Our Daily Bleed...
"The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope,
while the left eye peers into the microscope."
JOHN SAVILLE
Prominent British Marxist labor & economic historian.
INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S BOOK DAY.
FEAST OF ACAN, THE MAYAN GOD OF WINE.
1250 -- The 7th Crusade surrenders to the Muslims.
1725 -- Lover boy, spy, soldier, adventurer, memoirist Giovanni Casanova lives (1725-1798), Venice, Italy.Remembered for his autobiography, which established his reputation as the most prominent erotic hero of the 18th century. In 1760 he fled from his creditors & traveled across Europe. Between 1774 & 1782 he worked as a spy for the Venetian inquisitors of state, ending his last years as a librarian.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/casanova.htm
1792 -- US: First US mint established in Philadelphia.
1805 -- Hans Christian Andersen lives (1805-1875), Odense. Danish writer who combined folk legends with his own great imagination & produced fairy tales appreciated in many cultures.
http://www.solvangca.com/museum/h1.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hcanders.htm
1809 -- Heinrich Hoffman lives (1809-1894). German physician, director of the state mental hospital in Frankfurt am Main & writer best known for Slovenly Peter, the story of a boy with bad manners. The book was written as Christmas gift for his four-year-old son. See also Astrid Lindgren, whose world famous Pippi Longstockings represents anarchistic heroes in children's books in a positive way.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hhoffman.htm
1839 -- US: Hezekiah Niles dies. Journalist, editor/publisher of the Weekly Register, devoted primarily to politics; one of the most widely-circulated magazines in the country.
http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Niles__Hezekiah.html
1840 -- French writer, activist, experimental novelist Émile Zola lives (1840-1902), Paris, France.
1851 -- Joseph Lane (1851-1920), British anarchist, lives. A decade after his death Max Nettlau, who had known him in the Socialist League, wrote in his history of anarchism:I consider him to be the best head English socialism possessed in the years from 1879 to 1889, & I regret that his activity came to an end — not through his fault — in the first months of 1889; a man like him has been lacking from that time to this.
http://www.reocities.com/~johngray/joelane.htm
1861 -- Uchimura Kanzo lives, Edo (now Tokyo) to a samurai family. Japanese religious thinker & critic who would exert an important, formative influence on many writers & intellectual leaders of modern Japan. Died March 28, 1930.
1863 -- US: Bread riots in Richmond, Virginia.
1873 -- France: Anarchiste Luigi Luccheni lives, in Paris, to an Italian mother.Notably, on September 10, 1898, Luccheni stabs the impératrice Elisabeth of Austria "Sissi," in Geneva, using a frayed file, as a symbolic blow against "the persecutors of the workers."
The Swiss courts sentenced him to forced labor. He was found hung in prison in 1910.
1891 -- Saint Max Ernst (1891-1976) lives, Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. Painter, poet.
MAX ERNST
Surrealist painter of Loplop the bird & all he surveys.
Collage by SaintMeister James Koehnline
See Daily Bleed, Saints Gallery page,
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/saints/StMaxErnst.htm
& also the Daily Bleed's St. Max Ernst Ultimate Worksheet at
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/saints/StErnst.htm
1898 -- US: Emma Goldman, during her speaking tour of February-June, is honored at a farewell meeting held by the Committee on Agitation of the Progressive Labor Organizations of Chicago.
1899 -- Ferdinand Félix Fortin lives. French anarchist militant, member of the trade union of proofreaders, manager of The Libertarian Review.
1899 -- US: Emma Goldman spends over a month ( April-May) in Chicago, delivering about 25 lectures.Emma's efforts to speak before a wide variety of trade unions, philosophical & social societies, & women's clubs, are aided by Max Baginski & other German comrades; the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) helps her organize English lectures.
[Details / context]
1903 -- México: A demonstration of 10,000 in Monterrey, Nuero Leon, protesting the re-election of General Bernardo Reyes as state governor, are fired on by federales under the command of Reyes himself. 15 protesters are killed & many more wounded.
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/guerrero.html
1908 -- Italy: In Rome, during a funeral for a worker who died in an industrial accident, confrontations occur with the police, who oppose the procession. Police draw their guns & open fire, killing four & wounding 17.Among the dead is the anarchist militant Paolo Chiarelli. A General Strike is declared, & subsequently, several anarchists are arrested, tried & condemned to heavy prison sentences.
1908 -- Spain: Ramón Vila Capdevila lives (1908-1963; aka "Caraquemada," aka "Jabalí"(le Sanglier), aka "Commandant Raymond"), near Berga. Militant Spanish anarcho-syndicalist & guerrilla fighter.
[Details / context]
1914 -- British actor Alec Guinness lives.
1916 -- France: In Paris, during WWI, Sebastien Faure, with the help of Mauricius (Maurice Vandamme) launches the anarchist paper Ce Qu'il Faut Dire (What Must Be Said). The newspaper elicits a keen interest, despite heavy censorship due to its antiwar views.
1916 -- US: Emma Goldman chairs a public meeting in New York to protest imprisonment of Matthew Schmidt.
[Details / context]
1916 -- England: Marxist labor historian John Saville lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Saville
1917 -- US: Jeanette Rankin, representative from Montana, is seated in the House of Representatives.The first woman elected to Congress & the only member to vote against US entry into both World Wars. Prior to amendment of the US Constitution, Montana was the only state allowing women to vote.
http://jrpc.org/
1918 -- USSR: Volte face, "Major" (in Orwell's Animal Farm) champions the Taylor system in an article in Pravda. Lenin had previously denounced Taylorism as "the enslavement of man by the machine.""Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold."
— Peter Kropotkin
1919 -- Canada: Ban on the IWW (September 1918) because of the Great War to End All Wars is lifted. Two branches are formed in Toronto & Kitchener.
1919 -- Russia: Premier Congress of the Nabat Confederation, April 2-7th, Elizabetgrad (Kirovograd), Ukraine.
[Details / context]
1920 --
Jack Webb — dum-de-dum-dum — lives.Jack Webb did not believe in masturbation. Consequently he was plagued for years by infections resulting from his enormous accumulation of unspent semen. Fearing permanent prostate damage, he finally started visiting a doctor who drained him on a monthly basis. He was careful never to miss one of these appointments. Often he would leave the Dragnet set in the middle of a shoot, looking at his watch & matter of factly announcing that it was time to go get drained.
1925 -- The California Ramblers record "Charleston."
1928 -- Serge Gainsbourg lives (1928-1991). French poet, singer-songwriter, actor & director. Composer of existential malaise, angst, love; sleazy, dissolute dirty mouth of French pop music.SERGE GAINSBOURG
Daily Bleed Patron Saint, August 18, 2003.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Gainsbourg
1929 -- Edward Dorn (d.1999) begins slinging guns.
American poet & teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. Lived in the Pacific Northwest for some years, a mentor & supporter of the musical group Devo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Dorn
http://www.bigbridge.org/bios.htm
1931 -- US: Teenage girl strikes out Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig in an exhibition baseball game in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Source: Scope
1942 -- England: Equal Rights? Joyce Allen is the first woman to appear before CO (Conscientious Objector) Tribunal.
1942 -- US: Two black soldiers & one white soldier shot to death, & five black soldiers are wounded, near Fort Dix, New Jersey in a fight over the use of a telephone.
1943 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Senator Tydings introduces bill to Congress calling for independence for Puerto Rico. Nobody is listening.
1945 -- Poet Anne Waldman lives, Millville, New Jersey.
Waldman was part of the late Sixties poetry scene in the East Village. She ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, & gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work. She became a Buddhist, worshipping with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who would also become Allen Ginsberg's guru.
She & Ginsberg worked together to create a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
1947 -- Songster Emmylou Harris lives, Birmingham Alabama.
1952 --
Anti-anti
France:The Anticoncept is banned by the French film censorship commission.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]
1954 -- Seamus O'Sheel (1886 - 1954) dies. Irish-American bellettrist, poet.
[Details / context]
1958 -- US: San Francisco Chronicle newspaper columnist Herb Caen coins the term "beatnik" (a pun on "sputnik").
1959 -- US: The seven original astronauts are chosen for the Mercury Project.
1959 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Rep. Alexander Celia introduces bill for posthumous pardon for the anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti to Massachusetts Legislature. The petition is denied. It is only 50 years after their execution, when Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Mass. Governor Michael Dukakis proclaims August 23, 1977, Sacco & Vanzetti Day, that any stigma is removed from their names.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcgYwTnBIIQ
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/SaccoVanzetti/databaseEntries.htm
1960 -- US: Nearly 100 student sit-in rs from 19 states attend workshop at Highlander School; Guy Carawan teaches them 1930s labor songs: "We Shall Not Be Moved," "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," "This Little Light of Mine," "We Shall Overcome."
1960 -- ¶ During this month, while drunk, Beatster Jack Kerouac falls & injures his elbow in New York's Penn Station. Still later, in May, while drunk in the Bowery, he falls again & injures his head; Kerouac experiences first bout of delirium tremens.
1965 -- Ken Kesey busted for marijuana first time. We are sure it is the last time, given its addictive qualities — or Kesey would be a heroin junkie or Mall Rat by now.
‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, was a vehicle for Ken Kesey’s anarchist rant against the oppressive conformism imposed by society’s institutions, immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
http://hempfest.org/
http://wild-bohemian.com/kesey.htm
1966 -- Vietnam: 100,000 Vietnamese ingrates demonstrate in Da Nang against US & South Vietnamese governments. Civil unrest spreads to Hue & Saigon. Apparently they did not understand America was bringing them Civilization (ala Ayn Rand) & Democracy (ala CIA, FBI, NSA, etc) & Freedom (largest prison population in the world, death penalty, crime rate, etc).
