Daily Bleed: Eugene Varlin, Germinal Esgleas, Emma Goldman, Stella Ballantine, M. Eleanor Fitzgerald, Ben Reitman, Stig Dagerman, Jean Vigo, Madeleine Vernet, Jacques Ellul, International Situationists, anarchist, anarquista, anarchiste, What Happened on this day October 5, in recovered history
driving the freeway while
listening to the Country & Western boys
sing about a broken heart
& the honkytonk blues,
it seems that things just don't work
most of the time
& when they do it will be for a
short time
only.
well, that's not news.
nothing's news.
it's the same old thing in
disguise.
only one thing comes without a
disguise & you only see it
once, or
maybe never.
like getting hit by a freight
train.
makes us realize that all our
moaning about long lost girls
in gingham dresses
is not so important
after
all.
Poem: "The Last Song," by Charles Bukowski
from Bone Palace Ballet (Black Sparrow Press).
PHILIP BERRIGAN Rebel American Catholic priest, antiwar activist.
Cheshire, England: AUDLEM WAKES. Traditionally, the first person to get drunk at the event was proclaimed Mayor of Audlem for the coming year. Beats voting! Every saloon a voting booth!
UNIVERSAL CHILDREN'S DAY.
REPUBLIC DAY (Portugal, Azores, Guinea-Bissau, Madeira).
WORLD HABITAT DAY.
FEAST OF THE EMPIRE OF LIES.
1513 -- New Old World: Spanish conquistador Balboa discovers what he claims is a colony of cross-dressing males in Panama; he reportedly massacres them.
1582 -- Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?: Pope Gregory, having annulled 14 days yesterday, makes today October 15th. But his Gregorian calendar is off 11 minutes every 100 years, creating even more complex problems. Not adopted in Protestant England & Orthodox countries.
1713 -- Got Encarta?: Denis Diderot, French encyclopedist & philosophe, lives. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, et al, help in his 20-year endeavor to create his encyclopedia. He sold his private library to Catherine II of Russia in 1773 to raise a dowry for his daughter.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/diderot.htm
1789 -- France: Declaration of the Rights of Man.
1813 -- US: Shawnee Chief Tecumseh killed in the War of 1812.
1821 -- Greek revolt against the Turks, take Tripolitza in the Morea & massacre 10,000 Turks.
1829 -- The Comédie-Française accepts Victor Hugo's Hernani.
1839 -- France: Eugene Varlin lives, near Paris. Bookbinder, working militant, internationalist, anarchist. Forced into exile, returns with the fall of the empire, & during the Paris Commune of 1871, elected a member of the commune. Shot during the last week.
"The Commune is the end of the old governmental & clerical world, militarism, officialism, the exploitation, agiotage, the monopolies, of the privileges, to which the proletariat owes its serfdom, the Fatherland, its misfortunes & its disasters."
1840 -- John Addington Symonds, poet, essayist, & literary historian, lives, Bristol. Biographer of Ben Jonson, Shelley, & Walt Whitman.
1858 -- Russia: Mikhail Bakunin, in various prisons since his part in the Dresden uprising in 1849, & currently condemned to Siberian exile, today marries Antonia Ksaverievna Kwiatkowska.
In the spring of 1859 he leaves for Irkutsk where he effects his escape in June 1861. alt spellings: Michael Bakunin, Michel Bakounine, Mihail Aleksandroviç Bakunin; Aleksandrovic, Aleksandrovich, Mihkail
1864 -- India: Most of Calcutta destroyed by cyclone (approximately 60,000 die).
1864 -- Louis-Jean Lumiere, film pioneer, lives.
1871 -- Canada: William B. O'Donoughue leads Fenian raiders into Manitoba at Pembina. He is followed by US troops & arrested. Louis Riel secretly returns to Manitoba to help the government put down a Fenian raid (he is later publicly thanked by the lieutenant governor).
1878 -- US: George B. Vashion dies of yellow fever in Rodney, Miss. First African-American lawyer in NY, an educator & poet whose most famous work was Victor Oge (1854), the first narrative, nonlyrical poem by an African-American writer.
