Cat Has Had the Time of His Life

thin line

Our Daily Bleed...

--
He is a sorcerer
Before your eyes cast a spell
Out of control. . . .
He’s a bourgeois sorcerer
In a million factories department stores & mills & banks
Dark powers walk in broad daylight
Social forces driven in dreadful directions
Whole populations conjured out of the ground
Ooh! The abyss is close to home.

— The Mekons, 1991



Alice Paul
--
JANUARY 11

ALICE PAUL
Militant American women's suffragist.


Burghead, Scotland: BURNING OF THE CAVIE (tar barrel).

ST. VITALIS'S DAY. Patron saint of prostitutes.





1569 -- England: First English lottery is held at the West door of St. Pauls; 40,000 lots at 10 shillings with £20,000 & £30,000 prizes. The profits are supposed to be used for the repair of harbour walls & "other useful public works" — see also 18 October.
[Source: Calendar Riots]


1804 -- The Sussex Examiner reports English poet & anarchist mystic William Blake was tried on charges of sedition for having insulted one of the King's soldiers & having said "Damn the king & damn his soldiers." Daily Bleed Saint,
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/BlakeWilliam.htm


On the Dole?
1813 -- On the Dole?: First pineapples planted in Hawaii (or 21 January?).
http://www.dole.com/
http://www.oralhistory.hawaii.edu/pages/historical/1924.html http://www.levins.com/pineapple.html

1842 -- William James, American psychologist, philosopher, & brother of author Henry, lives, New York City. He said that a woman asked him once why he did not believe in orthodox Christianity: "I believe what I can. I would believe it all if I could."


1842 -- Francis Scott Key, who penned the words to our national anthem, dies.

Key's son Philip Burton Key was shot on the White House grounds by his girlfriend's husband, Congressman Dan Sickles. Sickles was tried & acquitted on the grounds that it was a crime of passion. He took his wife back, after demanding that she humiliate herself by confessing to her adultery in front of the servants.




1856 -- Giovanni Rossi (aka Cardias) lives (1856-1943). Italian veterinarian, teacher, collectivist anarchist, a founder of Cittadella Colony & the Brazilian Cecilia Colony. See the Anarchist Encyclopedia page, http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/RossiGiovanni.htm



19-Inch Nails: Got Milk?
1878 -- US: For the first time, milk is delivered in glass bottles by one Alexander Campbell, in New York. Previously moo juice was ladled out of a container by the milkman, right into the customer's container.

http://www.nineinchnails.net/graphicstrent.asp



Behind jail bars
1885 -- Alice Paul, first peace picketer at the White House, lives.
http://www.alicepaul.org/



1887 -- American naturalist Aldo Leopold lives.


1887 -- Jean-Jacques Liabeuf lives. French shoe-maker guillotined in 1910 despite massive protests initiated by the anarchists. Gustave Hervé, the revolutionary socialist & publisher of "The Social War", got four years in prison for writing articles defending Liabeuf.
http://ytak.club.fr/juillet1.html#2


anarchiste
1887 -- France: The anarchist thief Clément Duval goes on trial at the Seine Court of Assizes. Duval had broken into the apartment of a rich woman (25th October 1886), stolen her jewels & accidentally set it on fire.

From being the accused Duval became the accuser... The crowd which packed out the court-room was carried away by his vehemence, & echoed his words.

The hearing ended uproariously with Duval expelled, shouting "Long live anarchy", the police overwhelmed by the crowd, the judges in flight to their chambers, insults & blows, fights & arrests.

But freedom was closing its doors on him, & the inferno was to take him in, seemingly forever...

Further details/ context, click here[Details / context]




1903 -- South African novelist Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country) lives, Pietermaritzburg. Founder & president of the Liberal Party (1953-68), which opposed apartheid & offered a non-racial alternative. The party was outlawed in 1968.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/apaton.htm


?
1904 -- French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme dies.

JEAN-LEON GÉRÔME
Daily Bleed Saint 2002

French painter of the "decadent oriental." http://www.mala.bc.ca/~mcneil/gerome.htm



Miracle!
1906 -- Albert Hofmann, chemist, lives, Switzerland. He is inspires the slogan "Better Living Through Chemistry."



1908 -- South Africa: A prominent young lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, is jailed for the first time, for refusing to register as an Asian. Johannesburg.



1908 -- Argentina: General Strike by workers in Buenos Aires.
"To make labor increasingly obedient & cheap..."
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/index.html#galeano


1911 -- First "Modern School", based on ideas of Francisco Ferrer, founded by a group including Leonard Abbott, Alexander Berkman & Emma Goldman, New York City. Established in 1911, it was moved to Stelton, New Jersey, in 1914.

See Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement (Princeton, 1980), & Laurence Veysey, "The Ferrer Colony & the Modern School," in The Communal Experience: Anarchist & Mystical Communities in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago, 1978).

Several women were instrumental in the school's development: Elizabeth Ferm, Jo Ann Wheeler, Nellie Dick & Anna Schwartz.

Robert Henri taught at the Modern School. Other notable participants include Hippolyte Havel, Alfred Levitt, Will Durant & Man Ray. Visitors include Jack London, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, & Peter Kropotkin.

Voltairine de Cleyre, a teacher, translated Ferrer's book The Modern School from Spanish into English, helping to build the Modern School movement in the US, fostering dozens of schools which experimented with anarchist education & collective learning in the early 1900s.

Learning tree

Modern

Nice in-depth pages dedicated to the Modern School, Ferrer, etc, see Aaron Wunderlich's material at
http://www.talkinghistory.org/stelton/stelton.html
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/reidRadicalEducatorsNYC/reidRadicalEducatorsInNewYorkCity.htm

See Rutger's Modern School collection, http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/libs/scua/modern_school/modern.shtml

See the University of Michigan's Modern School collection for the magazines edited, published & printed by Joseph Ishill at the Modern School, http://www.lib.umich.edu/spec-coll/ishill/modern.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5422/

For a more contemporary take, see http://www.infoshop.org/kidz/k_schools.html & http://www.infoshop.org/kidz/readings.html

In 1911, Man Ray "Begins going to Ferrer Center (so named after the Spanish anarchist). The Center functioned under libertarian principles, with classes in drawing, watercolor. "In fact, everything was open & free, even love."

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2419/spain_ferrer.html



1912 -- US: Beginning of the IWW-organized (Industrial Workers of the World) "Bread & Roses" textile strike of 32,000 women & children at Lawrence, Massachusetts. The first to walk out were a group of Polish women who, upon collecting their pay, exclaimed that they had been cheated & promptly abandoned their looms.

The Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 lasts 10 weeks & includes 32,000 textile workers, most of them unskilled, foreign-born, & many women. It begins after the legislature cuts maximum working hours for women & children from 56 to 54 hours per week, & the employers cut their pay along with the hours. The workers called in the IWW for help.

The name "Bread & Roses" comes from the title of a poem written by James Oppenheim in 1912 about a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Ten thousand women & children marched against brutal working conditions, long hours & insufficient wages. The strike also inspired a massive "pageant" to publicize the strike, since newspapers like the NY Times refused to report on it, or simply sided with the owners against these ungrateful nasty strikers, many of whom were ignorant immigrants.

As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, & we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.




1914 -- US: Emma Goldman delivers an extensive lecture series on the modern drama, from January 11-March 8, in New York City Emma Goldman, anarchist feminist
Goldman expands her repertoire to discuss the works of British poet & dramatist John Masefield, & American playwrights Mark E. Swan, William J. Hurlbut, Joshua Rosett, & Edwin Davies Schoonmaker. Responding to the massive unemployment of the time, Goldman requests contributions for the jobless at each lecture.

See Emma Goldman's The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), the full text of which is online.




1922 -- Canada: At Toronto General Hospital, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson becomes the first person to receive an insulin injection as treatment for diabetes.

Diabetes had been recognized as a distinct medical condition for over 3,000 years, but its exact cause was a mystery until the 20th century.

...over 3,000... years (?)

— Bleedster Philip, 1999




1924 -- US: Slim Harpo, musician, lives.


1925 -- Aaron Copland's First Symphony premiers, in a Paris ensemble directed by Nadia Boulanger, his teacher.


1928 -- Eat Yer heart Out?: Thomas Hardy dies at his home near Dorchester at 87. His heart (more or less) is buried in the grave of his first wife in Dorset; his ashes are deposited next to those of Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey. His dried balls are worn as earrings by his second wife.

His family wanted a part of his mortal coil kept in his native Dorsetshire. An elderly cousin was given the canister containing the heart the night before the burial. Her cat sniffed it out, knocked the canister over, & ate Hardy's heart. The cousin put the lid back on, & unbeknownst to the world, the empty vessel was buried. The cousin did not confess until years later.




Leon Trotsky, Bolshevik
1928 -- Russia: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Leon Trotsky is in deep doo-doo. Trotsky played no less a role as Lenin in the Russian Revolution, & was a rival to Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Joseph Stalin, who exiles him today. Trotsky called Stalin's rule a distortion of a "proletarian" dictatorship, but it was just power politics, a dictatorship Trotsky wanted to head. He was stabbed to death in México in 1940 by an agent under Stalin's orders.

