Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Swing as Surrealist Music

Cultural Correspondence (1975-83) was a remarkable US-based radical journal with a particular focus on popular culture. Its entire archive is now available online and is a real treasure trove. I've been browsing through a 1979 special on surrealism, which has lots of music and dance related content. The following text is by the American philosopher Horace Meyer Kellen (1882-1974), an extract from his 1942 book Art and Freedom. I would certainly take issue with its association of jazz and swing (and by implication black people) with the 'primitive' - these developed as modern urban musics created by sophisticated virtuoso musicians. But the text does express very well the enthusiasm of its followers in that period for a music that seemed to embody liberation:

SWING AS SURREALIST MUSIC

'The musical equivalent of surrealism in painting and literature is not obviously connected with either its theory or practice. It develops as a practice entirely innocent of theory, as an unwilled expression of alogical spontaneity, of irresponsible, personal invention unenchanneled by form, unchecked by musical knowledge or learned tradition; develops thus with all the differentiae which the connoisseurs ascribe to surrealist creations. The name for it is Swing. Its native habitat is the United States of America, and it is indigenous to the southern portion, especially to the Mississippi riverfront at New Orleans. Unlike its literary and pictorial parallels, which sustain a local life already below the level of subsistence among selected groups of intelligentsia, Swing has attained a world-wide diffusion among all classes and occupations. The event is natural enough. Verbiform and graphic symbols require interpretation; sheer sonorous rhythm does not. Swing is caused in a medium which issues from and speaks to Dr. Freud's Unconscious direct, without disguise, without distortion...

...Swing arrived as the latest phase of a progression from Ragtime through Jazz. The trick of heightening emotional tension by opposing one rhythm to another became conspicuous as a practice about the same time that post-impressionism made its start. The matrix of Swing is said to have been opposed and mixed body-rhythms of the pasmala as danced in New Orleans bawdy-houses and honky tonks. The manner of mixing and opposition was carried over from dancing bodies to  sounding musical instruments. Popular songs so treated were said to be "ragged," and the treatment came to be called Rag-time. The singers and dancers and players who devised Ragtime were American Negroes with remnants of an eroding African culture in their body-rhythms, in their social habits and in their personal outlook. They were primitives indigenous to industrial civilization, with its timeclocks, its rigid divisions of the hours of the working day, its patterns of machine-logic and rationality. Negro Ragtime was the beginning of a break from that. In less than a generation the Negro's social heartbreak was absorbed into Ragtime's terpsichorean breakdown and Ragtime transmuted to Jazz. The vehicles of the American Negro's heartbreak is the Spiritual and Jazz, which is said to derive from jaser, an Acadian word meaning to gabble, to chatter, is the compenetration of the rag and the spiritual. Body, voice, wind and percussion instruments are its vehicles.

Jazz began to spread through the great industrial cities of the North American continent about the same year that the First International Exhibi-ion of Modem Art began its epoch-making trek across the States. This exhibition, which for the first time brought before the unaccustomed eyes of Americans the works of all the schools and cults that Europe had bred in two generations, had been arranged under the auspices of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Ragtime, which might be said to correspond to the cubist phase of the pictorial and verbiforrn arts, spread to Europe while modernist painting and poetry were acquiring a vogue in America. The four years o' the First World War were a plowing of a cultural soil wherein Jazz could take deep roots, and when the War ended it flowered indeed. . . .

The metronomic noises of the railroads and factories, the monotonous roar of the cities de-manded their rhythmic compensation. Even  formal music brought them forth. Percussion and wind instruments — brasses, saxophones, trombones, xylophones, bells — became more noticeable in orchestras. To atonality or to polytonality, which dropped modulation, which set key against key and scale against scale, was joined a continuous shift of rhythm or a contrapuntal opposition of many rhythms. In 1893, Dahomey Negroes, beating tom-torns for the entertainment of gaping Americans at Chicago's World Fair, had, by using feet and heads as well as hands, produced a triple cross rhythm which constituted an unconscious counter-point of rhythms. . .

