Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is dead

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Inspirational, distinguished German baritone and a proselytiser for the art of lieder

Alan Blyth
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 May 2012 14.55 BST

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the distinguished German baritone, has died aged 86. His Protean career was surely unique, as he sang and recorded more vocal music than any who came before. In particular, he broached more lieder (German songs) than any of his predecessors of the genre, his recordings running into the hundreds. Many of these songs he recorded several times over: for instance, he made no fewer than eight recordings of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle alone.

This truly incredible output was the result of an inquiring mind, an insatiable desire to tackle any and every song he could find, and to be a proselytiser for the art of lieder and singing in general, all these underlined by an instinctive wish to achieve perfection in his craft. More than that, he was an inspiration to the vast number of singers who have followed his example in this field, and made the singing of lieder a common experience, not to forget the audience he created for this kind of music-making. Go to the Wigmore Hall, London, any week or look at the myriad discs of songs pouring off the CD presses, and you will hear the benefits of his pioneering effort.

Fischer-Dieskau was born in Berlin and studied there with the veteran lieder artist Georg Walter, then after the second world war with Hermann Weissenborn, who partnered him at the piano in early recitals. But many of his first successes were in opera in Berlin. After his stage debut there, at the City Opera as Posa in Don Carlos in 1948, he was heard in most of the major baritone roles, Italian and German, in the house. From 1949 onwards he was appearing regularly at the Vienna State Opera and at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He also sang at the Bayreuth festival from 1954 to 1956 as the Herald (Lohengrin), Wolfram, Kothner and Amfortas.

In 1961 he created, magnificently, the ego-mad Mittenhofer in Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at the Schwetzingen festival and in 1978 the title role in Reimann’s Lear at Munich, an overwhelming portrayal. His Covent Garden debut came in 1965 when he created an immense impression as the impassioned Mandryka in a new production of Richard Strauss’s Arabella under Georg Solti. He returned later to portray Verdi’s Falstaff, a large-scale but somewhat unidiomatic reading.

Among roles in which he was unforgettable and which he recorded for posterity are Count Almaviva, Don Giovanni, the Flying Dutchman, Wolfram in Tannhäuser, Teiramund in Kempe’s classic set of Lohengrin, Busoni’s Faust, Hindemith’s Mathis, Mandryka, Barak in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, and both Oliver and the Count in the same composer’s Capriccio.

One of Fischer-Dieskau’s first and most moving portrayals on disc was as Kurwenal in Wilhelm Furtwängler’s legendary 1952 recording of Tristan und Isolde. Another classic recording with the German conductor was of Mahler’s Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesselen. He twice recorded the same composer’s Das Lied von der Erde, more usually sung by mezzos, first under Paul Kletzki, then with Leonard Bernstein, and made it very much his own.

Tall, with expressive features, Fischer-Dieskau was a riveting figure on stage and a not inconsiderable actor. Nobody who caught him as Mandryka, Mathis or Wolfram is likely to forget the experience.

His enormous repertory also included many choral works. Besides recording many of Bach’s cantatas, he was a sympathetic Christ in both that composer’s Passions, an imposing Elijah and one of the original soloists in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, the baritone contributions written specifically for him. Britten in 1965 composed his Songs and Proverbs of William Blake for Fischer-Dieskau, just one of the many commissions his singing inspired.

Yet it was with his lieder accomplishments that he achieved his greatest deeds. He recorded all the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Strauss suitable for a male voice. He worked on them first with Gerald Moore, doyen of pure accompanists, and then was partnered by a host of distinguished solo pianists and the conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, each of whom inspired him to refreshingly new insights.

Fischer-Dieskau had a full, firm and resonant baritone, which could be honed down to the most delicate mezza voce. It was used with the utmost care in managing and projecting the text. He could on occasion be too emphatic in his treatment of words and was sometimes accused of overloading climaxes, but these were only the downside of a singer who was totally immersed in everything he undertook. An excellent linguist, he was almost as happy singing in Italian, French and English as in his native tongue, and he spoke English with virtually no accent.

In a career lasting more than 40 years, there was, as the years went by, inevitably some deterioration in his tone, but he compensated for the decline with a new lightness of approach and an even deeper penetration into the meaning of each song, as his 1986 recording of Winterreise with Alfred Brendel reveals. After he had retired from singing in 1992, he took up another career reciting literary texts, often associated with song. He was also willing to give private lessons to carefully chosen singers to whom he imparted his immense experience as an interpreter.

He published a book of memoirs, Nachklang, in 1987, translated into English as Echoes of a Lifetime. It was an unusual autobiography in showing a man who, for all his many achievements, was uncertain of himself. That reflected the impression made when you met him. He was initially shy, but you always felt that behind the quizzical, sly, humorous eye and manner lay a man of philosophical bent, perhaps amazed himself at what his genius, for it was no less, had led him to achieve.

He is survived by his fourth wife, the soprano Julia Varady, whom he married in 1977, and three sons by his first wife, the cellist Irmgard Poppen, who died in 1963.

• Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone singer, born 28 May 1925; died 18 May 2012

Alan Blyth died in 2007

The Hardt-Negri declaration

Michael Hardt

Antonio Negri

It was to be expected that Toni Negri and Michael Hardt would eventually weigh in on the protests sweeping the world, from Tahrir Square to Wall Street. Their Declaration can be read on http://www.scribd.com/doc/93152857/Hardt-Negri-Declaration-2012 and is well worth the trouble. (I found it impossible to print but that might have just been a problem on my own computer.) Even if you disagree with much of it (as I do), it is necessary reading because of their influence. Furthermore, I detect a positive evolution in their thinking—especially a willingness to reconsider the merits of state power, albeit in a highly qualified manner. Like someone saying that though broccoli tastes like shit, it might be good for you.

Published in 2000, their “Empire” was widely seen as a generalized expression of the nascent anti-globalization movement that had a preponderantly anarchist leadership (an oxymoron?) Although Hardt and Negri come out of the autonomist tradition, there is enough of an affinity between the two movements that it was possible for them to serve as spokesmen. Now, just over a decade later, the anarchist movement has new winds blowing in its sails. While David Graeber is rightfully seen as a kind of patron saint to the Occupy movement, I am sure—well, mostly sure–that he would not resent Hardt and Negri playing the role of elder statesmen. (Did I say statesmen? No insult intended…)

To start off, I was very pleased to see that Hardt and Negri take note of the particular dynamics of debt today, something that I have written about recently.  In my view, debt tends to isolate us and make struggle more difficult. Instead of confronting a boss as a unified group of employees, such as sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan in 1938, the battle is between the individual and the bank or collection agency. (In their words, “No longer is the typical scene of exploitation the capitalist overseeing the factory, directing and disciplining the worker in order to generate a profit.”)

Turning to chapter one, I found these words particularly illuminating:

Whereas the work ethic is born within the subject, debt begins as an external constraint but soon worms its way inside. Debt wields a moral power whose primary’ weapons are responsibility and guilt, which can quickly become objects of obsession. You are responsible for your debts and guilty for the difficulties they create in your life. The indebted is an unhappy consciousness that makes guilt a form of life. Little by little, the pleasures of activity and creation are transformed into a nightmare for those who do not possess the means to enjoy their lives. Life has been sold to the enemy.

Another feature of life today that Hardt and Negri get right is how much it is defined through security, such as cameras, cops and prisons:

You are not only the object of security but also the subject. You answer the call to be vigilant, constantly on watch for suspicious activity on the subway, devious designs of your seatmate on the airplane, malicious motives of your neighbors. Fear justifies volunteering your pair of eyes and your alert attention to a seemingly universal security machine.

The sections on debt and what they call “the securitized” are much better than the one that follows, titled “The Represented”. Like Zizek, another celebrity, they are utterly disdainful of bourgeois democracy:

So many of the movements of 2011 direct their critiques against political structures and forms of representation, then, because they recognize clearly that representation, even when it is effective, blocks democracy rather than fosters it. Where, they ask, has the project for democracy gone?

They hail the Spanish protestors for not getting involved in electoral politics:

The indignados did not participate in the 2011 elections, then, in part because they refused to reward a socialist party that had continued neoliberal policies and betrayed them during its years in office, but also and more importantly because they now have larger battles to fight, in particular one aimed at the structures of representation and the constitutional order itself—a fight whose Spanish roots reach back to the tradition of antifascist struggles and throw a new and critical light on the so-called transition to democracy that followed the end of the Franco regime. The indignados think of this as a destituent rather than a constituent process, a kind of exodus from the existing political structures, but it is necessary’ to prepare the basis for a new constituent power.

One is not sure why participating in the 2011 elections was identical to supporting the Social Democrats. While I am no expert in Spanish politics, it would seem to me that there is some use in challenging the ideological status quo through the kinds of campaigns that Syriza ran since 2004. Who knows? Such a party might be capable of getting elected if the people get “indignado” enough.

For Hardt and Negri, just as was the case in 2000 when they wrote “Empire”, politics is only effective when it is local, in a kind of post-Marxist tip of the hat to the late ward-heeling Congressman Tip O’Neill. And no other group exemplifies this purer approach to social change than the EZLN in Chiapas:

The clearest contemporary example of the communicative capacity of an encampment is perhaps the decades-long experiment of the Zapatista self-rule in Chiapas, Mexico. The EZLN was renowned early in its existence for its novel use of the media, including electronic communiques and Internet postings from the Lacandon jungle. Even more important and innovative, though, are the communicative networks and political truths created in the Zapatista community practices of collective self-government.

