Louis Lecoin, Boris Vian, George Orwell, Cabaret Voltaire, Louise Michel, Marc Pierrot, from the Daily Bleed Calendar, on this day June 23

I’ve come this far to freedom
& I won’t turn back.
I’m changing to the highway
From my old dirt track.
I’m coming & I’m going
& I’m stretching & I’m growing
& I’ll reap what I’ve been sowing
Or my skin’s not black;
I’ve prayed & slaved & waited
& I’ve sung my song.
You’ve slashed me & you’ve treed me
And you’ve everything but freed me,
But in time you’ll know you need me
& it won’t be long.
— a student in the Mississippi Freedom Schools, 1964

JUNE 23

CHANEY, GOODMAN, SCHWERNER
Martyred Freedom Riders, early youth culture heroes.

MIDSUMMER'S EVE: Everyone into the woods at night; stay up all night, sing, dance, make love, worship the sun god in fire symbols, greet the rising sun.

Fairies speak in human tongues on this night; the flower of happiness blooms. Gather flowers & boughs. Large wheels bound with straw are set burning & rolled down hills, etc.

Brittany: PARDON OF THE FIRE. The pagan FEAST OF THE SUN, celebrated until a soldier displayed the finger of John the Baptist in the 16th century. Bonfires & romancing continues, & a "dragon" still lights fires.

England: ANCIENT DRUIDIC MIDSUMMER BALL.

New Orleans: Major Annual VOODOO CEREMONIES, since 1820, with ceremonies since the 1850's held at Lake Pontchartrain.

FESTIVAL OF THE PURPLE VOID.
http://www.thehighwaystar.com/

286 -- Heads or Tales?: Decapitation of St. Alban, said to be first Christian martyr in Britain. & they can never take that away.

1415 -- Bohemian reformer/martyr Jan Hus wrote in a letter: 'It is difficult to...esteem it all joy in various temptations. It is easy to talk about...but difficult to fulfill it.'

1626 -- A large Codfish, split open at a Cambridge market, reveals a religious text inside, written by John Frith (imprisoned in a fish cellar for his Protestant beliefs). Horrified onlookers exclaim, "Cod damn!" Cambridge University later publishes the treatise as Vox Piscis.
The ancient mariner walks along
The rough edge of the beach.
He puffs his pipe & looks around
And hears a horrid screech.
His pipe falls from his salty lips,
His old eyes open wide,
His ancient heart gives up the fight —
Pain in chest & side.
He clutches at his breast & then
Falls down upon his knees.
He falls upon his back, in sand,
And to the sky he pleads.
The codfish which had made the sound
Crawls swiftly to the man.
With lips pressed 'gainst the mariner's ear
The codfish wails again.
The salty dog dies instantly,
The codfish groans with glee.
It turns its tail & shuffles off,
Back to its home, the sea.
Moral: A fish in slime makes grime.

1668 -- Philosopher Giambattista Vico lives.

1683 -- Penn Pals? William Penn signs friendship treaty with Lenni Lenape Indians in Pennsylvania; Voltaire once remarked that it was the only treaty "not sworn to, nor broken."

1776 -- New World: The final draft of the Declaration of Independence is submitted to the rebel congress.

1784 -- First US balloon flight: 13 year old Edward Warren gets it up.
http://menely.tripod.com/old_index.html

1787 -- The Marquis de Sade begins writing his novel Justine.

1841 -- Benoît Malon lives. Founder of Société d'économie sociale in 1885.
http://www.ephemanar.net/juin23.html

1848 -- France: Paris Uprising. Hot on the heels of Prague, Paris burns in what is known as the "June Days"' workers' uprising. Lasts until the 26th.

1850 -- Beginning date of Vilhelm Moberg novel Unto a Good Land.

1871 -- France: Marc Pierrot lives (1871-1950). Doctor of medicine, anarchiste propagandist, publisher of the long-running libertarian review, "Plus Loin".

