Last Call at the Tin Palace

Paul Pines

At the risk of using a cliché, I would describe Paul Pines as the ultimate writer’s writer. Despite what might be seen as a modest output in terms of quantity, the quality is always superlative.

His last work was a memoir titled “My Brother’s Madness” that I reviewed in November 2007. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Growing up a few blocks from Ebbets Field, Paul Pines was a true child of the 1950s, which was much more about looking tough than sensitive. This was especially true when you had to fend off rival gangs of Irish or Italian youths. As a perpetual truant and an unsuccessful car thief, Paul fit right into the neighborhood, as this encounter with his high school principal would indicate:

We sit in straight back chairs. Bullethead [a nickname for the principal] tells us that he has been a cop and a trolley-car conductor and understands boys in motorcycle boots with ducks-ass hair welded in place by Dixie Peach. There are quite a few of us walking up Flatbush to Church Avenue every morning to the walled fortress spanning several blocks. