#underground modernist

[egoschwank]

al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #1143

first posted in facebook january 14, 2023

e. mcknight kauffer -- "bananas" (1926)

"how come i had never before now heard of the commercial poster designer e. mcknight kauffer, the subject of a startlingly spectacular show, 'underground modernist'" ... peter schjeldahl

"never put bananas in the refrigerator" ... roz chast

"the artist in advertising is a new kind of being. his responsibilities are to my mind very considerable. it is his business constantly to correct values, to establish new ones, to stimulate advertising and help to make it something worthy of the civilisation that needs it" ... e. mcknight kauffer

"the housewife is not here. she is running for congress" ... bob dylan

"a beautiful bunch of ripe banana (daylight come and we want go home) hide the deadly black tarantula (daylight come and we want go home)" ... traditional jamaican folk song

"never put tarantulas in the refrigerator ... let alone a banana in congress" ... al janik

[eurigmorgan]

Arnos Grove Underground Station (1932)

Piccadilly Line Extension

[useless-catalanfacts]

A pianist in a room of the old hospital. Photo by ivanbrns on Instagram.

The Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau was built in 1905 in Barcelona (Catalonia). Designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, one of the most famous architects of the Catalan modernist style, it was a public hospital designed to offer patients a healthy and beautiful environment with good air circulation and natural light. It was a pioneering hospital in many regards, including underground heating.

Nowadays, hospitals use a lot of machinery that made the building obsolete. In 2009, a new modern hospital was built to replace this one. Now, the modernist building can be visited and is also the setting of cultural events such as concerts.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Recent books, fiction -

Shola von Reinhold, LOTE - essentially a black queer modernist Possession; I enjoyed it quite a lot. Mathilda, an erstwhile archivist and self-described "Arcadian" devotee of stylish queer figures from the early twentieth century follows the trail of a forgotten black woman modernist writer. I loved Mathilda as a narrator, her unapologetically sensuous engagement with the figures she studies and her embrace of pleasure and style and decadence as sites of both joy and resistance. Like Possession, this includes some razor-sharp and very funny parody of contemporary academic and artistic circles, this time directed mostly towards nihilistic post-modernists; von Reinhold's gaze is very clear on the actual costs of this kind of fantasized negation of the self. I found myself wanting a little more out of the ending in some ways, but over all I loved and definitely recommend this.

Rahul Mehta, Quarantine - [despite our current associations with the title, this book came out in 2011 and is not related to plague or pandemics at all] collection of short stories largely about young gay Indian-American men struggling with various types of feelings of disconnection. Elegantly written and engaging, but sometimes overly detached and repetitive. I would read more by this author.

Rainbow Rowell, Carry On - I think I read this because Jo Walton recommended it on Tor and I hadn't read anything by this author? Anyway, I shouldn't have. The novel is a tepid Harry Potter parody that ends up amounting to bad Harry/Draco fic in which Draco is a vampire. It was stupid and badly written, and I don't care nearly enough about Harry Potter from any angle to be interested. Not recommended, and I will not be trying anything else by this author.

Darry Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine - this is now the third book I have read which takes as its premise survivors of horror movie scenarios coming together in some way (the others were Riley Sager's Final Girls, which I didn't like much, and Grady Hendrix' The Final Girl Support Group, which I had a lot of fun with). I found this one quite moving, though limited by being a novella - there were a lot of problems, especially with the denouement, that I think could have been easily solved in a longer book. Gregory's wife is a therapist (he thanks her in the acknowledgements), and so the therapy group in which all the characters meet is written a lot more believably than most group therapy in fiction (though I would make some different choices than the facilitator!). I was quite moved by the thread throughout many of the characters' stories about their own ambiguous relationship to their various victimizations, the parts of the experiences they long for or miss, the unresolved questions about meaning-making. Some of the characters came off as more full people than others, which I put down to limited space; likewise, there's a (heavily foreshadowed) reveal at the end about the identity of the therapist which I thought could have worked but as it was felt rushed, particularly given the attention to therapeutic ethics earlier in the book. Recommended, though not for everyone.

Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground - posthumously published novella expanding on a previously published short story of Wright's, which I have not read. A black man in Chicago is tortured while under arrest for a crime he did not commit; he subsequently flees into the city sewers, where he undergoes an existential shift in the experience of being proximate to but apart from human society. This was beautifully, vividly written; the sections describing our protagonist's solo journey through the sewers and the way he makes sense of what he hears and witnesses from the lives of the people around him will stay with me a long time. The novella is published with an autobiographical essay from Wright about his grandmother's religiosity, which inspired him to write the book; this essay was interesting in itself, but I felt that the novella stood well without it.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods - collection of graphic gothic horror short stories (graphic like graphic novel, not graphic like explicit - unwieldy turn-of-phrase). Carroll's art is gorgeous, and I enjoyed it a lot despite graphic fiction not working well for me. The stories themselves are slight and often could use more development and explication, but I am still glad I read this. Very good to read on a rainy autumnal day with some tea, which is what I did.