1876 -- Author Irvin S. Cobb lives.

1883 -- France: Louise Michel, arrested March 9th (when several bakeries were plundered during a popular demontration), is today sentenced to six years réclusion (prison), along with 10 years of monitoring by haute-police.
Le président: Vous prenez donc part à toutes les manifestations ?
Louise: "Hélas ! oui... je suis toujours avec les misérables. (...) Le peuple meurt de faim, et il n'a pas même le droit de dire qu'il meurt de faim. Eh bien! moi, j'ai pris le drapeau noir et j'ai été dire que le peuple était sans travail et sans pain. Voilà mon crime; vous le jugerez comme vous voudrez."
Source: [Michel Chronologie]
See also l'Ephéméride Anarchiste (which has this occurring the 22nd), http://www.ephemanar.net/juin22.html

1884 -- José Martins Fontes lives. Brazilian doctor, lecturer, poet, anarchist, militant activist in São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Some of his poems are online, in Portuguese,
[Details / links]

1888 -- US: Clallam Indian chief Chitsamakkan buried at Port Townsend, Washington.

1889 -- Anna Akhmatova lives (1889-1966), Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine.
One of the great Russian poets, member of the Acmeist group.

Akhmatova entered a period of silence when her ex-husband, poet Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed. Publishing again in 1940, she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1946; in the 1950s her poems eulogizing Joseph Stalin appeared — designed to gain the freedom for her son, who was in exile in Siberia.

After Stalin's death Akhmatova was slowly rehabilitated.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/aakhma.htm

1892 -- US: ThumbsUp? Midget Mrs. Tom Thumb gives four performances in Seattle (-June 24).

1894 -- Alfred Kinsey entomologist/sexologist author lives.

1903 -- H. C. Branner lives. Leading Danish novelist of the post-World War II period. Also wrote plays, radio dramas & short stories.

1903 -- Frank Fraser Darling lives, England. Naturalist, worked in Edinburgh & the Highlands. Wrote the definitive "Natural History of the Highlands & Islands (1947).

1904 -- US: Joe Scott, a black man, is lynched by other blacks for murder in Bibb, Alabama.
http://classic-web.archive.org/.../wdwylie6/1890-1899.htm

1905 --
Amsterdam, Netherlands
June 23-24, 1905 Fourth conference leading to the founding of the FIS (Federació Sindical Internacional).

Source: [Congressos Obrers]

1908 -- México: Anti-Diaz Magonista rebels (anarchists) attack Viesca, Coah.

1910 -- Jean Anouilh lives (1910-1987). French playwright, achieved fame with his plays within the play & bringing poetry & imagination to the stage. Adopted some of Sartre´s existentialist views. Influenced by the theater of Louis Jouvet & Jean Giraudoux. Wrote The Ermine; Traveller Without Luggage; Thieve´s Carnivals; The Lark; Becket, or The Honour of God .
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/anouilh.htm

1912 -- México: Socialist Party conference. From this gathering emerges a group of anarchist idealists who, on the 30th, found Grupo Luz.
[Source: Casa Obrero Mundial]

1914 -- US: Charles Moyer wishes he had stayed home...during a contentious meeting, the Miner's Union Hall in Butte, Montana, is demolished with dynamite.
[Details / context]

1915 -- Arnold Bennett meets André Gide, whom he pronounces "intellectually more than ever like an orchid."

1916 -- Cabaret Voltaire shut down by public outcry. Opened Feb 15th. In the same narrow alley, Spiegelgasse 14, where the Cabaret Voltaire played, lived a certain "Mister Uljanow" (aka Lenin). Authorities were much more suspicious about the chaotic dadaists than of the reserved Russian scholar ...
http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/hennings.html
http://members.peak.org/~dadaist/
http://www.mital-u.ch/Dada/cabvolte.html

1917 -- Babe Ruth punches an umpire after getting the "Yer outta here, Bub!" in a baseball game between Boston & Washington. Ruth, pitching, had thrown four pitches, all called balls. Ruth stomped off the pitcher's mound to the plate & tongue lashed Brick Owens with a volley of cuss words. Ernie Shore replaces him & retires all 26 he faces for a perfect game. Only relief pitcher to do so.