The allure of Zapatismo, at least for me, wore off quite time ago. While the struggle was instrumental in helping the anti-globalization movement to get off the ground, it has failed to materially change the conditions of life for the poor in Chiapas. As I stated in a critique of John Holloway’s “How to Change the World without Taking Power”:

In a February 3, 2003 Newsday article titled “Infant Deaths Plague Mexico”, we learn that the Comitan hospital serves nearly 500,000 people in Chiapas. Burdened by inadequate staffing and supplies, babies die at twice the national rate. Meanwhile, the February 21, 2001 Financial Times reported on a study conducted by the Association for the Health of Indigenous Children in Mexico in the village of Las Canadas, Chiapas. It found that not one girl had adequate nutritional levels compared with 39.4 per cent of boys. Female malnutrition has actually led to physical shrinking over the last decade from an average height of 1.42 meters to 1.32 meters. At the same time, more than half of women who speak an indigenous language are illiterate – five times the national average.

By contrast, Cuba’s medical system allowed its people to live longer than other Spanish-speaking nation in the Western Hemisphere, including Puerto Rico. Infant mortality in Cuba was seven deaths per 1,000 live births, much lower than the rest of Latin America.

Back in 2000, Hardt and Negri were so deep into their anti-statism that they would have seen no benefit from Hugo Chavez or any other state leader attempting to devote the nation’s resources to the benefit of the people. The “national liberation” project was dead from the start:

The perils of national liberation are even clear when viewed externally, in terms of the world economic system in which the ‘liberated’ nation finds itself. Indeed, the equation nationalism equals political and economic modernization, which has been heralded by leaders of numerous anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles from Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nelson Mandela, really ends up being a perverse trick…The very concept of a liberatory national sovereignty is ambiguous if not completely contradictory. While this nationalism seeks to liberate the multitude from foreign domination, it erects domestic structures of domination that are equally severe.

I was pleased to see that they now see some benefits in what they call progressive governments in Latin America. From the section titled “Progressive governments and social movements in Latin America” in chapter 3:

From the 1990s to the first decade of this century, governments in some of the largest countries in Latin America won elections and came to power on the backs of powerful social movements against neoliberalism and for the democratic self-management of the common. These elected, progressive governments have in many cases made great social advances, helping significant numbers of people to rise out of poverty’, transforming entrenched racial hierarchies regarding indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, opening avenues for democratic participation, and breaking long-standing external relations of dependency, in both economic and political terms, in relation to global economic powers, the world market, and US imperialism. When these governments are in power, however, and particularly when they repeat the practices of the old regimes, the social movements continue the struggle, now directed against the governments that claim to represent them.

So the basic approach outlined here amounts to critical support. In Bolivia, for example, one assumes that Hardt and Negri would find some merit in the election of Evo Morales while identifying with the protestors who “continue the struggle”. The only question, of course, is whether it makes sense for Bolivians to follow the example of the EZLN and Spain’s indignados, who tend to abstain from electoral politics.

These questions take on some urgency in light of the recent election results in Greece that prompted many leading Spanish leftists to write an open letter to Syriza’s leader Alexis Tsipras:

We want you, the members of your organization and the Greek citizens who, as political activists, trade unionists or participants in broad social movements, share the project of creating a common life truly based on freedom and solidarity, to know the hope with which we throughout Europe anticipate the possibility that, soon, a new Greek government of popular unity will confront the dictatorship of the financiers and bureaucrats who have hijacked Europe.

We see the current conjuncture in Greece as a turning point which could lead to a radical transformation of the European political and economic order. We need a new Europe, a Europe of and for its citizens and all its inhabitants, free of the brutal austerity policies that prioritize the payment of an odious, illegal and illegitimate debt, which prevents the human development of our communities. This is the call heard today throughout the squares of Europe, from Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Syntagma Square in Athens, squares scattered all over the European geography, liberated places that are the seeds and the constituent basis of the real democracy that women and men in Europe want to build together.

Would it make sense for the Greek left to hold Syriza at arm’s length? I think not. No matter the weakness of the leadership on one point or another, the election of Syriza holds out the promise that the Greek people will finally begin to turn back the monstrous austerity drive being imposed on it by Germany and its international allies in the big bourgeoisie. Class society will not be abolished in the ballot box, but we should never stand on the sidelines when issues of whether or not pensions should be slashed in half are at stake.

If Hardt and Negri remain hostile to what they call “socialist governments”, they do—for the first time, I believe—hold out hope for what Marx (and Lenin) described as the building blocks of true democracy, the Paris Commune or Soviet type formation:

Several twentieth-century’ socialist initiatives, for example, sought to spread power in a federalist manner by putting power in the hands of workers and constructing the means for workers to make political decisions themselves. Workers’ councils constituted the central proposition of all streams of socialism that, contrary to the authoritarian currents, consider the primary’ objective of revolution to be democracy, that is, the rule of all by all. At least since the Paris Commune, the workers’ council in its many variants, such as the German rat or the Russian soviet, has been imagined as the basis for a federalist legislative power. Such councils and the forms of delegation they institute serve not so much to represent workers but instead to allow workers directly to participate in political decision making. In many historical instances, of course, these councils functioned in a constituent way only for a brief period.