Gaile Parkin, Baking Cakes in Kigali - Angel, a middle-aged Tanzanian cake baker now living and working in Kigali, Rwanda, runs her business while trying to be a decent person and support those in the community around her. This was a beautifully gentle, optimistic novel that held a lot of space for the complexity of Angel's social world and treats the moral choices she has to make her day-to-day life as worthy of serious consideration (her musings about under what circumstances she would take a moral stand of refusing to serve a customer was a good example). At some points throughout the book I was worried it would land too shallowly on serious topics, but it came through and won me over. And I loved hearing about how Angel sold her cakes.

Caroline McKenzie, A Year of Ugly - a family of undocumented Venezuelan immigrants living in Trinidad deal with a madcap series of adventures with blackmailers while a romance plot line happens in the foreground. I didn't like this; its humor felt cruel to me, and the tone in sections about sex work or the female characters' sexuality felt very sour. McKenzie has an author's note about she was trying to write about serious experiences of her community in a more light-hearted way, but the contrast with Baking Cakes in Kigali, which ostensibly had the same aim but handled it with gentleness and humanity, was stark. Not recommended.

V. C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic - yes, I'd never read it before! It was at the library, and I thought it was finally time. It's a fascinating book - the use of detail which at once feels fetishistic while also reminding me of older children's novels (compare the Dollanganger children cleaning up the attic with the protagonists of The Boxcar Children in their titular makeshift home); the contained extremity of the gothic melodrama; the fantasmatic alternation of confinement and expansiveness in the use of space. I wouldn't say it's good, exactly, but I'm glad I read it. Probably won't read the sequels, but will be thinking about it for a long time.

[gravedangerahead]

Bestie I know you're having fun in the Niemeyer tag and if you like modernist/brutalist architecture the next work I recommend you to check it out is from Vilanova Artigas

Oh, that's cool, I'll check it out! Do you have some favorite works of his?

I know absolutely nothing about architecture, but I grew up with the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and I absolutely love it, and it has models of his buildings underground

Then I got very sentimental about Oscar after the fascists invaded Brasília, and there were a lot of very interesting things said about the meaning behind his projects

But I really just look at it and go "ooooooooooh, pretty 😍"

[grandhotelabyss]

Jumping off your comment on Substack that Poe invented avant-garde poetry and pulp fiction, and Jane Austen invented romance fiction, what other authors invented genres? What was the most recent genre invented?

I was being deliberately provocative with that statement. Often it's hard to name a single inventor. Why are all these genres invented in the last three centuries? Because of print culture and mass literacy's explosion of discourse. Back before the printing press and mass literacy, you didn't need that many genres; tragedy, comedy, epic, and romance were enough. And most modern genres are, as critics like Northrop Frye would insist, developments of these. (Austen writes comedy; Poe writes romance.) But still, with so many more opportunities to create, more is created, so a few further generalizations can be made. Walter Scott invented the historical novel at the same time as Poe and Austen were inventing everything else. And though I credited Austen with the realist novel in its modern form, Balzac had a hand in that, too, turning Scott's approach to the past as living continuum onto the present itself. Plenty of authors invent sub-genres of broader genres. Poe gives us modern horror in general by modernizing the Gothic, itself devised as the return of modernity's repressed by Walpole and Radcliffe, in the same way that Austen modernizes the domestic sentimental novel of Richardson and Rousseau by synthesizing it with the comic epic of Fielding. These innovations flow into others, from the realistic novel of ideas in George Eliot, the proto-modernist novel of consciousness in Henry James on Austen's side to the further techno-modernizations of the Gothic in Stoker, Stevenson, and eventually Lovecraft on Poe's. The superhero is invented in the 20th century out of pulp influences, synthesizing the Poe-like detective (itself a romance derivative: the modern knight-errant) with Wellsian science-fiction scenarios (themselves descended from the romance's enchanted landscapes); the inventors here, not quite literary or artistic geniuses, are Siegel and Shuster, who probably would have cited Hercules and Samson. Going back to high literature, the bildungsroman is invented in the 18th century as the epic itinerary of the modern soul in an alien society: Defoe and Fielding, Rousseau and Goethe. The bildungsroman becomes the existential novel in the late 19th century, often mediated by Poe's own influence, his injection of the immobilizing irrational into the narrative of development, as with Notes from Underground, and flowing from there into Hamsun, Camus, Sartre, Dazai, Ellison, and into the present. Dostoevsky more than anyone else can also perhaps also be credited with the novel of ideas, though, as I said, George Eliot provides a stabler English version. The synthesizers and the inventors, the last and the first, can be hard to tell apart. Austen and Poe stand at the end as well as at the beginning of traditions, each looking back to the ruins of an older order. Walter Benjamin: "every great work founds a genre or dissolves one." These two gestures are the same gesture. In Ulysses we find Austen's domestic realism and rational psychology fused with Poe's formalism and irrational psychology at the apotheosis of modern fiction and the birth of the 20th-century novel. Kafka and Borges each come out of Poe's innovation to create something new and indefinable we are still living with, still annotating, still working on, too "still in it" to quite name it. Woolf is unimaginable without Austen, yet not quite deducible from Austen, and still a regulating influence. It's an infinite topic. As for the most recent genres and their inventors, someone younger than me will have to answer; go ahead, tell me to read One Piece; tell me to play video games; you won't be the first.