1924 -- US: Marcus & Penny Westmoreland, a black man & woman, are lynched for "being argumentative" in Spalding County, Georgia.
http://classic-web.archive.org/.../wdwylie/index.html

1925 -- China: British warship fires on Hong Kong harbor strikers. (Strike in Hong Kong began on the 19th & boycott of British goods in Canton, lasting until October, 1926).

1925 -- China: British & French soldiers machine-gun Chinese demonstrators in Canton.
Source: [K.S. Karol]

1926 -- Langston Hughes's article "The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain," appears in "Nation" magazine. In it, Hughes expresses African-Americans' bold new confidence to create a new art during the Harlem Renaissance.
"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express out individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."

1929 -- American author Hart Crane is jailed after a bar fight. Harry Crosby helps arrange his release, & buys him passage home to NY.
Source: See Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun (Random House, 1976).
http://www.banger.com/banger/crosby/bio.html

1930 -- Bertolt Brecht play "He Who Says Yes" premiers.

1931 -- Canada: A plane piloted by Ruth Nichols, flying from New York in an attempt to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, crashes at St. John, New Brunswick.

1934 -- First British sci-fi magazine, "Scoops," publishes first issue [see 0210].

1937 -- Spain: Following the Communist suppression of the anarchists & the P.O.U.M., in which he served during the Spanish Civil War & Revolution, George Orwell flees with his wife.

The end of the war on April 1, 1939, did not end the killings. Franco systematically slaughtered some 200,000 of his opponents ... in a carnage of genocidal proportions that was meant to physically uproot the living source of the revolution...

[I]t was a vindictive counterrevolution that had its only parallel, given the population & size of Spain, in Stalin's one-sided civil war against the Soviet people.

http://recollectionbooks.com/links.html#GeorgeOrwell
http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/bookchin/sp001642/fifty.html
http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/history/spain/orwell-hom.html
http://www.reocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8195/blasts/pointblank/spanishrevolution.htm

1939 -- Italy: Eugenio Curiel, giovane scienziato padovano, esponente del partito comunista, è arrestato dall'Ovra a Trieste.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]

1944 -- Author Heinrich Mann completes his memoirs.

1947 -- US: Anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act passed by the Senate, overriding Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Truman's veto. The Act greatly weakened the power of labor unions in collective bargaining.
[Details / context]

1949 -- US: First 12 women graduate from Harvard Medical School.

1951 -- US: Most expensive hailstorm in nation's history strikes 200-mile stretch of Kansas, causing about $1.5 million in damage to crops & another $14 million in property damage.

1953 -- International Socialist Parliamentary Group founded in the Common Assembly of the European Coal & Steel Community, Strasbourg.

1955 -- NY folk/calypso singer & civil rights activist Harry Belafonte first appears on television.
"The passion that we feel about the love of our homeland must never be misconstrued as the acceptance of oppression. Nor should one look upon oppression as being the only experience one has when you grow up in an environment like this."

— Harry Belafonte, 1988, "Global Carnival" concert"
http://www.kennedy-center.org/...

1956 -- Egypt: Gamal Abdel Nasser elected president, as the voters decide to Gamal their lives away.

1958 -- Boris Vian (1920-1958) dies of a heart attack while at a preview screening of a film version of his 1947 novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I'll spit on your graves)

Vehemently anti-militarist & pacifist, an extremely gifted writer & jazz musician, & author of the song "Le déserteur" (a classic French chanson). After his death he became a hero to the '68 student revolution, especially in France, where his literary fame also grew. In English he is barely known.

Boris Vian was born at Ville d'Avray in 1920. He was trained as a civil engineer, receiving his diploma in 1942. He was also a jazz trumpeter, film actor, cabaret singer, translator, record company executive & Transcendent Satrap of the College de Pataphysique. Vian wrote novels, plays, songs, scenarios & one short opera.

His writing career began with a satirical erotic novel Jirai cracher sur vos tombes (1947), which was seized by the police on moral grounds.

In 1959, while watching a film version of this novel of which he did not approve, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
His last words are "what is this shit..."
(A Bleedster Mantra!!)

[Details / context]

1960 -- Leslie Caron/George Peppard movie The Subterraneans opens, US. Horrific attempt to translate the Beat mystique into Hollywood product. Peppard (later of 'A-Team') plays Kerouac, Jim Hutton is Allen Ginsberg, & Roddy McDowell (of 'Planet of the Apes') is Gregory Corso. Most incredibly, the black girl who the Kerouac & Corso characters fight over is played by Leslie Caron ('Gigi') who is, well, um ... she's white.... The "jazz" soundtrack supplied by Andre Previn.
http://www.litkicks.com/Films/SubterraneansFilm.html
http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/beathotel/default.htm

1960 -- Roger Corman/Vincent Price movie "House of Usher" is released. Should have let Corman do the The Subterraneans film. Might have rivalled Buckets of Blood.

1961 -- First of Carlos Castaneda's conversations with Don Juan on peyote.

1963 -- Nicaragua: Sandinista Colonel Santos Lopez attacks & occupies the towns of Raiti & Walaquistán on the Coco river.
There is no moment but the fall of the sun. The day is day & the night, night, but the dusk an hour of agony & frightful solitude; & the Sandinistas are not nothing still, or almost nothing.

See the old Memoria del fuego page, in Spanish,
http://web.archive.org/...eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/19630623.htm

1964 -- US: Burned station wagon found, belonging to Freedom Riders Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner, murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi. No liberty bell here.
[Details / context]

1966 -- US: Month-long race riots begin in Cleveland, Ohio.

1967 -- US: Welfare Cutback?: Senate voted, 92-5, to censure Beloved & Respected comrade Leader Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut for "conduct contrary to the accepted morals" — using campaign & testimonial funds for his own personal benefit.

1967 -- US: Police battle with 10,000 anti-war protesters greeting President at a Los Angeles speech.

1968 -- US: Vietnam becomes the longest war in nation's history.

1968 -- Pánico tras un partido de fútbol: 73 muertos y más de 100 heridos.
http://www.elmundo.es/larevista/num132/textos/crono.html

1969 -- US: Cook Inlet, Alaska, suffers its second massive oil spill in one year.

1970 -- Japan: On the 11th day of protests against a new U.S.-Japan defense treaty, more than 750,000 take to the streets in numerous cities.

1970 -- Checkmate?: Twist King Chubby Checker & three others arrested in Niagara Falls after marijuana & unidentified drug capsules are found in his car. Charges are dropped; they'd been set-up for the big falls.
http://hempfest.org/

1970 -- USA: 100 women invade Conference on "Profit Possibilities in Childcare."

1970 -- US: KnowYourABCs? FBI cuts off liaison with NSA, DIA, SS, IRS & US military "intelligence." Next up CNN?

1971 -- Louis Lecoin (1888-1971) dies. French antimilitarist, pacifist, anarchiste.
"One does not create human society on mounds of corpses."

— Louis Lecoin

1972 -- US: "Life" magazine publishes photos of South Vietnamese children running from napalm. The "American Way," How to Win Friends & Influence People.

1972 -- High Seas: New Zealand yacht Grant Davidson, attempting to enter nuclear test site, rammed by French Navy, Mururoa, South Pacific.

1972 -- US: From the Dick M & Bob — Best of the Watergate Party Tapes: The infamous smoking gun tape that destroys Dick M Nixon. Nixon & Haldeman agree to use the CIA to cover up Watergate. He blamed his downfall on "eager beavers."

Nixon: "Play it tough. That's the way they play it & that's the way we are going to play it.

