Our Daily Bleed...
Our Daily Bleed...
| Si monumentum requiris, circumspice...
Take stock, citizen bacillus, ... No, no, citizen bacillus!Here is your monument & it stands high! The cars which you wore out, the clothes you tore, The cans you emptied, furniture you broke, & all the shit with which you clogged the drains. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice... |
JOHN LENNON
"Imagine." Martyr. Author, artist, musician. Working Class Hero.
"Gag me," responds Canadian Bleed recipient, Tadpole collector
& rumored sometime Bookseller James Mountain in 1997.
MAGIC LANTERN DAY.
MOLDY CHEESE DAY.
UGANDA: INDEPENDENCE DAY.
ICELAND: LEIF ERIKSON DAY.
CHINA: FEAST OF HIGH PLACES KITE FLYING FESTIVAL.
JAPAN: CHRYSANTHEMUM DAY.
NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY.
ANTI-COLUMBUS DAY.
SEASON OF GLASS.
INSTANT KARMA DAY.
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE DAY."We're all Christ & we're all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements, T.V., records, films & newspapers ? The miracle today is communication. So Let's use it."
— John Lennon, '69
WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry...
At the start of the parade, when the boiler was filled with water, the calliope America weighed nine tons. This spectacular wagon was pulled by eight Percherons.
http://www.ragtimewest.com/
1880 -- Switzerland: The last congress of the Jurassic Federation (Jura Federation), at La Chaux-de-Fonds, adopts anarchist communist goals, "conséquence nécessaire et inévitable de la révolution sociale." Previously there was no strong sympathy for anarcho-communism among the mainstream European anarchist movement despite previous efforts in this direction by Reclus, Malatesta, Cafiero, Brousse, etc.
1899 -- US Civil War historian Bruce Catton lives, Petoskey, Michigan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Catton
1906 -- Léopold Senghor, poet & cofounder of the Negritude movement in African art & literature, lives, Senegal, French West Africa. Spent two years in Nazi concentrations camps where he wrote some of his best poetry. Inducted in the Académie Française in 1984, the first black member.
| Femme nue, femme noire Vétue de ta couleur qui est vie, de ta forme qui est beauté J'ai grandi à ton ombre; la douceur de tes mains bandait mes yeux Et voilà qu'au coeur de l'Eté et de Midi, Je te découvre, Terre promise, du haut d'un haut col calciné Et ta beauté me foudroie en plein coeur, comme l'éclair d'un aigle |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9opold_S%C3%A9dar_Senghor
|
Négritude: a term much used after WW II, embracing the revolt against colonialist values, glorification of the African past, & nostalgia for the beauty & harmony of traditional African society. The term owes a great deal to its French intellectual origin. Main exponents have been Senghor, Aimé Césaire & Frantz Fanon. A useful discussion of the various issues involved is found in "Orphée noir," Sartre's introduction to Senghor's Anthologie le la poésie nègre et malgache (1948).
1908 -- Australia: Harry Hooton (1908-1961) lives to waste paper. Poet & anarchist. Hooten's last book was It Is Great To Be Alive, published by Margaret Elliot just before he died.Language is not eternal. It will be replaced. We are not going to talk for ever.
1910 -- US: Forest fires in Minnesota destroys six towns, killing 400 people & destroying $100 million worth of property.
1916 -- US: Babe Ruth pitches & wins the longest World Series baseball game (14 innings) 2-1.
1919 -- US: Cincinnati Reds defeat Chicago White Sox, 10-5, to win the baseball World Series, five games to three, in an outstanding upset. It is later revealed that eight key Chicago players, subsequently dubbed the "Black Sox," conspired with gamblers to "throw" the series in response to working for one of the cheapest/sleaziest owners in the biz. (see 28 September).Eight Men Out — The loose film history, directed by John Sayles, of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. The players received a pittance & turned to the only source of financial security they could find, the bookies. With stunning performance by John Cusack as the only player who refuses to go along, & a cameo by Studs Terkel.
1919 -- Netherlands: International Fellowship of Reconciliation founded, Bilthoven.
1922 --Karl Capek play "R.U.R." opens in NY.
1922 -- France: International Anarchist Congress held in Paris (9-10th).
http://www.lelibertaire.net/article132.html
1932 -- Russia: Stalin expels two of Lenin's colleagues from Politburo, extending his clamp-down on rivals. Gone are Kamenev & Zinoviev from the Communist party, sent to Siberia to play in the snow for the second time in as many years.
Like horseshoes he forges decree after decree —
Some get it in the forehead, some in the brow,
some in the groin, & some in the eye.