[socmod]

Dear friends , We are happy to announce that ”Socialist Modernism in Romania and the Republic of Moldova”, the first photo album/digital guide in the 2nd release of @_BA_CU ‘s planned series, is available in 800 copies. Those who are interested in #SocialistModernism are able to order the book on 👉🏻 @fdestribute @FUDEshopAmazon 👈🏻distributor page, (Link in our profile☝️) ; link: http://fdestribute.com/fdshop/ or AMAZON: https://www.amazon.de/dp/6069490975/ref=olp_aod_redir_impl1?_encoding=UTF8&aod= by selecting the Photo album from among the books listed. (DHL Express Shipping worldwide) #SocialistModernism #_BA_CU The photo album includes landmarks of socialist modernist architecture in Romania and the Republic of Moldova – from 1955 to 1989/91. B.A.C.U. Association introduces and explains socialist modernist tendencies, it presents – in color photographs – a functional image of the buildings and their often original elements that synthesize local culture and traditions, while bringing us up to date with their current state of conservation. ( available for order, shipping starting 1 November, 2020) Print run 800 Pages 194+1 Spread/ Romania and the Republic of Moldova – SOC MOD Map Romanian, English Size 26×28.5 cm Weight 1.25 kg Designed and published by @_BA_CU Association 1, 2, 3 pic: Livezeni Coal Mine ( Mina Livezeni - E.M. Livezeni) One of the largest underground mining exploitation in Romania located in Petroşani - one of six cities in the Jiu Valley mining exploitation region of Hunedoara County. It was built in 1980. (c) BACU 5 Mihai Flamaropol Skating Rink (Patinoarul Mihai Flamaropol), Bucharest, Romania, opened in 1952 and rebuilt in 1974. 7 Ventilation shaft, Pitesti Sports Hall (Sala Sporturilor), Pitesti, Romania, built between 1972-5, Architect I.Ionescu (IPCT Bucuresti) 9 Government parking garage, Chisinau, Moldova, built in 1978, Architect: S. Khoma et al. MoldGIPROstroy 10 Munplast building, Bucharest, Romania, built in the 70s. Proiect Bucuresti (c) BACU https://www.instagram.com/p/CjQOlU_swJj/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[blakegopnik]

THE FRIDAY PIC shows the actors Ondine (as Scrooge) and Charles Stanley (as Señor Oro) in a scene from last night’s first-ever (legible) projection of Andy Warhol’s “Xmas Carol," which was his (sort-of) record of the play “Chas. Dickens’ Christmas Carol,” by the underground poet (and sometimes scoundrel) Søren Agenoux. The show played for a month at New York’s Caffe Cino during the holiday season in 1966, and Warhol caught it on film at some point late in its run. Yesterday’s screening was part of the launch party for the new book “I Insist on Being: Selected Writings of Søren Agenoux,” in which editors Gerard Forde and Michael Smith at last shed light on one of the more obscure but fascinating figures of the New York underground, and of the Factory scene around Warhol.

I was surprised to see how a non-Factory production like Agenoux’s riff on Dickens still seemed to orbit around Warhol, as though his gravitational pull was too great to resist: The silver foil used as a backdrop to this scene in the play is an obvious reference to the foil covering Warhol’s 47th Street studio. (It must have reminded him of his own first use of silver foil, in the sets he designed for Michael Kahn’s 1959 student production of Jean Cocteau’s “Orphée.”)

I was also struck by how much Warhol turned his “record” of Agenoux’s play into his own work of art. His in-camera edits seem to have cut out something like half of the play’s action, injecting full-blown modernist disjunction into a work that was only half-coherent to begin with.

Warhol’s Pop pictures get a lot of their force from an almost excessive legibility, which is also true of many of his greatest early films, like “Kiss” or “Empire” or “Blow Job.” So it’s interesting to see him taking “Xmas Carol” in an almost Cubist direction, and with all the virtuoso control of a Picasso. It’s easy to think of Warhol as the most casual of craftsmen — as an anti-crafstman, even — but there’s nothing casual about how brilliantly he shoots and frames and reconfigures Agenoux’s play.

[vacabee-travel-and-lifestyle]

Travel spot: Brno, Czechia

A vibrant city known for its blend of historical and modern attractions. Key tourist spots include:

Špilberk Castle: A medieval fortress offering panoramic views and housing a city museum.

Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul: An iconic Gothic structure with stunning interiors.

Villa Tugendhat: A UNESCO World Heritage site showcasing modernist architecture.

Brno Underground: A network of historical cellars and tunnels beneath the city.

Freedom Square: The heart of Brno, bustling with shops, cafes, and cultural events.

Brno is also celebrated for its lively music scene and annual festivals​

[mi4011ayodyarajakaruna]

Narration 02 (Oskar Fischinger)

Painting Dreams

In the dimly lit studio of Oskar Fischinger, a mesmerizing dance of light and shadows unfolded. With his homemade animation device, Oskar tirelessly manipulated glass slides, bringing shapes to life and watching them dissolve before his eyes. Oblivious to the rumbling of his stomach and the late hour, he was consumed by his boundless imagination. This makeshift contraption, crafted from discarded odds and ends, was his key to unlocking a world of visual wonders.