.... the president believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing again ... & that they should call the FBI in & (unintelligible) don't go any further in this case, period!"

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/ArchiveMirror/Parascope/nixon.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/front.htm

1973 -- International Court of Justice grants injunction, requested by Australia & New Zealand governments, against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

1973 -- US: Writ in Stone?: The last person drafted into the Armed Forces prior to the expiration of the Selective Service Act is Dwight Eliott Stone.

1974 -- First extraterrestrial message deliberately sent from Earth into space. No reply; instead, a busy signal.

1975 -- John Joseph Akar dies, Kingston, Jamaica. Actor, journalist, wrote the music for Sierra Leone's national anthem.

1983 -- US: 19-year old Lisa Collins attempts suicide by jumping off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge; instead of the span's 50th suicide, she is the first to survive the plunge, Tacoma, Washington.

1984 -- Australia: Bad Kitty? 2,000 protest against arrival of nuclear warship USS Kittyhawk in Fremantle.

1984 -- Beginning date of Umberto Eco novel Foucault's Pendulum.

1988 -- Canada: Toronto Board of Education committee rules William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies is racist & recommends its removal.

1990 -- Fly in the Ointment?: Fly-fisher Norman Maclean dies. Firefighter, fly-fisher, scholar, storyteller. Author A River Runs Through It. Spent his last 14 years researching the Mann Gulch fire.

If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the sufferings of his characters. A storyteller, unlike the historian, must follow compassion wherever it leads him. He must be able to accompany his characters, even into smoke & fire, & bear witness to what they thought & felt even when they themselves no longer knew.

http://www.moshplant.com/prob/prob01/ring.html

1993 -- UK & Iran ask the UN Conference on Human Rights to recommend creation of a UN criminal court; meanwhile Iran announces the arrest of 9,400 for "drug offenses" in five days.

1994 -- The UN says about 20,000 Muslim women have been raped in three years of fighting in ex-Yugoslavia. The United States, not wanting to "get involved" (it's bad timing') closes its eyes to the atrocities occurring in the former Yugoslavia.

"Unpopular ideas can be silenced & inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need of any official ban ...

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

See David Watson's "The Balkan Wars & the New World Dis/Order," (Fifth Estate, Spring 2002)
& also his "Empire & Exterminism."
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/watson.htm
http://www.newint.org/issue323/essay.htm

1995 -- CBS News anchor, Dan Rather, joins R.E.M. onstage during a soundcheck to perform "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" referring to a bizarre incident years before when Rather was beaten up by thugs demanding the answer to the question. Asked to join the tour, Dan demurred; "I'd rather not."
http://archive.birdhouse.org/words/sandman/kenneth.html

2000 -- US: Experience Music Project museum opens, Seattle, Washington.

2001 -- México: In the Hen House? Demonstrators take to the streets in México City wearing only towels & sheets. They are protesting the government purchases of towels costing $433 apiece & $4,000 sheets for the mansion of Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Presidente Vincente Fox.
Seattle Times, 6-24-2001

2003 -- Canada: Three Grannies blockade against the Working Forest — Weyerhaeuser's logging halted yet again in the Upper Walbran Valley.

Three grandmothers are blockading Weyerhaeuser's logging trucks today, protesting the company's liquidation of the Upper Walbran Valley's ancient rainforests & the BC government's drive to privatize public lands through its so-called "Working Forest" initiative.

The protesters include: 74 year old Betty Krawczyk, already arrested three times for protesting the Working Forest initiative, as well as in Clayoquot Sound & the Elaho Valley; 80 year old Ruth Masters, a veteran of campaigns to stop mining in Strathcona Provincial Park, trophy hunting of bears, & the logging of the Walbran & Tsitika Valleys & Clayoquot Sound; & 48 year old Jen Bradley, women's & human right's activist.

http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0308145/clayoquot.shtml

3500 --

"When will I learn? The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle — they're on TV!"

— Homer Simpson

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