Formal professional music, however modem, somehow failed to release the emotions which the industrial workday blockaded and starved. Night, that so long had been the time, not for living, but for sleeping away the fatigues of the living day, became conspicuously the time for living. The existence of the folk of the industrial cities is now a cultural schizophrenia of day-life and night-life. Day is the time when they earn their livings, night is the time when they live their lives. During the day most people are producers, disciplined to the machine, their bodies held to its rhythm, their minds constrained to its motions. By night, they are consumers; their body-rhythm seeks to recover its native physiological patterns, their movements search to resume the human form appropriate to autonomous human function. The extraordinary spread and influence of Swing testifies that in it the seeking and searching come to a haven; that it owns the power of gratifying the needs which launch them. Also its well-spring is the Negro of the urban jungle in New Orleans; also its centers of power are the great industrial areas — Chicago, New York, London, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo.

Atonal, polyrhythmic, Swing cuts itself loose from every rule and canon that tradition has brought down or craftsmanship confirmed. It asks of the performer two things, a maximum of virtuosity on his instrument, a maximum of spontaneity in his performance. That must needs be sheer, unrestricted improvisation, the free, the anarchic expression of his Unconscious, undisguised and unashamed. Nor is the expression sonoriform only. His whole body collaborates: as he plays, he dances, he acts, he sings, he leaps and twists and weaves like an acrobat, and the different behaviors pass seamlessly into and out of one another. He becomes the leader, not only of his band, but of his audiences: they step from their seats into the aisles and dance with him in an ecstasy — orgiastic or mystical or both according to the observer's lights — of release and self-recovery. It is the liberation of Dionysos from Apollo, of the living organism from the automatic machine, an insurgence of the depths into a conscious experience without connection and without analogue, though perhaps revivalist religious gatherings do enfold likenesses wherein convert and jitterbug are one under the skin. Swing might with good reason be called surrealism in excelsis'.

(full text below- click to enlarge)


Sunday, November 27, 2011

Agit Disco Book Launch

Agit Disco has just been published by Mute Books, compiled by Stefan Szczelkun, edited by Anthony Iles  The launch takes place on 8th December 2011, 6.30pm – 9.00pm at The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London, NW8 8PQ.

I have a chapter in the book so will be going along, maybe see some of you there  (details here, including how to order a copy).

'Agit Disco collects the playlists of its 23 writers to tell the story of how music has politically influenced and inspired them. The book provides a multi-genre survey of political musics, from a wide range of viewpoints, that goes beyond protest songs into the darker hinterlands of musical meaning. Each playlist is annotated and illustrated.

The collection grew organically with an exchange of homemade CDs and images. These images, with their DIY graphics, are used to give the playlists a visual materiality. Almost everyone makes selections of music to play to themselves and friends. Agit Disco intends to show the importance of this creative activity and its place in our formation as political beings. This activity is at odds with to the usual process of selection by the mainstream media - in which the most potent musical agents of change are, whenever possible, erased from the public airwaves. Agit Disco Selectors: Sian Addicott, Louise Carolin, Peter Conlin, Mel Croucher, Martin Dixon, John Eden, Sarah Falloon, Simon Ford, Peter Haining, Stewart Home, Tom Jennings, DJ Krautpleaser, Roger McKinley, Micheline Mason, Tracey Moberly, Luca Paci, Room 13 – Lochyside Scotland, Howard Slater, Johnny Spencer, Stefan Szczelkun, Andy T, Neil Transpontine, Tom Vague'.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Shelagh Delaney RIP


Shelagh Delaney (1939-2011) died this weekend. She achieved many things, but will always be primarily remembered for A Taste of Honey, the play she wrote when she was just 18 years old in 1958. As her Guardian obituary mentions 'A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman's point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype'. This was recognised from the start, with Colin MacInnes stating in a 1959 review in Encounter that it was ‘… the first English play I’ve seen in which a coloured man, and a queer boy, are presented as natural characters, factually without a nudge or shudder. It is also the first play I can remember about working-class people that entirely escapes being a “working class play”: no patronage, no dogma, just the thing as it is, taken straight’.