After his day job at a drafting office, Oskar would immerse himself in his artistic experiments. He delved into the realms of color, form, and motion, seeking to capture the elusive essence that lay hidden from ordinary perception. While Berlin's modernist art scene captivated many, Oskar's abstract animations pushed the boundaries even further. His creations transformed simple lines and hues into poetic swirls, evoking emotions and sensations beyond the realm of mere pictures.

News of Oskar's luminous masterpieces spread like wildfire among the avant-garde circles of Berlin. Experimental theater directors eagerly sought his optical-sound animations to infuse their productions with surreal and trance-like interludes. At underground art salons and exhibition halls, his animations sparked fervent debates among artists, intellectuals, and eccentric individuals drawn to the city's vibrant counterculture. While some dismissed his works as nonsensical, others recognized a kindred psychedelic spirit within the dizzying sequences. A select few even believed that Oskar's images held occult secrets, accessible only to those enlightened enough to perceive them.

Not all viewers embraced abstraction's challenges to conventional beauty. As economic turmoil during the Great Depression fueled political unrest, nationalism emerged as a remedy for the masses. Art was required to glorify the Fatherland through realistic portraits celebrating martial virtues and folk Germania. Oskar's experimental works, straying far from mimesis with swirling colors, left little room for interpretation. Some critics labeled his animations as decadent creations by a Bolshevik degenerate, with increasingly ominous undertones.

The NSDAP's rise to power amplified these sentiments. Terms like "degenerate art" took on new significance as state censors wielded their iron scissors. While still tolerated as an oddity on the fringes, Oskar felt a growing intolerance towards any art not conforming to the narrow parameters of promoting an Aryan spirit through sentimental propaganda. His vision faced extinction in his own country.

However, abandoning his quest meant more than just censorship - it meant forfeiting the ability to witness and share unseen wonders that defied explanation. Oskar's drive pushed him to find a way to continue his animations despite the obstacles. Even as the walls of his studio seemed to close in each night, he found solace in a private world filled with endless possibilities, thanks to his magical lantern of colors, shapes, and movements. This miniature world remained the only evidence that his vision endured.

[ntriani]

OQM Playlist : Life during quarantine #12 Listen to Life during quarantine #12

BEWARE THE SECOND WAVE As we enjoy this heatwave in Finland and relax with each other, literally sharing the same spaces once again, we must realise the temporary nature of our new freedom.

HEADSTART I became an obsessive fan of The Jam at around the age of 13 – I even had a photo book of my favourite press clippings of the band. This love for The Jam also ignited some kind of realisation that political discourse actually exists within the confines of pop music. What was astonishing about records like ‘Going Underground’ or ‘Town Called Malice’ going straight into the #1 spot on the national pop charts was the potent message those singles possessed. Of course, as I got older, I realised a lot of my contemporaries despised The Jam’s Paul Weller, finding his political songs too simplistic and dismissed them as nothing more than sloganeering. For me Weller’s lyrics hit home because I could fully relate.  When singles such as ‘Funeral Pyre’ also went straight in at #1 you had to admire the sheer gall of releasing  such uncommercial music and then seeing it hitting the top of the charts. The Jam remain one of the great British single bands.

CHANGING MAN Once The Jam ended there was a dramatic change from Weller with what came next; The Style Council. In came a mix of cappuccino drinks, Euro Euphoria and a committed  focus on style –  the political intensity and focus on living in Thatcher’s Britain that so defined The Jam disappeared. Weller, always a modernist in the truest sense, was now increasingly becoming a foppish clothes horse, enjoying not being the voice of a generation and even more so enjoying being a pop star and having some fun. It’s astonishing to think that Weller was still only 25 when he formed The Style Council, but the sense of relief from Weller is evident in the freedom of the music The Style Council initially released. One could surmise that Weller had simply had enough carrying that political lyrical torch. It felt like he was more enthused by singing songs relating to matters of the heart and looking good in some sharp vintage threads and tailor made suits (which he still does) than plotting any further political music movement.

I FOUND YOU AGAIN For me,  I lost interest in Weller and his music for a long time after those first couple of Style Council records. The band descended into a bland pastiche of soul and trying to keep up with some notion of modern pop trends, which by the end saw Weller struggle professionally. I was late picking up on Weller’s increasingly successful solo career and kind of resented his honorary status amongst the Britpop community (Weller was always so much better than that.) But then the 22 Dreams album pulled me back into his orbit. Mostly absent was the dad rock replaced by a wide palate that took in a myriad of influences backed by solid songwriting and wilful experimentation. And ever since it’s been mostly great stuff from Weller.  His voice has matured, his records remain eclectic and interesting and his songwriting still delivers. His politics still appear in his music from time to time but it’s more subtle and more grown up. The bright spark of political anger that so defined his youth has mostly gone but musically Weller remains a contender.

[artcollectorsnews]

Guilty Plea for Billionaire Art Dealer "Helly" Nahmad

Helly Nahmad

New York-based billionaire art dealer Hillel "Helly" Nahmad admitted last week to running a $100-million gambling ring that entertained the likes of Wall Street financiers, sports figures, and A-list movie stars from Leonardo diCaprio to Matt Damon.