First arrested as a revolutionary in 1898 & exiled to Siberia, Trotsky escaped to England where he collaborated with Vladimir Lenin, & his radical activities led to arrests throughout Europe before his return to Russia in 1917. In the power struggle after Lenin's death, Stalin bested Trotsky, who thought himself Lenin's heir.

http://www.corpse.org/issue_5/critical_urgencies/elias.htm



1929 -- Emma Goldman, anarchist feministAfter two weeks in Paris, Emma Goldman returns to St. Tropez during January-February, where she learns that friends, principally Peggy Guggenheim & Mark Dix, have contributed enough money to help her purchase the cottage & ensure her a place to live & write. She returns to working full-time on her autobiography, interrupted only by the visit in February of her nephew Saxe Commins & his wife Dorothy.



1930 -- Emma Goldman, anarchist feministFrance: In Paris for the winter, Emma Goldman continues writing; Alexander Berkman, who lives nearby in St. Cloud, helps edit her manuscript. She mails the first installment of her autobiography to Knopf. American journalist & editor H. L. Mencken visits Goldman.



1931 -- Emma Goldman, anarchist feministEmma Goldman finishes her autobiography, Living My Life, having written 100,000 words since she began the last two chapters in July 1930.



1932 -- Spain: Rising of Casas Viejas Pueblo in Cadiz, Spain, heralds Civil War; anarchist elder "Seisdedos" fights to the death against the hated Civil Guards. See The Anarchists of Casas Viejas by Jerome Mintz.

CASAS VIEJAS TANGO

Quien vivio, quien vivio
en esas casas de ayer,
viejas casas que el tiempo bronceo,
patios viejos color de humedad,
con leyendas de noches de amor.

Platinadas de luna las vi,
y brillantes con oro de sol,
y hoy sumiso las veo esperar,
la sentencia que marca el adios,
y alla van sin rencor,
como va al matadero la res,
sin que nadie le diga un adios.

Se van, se van,
las casas viejas queridas,
Demas estan,han terminado sus vidas.
Llego el motor y su roncar,
ordena que hay que salir.
El tiempo cruel, con su buril,
carcome y hay que morir.

Se van, se van,
llevando a cuestas su cruz,
como las sombras,
se alejan y esfuman, ante la luz

Se van, se van,
llevando a cuestas su cruz,
como las sombras,
se alejan y esfuman, ante la lu

http://www.spunk.org/library/reviews/



1935 -- Amelia Earhart took off from Honolulu on first trans-Pacific solo flight by a woman.


1935 -- American literary critic Edmund Wilson writes to John Dos Passos that he had visited Gertrude Stein in Paris & found "the whole setup rather creepy."


1936 -- Raymond Chandler & Dashiell Hammett are introduced to each other at a dinner for "Black Mask" magazine contributors in Los Angeles.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/3224/
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes.html

1936 -- US: Auto workers sit-in at General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan.
'Calendar Riots'


Carlo Tresca, dead
1943 -- US: Assassination of anarchist militant Carlo Tresca, New York City.

Murdered by an unknown assailant. Gentle & courtly in person, Tresca was an outspoken foe of Fascism in Germany & Italy & of Communism in the Soviet Union. The FBI accumulated a mere 1,358 pages on this outstanding citizen, they revealed on February 25, 2000, under the Freedom of Information Act.




Coppola describes his opera as "a presentation of the circumstances & the characters involved in a dramatic tragedy."

In Sacco & Vanzetti, the characters in the prologue are Carlo Tresca, a Protestant Minister, a Roman Catholic Priest & a congregation of worshipers. Carlo Tresca was a leader of the Italian Anarchist Movement in America. His ghost functions as the narrator throughout the entire opera, introducing & commenting on characters & situations as they arise... We are shown the suspicion, hatred, & fear of those already in America toward those newly arrived. This darkness of humanity stands in contrast to the seeming piety of the religious faithful. Those 40 years have not changed anything. Tresca forewarns us that they will be no different in the 1920s & beyond, saying (in French),

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."


Carlo Tresca edited a number of papers which stood up for workers rights & denounced the hypocrisy & corruption of those in power. One of his favorite targets was the clergy, whom he attacked relentlessly. Tresca was a skilled labor agitator, leading strikes & urging workers to stand up for their rights. Served on the famed John Dewey Commission, which declared Trotsky "not guilty" of the charges presented at the Moscow Purge Trials. Once Tresca took such positions, the Communists conducted a campaign of character assassination aimed at destroying his influence in the antifascist movements. See Gallagher's All the Right Enemies.