Of course both Taste of Honey and Delaney's subsequent The Lion in Love had a huge influence on Morrissey and The Smiths, as summarised  by Passions Just Like Mine:

'Delaney's "A Taste Of Honey" features the following lines which were adapted by Morrissey mainly for the Smiths' "Reel Around The Fountain" and "This Night Has Opened My Eyes", but also other songs: "I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice"; "You told me not to trust men calling themselves Smith."; "That river, it's the color of lead."; "I'm not sorry and I'm not glad"; "Oh well, the dream's gone, but the baby's real enough"; "It's a long time, six months"; "You can't just wrap it up in a bundle of newspaper. And dump it on a doorstep."; "I'll probably never see you again"; "I don't owe you a thing"; "As merry as the day is long"; "Sing me to sleep"; "You want taking in hand"; "It's your life, ruin it your own way.".


Delaney's "The Lion In Love" features the lines "I think we've courted long enough, it's time our tale was told"; "I'll probably never see you again"; "Cash on the nail"; "Anything's hard to find if you go around looking for it with your eyes shut"; "I'd sooner spit in everybody's eye"; "I'll go out and get a job tomorrow / you needn't bother" ; "Nell: And getting nowhere fast. Andy: These things take time."; "Pagliacci - that's me"; "Shall I tell you something? I don't like your face"; "ten-ton truck"; "Do I owe you anything"; "Tied to his mother's apron strings" which also appear in similar form in various songs penned by Morrissey. The line "So rattle her bones all over the stones, she's only a beggar-man whom nobody owns" also appears almost word for word in Morrissey's "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" although it must be said that this line had previously appeared in James Joyce's "Ulysses" and even earlier in English poet Thomas Noel's "The Pauper's Funeral". Still, Morrissey's most direct inspiration is very likely the Delaney source'.

And Delaney's image graced two Smiths covers.

 
Delaney on the cover of Girlfriend in a Coma
Delaney on the cover of Louder than Bombs

Interesting to reflect on the similarities between Delaney and Morrissey, both from working class Manchester/Salford families of Irish origin. In fact that Manchester Irish proletarian perspective is a major influence on 'English' popular culture, isn't it? Shaun Ryder/Happy Mondays would be another example.

(The Beatles also recorded A Taste of Honey, a song originally written for the Broadway version of the play; their song Your Mother Should Know lifted its title from the play)

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Riots 'like a rave'

The August riots in England: Understanding the involvement of young people, published by the National Centre for Social Research (Novemeber 2011) is a report commissioned by the Government's Cabinet Office, with all that implies. But it does at least have the strength of actually being partly based on interviews with people involved, and gives the lie to the notion that the riots were simply a gang-organised mindless explosion. Here's a few extracts:

'Why did young people get involved (or not)?
...
• Something exciting to do: the riots were seen as an exciting event – a day like no other – described in terms of a wild party or “like a rave”. The party atmosphere, adrenaline and hype were seen as encouraging and explaining young people’s involvement by young people themselves and community stakeholders.
• The opportunity to get free stuff: the excitement of the events was also tied up with the thrill of getting “free stuff” – things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.
• A chance to get back at police: in Tottenham, the rioting was described as a direct response to the police handling of the shooting of Mark Duggan. Here and elsewhere in London, the Mark Duggan case was also described as the origin of the riots and the way it was handled was seen as an example of a lack of respect by the police that was common in  the experience of young black people in some parts of London. Outside London, the rioting was not generally attributed to the Mark Duggan case. However, the attitude and behaviour of the police locally was consistently cited as a trigger outside as well as within London.

“People doing it because they’re angry at police. Police and people don’t have a good relationship and feel mad when get pulled by the police. Government were going to close [swimming] baths and people were angry about this ‘cos the only thing for young people to do.” (Young person, in custody)

“I think some of them just wanted the free stuff and some of them wanted to get back at the police. … Some of them might have been there because of the cuts, because of the EMA. … There were different reasons why people went there. Some it was for the enjoyment, to be with friends, some because they were angry with the government, the police.” (Young person, Peckham)

“We was just bored really and obviously nothing like this has ever happened for however long we have been alive. It was a first really, and we decided just to go up there just so we can say we had been there, not to act cool or anything, just to say, it is so big, it will probably be put in history, so we decided to go up there. We were that bored.” (Young person, Birmingham)

'However, the excitement was an attraction not just for the bored and underoccupied but also for young people who were otherwise engaged in work or education. In some instances, the events were described in terms of a wild party or, as one young person put it, “like a rave”. A sense of glee pervaded these accounts – people were often grinning while describing their experience – a delight that the normal order of things was briefly turned upside down. There was satisfaction in having “put two fingers up” to the “authorities” and pleasure in the memory of a day of disorder and misrule'.