Nahmad, 35, pleaded guilty in a Manhattan district court to operating a gambling business. He agreed to pay $6,427,000 and to forfeit a Raoul Dufy painting titled “Carnaval à Nice, 1937,” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. His plea bargain with prosecutors dropped other charges, such as money laundering, racketeering, and conspiracy, that could have landed him in prison for up to 92 years. He now faces up to five years behind bars.

Worth an estimated $3 billion by The New York Times, Nahmad is part of the art-dealing family known for their top-tier collection of Impressionist and Modernist art.

Nahmad says he started with a group of friends "betting on sports games." He worked with Russian organized crime and in April, Nahmad was indicted with 34 others for their roles in two related gambling and bookmaking rings accused of running illegal high-stakes online gambling, as well as underground poker games.

They took in tens of millions of dollars through illegal websites in the U.S. and laundered $100 million through businesses from plumbing to real estate and car repair, according to the indictment.

Russian Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov is at the top of the indictment. He is wanted by Interpol and was previously indicted for allegedly bribing ice-skating judges at the 2002 Winter Olympics. Another named in the indictment sent mixed martial arts fighters to collect debts.

Nahmad is scheduled to be sentenced on March 19.

[butterlaneantiques]

A Journey Through the Ages

In a world of fleeting trends, antique jewelry stands as a testament to enduring elegance. Join us on a journey through history, appreciating the craftsmanship that narrates tales of bygone eras.

Pre-Georgian (Pre 1714): Jewelry has been a constant companion throughout history. From Ancient to Medieval times, precious gemstones adorned people, occasionally preserved underground for centuries. This period encompasses the grandeur of the Baroque style.

Georgian (1714 - 1830): Spanning from the early 18th to the early 19th century, the Georgian era exudes grace and sentimentality amid social and political upheavals. Reserved for the aristocratic elite, Georgian jewelry features opulent gemstones like garnets, emeralds, and diamonds, with intricate metalwork and nature-inspired motifs capturing the essence of a romantic age.

Victorian (1837 - 1901): The Victorian era, under Queen Victoria's reign, witnessed stability and prosperity. Departing from Georgian rationalism, Victorian jewelry embraced romantic ideologies, symbolizing everything from Hope to Death. As the middle class grew, increased disposable income and advanced production techniques made jewelry accessible to the masses.

Art Nouveau (1890 - 1915): Reacting against Victorian industrialism, Art Nouveau, or "New Art," flourished from 1890 to 1920. Characterized by flowing curves and nature-inspired motifs, this movement brought a departure from large diamond pieces, focusing on vitreous enameling and unconventional gemstones. It aimed to distance itself from Victorian industrialism, making jewelry more accessible.

Edwardian Grace (1901 - 1910): The Edwardian period, from King Edward VII's reign to 1920, radiates leisure and elegance. Departing from High Victorian ostentation, late 19th-century jewelry trends embraced smaller, more refined pieces. Technological advancements, especially in platinum usage, allowed intricate metalwork, defining the delicate elegance of the Edwardian era.

Art Deco (1920 - 1935): Emerging before World War I, Art Deco blended modernist aesthetics with meticulous craftsmanship. Influenced by Cubism's geometric forms and the vibrant colors of the Ballet Russes, it broke down barriers between artists and craftsmen. Designers like Cartier and René Lalique shifted focus to colorful gemstones, employing millegrain and embracing futuristic geometric designs.

This journey through time illustrates the evolution of jewelry, where each era tells a unique story of societal changes, evolving aesthetics, and exquisite craftsmanship.

[cianeto666]

Header of a men's magazine from the early 80's. Does anyone gets the change in morals, censorship, etc., in 43 years. One can claim that these magazines were sexist - made for men's pleasure (Id Est - as a teen, wanking off). Well, that's a load of shit - society itself was more sexist and the pro-moral 'majority' was (not) satisfied by slutting down models and shaming readers/users (I'm mixing the 'then' jargon with nowadays reality. Notice the Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n Roll underline. Is this possible today (unless it's an underground fanzine? I don't think so.) And about what I said above, slut, sluttish, is not even a word that should be admitted. ANYONE can do whatever he/she wants with his own body, if not coerced. I have been in the punk/ metal scene since the mid 80's - I did engage with the sound before that, but let's say that 16 years old in the mid 80's was like manhood. Most of us, then or until the mid-90s became addicts - either to chemicals, alcohol, heroin or coke. A third of my teenage friends are dead. Even in a small country (Portugal) the offer to do nude/ porn pics existed. I was invited, but didn't do it (16 at the time), some did - both guys and girls. When the hard drugs came in, a lot of my girl friends (not as in girlfriend - pardon my English) prostitutized themselves. I guess some of my male friends also did it, but they wouldn't admit to that at the point of a gun. I don't have a single bad word for them. Only LOVE. I could have been there.

It was 1984, when I started sniffing glue, taking amphetamines and downers - even before trying hashish (that makes me paranoid) and I started drinking.

By 1990, I was addicted to heroin as (almost) all Lisbon punks.