1903 -- Spain: Germinal Esgleas lives, Barcelona. Anarcosindicalista militant & companion of Federica Montseny. Collaborator on Revista Blanca, with Joan Montseny (Federico Urales). Secretary-general of the AIT, 1958-1963). During exile (in France) he was imprisoned by the fascist Vichy government.
Anarchist, anarquista
1908 -- US: Israel Zangwill play "The Melting Pot" premiers, Washington, DC. Zangwill also wrote Children of the Ghetto (3 volumes), The King of Shnorrers & many other books. sometimes (not often) spelled Zangwell
The Melting Pot showed the fire of the American experience burning off human impurities, fusing all the best elements of each immigrant "race" into "a new & superior American nationality."
1909 -- Canada: 32 workers die in Extension Mine, Ladysmith, British Columbia.
1910 -- Portugal: 1ª Republic proclaimed. Revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy yesterday (King Manuel II gracefully scurries to England at the outbreak).
The monarchy is brought down through a successful alliance, begun in 1908, of Republicans & anarchists. The latter were mainly workers, fighting & dying in various revolts, while the Republicans protected their mansions while waiting for the final blow to be struck, with an eye to moving into the palace. Over the next decade the initially glowing Republican image, in the fight against the monarchy, is badly tarnished.
1911 -- Irish novelist, dramatist, 26-year Irish Times columnist, Flann O'Brien lives, Strabane, County Tyrone.
At Swim-Two-Birds, (1939), his best-known book, which sold poorly, was described by John Updike as "a fantastic parodistic stew of drunken banter, journalese, pulp fiction, & Celtic myth," & Dylan Thomas called it "just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."
Giliana studied medicine & specialized in pediatrics. A militant involved with the French anarchiste milieu, she also worked with the paper Le Libertaire.
Created the review 40-tal & wrote for the libertarian newspaper Arbetaren.
His works present a variety of themes which prefigure the French existentialists. His many writings include The Snake (1945), & Island of the Condemned.
(See also 4 November 1954).
1923 -- US: Rebel Roman Catholic priest, anti-war activist & christian anarchist, Philip Berrigan lives (d.2002).
Along with his brother Daniel Berrigan, also a priest & anarchist, he was for a time on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for actions against Vietnam war.
1929 -- Nicaragua: National Guard garrison mutinies, murders its US Marine commander.
1931 -- Elmer Rice play "The Left Bank" premiers, NY (242 performances).
1931 -- US: Fascist Father Coughlin, a Catholic, makes his network radio premiere, on CBS.
1934 -- France: Surrealist/anarchist filmmaker Jean Vigo (1905-1934) dies.
Son of the anarchiste Eugene Vigo.
Great filmmaker, social rebel — French authorities give him Zero for Conduct.
Jean VIGO
:
Zero De Conduite
His first film, "In Connection with Nice" (1930) is a virulent social satire. "Zero for Conduct" (1933) his most famous film, is banned for "Praise of indiscipline & attacking the prestige of the educational institution." Also filmed "L'Atalante" (1934). Died at the age of 29 from tuberculoses.
Life in a French boarding school, where the authorities attempt to regiment the students — unsuccessfully. The kids are all wonderfully spontaneous; one of the best films ever about children among children. The inspiration for [Lindsay Anderson's] If….
— Leonard Maltin
1934 -- Spain: 40,000 miners & iron workers strike against the rightwing government, seizing towns around Gijon. 3,000 killed. The uprising in the mining districts of Asturias, Spain, October 5-18, is followed by severe repression; thousands of miners are executed, thousands more tortured, & 30-40,000 are imprisoned.
anarchist, anaquista http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/spain/sp001873/
1936 -- Václav Havel lives. Prominent Czech playwright, poet & statesman, one of the leading intellectual figures & moral forces in Eastern Europe.
Satirized the communist bureaucracy & supported the Prague Spring reform movement in 1968. A cofounder of the human rights organization Charter 77 & the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His works were banned by the government, but the manuscripts circulated privately & printed in Western Europe.
The music of Frank Zappa & Lou Reed inspired Havel & other dissidents during their struggle against Soviet rule. During his 1998 visit in the US Lou Reed played at the state dinner in the White House at his request.
To underwrite its expanding glory, the fascist government introduces an extraordinary progressive tax on land owners, & obliges manufacturers to underwrite loans to the state, paying the interest with the new tax income. The perverse genius of the state in matters of theft & expropriation knows few limits.