Whatever the execution — it's a raspberry to him
& his Georgian chest is broad. — Osip Mandelstam, "We Live, Not Feeling," (1934?)
1936 -- Anarchist journal Guerre de classe appears. Founded by Camillo Berneri. In 1936, Berneri also published the bilingual anarchist & antifascist paper Italia Libera/Free Italy in collaboration with Vernon Richards. His daughter Marie Louise Berneri was a member of the group that edited Revolt, War Commentary & Freedom (still currently publishing), which were issued by the Freedom Bookstore (originally co-founded by Peter Kropotkin) in London.
http://web.archive.org...papini/comunism/29bern.html
http://cgecaf.ficedl.info/mot1276.html
1936 -- US: During a lettuce strike in Salinas, California, red flags appeared around town, specifically at intersections & on power poles.Fearing communists, the local authorities took down the flags, only to discover later that they were "part of a traffic check being made by the state highway division."
Source: http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/laborpress/TimberWorker.htm
1936 --
1938 --Spain: Libertarian Movement Congress in Oct. 1938. Pura Perez Arcos reports:
We were tremendously excited & ready to argue the case for Mujeres Libres on the floor of the congress. But they would not even allow us into the meeting....
[Details / context]
1940 -- Future Beatle John Lennon lives, Liverpool, England. Wrote A Spaniard in the Works (1965) & In His Own Write (1964).
"I'm a moldy moldy man..." — In His Own Write, (1964) Other pop or rock stars with literary merits (novels, collections of poems, short story collections): Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Nick Cave, Ulf Lundell, Leonard Cohen, Ray Davies.
1944 -- Reggae legend Peter Tosh lives.
1946 -- Pig in a Blanket?: First electric blanket manufactured.
1948 -- Songster Jackson Browne lives.
1950 -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet, dies at 58 in Austerlitz, New York.One-time companion of free-love radical & novelist Floyd Dell (1887-1969; Saint July 22). http://www.sappho.com/poetry/e_millay.html http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/millay/millay.htmConscientious Objector
I shall die,
but that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn floor.
[...]
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll…
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpts
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/conscientious-objector/
http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/AmeLit.html
1961 -- Nunnally Johnson writes Groucho Marx: "some drunk dame told [James Thurber] at a party that she would like to have a baby by him. Jim said, 'Surely you don't mean by unartificial insemination!'"
1964 --
1965 -- Important date in musical history — Jimmy Dickens' song "May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up your Nose" begins it's climb to number one.
1967 -- Bolivia: Revolutionist Ernesto "Che" Guevara captured & summarily executed, age 39, in the Bolivian highlands (by troops trained in the US). Argentine doctor, who rejected both capitalism & orthodox communism.
CHE GUEVARA
Hero of the Cuban revolution, iconic hero of 60's culture. Patron Saint, June 14."Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
http://libcom.org/history/guevara-ernesto-che-1928-1967
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/dolgoff/cubanrevolution/toc.html
http://search.time.com/...Covers&Ntt=che+guevara
http://web.archive.org/web...eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/19651003.htmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mOjijV4jA0
1969 -- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young opened at Fillmore West, Frisco, California.
http://www.sftoday.com/enn2/summerlove2.htm
1969 -- US: 2,500 National Guard called in, Chicago, Illinois, the 9th to the 11th, during the Weather Underground's "Days of Rage."Underground (1974). The film introduces each member of the Weathermen Underground Organization in a group discussion/interview made on May 1st, 1975 in a secret location. The era of the 60's & 70's is vividly bought to life by interweaving the stories of the "Weathermen's" personal political development with the significant events & personalities of the two decades. Billy Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Cathy Wilkerson. 88 min. Video/C 3219. Information about this film from the Internet Movie Database,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075367/
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathermen
1970 -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn turns down Nobel Prize for Literature.
1970 -- England: Italian Trade Centre, Exhibition Building, Cork Street, London, bombed. Attacks simultaneously in Manchester, Birmingham & Paris against Italian State buildings. The attacks are claimed on behalf of Giuseppe Pinelli, the anarchist murdered by Italian police in 1969. Part of large series of bombings this year, attributed to the Angry Brigade.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/PinelliGiuseppe.htm
1975 -- Ireland: Noel & Marie Murray arrested & charged with murder. Prisoners' rights activists jailed for explosions. Irish activities, on the same lines as those in the UK (see above), become prominent during the campaign to free the Spanish freedom fighter, Salvador Puig Antich.
Source: Chronology from Albert Meltzer's, I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels.