By then, my first band (C.I.A.neto), became a chaos due to to drugs, alcohol and compulsive military service for some. A band that will disappear in history - we just recorded 2 songs for a compilation, but that was influential in the Lisbon area: 1 or 2 minutes hardcore songs, mixed with experimental jazzy/funky hardcore rock songs. And a NO MEANS NO attitude towards fascists and nazi skinheads - in the following years, after cleaning off drugs of the system and having grown muscle, my third band was decidedly Antifa - by 1995, no fuckin' nazi would even try to get inside a concert where we played.

All these are old stories. I'm an Arts Teacher now - well, mostly I teach Descriptive Geometry (10th, 11th graders love it... No, they, don't).

I'm still fighting fascism. By information, the most I can.

Sadly. I'm still fighting addiction: alcohol and benzodiazepines. I'm 53 now - for me it means it means 40 years of punk metal. In the meanwhile, I still have been an artist (painting) and studied an awful lot of History, Religions and the Occult. Also, Sociology and Marx (that deserves a chapter of his own). I'm a fuckin' walkin' encyclopedia of Rock Music! Ahahah... Of course, I'm not sobber - but hey, the homework is done and tomorrow I only begin at 12:00 AM.

The point of this was...

AH! WE ARE LIVING IN A PURITANE AGE. TRULLY!

This is not some old fuck talking gibberish. My father was (not now - he's old and sick) one of the great Modernist Portuguese Poets. I have two sisters: the older one is 58, an accomplished theater actress/director; the younger one (from a different marriage) is 27, lost girl, unsure of her feelings, uneasy with her body... Not her fault, not an education fault, but the outcome of a specific time and culture. Getting back to the photo, in 2023 ocidental society, in general, is much more puritan than what it was in 1980. Thank you, Gringos. First, I hated You because I was a communist; then, I hated You because I was an Anarchist; Then, I learned to respect everyone; Then came the Internet... And I Fuckin' Hate the way that American 'culture' and it's Puritan stance makes the rules in Social Media - that, either you like it or not, affects a large part of the world's stances, opinions, acting, etc.

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you have any experience with Colson Whitehead? I was very impressed by the Pynchonesque The Intuitionist, but let down by the hype around The Underground Railroad, which turned out to be some fragments of an excellent "straight" historical novel stapled to some bad YAish Twilight Zone episodes. Since then he seems to have trended more towards realism (Nickel Boys etc), and there were more Lethem-esque genre experiments before Railroad. Has any of it stood out to you? Is there greatness there?

Never read him. I once found a copy of The Underground Railroad in a Little Free Library and browsed through it. The nice liberal white lady who'd deposited it there (I make these assumptions based on the demographics of the neighborhood and the demographics of the literary novel's readership) had written in her bubbly handwriting items in the margin such as, "Just like mass incarceration today," so I concluded, perhaps unfairly, that it was some kind of pedagogical exercise. I've also always held this unfunny parody of James Wood against him, since it so totally misses the mark; you can find Wood's taste too narrow, and I do, but, for one thing, it counted as cosmopolitan and modernist in the England of his formative years, and, for another, it was the product of a secularized Evangelical fervor rather than placid English snobbery. From this misfire, I concluded that he didn't have the satirist's keen eye. I always meant to read The Intuitionist though.

[lanuitlennuie]

Exchange Rate, un texte d'Eyal Weizman publié le 2 novembre 2023, dans la London Review of Books.

In​ the spring of 1956, eight years into the Nakba, a group of Palestinian fedayeen crossed the ploughed ditch which was all that separated Gaza from the state of Israel. On one side of the ditch were 300,000 Palestinians, 200,000 of them refugees expelled from the surrounding area; on the other were a handful of new Israeli settlements. The Palestinian fighters attempted to enter the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, killing Roi Rotberg, a security officer. They took his body back with them to Gaza, but returned it after the UN intervened. Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s chief of the general staff, happened to be in the settlement for a wedding and asked to give the eulogy at Rotberg’s funeral the following evening. Speaking of the men who killed Rotberg he asked: ‘Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and saw in front of their eyes how we turned the lands and the villages in which they and their forefathers once dwelled into our homeland.’ It was a recognition of what Palestinians had lost that contemporary Israeli politicians can no longer afford to express. But Dayan wasn’t advocating the right of return: he ended his speech by arguing that Israelis had to prepare themselves for a permanent and bitter war, which would have a major role for what Israel called ‘frontier settlements’.

Over the years, the ploughed ditch turned into a complex system of fortifications – a 300-metre buffer zone, where more than two hundred Palestinian demonstrators were shot and killed in 2018-19 and thousands more injured, several layers of razor-wire fences, concrete walls extending underground, remote-control machine guns – and surveillance equipment including watchtowers, CCTV, radar sensors and spy balloons. Beyond this are a series of military bases, some of them near or inside the civilian settlements that form what’s known as the Gaza Envelope. On 7 October, in a co-ordinated attack, Hamas struck at all the elements of this interlinked system. Nahal Oz, the closest settlement to the fence, was one of the attack’s focal points. The term ‘Nahal’ refers to the military unit that established the frontier settlements. Nahal settlements started life as military outposts and were supposed to turn into civilian villages, mostly of the kibbutz type. But the transformation is never complete, and some residents are expected to double as defenders when the time comes.

