Vitro Nasu

Pete Seeger

Photo via Passion for boating

Pete Seeger performing “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram” in Calcutta in 1963.

This bhajan (Hindu devotional song) translates:

Chief of the house of Raghu, Lord Rama,
Uplifters of those who have fallen, Sita and Rama,
Sita and Rama, Sita and Rama,
O beloved, praise Sita and Rama,
God and Allah are your names,
Bless everyone with real wisdom, Lord.

h/t to Priya Barr

The Power of Song – a film by his late wife..

Pete Seeger Remembers His Late Wife Toshi, Sings Civil Rights Anthem “We Shall Overcome”

Fracking Indigenous Struggle and Hiroshima Bombing

Arlo Guthrie

Pete Seeger:

I usually do a little meditation and prayer every night before I go to sleep – Just part of the routine. Last night, I decided to go visit Pete Seeger for a while, just to spend a little time together, it was around 9 PM. So I was sitting in my home in Florida, having a lovely chat with Pete, who was in a hospital in New York City. That’s the great thing about thoughts and prayers- You can go or be anywhere.

I simply wanted him to know that I loved him dearly, like a father in some ways, a mentor in others and just as a dear friend a lot of the time. I’d grown up that way – loving the Seegers – Pete & Toshi and all their family.

I let him know I was having trouble writing his obituary (as I’d been asked) but it seemed just so silly and I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound trite or plain stupid. “They’ll say something appropriate in the news,” we agreed. We laughed, we talked, and I took my leave about 9:30 last night.

“Arlo” he said, sounding just like the man I’ve known all of my life, “I guess I’ll see ya later.” I’ve always loved the rising and falling inflections in his voice. “Pete,” I said. “I guess we will.”

I turned off the light and closed my eyes and fell asleep until very early this morning, about 3 AM when the texts and phone calls started coming in from friends telling me Pete had passed away.

“Well, of course he passed away!” I’m telling everyone this morning. “But that doesn’t mean he’s gone.”

photo via

Amiri Baraka (LA times)

Amiri Baraka, controversial author and activist, dies at 79

The Guardian obit

Baraka was the subject of a 1983 documentary, In Motion, and holds a minor place in Hollywood history. In Bulworth, Warren Beatty’s 1998 satire about a senator’s break from the political establishment, Baraka plays a homeless poet who cheers on the title character. “You got to be a spirit,” the poet tells him. “You got to sing – don’t be no ghost.”

Amiri Baraka Homepage

12 great quotes by Amiri Baraka (buzzfeed) .

“When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.” – Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela 1918-2013 – RIP.

Jacques Derrida visits Nelson Mandela’s jail cell (youtube)

~12 Mandela Quotes That Won’t Be In the Corporate Media Obituaries~ (Commondreams)

Zizek on Mandela

Coetzee on Nelson Mandela (with a great photo)

The Child is Not Dead by Ingrid Jonker

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

Raul Hilberg, the first historian to document the banality of Nazi evil, nursed a lifelong grudge against Arendt. who borrowed from and popularized his work without crediting him.

Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.”

Hannah and Her Admirers by David Rieff (Susan Sontag’s son)

Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them.
Arendt had relied, by her own admission, on Raul Hilberg’s magisterial history of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. Most valuable of all to her was Hilberg’s account of the role of the Judenräte during the Shoah, and to what degree the leaders of these councils had in effect collaborated in the Jews’ extermination. Her conclusion was that had the Jews been leaderless and unorganized, there would have been chaos and misery, but nowhere near as many as 6 million would have been murdered. It was this position, far more than her thinking about the banality of evil, that had set so much of the official Jewish world against her. And while Hilberg did not agree with her, as he makes clear in a few icy paragraphs of his memoir, The Politics of Memory, he nonetheless defended Arendt publicly during the controversy.

It is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them. Despite her immense talent as a director of actors, perhaps with Hannah Arendt von Trotta is not so far from those late Rossellini films after all, and is nowhere near being as diligent or trustworthy.

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt

Photo via

Democracy Now.. interviewed Michel Gondry.

Approaching Half Dome click to see large

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4 Ducks Captain Monty
leading us to the journey of unknown.

See more photos here on FB album (Camping, biking and rafting at Yosemite)

Google celebrates Yosemite as Government shuts famous park down.

Demand pay freeze for congress..Petition sign here..

Cartoonists take aim at the shutdown.

Live at Occupy Wall Street– soundcloud. by Christopher Delaurenti

You know why a May day protest was successful (The Stranger – thx to Christopher D).

See Christopher harrassing the turtles – (previous post)

Jacques Audiard – birthday April 30, 1952

The Prophet – previous post

He knows how to cast, how to tell a great story.. he calls the Prophet anti– Scarface.. and his films.. Melo-Trash.. his people are mostly working class.. having a rough time.. his films fill your heart and brain.. it’s a good mix.
Earlier in his career..he produced films for Claude Miller. Jacques Audiard gets the big picture but he is also very meticulous..I watched how he works with actors on a DVD special feature.
He has introduced us to Tahar Rahim and Matthias Schoenaerts. (Mathhias Schoenaerts speaks three languages)

See a trailer for Rust & Bone

Alain <> Robbe Grillet
See a scene fromTrans Europe Express (youtube). . a film directed by Alain Robbe Grillet

Langston Hughes
Pastel drawing of Hughes by Winold Reiss
(February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)

Jukebox and Love Song (previous post)

On Geroge Whitman and Langston Hughes by Alan Sondheim

I haven’t seen the film but in the 1960s I hung around Whitman’s bookstore and got to know him;
I also remember listening to Langston Hughes through the bookstore skylight, we were on the roof and I almost fell through and on him. There was a wishing-well in the center of the place. It was amazing.

