Our Daily Bleed...
Our Daily Bleed...
JACK HERER
"The Hemporer," American pot activist and journalist.
AFRICAN FREEDOM DAY.
England: SWALLOW DAY: The chimney swallow arrives back, heralding the return of summer. Time reckoning by bird migration is an ancient & surprisingly accurate custom since birds navigate not only by the sun's position but also by celestial motion — see also 4 October.
CONVERSATIONS WITH A TAX COLLECTOR ABOUT POETRY
Your form
has a mass of questions:
'Have you traveled on business
or not?' But suppose
I have
ridden to death a hundred Pegasi
in the last
15 years?
And here you have —
imagine my feelings! —
something
about servants
& assets.
But what if I am
simultaneously
a leader
& a servant
of the people
... Citizen tax collector
I'll cross out all the zeros
after the five
& pay the rest. I demand
as my right
an inch of ground
among
the poorest
workers & peasants
— Mayakovsky
Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, treats anarchism primarily as a threat to art...
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hjames.htm
THOMAS HART BENTON
Heartland painter, political radical, free thinker.
"The essence of trade unionism is social uplift.The labor movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor." Randolph believed that no permanent social change or reform would happen in America without the direct, democratic participation of those most affected by the injustice they sought to change. In Randolph's day, few envisioned mass demonstrations as being effective or even possible, & not a single African-American newspaper in initially supported his fight to unionize the porters at the Pullman Train Company.
Many supported instead a competing strategy of social reform, the "talented tenth" view for which W.E.B. Du Bois argued. The "talented tenth" view of social change relied on an elite few educated African-Americans to lead the rest of the African-American community towards social equality & relied on legal reforms.http://www.aphiliprandolphmuseum.com/
http://www.pbs.org/weta/apr/
http://www.aflcio.org/About/Our-History/Key-People-in-Labor-History/Asa-Philip-Randolph-1889-1979
http://www.laborarts.org/exhibits/iol/
1889 -- France: Louis Bertho lives (known as Jules Lepetit), Nantes. Anarchist/syndicalist, reported missing after a trip to Moscow, probably eliminated by the Communists.[Details / context]
1895 -- Hip Hop?: Josephine Blatt (US) makes hip-&-harness lift of 3564 lb (record).
1898 -- Blues vocalist great Bessie Smith lives, Chattanooga, Tennessee.http://www.wussu.com/bessiesmith/index.htm"Gimme a pigfoot & a bottle of beer..."
"Gimme a reefer & a gang of gin..."
http://www.redhotjazz.com/bessie.html
1898 --US: Emma Goldman visits Salt Lake City, mid-April.
1899 --US: Theft of the Stanford University Axe.
1902 -- Russia: In a general uprising, with riot, arson & peasant plunder of estates, Sipyengin, the Russian head of the secret police, is assassinated.
'Calendar Riots'
1906 -- Spain: Ricardo Mestre lives (1906-1997), Cataluña.
Bio/hist.note: Ricardo Mestre Ventura. Born in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Catalonia; anarcho-syndicalist; construction worker; CNT & FAI member; one of the founders of the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL); exile in México City after the Revolution of 1936; cofounder of the Unión Distribuidora de Ediciones.
“Anarchy is an art, a beautiful pink elephant; consequently, the anarchist is an artist, capable of taming his impatience, annihilating his fears & overcome his ambitions.”
Maintained broad working friendships in & oustside the anarchist movement, which included Octavio Paz & Gabriel Zaid. Mestre sold books & material for painters, & founded the Editions Minerva imprint, publishing important anarchist texts like those of Rudolf Rocker.______________________________________
Sigues pues Mestre navegando, navegando y sembrando la semilla de la libertad; alentando lecturas, cultivando ediciones, cosechando rebeldes, reconciliando pasiones. Sigues Ricardo poniendo el ejemplo; con tu voz, tu risa y tu aliento, enseñando el amor a la libertad y señalando que a la libertad se llega por los senderos del amor, por el amor y no por la fuerza, por la fuerza del amor. Sigues en la lucha pacífica, maestro y amigo, por lograr el sueño infinito de un mundo mejor. Sigues Ricardo alumbrando, con tu querida presencia, la sombra espesa de tu ausencia.
— Braulio Hornedo, Semilla Libertaria
http://www.libertad.org.mx/
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/1998/03/01/sem-mestre.html______________________________________
1906 -- Brazil: First National Labor Congress, Rio de Janeiro, April 15-20th.
Delegates from 23 organizations representing five states converge at the Centro Galego. Twelve sessions are held, with 23 items (previously argued) are quickly considered. Also present is the Italian Giovanni Rossi, founder of the anarchist Colônia Cecília (Cecilia Colony).