‘Absentee land’ was the tabula rasa on which Israeli planners drafted the blueprint of the Zionist settler project after the expulsions of 1948. Its chief architect was Arieh Sharon, a graduate of the Bauhaus, who studied under Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer before moving to Palestine in 1931, where he built housing estates, workers’ co-operatives, hospitals and cinemas. When the state of Israel was established, David Ben-Gurion made him head of the Government Planning Department. In The Object of Zionism (2018) the architectural historian Zvi Efrat explained that, though Sharon’s master plan was based on the latest principles of modernist design, it had several other aims: to provide homes for the waves of immigrants who had arrived after the Second World War, to move Jewish populations from the centre to the periphery, to secure the frontier and to occupy territory in order to make the return of refugees more difficult.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Sharon’s master plan and its successors led to the building in the ‘frontier zones’, then defined as roughly 40 per cent of the country, of regional hubs or ‘development towns’ which served a constellation of agrarian settlements. These development towns were meant to house Jewish immigrants from North Africa – the Arab Jews – who would be proletarianised into factory workers. The agrarian settlements of the kibbutz and moshav type were meant for the pioneering members of the labour movement, mainly Eastern Europeans. The land belonging to the Palestinian villages of Dayr Sunayd, Simsim, Najd, Huj, Al Huhrraqa, Al Zurai’y, Abu Sitta, Wuhaidat, and to the Tarabin and Hanajre Bedouin tribes, was built over by the development towns Sderot and Ofakim and the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Re’im, Mefalsim, Kissufim and Erez. All of these settlements were targeted on 7 October.

Following Israel’s occupation in 1967, the government established settlements between the main Palestinian population centres in Gaza itself. The largest was Gush Katif, near Rafah on the Egyptian border; in total, Israeli colonies covered 20 per cent of Gaza’s territory. In the early 1980s the area in and around Gaza also absorbed many Israeli settlers evacuated from Sinai after the peace accord with Egypt. The first fence around the territory was built between 1994 and 1996 – a time seen as the height of the ‘peace process’. Gaza was now being isolated from the rest of the world. When, in response to Palestinian resistance, Israel’s Gaza colonies were dismantled in 2005, some of the evacuees chose to relocate to settlements close to Gaza’s borders. A second, more advanced fencing system was completed shortly after. In 2007, a year after Hamas took power in Gaza, Israel began its full-scale siege, controlling and limiting incoming flows of life-sustaining provisions such as food, medicine, electricity and petrol. The Israeli army calibrates the privation to a level that brings life in Gaza to an almost complete standstill. Together with a series of bombing campaigns, which according to the UN resulted in 3500 Palestinian deaths between 2008 and September this year, the siege has brought humanitarian disaster on an unprecedented scale: civil institutions, hospitals, water and hygiene systems are barely able to function, with electricity available for only around half the day. Almost half of Gaza’s population is unemployed and more than 80 per cent rely on aid to meet basic needs.

The Israeli government offers generous tax breaks (a 20 per cent reduction in income tax, for example) to residents of the settlements around Gaza, many of which are strung along a road a few kilometres from the fence line and running parallel to it. The Gaza Envelope contains 58 settlements within 10 km of the border, with 70,000 inhabitants. In the seventeen years since Hamas took power, despite sporadic Palestinian rocket and mortar fire, as well as Israeli bombardment of the territory a few miles away, the number of settlers has kept growing. Rising property prices in the Tel Aviv area, and the region’s open hills (real estate agents call it the ‘Tuscany of the Northern Negev’), have led to an influx of middle-class settlers. Conditions on the other side of the fence have deteriorated in inverse proportion to the region’s growing prosperity. The settlements are a central part of the system of enclosure imposed on Gaza, but their inhabitants tend to differ from the religious settlers of the West Bank. Demonstrating the partial blindness of the Israeli left, some settlers in the Negev are involved in the peace movement.

On 7 October, Hamas fighters broke through the interlinked elements of the siege network. Snipers shot at the cameras that overlook the no-go zone. They dropped grenades on the communication towers. Barrages of rockets saturated the radar space. Rather than tunnelling under the fences, the fighters approached on the ground. The Israeli observers either failed to see them, or couldn’t quickly communicate what they saw. The fighters blew or cut open a few dozen holes in the fence. Palestinian bulldozers widened the breaches. Some Hamas fighters used paragliders to cross the border. More than a thousand stormed the military bases. The Israeli army, blinded and muted, was left without a clear picture of the battlefield and detachments took hours to arrive. Unbelievable images appeared online. Palestinian teenagers followed the fighters on bikes or horses into land they may have heard about from their grandparents but was now transformed beyond recognition.

After the bases came the settlements, and the massacres that no previous violence can justify. Families were burned or shot in their homes. In total, the fighters killed about 1300 civilians and soldiers. Two hundred people were captured and taken to Gaza. Israel has spent decades blurring the line between the civilian and military functions of the settlements, but now the line has been blurred in ways never intended by the Israeli government. The civilian inhabitants co-opted into becoming part of the living wall of the Gaza Envelope got the worst of both worlds. They couldn’t defend themselves like soldiers, and they weren’t protected like civilians.