Of course, the Paris Commune is the gold standard for practically everybody on the hard left, from Marxists to autonomists to anarchists. Like the classless society, how can anybody object to it? The big difference appears to be over transitional formations like the “progressive governments” in Latin America or the USSR, even before Stalin’s rise.

There are also differences over coordinated political action through the medium of a revolutionary organization. Since Leninism has become so compromised, there is a tendency for some on the left to make a principle out of “localism” or what has been called “horizontalism”.

In a politically backward country like the USA, it matters little if you are a “horizontalist” or a dyed-in-the-wool Leninist. We are not in the ninth month of a pregnancy so your ideological affinities with Bakunin or Marx could matter less. What matters most is being effective and on this score the anarchists were a credible force early on.

However, in Greece such questions have a bit more urgency whether or not the country is in the fifth month or the ninth. By the time you get to the fifth month of a pregnancy, you have to be damned careful or else you will end up with a de facto abortion if you don’t take care of yourself.

Politics, especially electoral politics, does matter in such conditions. It matters that the KKE has taken such a suicidally sectarian position. It is, with all proportions guarded, akin to the position that the German CP took during the rise of Hitler, when it opposed the social democracy as “social fascist”. Leftists in Greece have an obligation to counter the bourgeoisie on all fronts, including the electoral front.

On May 13, the NY Times wrote about the support that Greeks gave Syriza. For some, the election was a chance to put a “progressive government” in power of the kind that Hardt and Negri gave critical support to:

But it is Europe, fearful of encouraging more policy slippage by Greece, that has been pushing the austerity line. And the danger of such an approach is growing by the day, he said.

“For whatever reason, the hard-liners in Europe are saying that we deserve it,” Mr. Hardouvelis said. “They have destroyed the political center here, and the possibility of creating another Hugo Chavez is not zero.”

For the moment, it seems unlikely that Greece will get the chance to see if Mr. Tsipras — with his talk of repudiating the country’s debt and opposing privatization — will become as radicalized as Mr. Chavez, the Venezuelan leader.

But his message that Greece can stay in the euro and reject Europe’s budget-cutting terms has struck a chord, however contradictory that may seem.

While everybody can understand the need for the revolutionary movement in Greece to apply pressure to a Syriza government from the left, in accord with the formulations in the Hardt-Negri article, it should be obvious to all that such an outcome hinges on Syriza taking power. In revolutionary politics, the final outcome—communism—rests on the outcome of many, many skirmishes and battles along the road to the final conflict. As such, keeping an open mind about electoral politics and every other medium of struggle is imperative.

A smart Chihuahua

God hates no one

Elena

Isn’t it high time that we recognize the existence of Russian New Wave films? That was my reaction to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Elena”, a film that opens tomorrow at NYC’s Film Forum for a two week engagement and that incorporates two of the essential features of the new cinema in Russia: social criticism and artistic innovation.

With its money-grubbing and deceitful characters, “Elena” evokes Balzac—not surprising given contemporary Russia’s affinity with mid-19^th century France. Indeed, as Le Père Goriot’s Vautrin observed, “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed.” That is both the case of the oligarchy running Russia today and the eponymous character of Zvyagintsev’s film, the zaftig, 60ish wife of Vladimir, an elderly retired businessman who owes his success to a properly executed crime, namely the privatization of the Soviet economy.

We first meet Vladimir and Elena in their sumptuous but sterile apartment that has flat-screen televisions in every room and a kitchen filled with electronic gadgets that would put the French couple’s ultramodern house in “Mon Oncle” to shame. Elena, a former nurse, has “married up” but she did not marry Vladimir for his money. When she met him as an appendectomy patient in the hospital she worked at ten years earlier, she fell for him almost immediately. The lavish life-style was a bonus.

However, their economic differences create tensions especially when it comes to Elena’s son Sergei and his family who live in a rundown Soviet-era housing project that looks just like the worst council housing in Britain. Sergei is unemployed, and probably unemployable based on his shiftless character. His favorite pastimes seem to be drinking beer, playing video games with his equally shiftless son Sasha, and spitting on the street from his balcony. His mother could care less about his failings and relies on Vladimir’s fortune to keep him afloat. In her visits to Sergei, where she spends quality time with her new infant grandson, she appears far happier than at her cold but palatial apartment.

When Elena’s allowance to Sergei falls short of Sasha’s college tuition, she pleads with Vladimir to make up the difference. Since he is not particularly happy about keeping his son-in-law’s refrigerator filled with beer to begin with, he is even more loath to come up with the tuition fees. When Elena reminds him that this would make him army-bait and eligible to serve in Ossetia, Vladimir shrugs his shoulders and says that the army provides the best education.

Growing ever more desperate and resentful of Vladimir’s obsession with money, Elena plots what Balzac dubs a “perfectly executed crime”. But to be sure, this is not so much a crime melodrama as it is a study of class society. In contrast to Elena’s lumpen-like son and grandson, Vladimir’s daughter Katerina (Yelena Lyadova) is an articulate, elegantly dressed product of post-Soviet society with a hatred for her father and an equal hatred for herself. Addicted to sex, tobacco, drugs and alcohol, she has nothing to live for. When her father tells her that he gave her everything, she replies in effect, “Thanks for nothing”. Like Père Goriot, this is a man despised by his daughter.