Source: [Arquivo de História Social]
1908 -- France: The pacifist anarchiste Eugène Humbert begins publishing the néo-Malthusian newspaper "Génération consciente", which Jeanne Humbert also collaborates on.
http://www.ephemanar.net/aout01.html
1912 -- Titanic sinks at 2:20am. Harry Elkins Widener goes down clutching his 1598 edition of Bacon's Essays. Most Americans think it is just a movie.
1915 -- US: IWW union Agricultural Workers Organization forms in Kansas, Missouri.
http://www.iww.org/
http://wiki.infoshop.org/IWW
1919 -- US: Start of victorious six-day strike across New England by first women-led US union, Telephone Operators Department of IBEW.
1920 -- US: In South Braintree, Massachusetts, two men armed with handguns shoot & kill Frederick Parmenter & Alessandro Berardelli, employees of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company. The thieves rob the men of the $15,776.51 payroll they were carrying. The thieves are picked up by a car carrying other men. The anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti will ultimately be blamed & railroaded to their deaths.See Heroes & Martyrs: Emma Goldman, Sacco & Vanzetti, & the Revolutionary Struggle, an audio CD by Howard Zinn.
http://www.torremaggiore.com/saccoevanzetti/storia.html
http://infoshop.org/page/Sacco-Vanzetti
1921 -- Albert Einstein gives a lecture on temporal relativity.
1934 -- US: Blue Moon Tavern opens, Seattle, Washington. Some jokesters insist it opened on April Fools Day."Gimme a pigfoot & a bottle of beer..."
"Gimme a reefer & a gang of gin..."The Blue Moon Tavern in the U District opened its doors on April 15, 1934.
It became a beloved hangout of poets, the Beat Generation & 60's activists & gave new meaning to the phrase "lit major."
In the late 1980's, however, the Blue Moon Tavern was marked for demolition ... saved from the wrecker's ball at the eleventh hour by a civic crusade with broad support (one holdout: "The Seattle Times"). The tavern gained official landmark status in 1990.
Home of the famed "Hammered Man" sculpture — which the Seattle Art Museum would shamelessly copy with its own sad version, inSIPidly called "Hammering Man."
1934 -- US: Small group of subway workers led by Mike Quill & Douglas MacMahon found TWU (Transport Workers Union).
[Source]
http://www.aoh61.com/history/labor/mike_quill.htm
1935 --
1937 -- US: Benevolent Henry Ford (the old anti-semite & Nazi symp) vows to root out 'troublemakers' — namely union members who tried to organize at his works. During this month some of his 'service department' heavies move on UAW (United Auto Workers) union representatives (I don't have exact date — ed.).
1938 -- Poet César Vallejo dies, Paris, France. Left his native Perú in 1923, & once expelled from Paris in 1930 as a political militant. Kept involved with Perú by publishing in Amauta, a journal established by his friend José Carlos Mariaátegui, founder of the Perúvian Communist party.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/30
1938 -- Spain: Nationalists (fascists) break through Republican forces & reach Mediterranean at Vinaroz; Republican Spain split in two.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/scw/chronology.htm
1942 -- In Stockholm, Swedish writer Ludvig Nordström, dies. Popular as a short story writer & novelist; wrote Landsortbohème (1911, "Small-town Bohemia"); Planeten Markattan (1937, "The Monkey Planet").
1944 -- Italy: Il filosofo Giovanni Gentile viene assassinato a Firenze dai Gap (Gruppi di azione patriottica), formazioni di matrice prevalentemente comunista.Source: [Source: Crimini e Misfatti]Nel 1926 era toccato a Benedetto Croce subire violenza. Con i zelanti becchini di stato cambiano solo i bersagli ma non la musica, fatta come sempre di sopraffazione e morte.
1947 -- Rudolph Hess, a leading member of the Nazi party, is hanged.Bleedster Jay notes:
I don't know who was hanged in 1947. But it definitely wasn't Rudolph Hess who, for better or worse, was kept alive by the Allies in a prison cell in Berlin until sometime in the Nineties (I think) when he committed suicide.
1947 -- US: French freighter Grandcamp docks at Texas City, Texass (or 4/16?) & takes on 1,400 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
1951 -- Spain: Beginning of first strike wave in fascist Spain, beginning in the Basque country & spreading to Catalonia. Workers from a number of different industries & cities participate, with over 100,000 defying the government's order to return to work.
1955 -- US: Ray Kroc starts the McDonald's chain of fast food restaurants."You deserve a kroc today."
1959 -- US: Makah Indians in Washington State recognized as entitled to compensation for loss of halibut & seal hunting, because of international treaty.
1959 --
A meter of art....
Germany:
"A meter of art for 40 to 70 marks," slogan of Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio's first exhibition of industrial painting at Van de Loo Gallery, Munich.