“[I felt] excited, adrenaline, scared, but a good scared, like: ‘Wow, wow, wow, is this happening?’ And the bin on fire was wow. It was a new experience. [I] think it was for everyone. People were excited, especially getting PS3 boxes.” (Young person, Peckham)

Communities, commodities and class in the August 2011 riots

Also good is an article from Aufheben, Communities, commodities and class in the August 2011 riots.

'Detailed examination of the August unrest allows a tentative designation of three forms of disturbance. These categorisations are fairly loose, as repertoires of activity such as collective violence directed against the police and organised looting were features of most of the disorders to greater or lesser degree. However, there were clearly some differences in the primacy of activity in the August unrest that were related to the motivations and temporal positioning of the events.

The first disturbance form, designated the 'community riot', is characterised by locale rather than purely by its activity. These incidents in August 2011 were typically located in largely proletarian inner-city areas of mixed ethnicity (e.g. Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth). Typically they were triggered by police actions (e.g. the shooting of Mark Duggan and the police reaction to the subsequent demonstration in Tottenham, the 'stop and search' operations in Hackney) in areas, which had a significant pre-history of both contested policing and 'riotous' responses.37 These incidents were characterised by a large amount of violence directed against the police, static defence of 'territory' by the 'rioters' (such as Tottenham High Rd. and the Pembury estate in Hackney), attacks on important 'symbolic' targets (such as police stations, courts, public buildings) and the active and passive support of different sections of the local population (e.g. Tottenham and Hackney). Looting was clearly a subsidiary activity in these events.

The second category of disturbance can be labelled as 'commodity riot', as the primary aim of the participants was to appropriate goods. In August these events were the most common, were precipitated by the participants rather than the police and characterised by some level of pre-meditated target selection and organisation (using BB messaging, e.g. Enfield, Oxford Circus, Bristol and many other areas). They were usually aimed at large concentrations of commercial outlets (such as shopping centres, malls and retail parks), involved significant crowd mobility (including the use of bikes and vehicles to transport 'booty') and avoided contact with opposing superior forces (of police). The 'cat and mouse' manoeuvring between the police and 'looters' that occurred in many incidents - the latter aided by mobile phones and instant messaging - was a by-product of the primary aim to acquire useful (and valuable) commodities for the protagonists. Looters operated in numerous but smaller groups than in 'community riots', often travelled significant distances to 'hit' selected targets and were not spatially tied to their home locales.

The final (and fairly unusual) type of disturbance, which occurred in August in a few locations in London (Ealing, Pimlico, Sloane Square, Notting Hill), was the 'anti-rich riot'. These were characterised by pre-planning, movements by participants out of home locales to attack areas that were perceived to be dominated by the wealthy and were marked by widespread destruction of cars, cafeacute;s, restaurants, boutiques and commercial properties that were not necessarily high value 'looting' targets. Face to face robbing, terrorising and violence, directed at rich residents of these areas were a significant feature of these events'.

Looting, violins and ballet

I remember people looting a music shop on Charing Cross Road during the 1990 London poll tax riot, a young Chinese guy sprinting down the road carrying an electric guitar, somebody else grabbing a saxophone. People have been jailed in Manchester after similar scenes at a music shop in the city:

'[S.H.] was clutching a looted violin when he was arrested in the aftermath of riots in Manchester. Smelling strongly of drink, the aspiring musician quipped: ‘I’ve always wanted to learn to play the violin.’ His parents wept in the dock as district judge Alan Berg told the 19-year-old it was an ‘absolute tragedy’ that he had thrown away his prospects in this way.Hoyle, of Manchester, was arrested at 3am on Wednesday when police encircled a group of youths and saw him clutching the violin, thought to be from a music shop which had earlier been looted. He tried to run away as police arrested a girl, but the court heard he was chased and caught, telling officers: ‘I can understand why people riot, you really are fascist ********.’ Hoyle had never been in trouble before and is on Jobseekers’ Allowance, the court heard.
Sentencing him to four months in a young offenders’ institution for theft, Judge Berg told Hoyle he had brought ‘shame and disgrace’ on his family. But he told the shamefaced teenager: ‘Nobody forced you to get drunk and pick up the violin.’