In the press notes for “Elena”, director Zvyagintsev states:

I’m thrilled by the chance this story provides to explore the central idea of the early modern period: survival of the fittest, survival at any cost. With the growth of individual freedoms, society requires a corresponding growth of solidarity. Ever-increasing disengagement and individualism mean that people start to behave more and more like a bunch of tarantulas in a jar. This will be a rough drama — a pitiless, uncompromising look at human nature.

We see two old people who have what appears to be an entirely normal relationship. You could even say that these people love each other, though it’s not a passionate, youthful kind of love. We see their mutual care, gentleness and tact, which, along with their dedication and fairness, persuade us that they are bound by a lasting love.

However, if we choose to call the illusion of a commercial relationship “love” then, in a moment of crisis, individuals will always act first and foremost in their own interests.

I can also strongly recommend Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2003 film “The Return” that I mentioned here and that is now available on Netflix streaming. Like “Elena”, the politics serves as a backdrop for some riveting human drama.

Ex-Marxist sociology professor cashes in

Fernando Cardoso

John Kluge

Today’s NY Times reports that ex-President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso is being honored (or rewarded?):

The Library of Congress will award the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime intellectual achievement in the humanities and social sciences to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had a distinguished international career as a scholar before twice being elected president of Brazil. An official announcement will be made in Washington on Monday, with an awards ceremony there on July 10.

The newspaper of record finds Cardoso’s regime most laudable:

Brazil has become the world’s sixth largest economy, having recently passed Britain and Italy, and has a dynamic and growing middle class, numbering more than 100 million. As president from 1995 through 2002 Mr. Cardoso was the primary architect of that rise. He presided over the elimination of hyperinflation and initiated sweeping social investment and income redistribution programs, which his two successors have extended and deepened.

Although Cardoso’s political views are dubbed as “hard to categorize”, the two works of this sociology professor mentioned by the Times sound rather Marxist: “Dependency and Development in Latin America” and “Capitalism and Slavery in Southern Brazil,” that is described as “an examination of how racially based servitude contributed directly to Brazil’s economic and social backwardness.”

This is an irony that is missed by the gray lady—surprise, surprise. A Marxist, or at least Marxish sociology professor, becomes the president of Brazil and a leading advocate of what is popularly known as neoliberalism. Under Cardoso’s two terms (1995-2002), the economy did grow but at the expense of the working class, poor peasants and the indigenous peoples.

In a useful history of Brazil on the Mother Earth Travel website, we get the hard data on Cardoso’s “sweeping social investment and redistribution programs”:

Relatively few Brazilians have benefited from the economy. In a country with some of the world’s widest social differences, grinding poverty and misery coexist with great industrial wealth; 20 percent of the population is extremely poor and 1 percent extremely wealthy. Brazil’s Gini index in 1991 was 0.6366. According to the UN, Brazil had the most uneven distribution of wealth in the world in 1995. The richest 10 percent of Brazilians hold 65 percent of Brazil’s wealth (GDP), while the poorest 40 percent share only 7 percent. Brazil placed sixty-eighth out of 174 countries in the UN’s 1997 human development index.

No other organization articulated the needs of the “other Brazil” better than the MST (Landless Workers Movement) that Cardoso’s cops repressed on numerous occasions. On April 17, 1996 military police killed nineteen landless farmers, who were members of the MST and had been demonstrating for the right to take over an unproductive ranch in Pará, Brazil. In Brazil 90 percent of the population lives on 10 percent of the land, so there is obviously a burning need for land redistribution.

Despite expectations that the “radical” sociology professor who wrote so sensitively about slavery would stand up for the rights of indigenous peoples, encroachment on their land continued under his administration. In the first year of his rule, his Minister of Justice Nelson Jobim turned over Indian reservation land that equaled the size of Rhode Island to 14 ranchers.

In a way it makes perfect sense for Cardoso to be given the John Kluge prize in light of this billionaire’s career. In an October 15, 1989 profile on the tycoon, the London Times reported:

The Kluges again hit the headlines last year when three of their gamekeepers in America were convicted of killing federally-protected hawks, owls and even neighbourhood dogs. Kluge had organised an ‘authentic British shoot’ and invited his friends to come and kill imported pheasant and ducks. He feared his stock of game might be hurt or killed by its natural prey, so he ordered anything that would interfere with the good time slaughtered.

The New York crowd merely guffawed at Kluge’s misfortune with the law, and he was in even greater demand at Manhattan’s most chic dinner tables.

Kluge and his ilk have been labelled the ‘Nouvelle Society’, and nowhere were they more in evidence than at the recent spectacularly decadent seventieth birthday party of Malcolm Forbes in Morocco. Patricia’s fortieth birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria was not quite on a par, but it was quite an event. From Britain came the Sangsters, the Frosts, Lord Grade but no royals, other than the ex-empress Farah of Iran and her son, Ali Reza (who proclaimed himself shah after his father’s death in 1980, so he is a sort of royal).