15 April to 8 May 1959
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]
1960 -- US: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the main organizations of the civil rights movement, forms. In the late 60s it becomes a black militant organization & far from non-violent in position. Nearly 150 students from nine states met in North Carolina with Ella Baker, James Lawson & Martin Luther King, Jr. By this time, in mid April, over 50,000 students have participated in sit-ins. Historian Howard Zinn, along with Baker, was an adviser.
1961 -- Cuba: CIA invasion force lands at the Bay of Pigs. A fiasco, defeated within two days.
1963 -- Greece: Mass rally after release of 2,000 arrested for trying to hold Marathon peace march, Acropolis, Athens.
1966 -- US: Fifth-Annual Frisco State College Folk Festival with Malvina Reynolds, Mark Spoelstra, & Richard ("Been down so long it looks like up to me") & Mimi Fariña, The Blues Project, Doc Watson & others.Poster artist: Michael Ferguson. From The Art of Rock.
1967 -- US: First mass burning of draft cards as 400,000 march in New York City & 80,000 in San Francisco opposing the Vietnam War.Culmination of April 10-15th Vietnam Week featuring draft card burnings & turn-ins & anti-draft recruiter demonstrations all over the country. In NY speakers include Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael, Benjamin Spock.
"April 15 Spring Mobilization To End The War In Vietnam. SF: Communication Company, 1967. Handbill announcing the anti-war rallies "to end the senseless slaughter of American GI's & the mass murder of Vietnamese" to be held in San Francisco & New York. Illustrated. Printed in black on brown stock."
http://www.peace-action.org/timeline
1968 --US: "Spring Mobilization Committee To End the War in Vietnam."
1968 -- France: Amparo Poch y Gascon dies on her birthday, Toulouse. Spanish anarchist feminist, propagandist for sexual freedom.
Studied sociology & medicine. Worked with women's education & in 1936, with Mercedes Comaposada & Lucia Sanchez, & co-founded Mujeres Libres (Free Women) which began publishing a review of the same name, in May 1936.
Amparo Poch y Gascon wrote for many libertarian publications, & after the revolution in Spain worked with Spanish refugees in the French concentration camps.
http://libertaire.pagesperso-orange.fr/archive/2000/233-nov/mujeres.htm
1968 -- US: Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley publicly criticizes Superintendent of Police James Conlisk's cautious handling of the riots that followed King's assassination.Daley said he was giving the police specific instructions "to shoot to kill any arsonist & to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting."
http://www.chicago68.com/c68chron.html
Hizzoner Daley was an intellectual giant, rivaling Judge Julius Hoffman, & proof that any idiot can be a successful politician or crook.
1969 -- US: Several thousand welfare recipients march in New York City to protest benefit cuts.
1970 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Rep. Gerald Ford calls for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Ford will go on to become perhaps America's Greatest President. Disputably able to chew gum & govern at the same time.
1970 --US: Police tear-gas anti-Vietnam War protesters staffing flaming barricades which were set up to block access to the University of Oregon in Eugene.
1971 -- Rolling Stone reports that the Illinois Crime Commission has issued a list of "drug oriented rock records." Included are" "Lets Go Get Stoned," "A Whiter Shade of Pale" & "White Rabbit."
1972 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader US President Nixon & Canada's Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader P.M. Pierre Trudeau sign pact to clean up Great Lakes.
1972 -- US: April 15-28, the nation experiences a new wave of antiwar protests on campuses & near military & defense-industry installations — with hundreds of arrests across the country.This month has seen, recently, heavy US bombing of North Vietnamese entering South Vietnam & demonstrators in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania turning out in support of anti-war activist Phil Berrigan & six co-defendants.
1974 -- US: Kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst is filmed participating in a bank robbery, along with 8 other members of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), in Sacramento, California.
1977 -- Argentina: Jacobo Timerman, editor & publisher of "La Opinión", arrested by military authorities. Critical of the government & military during the "Dirty Little War," he was tortured in prison, chronicled in his book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Released in 1979, he astutely got out of the country while the getting was good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobo_Timerman
1980 -- France: Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre dies, Paris."I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone.
"I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, & instead they taste like cheese.
"I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back."
http://www.martysmith.com/sartre.htm
1980 -- US: Court of Appeals dismisses suit by Eastern Cherokee to prevent the construction of the Tellico Dam by the TVA because plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate the land is indispensable to the practice of the tribe's religion.
1981 -- Guatemala: Security forces murder 69, Cocob, Quich (Ronnie Reagan's Beloved "Freedom Fighters").
1982 -- Guatemalan soldiers (Ronnie Reagan's "Freedom Fighters") murder 100 children & 73 women, Baja Verapaz.
1984 -- Australia: 250,000 attend nuclear disarmament rallies across the country.
At age 32, while in prison, he started writing his first manuscript, Our Lady of the Flowers. It was discovered & destroyed. Genet rewrote it from memory. It was smuggled out of his cell & came to the attention of Cocteau & Sartre, who lobbied vigorously for a pardon from a life-sentence.