The images of the devastated settlements provided the Israeli army with a free pass from the international community, and lifted whatever restraint may have held it back in previous rounds. Israeli politicians called for revenge in explicit, annihilationist language. Commentators said Gaza should be ‘wiped off the face of the Earth’, and ‘It’s time for Nakba 2.’ Revital Gottlieb, a Likud member of the Knesset, tweeted: ‘Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!! Stop with this impotence. You have ability. There is worldwide legitimacy! Flatten Gaza. Without mercy!’

However the conflict ends, with or without Hamas in power (and I bet on the former), Israel won’t be able to avoid negotiating over the exchange of prisoners. For Hamas, the starting point will be the six thousand Palestinians currently in Israeli prisons, many of them held in administrative detention without trial. The capture of Israelis has had a central place in the Palestinian armed struggle throughout the 75 years of conflict. By obtaining hostages the PLO and other groups aimed to force Israel into an implicit recognition of Palestinian nationhood. The Israeli position in the 1960s was to deny that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people, which meant that it was logically impossible to recognise the PLO as their legitimate representative. The denial also meant that there was no need to recognise Palestinian fighters as legitimate combatants under international law, and therefore no need to grant them POW status in line with the Geneva Conventions. Captured Palestinians were held in a legal limbo, much like the ‘unlawful combatants’ of the post-9/11 era.

In July 1968 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an El-Al flight and landed it in Algeria, inaugurating a series of hijackings whose explicit aim was the release of Palestinian prisoners. The Algeria incident led to 22 Israeli hostages being exchanged for sixteen Palestinian prisoners, though the Israeli government denied that there had been a deal at all. Sixteen for 22: such an exchange rate would not hold for long. In September 1982, after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-General Command captured three IDF soldiers; three years later, in what was known as the Jibril agreement, Israel and the PFLP-GC finally reached a prisoner-swap deal: three soldiers for 1150 Palestinian prisoners. In the 2011 deal to release Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in 2006, the exchange rate was even more favourable to the Palestinians: 1027 prisoners for a single Israeli soldier. In anticipation of being forced to make many more such deals, Israel began arbitrarily to arrest more Palestinians, including minors, to increase its assets for future exchange. It also kept the bodies of Palestinian fighters, to be returned as part of any exchange. All of this reinforces the perception that the life of one of the colonisers is worth a thousand times more than the lives of the colonised. This calculation inevitably brings to mind the history of human trading. But here the exchange rate is mobilised by the Palestinian resistance to invert the deep structural colonial asymmetry.

Different states deal with the capture of their soldiers and citizens in different ways. The Europeans and Japanese usually engage in secret prisoner exchanges or negotiate ransoms. The US and UK claim in public that they don’t negotiate or comply with captors’ demands, and although they haven’t always strictly adhered to this, they have favoured inaction and silence when a rescue operation has seemed impossible. This is seen as the ‘lesser evil’ and is part of what military game theorists call the ‘repeated game’: every action is evaluated in relation to its possible long-term consequences, with the benefits of securing a prisoner’s release weighed against the chance that the exchange will result in more soldiers or civilians being captured in future.

When any Israeli is captured, their family, friends and supporters take to the streets to campaign for their release. Most often, the government acquiesces and makes a deal. The Israeli army usually advises the government against exchange deals, pointing to the security risk posed by released captives, especially senior commanders, and to the likelihood that it will encourage more hostage-taking by Palestinian fighters. Yahya Sinwar, who is now the leader of Hamas, was released in the Shalit deal. A significant civil campaign against such exchanges was led by the religious settler movement Gush Emunim, which saw them as a manifestation of the fragility of Israel’s ‘secular-liberal’ society.

In 1986, in the wake of the Jibril deal, the Israeli army issued the controversial Hannibal Directive, a secret operational order designed to be invoked on the capture of an Israeli soldier by an irregular armed force. The military has denied this interpretation, but it was understood by Israeli soldiers as a licence to kill a comrade before they were taken prisoner. In 1999, Shaul Mofaz, the then chief of the general staff, explained the policy: ‘With all the pain that saying this entails, an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier who has been killed, is a national problem.’ Although the military claimed that the directive’s name was randomly selected by a computer program, it is an apt one. The Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca killed himself in 181 bc in order not to fall into Roman hands. The Romans had shown similar resolve thirty years earlier: when Hannibal tried to secure a ransom for the soldiers he had captured in his victory at Cannae, the Senate, after a heated debate, refused and the prisoners were executed.

On 1 August 2014, during the offensive on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge, Palestinian fighters captured an IDF soldier near Rafah, and the Hannibal Directive came into effect. The air force bombed the tunnel system into which the soldier had been taken and 135 Palestinian civilians, including entire families, were killed in the bombardment. The army has since cancelled the directive. But with the current indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, the government seems not only to be bringing unprecedented destruction on the people of Gaza but to be returning to the principle of preferring dead captives to a deal. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, has called for Hamas to be hit ‘mercilessly, without taking into serious consideration the matter of the captives’. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, has said that the hostages ‘would not prevent us from doing what we need to do’. But in this war the fate of the civilians in Gaza and the captured Israelis is closely entangled, as is that of both peoples.