See also H. L. Mencken article on Tresca, http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/11610/

Carlo Tresca & other radicals
From left, Patrick Quinlan, Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Adolph Lessig, & Bill Haywood at Paterson, 1913


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Tresca
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAtresca.htm



1946 -- Haiti: In January 1946, events came to a head when Lescot jailed the Marxist editors of a journal called "La Ruche" (The Beehive). This action precipitated student strikes & protests by government workers, teachers, & shopkeepers in the capital & provincial cities. In addition, Lescot's mulatto-dominated rule had alienated the predominantly black Garde. His position became untenable, & he resigned on January 11. Radio announcements declared that the Garde had assumed power, which it would administer through a three-member junta.


1949 -- US: Where Flakes Come From?: First recorded snowfall in Los Angeles, California.


1952 -- Nasty Bout With Virus?: Thomas Eboli, manager of middleweight fighter Rocky Castellani, enters Madison Square Garden ring & assaults referee Ray Miller, after Miller declares Castellani's opponent the victor by TKO.


1952 -- England: Peace Pledge Union organizes "Operation Gandhi," first British protest against nuclear weapons, London.


1959 -- US: "Sex Beast" Melvin Rees, killer of at least eight, forces a family of four into the trunk of his car; he will shoot the father, rape & kill the mother, smother one child & beat the other to death, Apple Grove, Virginia.


Smoking Baby
1964 -- Small Print?: US Surgeon General declares cigarettes to be a "health hazard" in a report linking cigarette smoking & lung cancer.



1967 -- SI dingbat

Parapolice control

orange diamond dingbat; new entry, remove 2008January 11, 1967

France: Avis (Notice), flyposter announcing the closure of the Strasbourg University Psychological Aid Centre (BAPU) by the AFGES "considering that the BAPU's are the manifestation in the student milieu of a repressive psychiatry's parapolice control, whose obvious function is to maintain [...] the passivity of all exploited sectors."


http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]




Jimi Hendrix
1968 -- The Daily Mirror of London reports Jimi Hendrix has moved into the London townhouse where George Frederick Handel is believed to have composed "Water Music" & the "Messiah." Hendrix assures the newspaper that he will also compose in the Handel House & "not let the tradition down."

"You have to forget about what other people say, when you're supposed to die, or when you're supposed to be loving. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on & be crazy. Craziness is like heaven."

      — Jimi Hendrix

I read the other day that a Blue Plaque (which mark the homes of historic persons in the UK) has recently been put up on Hendrix's house in Soho, London, but that it was _next_door_ to Handel's house (which also has a Blue Plaque). (But why let a detail spoil a good story?)

Regards,

— Bleedster Philip, 1999




Spy vs Spy
1974 -- US: Spy vs. Spy?: "Well-informed sources" report Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, placed military "spies" in the executive branch of government to obtain secret information on US diplomatic initiatives.



1975 -- CIA (terrorists par excellence) assassinates two Puerto Rican independence activists, Luis Chavonnier & Eddie Ramos, also killing a six-year-old child & injuring 10 others.

Were terrorists to take over the MTV transmitter, line the video jockeys up against the studio wall, & shoot them, viewers would rightly wonder what new group was being promoted.

— Greil Marcus, Artforum, November 1983





1981 -- El Salvador: The Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation launches a general offensive. Embattled El Salvadoran junta imposes dawn-to-dusk curfew. In two days the guerrillas' political arm will call for a General Strike. By January 15th, about half the shops in the capital city, San Salvador, are closed & 20,000 government workers walk out.

Further details/ context, click here[Details / context]


"To make labor increasingly obedient & cheap... the poor countries need legions of executioners, torturers, inquisitors, jailers, & informers... "

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sinners/CenturyoftheWind.htm



1981 -- Puerto Rico: The "Macheteros" blow up 11 jet fighters of Puerto Rico's National Guard near San Juan.
http://www.spanamwar.com/SanJuan.htm


1986 -- US: First African American Lieutenant Governor since reconstruction sworn in (Douglas Wilder of Virginia).


1990 -- 200,000 demand return of Lithuania's independence.



Social Security hag armed with a  rifle
1999 -- "It's like you're living in Vietnam. Something has got to give before I have a nervous breakdown."

— Katie Bell Oliver, a grandmother in Craven County, NC, who's attempting to raise four grandchildren on welfare.

Oliver receives $272 per month for the three youngest children & a tiny disability check for the oldest; the family lives well below the federal poverty line.

— Reported in the Washington Post Weekly, 1/11/99.






1999 -- Italy: Fabrizio De André (-1999), Sardinian anarchist songster, dies in Milan. Buried two days later, in Genoa, the ceremony is attended by an immense crowd of about 10,000.
http://www.viadelcampo.com/html/tribute_to_fabrizio_de_andre.html




3500 --

The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, & evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

       — KARL MARX, 1867




Children in a Democracy, Dorothea Lange
4000 --




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