Over 40 intellectuals & artists petitioned the French government on his behalf. Genet's stature as an original & important writer was cemented with Sartre's study of him in the work Saint Genet.
After five novels, & then a silence of several years in the late 40s/early 50s, Genet re-emerged as a playwright.
Genet, like Artaud, believed the theatre should be an incendiary event. He also portrayed the gay world openly, without apology or explanation. Genet's sense of solidarity was even stronger with thieves, & others of society's dispossessed. In later life, he championed the causes of the Black Panthers in the US & Palestinian soldiers in Jordan & Lebanon. His final work, Un captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love), is a record of his years spent with these two groups.
Jean Genet died in a hotel room of the same working class district where he'd been abandoned as a child 75 years earlier. He is buried in Morocco.
But now I am afraid. The signs pursue me & I pursue them patiently. They are bent on destroying me. Didn't I see, on my way to court, seven sailors on the terrace of a cafe, questioning the stars through seven mugs of light beer as they sat around a table that perhaps turned; then, a messenger boy on a bicycle who was carrying a message from god to god, holding between his teeth, by the metal handle, a round, lighted lantern, the flame of which, as it reddened his face, also heated it? So pure a marvel that he was unaware of being a marvel. Circles & globes haunt me: oranges, Japanese billiard balls, Venetian lanterns, jugglers' hoops, the round ball of the goalkeeper who wears a jersey. I shall have to establish, to regulate, a whole internal astronomy.
1986 -- Libya: US bombs Libyan base.
1987 -- US: ACT UP's second demonstration at the General Post Office, in New York City. protesters decried the paucity of government help fighting AIDS, failure to spend moneys already appropriated, & the FDA's sweetheart deal with Burroughs Wellcome (charging $10,000 a year for the only approved anti-AIDS drug, AZT, which was developed with the aid of government funds). Silence = Death.
1989 -- England: Before a Liverpool/Nottingham Forest FA Cup semifinal soccer match, 95 fans are crushed to death against a fence surrounding the field as gatecrashers surge into Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, England.
1996 -- The rest of Jerry Garcia's ashes are scattered near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A small portion had been scattered in the Ganges River in India 11 days ago.
http://www.buttsacrossamerica.com/buttshot_pages/golden_gate_bridge.html
1997 -- Sam Moskowitz dies. American science fiction editor & author.He was dedicated to the past, not the present or future. His prose, which Sid Coleman once suggested read as if badly translated from a middle-European language. At one point in the fifties, Dick Ellington "edited" Sam's writing for him, significantly improving it. One wishes Dick had kept doing it longer than he did.)
In 1960 or thereabouts, NYC fandom divided into two general factions: the sercon types, exemplified by Sam, his wife Christine, & Belle Dietz, who ran the Lunarians & ESFA — & the Fanarchists, exemplified by the Riverside Dive/Nunnery group that included Dick Ellington & Bill Donahoe. They socialized together to some extent, but took potshots at each other in the pages of local fanzines.
See "In the Midst of Life, Dr. Fandom," by Ted White in APAK Issue #78, May 8th, 1997
1998 -- Pol Pot dies in his sleep, engineered the Cambodian "Killing Fields." Not the movie.
1998 -- US: Microradio movement news accounts on the struggle to free the airwaves: "Rebels of the Airwaves" — New Haven Advocate
Also: "More free radio stations shut down in Tampa."
Source: [Pirate Radio Kiosk]
1999 -- US: Erotica USA, a pornography trade show, opens a 4-day exhibit at the Javits Center.
1999 -- US: Microradio movement news accounts on the struggle to free the airwaves: DEMO AGAINST FCC CRACKDOWNS, New York City.Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
— A. S. Tanenbaum
[Source: Pirate Radio Kiosk]
2000 -- US: 5th Annual Frisco Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. Special guest: songster U. Utah Phillips.
http://web.archive.org/...infoshop.org/bookfair.html
http://www.thelongmemory.com/
2009 -- US: Tax time for everybody in America but the filthy rich & those with corporate loopholes.
[& you know who you are]; please read the following IRS form carefully:
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/BB/DotCom1040.jpg
2010 -- US: "Hemperor" Jack Herer, post activist, dies, Eugene, Oregon. Wrote The Emperor Wears No Clothes & Grass. "Jack Herer" is now a prized sativa-dominant indica/sativa hybrid of Cannabis well known for both its cerebral high & its strong body high. The strain is a cross between Skunk #1, Haze, & Northern Lights #5. Jack Herer is the parent to many subset strains.
http://www.jackherer.com/
3000 --
"How can you help resenting the absurdity of time, its march into the future, & all the nonsense about evolution & progress? Why go forward, why live in time?"
— E.M.Cioran
4500 --
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