An aspiring ballerina was arrested after police published images of her looting two boxed flat screen TVs from a hi-fi store where £190,000 of damage was caused. The 17-year-old, who has been studying ballet since she was seven and wants to be a dance teacher, gave herself up after seeing a CCTV image of herself in a newspaper.  The dancer was among a group of masked women caught on camera looting Richer Sounds, in Croydon. She was remanded in custody' (Daily Mail, 2 September 2011)



'Just two days after gangs of youths rampaged through Manchester smashing windows and looting shops, the city's retailers were in defiant mood. "We are Manchester, we don't give in that easy," said Trina Rance, operations manager at Dawson's, one of Manchester's largest music stores. Standing by a wrecked £14,000 grand piano, she described how she learned on Tuesday night that looters had broken into the shop.What followed was anarchy, with looters helping themselves to musical instruments and smashing equipment. One hooded youth was filmed walking casually down Portland Street carrying an expensive electric guitar he had stolen, the price tag still fluttering' (BBC, 11 August 2011).


'A soldier from Greater Manchester has been jailed for eight months after trying to sell a guitar that had been stolen during August's riots. [LB] 20, bought the guitar for £20 from an unknown man in Manchester city centre, during the height of the disorder on 9 August.He was arrested two days later as he tried to sell the instrument at a music shop in his home town of Leigh.He was sentenced to eight months in jail at Manchester Crown Court.Bretherton bought the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which had an estimated value of £2,000, from a looter in the street. It had been taken from Dawson's music store on Portland Street shortly before. The soldier, a member of the 7th Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, took the guitar into a music shop in Leigh two days later.As he attempted to sell the instrument, the shop owner became suspicious, locked him in and called the police' (BBC, 21 October 2011)

Monday, November 07, 2011

Halloween in London

London Halloween
Costume 2011
Halloween weekend in London, and the streets were full of zombies, witches and men wrapped in bandages. White make up and fake blood. The fancy dress theme seems to have spilled beyond horror into generic carnivalesque costume. On the way to a house party in Brixton on the Saturday night a pantomime horse crossed the road in front of us, and a man ran down the road dressed up as a flying squirrel.

At the party a DJ dressed up as a penguin span the obligatory Michael Jackson's Thriller to a party including a crocodile, a parrot, the snow queen from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (handing out Turkish delight), a bat, two suicide bombers, Amy Winehouse and somebody dressed up in a take on one of Louise Bourgeois' costumes from her performance piece Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts (seemingly somebody had a similar idea at a feminist art themed Halloween ball in New York in 2010).

Louise Bourgeois in 1978
 
Erica Magrey, New York Halloween Costume 2010
 

Sunday, November 06, 2011

New York 1977: when the lights went out

The Trammps' disco classic The Night the Lights Went Out (1977) commemorates an actual historical event in that year - the New York blackout. In The Trammps' account this was an occasion for sex in the unlit darkness:

Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City (I wanna know, I wanna know)
Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City

Don't you know that I was making love
(She was making love)

I remember on the 13th of July
The only light was the light up in the sky
New York had black-out for 25 hours or more
And nobody really knows the reason why...

Politicians said it was a pity
But that was the night they call it love city
So I took my lady by the hand
And led her to love me, love me, love me!

Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City (I wanna know, yeah)
Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City



But sex wasn't the only thing on New Yorkers' minds - the power cut also prompted mass looting. John Zerzan celebrated this aspect in an article published in the Detroit-based radical paper Fifth Estate (August 1977):

New York, New York

“Amid All the Camaraderie is Much Looting this Time; Seeing the City Disappear”, Wall Street Journal headline, 15 July 1977

The Journal went on to quote a cop on what he saw, as the great Bastille Day break-out unfolded: “People are going wild in the borough of Brooklyn. They are looting stores by the carload.” Another cop added later: “Stores were ripped open. Others have been leveled. After they looted, they burned.”