1937 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Roosevelt delivers his Quarantine Speech.
Yet nothing exemplifies FDR's point-to-point navigation better than his success at shifting the country's mood from isolationist to internationalist by means of carefully constructed speeches delivered over a three-year period. From the Quarantine Speech of October 5, 1937, to the Arsenal of Democracy fireside chat of December 29, 1940, he "brought the people along" a "bite" at a time.
1942 -- Ukraine: Nazis massacre 1,000 Jews in Dubno. German engineer Herman Graebe witnesses a Nazi mass execution in the Ukraine; after the war he writes a famous & terrifying testimony. Also today, all Jews in concentration camps in Germany are to be sent to Auschwitz.
1942 -- Date of Sal's "party" in Joe Pesci movie .
1949 -- France: Madeleine Vernet dies.
Anarchiste, radical educator. Gets a street named for her in Paris [Details / context]
1957 -- US: Outer space "nation" of Celestia is formed.
1958 -- US: Clinton, Tennessee high school, desegregated in 1956, is destroyed by segregationists in three predawn dynamite explosions.
1959 -- Architect Maya Lin, lives, Athens, Ohio. Best-known for her design of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. The war monument was inspired by the sense of peacefulness that she had experienced in her cemetery walks.
1966 -- US: Soda Jerks? Sodium cooling system malfunction causes a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration breeder reactor near Detroit, Michigan (basis of the book We Almost Lost Detroit). Half the city looks like it was bombed already; the radiation was reportedly contained.
1966 -- Italy: Actors Gina Lollobrigida & Jean Sorel, together with director Mauro Bolognini & producer Gianni Hecht Lucari, are
condemned for obscenity for film episodes in Le bambole.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]
1966 -- High Seas: Haute Cuisine? A storm drops 2-cm maggots on Olympic yachts off Acapulco.
1966 -- England: Janice Pepper marries Francis Salt.
1967 -- France: Two fly-poster comics announcing the appearance of IS #11, one designed by André Bertrand, the other by Gérard Joannès, & both featuring the same text by Raoul Vaneigem, lead to Vaneigem & René Viénet being called before a police judiciary for incitations to theft, debauchery, rioting & murder (of rulers). No proceedings follow.
[Situationist Resources]
1968 -- Cambodia: Vietcong allowed to seek sanctuary.
1968 -- Ireland: Police break up civil rights demonstration, trying to suppress a Catholic prodemocracy protest, Derry, Northern Ireland.
1968 -- US: Seattle police kill Black Panther member Welton "Butch" Armstead during an arrest for suspicion of car theft.
1969 -- US: Dianne Linkletter, daughter of TV personality Art Linkletter & an aspiring actress, leaps to her death from her West Hollywood apartment. Linkletter claims his daughter was under the influence of LSD at the time of her apparent suicide. He says "it isn't suicide, it's murder."
1969 -- US: In an embarrassing breach of the United States' air defense capability, a Cuban defector enters US air space undetected.
Lands his Soviet-made MiG-17 at Homestead Air Force Base near Miami, Florida, where the presidential aircraft Air Force One is waiting to return Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Dick M Nixon to Washington.
1969 -- US: Crap Shoot? Blacks riot in North Las Vegas, Nevada.
1969 -- All Crossed Up?: Premiere of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Mainstream anarchy & mayhem.
1971 -- US: Arctic Slope Native Association files suit against Alaska, claiming the 76,000 acre North Slope.
1972 -- Serial killer Herbert Mullin begins his killing spree, to prevent earthquakes. Voted "Most Likely to Succeed" by his high school classmates.
1973 -- US: A CIA assessment calls war in the Middle East "unlikely." Someone please advise George Dubya.
1977 -- US: Taco Time, Texass? Mrs. Rubio notices the marks on her tortilla look like Jesus. Thousands of pilgrims have since visited the site.
"It wasn't a shark attack, but a shark accident. More than likely he ran into the swimmer's leg & got it caught in his mouth."
— Town spokesman Joe Rubio, explaining away rumors that a woman had been attacked by a shark while swimming off South Padre Island, Texass
1978 -- Isaac Bashevis Singer wins a Nobel Prize for literature.