1977 -- Japan: 20,000 farmers, students & workers demonstrate against construction of Narita airport on scarce farmland. (or 1971?)
See David Apter & Nagayo Sawa, Against the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) — the violent anti-airport movement at Narita.
http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/terror_92/backg.html
http://www.eltoroairport.org/news/latimes7498-www.html
1977 -- Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Amnesty International, also to Mairead Corrigan & Betty Williams, militants of the Peace People movement in Northern Ireland.In October 1998, Amnesty International announces a one-year campaign to focus on Human Rights abuses in the United States. About 1/3 of its membership & source of its funding is there. The US government has long been a self-righteous critic of human rights abuses in other countries which belittles its critics, much as it did foreign critics of racist policies & practices in the 1950s & 60s.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/
1978 -- Not "Alive & Well in Paris"?: Jacque Brel dies.
1981 -- US: American Writer's Congress, New York City, October 9-12.
1982 -- Poland: Trade union "Solidarity" (SolidarnoϾ/Solidarnosc) declared illegal.
http://www.alter.most.org.pl/fa/
1983 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader James Watt resigns as Reagan's Secretary of the Interior after referring to his appointment of "a black... a woman, two Jews & a cripple." Devastation of natural resources continues unabated.
1985 -- England: All-out rioting develops in Highfields, Leicester after cops are pelted with shoes stolen from a city centre store following a football match.
Source: [Calendar Riots]
1987 -- US: Thousands march on Washington, DC for Lesbian & Gay Rights.
1988 -- Felix Wankel, developer of the Wankel, dies.
1989 -- US: Kosher? Penthouse magazine's Hebrew edition hits the newsstands.
1989 -- Germany: 80,000 in a nonviolent march for freedom, Leipzig, East Germany.
1989 --
1990 -- US: The first nine redress payments to made to Japanese-American victims of American racism during WWII at a Washington, DC ceremony. One hundred seven year-old Rev. Mamoru Eto of Los Angeles is the first to receive his check.
1991 -- Serbia: Women In Black founded, Belgrade. "Every Wednesday since then we have stood on the streets or squares of Belgrade."We dressed in black. We knew that despair & pain needed to be transformed into political action. Our choice of black meant that we did not agree with everything that the Serbian regime was doing. We refused their language which promotes hate & death. We repeated:
"DO NOT SPEAK FOR US,
WE WILL SPEAK FOR OURSELVES "
http://web.archive.org...agony/kosovo.html
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/062.html
1994 -- Italy: Florence, Extraordinary Congress of the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (FdCA); members of the Livorno, Lucca & Pisa branches leave. The magazine Comunismo Libertario goes with the branches which leave, the majority of whose members join the Federazione Anarchica Italiana (FAI - Italian Anarchist Federation) over the next few years.
http://www.fdca.it/fdcaen/organization/cronologia/1994.htm
1997 -- Dario Fo receives Nobel Prize for Literature, for emulating"the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority & upholding the dignity of the downtrodden."
Italian playwright/actor, author of nearly 50 plays, including Accidental Death of an Anarchist (about the police suiciding the anarchist Pinelli out a window), We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay!, & The Devil with Boobs. (See 24 March)The Roman Catholic Church has been a frequent target of Fo's satire, & the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said it was flabbergasted by his selection.
"Imagine a cross between Bertolt Brecht & Lenny Bruce, & you may begin to have an idea of the scope of Fo's anarchic wit,'' — Mel Gussow, The New York Times, 1983.Fo & his wife, writer/actress Franca Rame, were refused entry into the US in the 1980s under longstanding laws denying visas to those taking part in anti-government activities... But the State Department twice granted them waivers, in 1984, for the premiere of his play Accidental Death of an Anarchist on Broadway, where it failed. The couple were again allowed to visit the Land of the Free in 1986.
Fo criticized the adulation given Italy's flag of red, white & green, which he said had been used to cover up "thefts, private interests & the blood of innocents.''http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1997/
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dariofo.htm
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec97/fo_10-9.html
1998 -- US: Main Coarse?: Nobel Laureate neoliberal economist Milton Friedman gets just desserts at the Marriott Hotel in Frisco, during the "School Choice & Corporate America" conference. BBB Field Agents Custard & Lemon Meringue approached him & let fly with tofu creme & sweet potato pies.
Up next, WTO gathering, Seattle, Washington, November 1999.
"The Biotic Baking Brigade doesn't just promise pie in the sky, we deliver"
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/wto.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_Baking_Brigade
3000 --
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud & the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds & the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder— Dylan Thomas, "Poem in October" 
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