Kluge, in his high-living, high-spending manifestation, fits in well with the new breed of celebrity entrepreneur who would make the American tycoons of yesteryear squirm with their brashness. The modern celebrity businessman loves the glare of publicity and the flash of the paparazzis’ cameras almost as much as he loves the money he makes.

It is a world where wealth is not worth having unless it can be flaunted, and where no expense is seen as over the top. In Manhattan, Patricia has organised a three-floor penthouse over her husband’s office which is the last thing in glitz and bad taste: solid bronze electric doors, a waterfall that flows over one balcony, a huge sunken bar and sliding walls that rise between the dining room and the lounge at the touch of a button.

In Virginia, there is a butler imported from England, and black servants dressed in antique livery for the bigger parties. ‘We live like we want to live, and it is nobody’s business but ours, ‘ Patricia replied to a critic of her lifestyle.

Dying at the age of 95 in 2010, Kluge was named the richest man in America in 1986, largely through the profits made in the television business. So, like Alfred Nobel, the arms manufacturer, he set up a foundation to award prizes to the deserving.

The question of Cardoso’s political evolution is intriguing. As the title of one of his books should indicate, “Dependency and Development in Latin America”, he is a “dependency theorist”. As someone who has written in support of dependency theory against its critics in the Robert Brenner school, I suppose I should be embarrassed to be connected in any way with some like Fernando Cardoso.

But it should be understood that like all political tendencies on the left, dependency theory had both revolutionary and reformist wings. Cardoso was a reformist as was Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist who Nestor Gorojovsky once described to Marxmail as follows:

Raúl Prebisch was much more than a sell-out, dear Lou!

His origin was the pro-imperialist Partido Socialista of the 20s. He broke with the party and entered the Partido Socialista Independiente of De Tomaso and Pinedo, who provided the think tank for the establishment of the pro-imperialist regulatory regime that was imposed on the country during the early 30s.

During those times, he worked as a primary official of the British imposed Central Bank of Argentina (this Central Bank was the carbon copy of the one that Sir Otto Niemeyer had failed to impose on India!) and from that post he developed a very particular form of Keynesianism, a Keynesianism aimed at keeping Argentina within the bonds of the imperialist regime, not at saving central capitalism from itself.

Later on, Peronism swept away Pinedo, Prebisch and all this host of “pure” technicians of economics (of dependent economics) from the high positions in the financial and economic structure of the Argentinean state, while profiting from these structures to put the state to the service of self-centered economic development. This was an attempt to develop a bourgeois revolution without any revolution, a transformation of the role of the state by modifying the direction in which it moved.

As opposed to figures like Cardoso and Prebisch, the theorists grouped around Monthly Review never lost sight of the revolutionary goal. In their ranks were Samir Amin, A.G. Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. What some on the right and left shared in common was a professional affiliation with the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA). Both Frank and Cardoso worked there.

In an article on dependency theory that I wrote about a decade ago, I summed up Cardoso’s conversion to neoliberalism as follows:

Cardoso, another ECLA economist, turned his back on dependency theory in the mid 1970s. In a 1976 article (“The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the USA”), he made a number of counter-arguments against the MR school:

1. Capitalist development at the periphery is viable. 2. Underpaying labor in the periphery is not essential. 3. The local bourgeoisie is capable of leading dynamic growth. 4. The penetration by multinational firms does not have political consequences. 5. The only alternatives in Latin America are socialism or fascism.

In any case, after Cardoso “saw the light”, he decided to enter the bourgeois political arena. Here are quotes from his earlier dependency phase and his new, more sophisticated understanding:

“It is not realistic to imagine that capitalist development will solve basic problems for the majority of the population. In the end, what has to be discussed as an alternative is not the consolidation of the state and the fulfillment of ‘autonomous capitalism,’ but how to supersede them. The important question, then, is how to construct paths toward socialism.” (“Dependency and Development in Latin America”)

“I am in favor of deregulating the economy. To put an end to inflation means to deregulate the economy, right? The economists invented indexation of the economy to correct the devaluation of the currency. When inflation disappears, indexation will disappear. As we want to defeat inflation, we will deregulate the economy.” (Oct. 6, 1994, news conference.)

“A real process of dependent development does exist in some Latin American countries. By development, in this context, we mean ‘capitalist development.’ This form of development, in the periphery as well as in the center, produces as it evolves, in a cyclical way, wealth and poverty, accumulation and shortage of capital, employment for some and unemployment for others. So, we do not mean by the notion of ‘development’ the achievement of a more egalitarian or more just society. These are not the consequences expected from capitalist development, especially in peripheral economies.” (“Dependency and Development in Latin America”)

“I am certain we must continue to fight inflation, because inflation is what impoverishes Brazil and the Brazilian people. Inflation causes an unfair distribution of income, it prevents calculations from being made and it prevents domestic and foreign investments.” (Oct. 6, 1994 news conference.)