At about 9:00 p.m. on July 13 the power went out in New York for 24 hours. During that period the complete impotence if the state in our most ‘advanced’ urban space could hardly have been made more transparent. As soon as the lights went out, cheers and shouts and loud music announced the liberation of huge sections of the city. The looting and burning commenced immediately, with whole families joining in the “carnival spirit”. In the University Heights section of the Bronx, a Pontiac dealer lost the 50 new cars in his showroom. In many areas, tow trucks and other vehicles were used to tear away the metal gates from stores. Many multistorey furniture businesses were completely emptied by neighborhood residents.

Despite emergency alerts for the state troopers, FBI and National Guard, there was really nothing authority could do, and they knew it. A New York Times editorial of July 16 somewhat angrily waved aside the protests of those who wondered why there was almost no intervention on the side of property. “Are you kidding?” the Times snorted, pointing out that such provocation would only have meant that the entire city would still be engulfed in riots, adding that the National Guard is a “bunch of kids” who wouldn’t have had a chance.

The plundering was completely multi-racial, with white, black and Hispanic businesses cleaned out and destroyed throughout major parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Not a single “racial incident” was reported during the uprising, while newspaper pictures and TV news bore witness to the variously coloured faces emerging from the merchants’ windows and celebrating in the streets. Similarly, looting, vandalism, and attacks in police were not confined to the City proper; Mount Vernon, Yonkers and White Plains were among suburbs in which the same things happened, albeit on a smaller scale.

Rioting broke out in the Bronx House of Detention where prisoners started fires, seized dormitories, and almost escaped by ramming through a wall with a steel bed. Concerning the public, the Bronx District Attorney fumed, “It’s lawlessness. It’s almost anarchy.”

Officer Gary Parlefsky, of the 30th Precinct in Harlem, said that he and other cops came under fire from guns, bottles and rocks. He continued: 'We were scared to death... but worse than that, a blue uniform didn’t mean a thing. They couldn’t understand why we were arresting them'.

At a large store at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue, the doors were smashed open and dozens of people carried off appliances. A woman in her middle-50s walked into the store and said laughingly: “Shopping with no money required!”

Attesting to the atmosphere of a “collective celebration”, as one worried columnist put it, a distribution center was spontaneously organized at a Brooklyn intersection, with piles of looted goods on display for the taking. This was shown briefly on an independent New York station, WPIX-TV, but not mentioned in the major newspapers. The transformation of commodities into free merchandise was only aided by the coming of daylight, as the festivity and music continued. Mayor Beame, at a noon (July 15) press conference, spoke of the “night of terror”, only to be mocked heartily by the continuing liberation underway throughout New York as he spoke.

Much, of course, was made of the huge contrast between the events of July 1977 and the relatively placid, law-abiding New York blackout of November 1965. One can only mention the obvious fact that the dominant values are now everywhere in shreds. The “social cohesion” of class society is evaporating. New York is no isolated example.

Of course, there has been a progressive decay in recent times of restraint, hierarchy, and other enforced virtues; it hasn’t happened all at once. Thus, in the 1960s, John Leggett (in his Class, Race and Labour) was surprised to learn upon examining the arrest records of those in the Detroit and Newark insurrections, that a great many of the participants were fully employed. This time, of the 176 people indicted as of August 8 in Brooklyn (1,004 were arrested in the borough), 48% were regularly employed. (The same article in the August 9 San Francisco Chronicle where these figures appeared also pointed out that only “six grocery stores were looted while 39 furniture stores, 20 drug stores and 17 jewelry stores and clothing stores were looted”). And there are other similarities to New York, naturally; Life magazine of 4 August 1967 spoke of the “carnival-like revel of looting” in Detroit, and Professor Edward Banfield commented that "Negroes and whites mingled in the streets [of Detroit] and looted amicably side by side....”

The main difference is probably one of scale and scope — that in New York virtually all areas, even the suburbs, took the offensive and did so from the moment the lights went out. Over $1 billion was lost in the thousands of stores looted and burned, while the cops were paralyzed. During the last New York rioting, the ‘Martin Luther King’ days of 1968, 32 cops were injured; in one day in July 1977, 418 cops were injured.

The Left — all of it — has spoken only of the high unemployment, the police brutality; has spoken of the people of New York only as objects, and pathetic ones at that! The gleaming achievements of the unmediated / unideologized have all the pigs scared shitless'.