1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.

2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.

5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.

6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.

7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

Seven short stories about drones by Teju Cole

R.I.P Lucien Stryk (1924-2013) was an American poet, translator of Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, and former English professor at Northern Illinois University

Update: Lessig remembers Aaron – An incredible soul (Democracy Now, Amy Goodman)

Tech bloggers pay tributes to Aaron

My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved. Quinn said

He read to me and Ada compulsively; he read me a whole David Foster Wallace book. He read Robert Caro to me, countless articles, blog posts, snippets of books. Sometimes, he would call, just read, and hang up. He loved the Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, and the three of us read it together many times. We loved George Saunders. We loved so many things together.

Iternet prodigy, activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide

The world is robbed of a half-century of all the things we can’t even imagine Aaron would have accomplished with the remainder of his life.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide Friday in New York. He was 26 years old.

image via

Prosecutor as Bully by Lessig

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”
In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.”

How we stopped SOPA – (Aaron on video talking as an activist – via Boing Boing)

See Aaaron in bike helmet mask…(Slacsktory)

Aaron on depression —Very SICK

A Tribute to Aaron (Commondreams) – An Inspiring Heroism (UK Glenn Greenwald

He describes Palestine as a metaphor–for exile, for the human condition, for the grief of dislocation and dispossession. In “Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky,” he writes:

I’m the Adam of two Edens lost to me twice:
Expel me slowly. Kill me slowly
With Garcia Lorca
Under my olive tree.

Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish

A People With No Poetry Is A Defeated People

Notre musique (Our Music) is a 2004 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The film reflects on violence, morality, and the representation of violence in film, and touches especially on past colonialism and the current Israeli-Palestinian conflic

I belong there.. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born….

In Jerusalem..

Edward Said and his sister

In a poem Mahmoud Darwish bids Edward Said farewell

New York/ November/ Fifth Avenue
The sun a plate of shredded metal
I asked myself, estranged in the shadow:
Is it Babel or Sodom?

R.I.P Mahmoud Darwish 1941-2008 (previous post – Two Windows and a Story)

Ali, Fear Eats the Soul – 1974 – Fassbinder’s great film – full film on youtube

Not numbers: Named 108 Gazans killed (11pm Nov. 19 2012) –

Top 10 Myths about Israeli Attack on Gaza by Juan Cole

John Berger

I’ve only been actively concerned with Palestine as a writer for about seven years. But the crisis, the injustice, the suffering of the Palestinians, have coexisted alongside my whole life as a writer. The length of this injustice, the lack of recognition of it by the rest of the world, while Israel pursues its own logic, totally regardless of the views of the external world – all this I was not conscious of then, but I am now.

Dome

Noguchi Garden
in Jerusalem <>

( Photos by Fung-Lin Hall taken from the Billy Rose Garden in Jerusalem)

Isamu Noguchi – Nov 17, 1904

(image via)

This set by acclaimed designer Isamu Noguchi, used in Martha Graham’s ‘Embattled Garden,’ was damaged when basement storage of the Martha Graham Dance Company, located in the West Village, flooded in late October 2012. The company said it is still assessing the extent of the damage.

See Isamu Noguchi design from The Appalachian Spring..

Noguchi Museum NY..(youtube)

Yoshiko and Isamu Noguchi
Yoshiko Yamaguchi – Isamu Noguchi’s ex-wife .. an international diva who became a politican and has become a passionate advocate for Palestinian causes.

Edward Said on Israel occupation (youtube)

Horace Silver Blowing the Blues Away

Victory for equality, justice and women – 2012 election

We must learn how to sign “NO Drones”

Top Ten Wish List Progressives should Press on President Obama by Juan Cole

A Letter to Obama by George McGovern

McGovern with Hunter Thompson (previous post)

Louis Simpson
March 27, 1923 – September 14, 2012 (photo via)

Louis Simpson, Poet of Everyday Life dies, he was 89 years old

It’s complicated, being an American,
Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.
Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem.
On the Lawn at the Villa (l. 14-16) (1980)

For people may not know what they think
about politics in the Balkans,
or the vexed question of men and women,
but everyone has a definite opinion
about the flavour of shredded coconut.
Chocolates (l. 18-22) (1980) (Wikiquotes)

Whatever it is, it must have

A stomach that can digest

Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

Like the shark, it contains a shoe.

It must swim for miles through the desert

Uttering cries that are almost human.

(via NYtimes)

“All you really know is given
at moments when you’re seeing
and listening.
Being in love
is a great help.
Oh yes, but keep a dog.”

Two poems from the Struggling times (youtube)

Occupy news (from Democracy Now)

Occupy Wall Street – People’s Library