“Of course, imperialist penetration is a result of external social forces (multinational enterprises, foreign technology, international financial systems, embassies, foreign states and armies, etc.). What we affirm simply means that the system of domination reappears as an ‘internal’ force, through the social practices of local groups and classes which try to enforce foreign interests, not precisely because they are foreign, but because they may coincide with values and interests that these groups pretend are their own.” (“Dependency and Development in Latin America”)

“The international system is a field of opportunities, of resources, that must be sought naturally. We are a great country, with a clear vocation for an active and responsible participation in world affairs.” (“Let’s Work, Brazil”, Cardoso campaign manifesto)

“It has been assumed that the peripheral countries would have to repeat the evolution of the economies of the central countries in order to achieve development. But it is clear that from its beginning the capitalist process implied an unequal relation between the central and the peripheral economies. Many ‘underdeveloped’ economies — as is the case of the Latin American — were incorporated into the capitalist system as colonies and later as national states, and they have stayed in the capitalist system throughout their history. They remain, however, peripheral economies with particular historical paths when compared with central capitalist economies.” (“Dependency and Development in Latin America”)

“The process of liberalization of the economy and opening toward the outside world will continue, not an objective in and of itself, but as a strategic element in the modernization of our economy.” (“Let’s Work, Brazil”)

“We stress the socio-political nature of the economic relations of production, thus following the 19th-century tradition of treating economy as political economy. This methodological approach, which found its highest expression in Marx, assumes that the hierarchy that exists in society is the result of established ways of organizing the production of material and spiritual life. This hierarchy also serves to assure the unequal appropriation of nature and of the results of human work by social classes and groups. So we attempt to analyze domination in its connections with economic expansion.” (“Dependency and Development in Latin America”)

“Privatization cannot be proposed or carried out under ideological banners. Privatization imposes itself in order to increase society’s investment capacity, to increase competitiveness and, where it is the case, improve management. (“Let’s Work, Brazil”)

New works of poetry by Paul Pines and Daniel Marlin

This is a belated review of books by two of my favorite poets, Paul Pines and Daniel Marlin. The fact that I have know them for fifty years does not in any way influence my high esteem for their work. Both are part of the living tradition of the poetry renaissance of the 1950s and early sixties, whose impact lasts with me all these decades. Although sometimes facilely described as the poetry of the “beat generation”, it was much deeper and much more universal. It incorporated spiritual and philosophical motifs going back thousands of years, if not to our earliest collective memories as members of our human tribe.

Paul’s “Reflections in a Smoking Mirror: poems of Mexico and Belize” is a powerful engagement with the culture of the indigenous peoples, the Aztecs in particular. Part one, titled “Configurations of Conquest”, is exactly what the title suggests: reflections on the Spanish colonization and genocide of the native peoples. In his own words:

Reflections in A Smoking Mirror is a crazy quilt of historical and personal material knit by themes unraveled over the last thirty years. I first went to Mexico in the 60s, before there was a paved road between Mexico City and Yucatan, and most of the archaeological sites referred to here were still covered by bush. I went again after returning from Vietnam when the remains of lost civilizations and the legacy of conquest drove me to search for what might be reflected in the Smoking Mirror, both as volcanic lake, and metaphor. During that time I’ve come to understand what I may have done beyond my intention, to let the ancestors speak in ways that have not always been apparent to me, except for the blood-smoke on these pages.

In 1959 Jack Kerouac wrote “Mexico City Blues”, an attempt to write poems in the same way a jazz musician improvises. Paul Pines’s poems bear up well in comparison to Kerouac’s, no surprise since he was deeply involved in the jazz scene in NYC in the 70s as owner of the Tin Palace, a groundbreaking venue for avant-garde musicians. Today he hosts the yearly Lake George jazz festival.

One of my favorite poems in the collection comes from part three, “The Belize News”. Titled “Rum Point Sutra”, it pays homage to the local scene and the late Paul Blackburn, one of the greatest poets of the 1950s renaissance. (My apologies to Paul for not getting the poem’s typography right since MS Word is hostile to those kinds of esthetic considerations, but the words should suffice.)

RUM POINT SUTRA

Another rainy day,
cobalt clouds along the peninsula
turn sand grey.
Bananas I bought
last week in Mango Creek
are turning too.
It will be
a challenge to eat them
before they go black.

Also I am out of propane
and must dispose of fruit
in the fridge
I brought back
from San Cristobal
two weeks ago.

No,
this is not a poem
about domesticity
unless that be the place
one contemplates

the implications
of what is
or will become
indigestible.

No!
this is
the song of an idiot
who can’t let go,
a lover with a stomach ache
waiting for a dial tone

No! no-
body on the other end
no reason to pretend the heart
is not a fruit
shriveled by
desire.