1968 -- Germany: In the first (& least worst) Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) action, incendiary devices are placed at the Kaufhof & Schneider department stores in Frankfurt: "Well, it's better to burn a store than to run one." — Fritz Teufel
Source: 'Calendar Riots'
1969 -- US: Twenty-one Black Panther Party members are charged with plotting to charged with conspiring to kill cops, bomb five New York City stores, shooting at police & trying to blow up police stations. Thirteen are prosecuted in September 1970. After an eight month trial, the jury took only two-and-a-half hours to vote to acquit the defendants, rejecting the prosecution's crusade to discredit the Black Panthers.
http://www.blackpanther.org/
1970 -- US: Massachusetts enacts a law which exempts its citizens from having to fight in an undeclared war, ala Vietnam.
1970 -- US: Native Americans, including the young activist Leonard Peltier, stage a third attempted occupation of Fort Lawton in an effort to force the city of Seattle to return the land to its original owners. It results, eventually, in Discovery Park, with the Daybreak Star Cultural Center.
http://www.leonardpeltier.net/
http://www.unitedindians.com/
1973 -- Ed Kemper stuffs mother's throat in disposal. Earlier she'd had that sinking feeling.
1974 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President "I Am Not A Crook" Richard M. Nixon is informed by the Internal Revenue Service that he owes the government $271,148.72 in back taxes for the years 1970, 1971, & 1972, plus a 5% negligence penalty of $13,554.44 (see 10 April).It was of course Dick who proclaimed to the nation "I am not a crook."
If this was you — under the three strikes & you're out laws — you'd be doing hard time. He was soon replaced in office by a worn-out Used Car & pardoned.
1980 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Jimmy James Carter signs the "Windfall Profits Oil Tax." Sounds like a song by Seattle songster Jim Page.
...history walkin' on a tightrope line
big money pullin’ on invisible strings
gettin’ into everything
...the banker with the bottomless check
the corporations & the CEOs
& the bottom line is, the profit grows
the money talks, you don’t talk back
they don’t like it when you act like that
but didn’t we
shut it down
didn’t we— Jim Page, "Didn’t We"
http://www.flyingdisk.com/didn't_we.htm
1980 -- England: St. Pauls riots, Bristol.
Source: [Calendar Riots]
1982 -- Falkland Island "incident" begins — England & Argentina attack in the Penguin Islands — the Penguins lose.Oh, to be in England
— Robert Browning, Home Thought from Abroad
Now that April's there.
1982 -- US: Anti-Big Government Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Ronald Reagan authorizes much broader powers for the feds to hide/withhold information on citizens on "national security" grounds.
1984 --"We have taken that question out of the game because it is distasteful in this country."
— Selchow & Righter executive John Nason confirming that the question, "How many months pregnant was Nancy Davis when she walked down the aisle with Ronnie Reagan?" has been removed from the American version of "Trivial Pursuit."
(The answer: two & a half.)
1987 -- Famed drummer Buddy Rich dies from complications caused by a brain tumor.
1990 -- England: Riots in 20 more prisons throughout Britain, following Trafalgar Square & Strangeways.
Source: 'Calendar Riots'
1996 -- Antonio Ortiz Ramirez (1907-1996) dies.Ortiz was a member of the CNT in 1936 during the Spanish Revolution & Civil War.
[Details / context]
1997 -- US: Over 200 citizens show up at a Seattle Department of Energy budget hearing, many in radiation suits & mutant radioactive survivor makeup, & conduct die-ins to protest possible restart of nuclear weapon production at Hanford, Washington.
2004 -- US: US Vice-president's wife, Lynne Cheney, stops reissue of sex novel, Sisters, authored in 1981.
2008 -- England: How-Now-Brown...? A cross human-cow embryo survives a third day after being fertilized at Newcastle University. A director at the Australian Stem Cell Centre said the "99 per cent human" embryo could improve research into human diseases. The creation is called "monstrous" & its later destruction unethical by the Catholic Church (famed for roasting people alive during the Inquisition).
2010 -- Brazil: Land reform activist Pedro Alcantara de Souza is fatally shot five times in the head by two men on motorcycles as he tries to ride his own bicycle in Pará. Souza was shot just hours after a trial delay of the landowner accused of ordering the murder of Dorothy Stang, 73.
2011 -- North Korea: Government cracks down on IT gadgets such as computers & phones amid fears that news about the Middle East & North Africa protests could influence its citizens.
3000 --
The splendor of the stars is not reserved for those who have tickets.
— Max Ernst, "Dream of a Little Girl Who Wanted to become a Carmelite"
3500 --
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