'Pass it Along', they immediately wanted to use it as the sort of 'youthful hip' tune that perfectly suited the image their new adverts sought to reinforce.
But what they didn't know was that the British band in question — Chumbawamba — were lifelong anarchists opposed to big corporations like GM.
IndyMedia said it would use some of the money for 'corporate-jamming actions', publicising the flaws of firms such as GM. At CorpWatch, the money is powering an internet campaign against GM & corporate globalisation.
2002 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader George Dubya Bush calls Iraq, Iran & North KoreaIkea an "axis of evil."
2003 --
Australia: Airports begin using electronic photo-matching (of faces to passport photos).
2006 -- Korean neo-Dadaist video artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) dies, Miami, Florida. http://www.paikstudios.com/
3000 --
A Prayer for the Traveler
by Edward Abbey
May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into & above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples & castles & poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch & monkeys howl, through miasmal & mysterious swamps & down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes & pinnacles & grottos of endless stone, & down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come & go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful & more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes & disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
— Ed Abbey
Anti-Authoritarian / Anarchist Encyclopedia
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Venice: Printing any book without prior governmental permission is banned.
— from "In defense of the Redneck", Abbey's Road
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxrWz9XVvls
Anti-Authoritarian / Anarchist Encyclopedia
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