No!

this is about fire,
a Sutra
in which the senses
are sutured like old wounds.
No pain,
but a refrain
by Blackburn

(composed three months
before
he died)

contemplating his coffee cup, he wrote:

EMPTY AND ALIVE!

Reflections in a Smoking Mirror can be ordered from Dos Madres, the publisher.

Daniel Marlin is a Yiddishist, a socialist, an artist and a poet. What more can you ask for, nu?

In the introduction to “Amagasaki Sketchbook”, Daniel states:

From 1999 through 2009,1 spent roughly half of each year, late December through late June, living in Amagasaki City, between Osaka and Kobe, Japan. This collection includes some of the art I made on walks past fields in Mukonoso, Sonoda and Itami, and along the banks of the Mukogawa and Mogawa rivers. I painted the colors of the darkening western sky at dusk, sketched as I rode trains and lingered at Hankyu Umeda station, and at intersections nearby, where I was fascinated by the relentless, fluid landscape of crowds.

As an outsider, I used writing and art as quiet portals of entry into Japanese life. These disciplines helped me to overcome isolation, as did the friends I made, Japanese language study, involvement in the local anti-war movement and in Amnesty International, and a walking temple pilgrimage on Shikoku Island.

Trees and clouds were indifferent to my artistic attention, but at close quarters in train cars, I needed to be discreet, and thus discovered a method which permitted me to observe other passengers indirectly, without being noticed. Sitting at the end of the car, my pad and pencil hidden behind the backpack placed on my lap, I learned to sketch my fellow passengers’ reflected images in the glass of the adjoining door or opposite window. Or, I simply peered into the next car, whose riders never looked my way.

A drawing of weary Japanese train passengers, filled with the humanity that pervades all of Dan’s work:

Despite Dan’s claim that trees and clouds were indifferent to his artistic attention, I suspect that their souls were more than pleased with his beautiful watercolor renditions.

And finally, here is one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Crow Log”, a most enchanting homage to one of nature’s least enchanting creatures:

CROW LOG

In the neat rows of a field of spinach and green onions, shiny silver DVDs and hand mirrors hang from stakes, their glare intended to repel foraging birds. Nearby, two rubber facsimiles of crows have been tied by their feet, limp heads inches above the soil. The message,”Woe to ye who trespass here!”

Working its way down an unplanted furrow nearby, a large crow takes awkward, plodding steps in soft dirt, stopping occasionally to inspect debris and peck a stray seed, then passes under its own lynched image without a glance or tremor.

With three barks,
barrel-deep like a seal’s,
crow lands
at the temple gate

Crow glides from an old tree, bearing a persimmon in its beak, lands on a dark, tin roof. Cocking its head with what seems both pride and confusion, it lays the bright orange fruit down, and begins poking it—as if expecting it to flee, or fight back.

Perched on the aluminum rail of the apartment house parking lot, crow is engaged in conversation, a low-key, hollow, two-note call. When I approach, it’s tone changes suddenly, to a single sharp “Crahh!”

Is it a look-out while its partner
nearby breaks into someone’s minivan?

Inquiries on purchasing “Amagasaki Sketchbook” should be directed to Daniel Marlin.

Other posts about the works of Paul Pines are at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/last-call-at-the-tin-palace/ and http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/my-brothers-madness/.

And Daniel Marlin: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/isaiah-at-the-wall/ and http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/heart-of-ardor/

Gerry Foley memorial meeting

Big Country

HBO Girls: Hipsterism gone awry

Dunham’s Jugs A-Flashin’ Ain’t Gonna Save Girls

The HBO series Girls misfires again in this week’s episode that has viewers pulling their hair out wishing the characters would just stop their whining, grow a spine and grow up. In the wake of the recent backlash, it’s curtains for the series for this viewer (and many others) as the backlash grows.

{Note: I admire all who create. Creating is not easy. Still, when you put something you create into the world you open yourself up to criticism. Girls has been getting a fair share of it as of late, some of it deserved. The following is my opinion, take it for what it’s worth. I believe that Lena Dunham can do better.}

The problem with the HBO series Girls (by creator & star Lena Dunham) isn’t so much the backlash and controversy against the show, although that was on an epic scale. (In case you missed it, one of the show’s writers tweeted insensitive comments that were deemed “racist” which lead to a critique that for a show set in Brooklyn, a very diverse borough, it lacked diversity.) The problem in addition to that is — the show isn’t as funny as it thinks it is. The characters are so pathetic while being so arrogant at the same time that it’s hard not to feel they deserve every horrible thing that happens to them. In short: They act like idiots.

And not the endearing kind.

“Hannah’s Diary” doesn’t show them changing anytime soon. They’re still clueless girls who want us to revel in their cluelessness. They are the kind of moronic idiot that is hired as a nanny, goes to the park to talk down their nose at actual (multi-cultural) nannies, and then loses your kids. Then said nanny goes home to flirt with your husband who tells said nanny that losing children in public “happens to all of us.”

God bless and god help us all but um, cough, no — it does not.

full: http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/959665/hbo-girls-episode-recap-hannahs-diary