1979 -- US: 2,000 activists demonstrate against development of uranium mines in Black Hills, South Dakota.
1983 -- Poland: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Lech Walesa, labor militant & SolidarnoϾ trade union honcho, wins the Nobel Peace Prize. alt sp; Solidarity, Solidarnosc
1986 -- Nicaragua: An illegal American CIA contra resupply plane is shot down; Eugene Hasenfus is the only survivor.
1987 -- US: Supreme Court refuses to hear Leonard Peltier appeal in one of the most corrupt trials in recent US history. Still in jail in 2012 as the FBI vehemently opposes his release. (The Federal Bureau of Fabrication still holds 6,000+ pages on his case which they refuse to release for "National Security reasons".) He remains the "Shackled Eagle." http://www.leonardpeltier.net/ http://rfester.tripod.com/tribute.html
1988 -- US: 50 million watch the Dan Quayle-Lloyd Bentsen VP debate on TV. Obviously nothing on the other channels.
Asked three times in a debate what he would do if he suddenly became President — & three times robotically reciting his meager qualifications — Dan Quayle testily observes, "I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the Presidency."
"Senator," says Lloyd Bentsen somberly, delivering the sound bite of the night, "I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
"When you think about what might have happened, we have to be pretty happy." — Campaign chief James Baker assessing the Quayle performance.
"Well, Dan, you're no Jack Kennedy." — Wife Marilyn assessing the Quayle performance.
1988 -- India: Salman Rushdie novel The Satanic Verses banned.
1989 -- US: Television preacher Jim Bakker is found guilty of fleecing his flock.
1989 -- InGen files for bankruptcy...end of Jurassic Park (in the novel).
1990 -- Meir Kahane, founder of the right-wing Jewish defense league, assassinated at 58.
1990 -- US: Cincinnati jury acquits an art gallery of obscenity (Mappelthorpe photos).
1990 -- US: "Henry & June," first movie rated NC-17 (replacing X), is released. The primary characters are based on Anais Nin & her husband Hugo Guiler & Henry Miller & his wife June.
1991 -- Yugoslavia: "Stop the hatred to stop the war" demonstration, Belgrade.
1992 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader General Schwarzkopf is splattered with blood at a book signing, just across the lake from Seattle, in Kirkland, Washington.
1994 -- Italy: 54th country to abolish the death penalty.
1995 -- US: In a protest of proposed Medicare & Medicaid cuts, 31 people are arrested for occupying King County Republican Party headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Related demonstrations occur in Bellingham, Tacoma, Everett, & Yakima.
1995 -- Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney wins the Nobel Literature Prize.
1996 -- Why Bother? Argentina: A top general says the junta should have legalized torture.
1998 -- US: FCC shuts down pirate radio station in Memphis, Tenn. — Boston Globe
"Radio Pirates" is also broadcast on NPR - All Things Considered today.
Source: [Pirate Radio Kiosk]
2000 -- Yugoslavia: Opposition demonstrators seize parliament & the TV station.
2000 -- Two physicists who magnetically levitate a frog & an Australian author who believes people don't need to eat, win the 2000 Ig Nobel Prizes. http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2000
2002 -- US: 15,000 rally against war with Iraq, Portland, Oregon.
All our political forms are exhausted & practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary & electoral system & our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable.
Nothing is left. & this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, & omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, & at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, & social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.
— Jacques Ellul, Anarchie et Christianisme
4000 --
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New Old World: Spanish conquistador Balboa discovers what he claims is a colony of cross-dressing males in Panama; he reportedly massacres them.
[Further details / context]
US: Emma Goldman, her niece Stella Ballantine , & M. Eleanor Fitzgerald begin publication of Mother Earth Bulletin. Ben Reitman returns to Chicago, in sharp disagreement with Emma over the direction of the Bulletin.
Sweden: Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) lives.
Two fly-poster comics announcing the appearance of IS #11, one designed by André Bertrand, the other by Gérard Joannès, & both featuring the same text by Raoul Vaneigem, lead to Vaneigem & René Viénet being called before a police judiciary for incitations to theft, debauchery, rioting & murder (of rulers). No proceedings follow.
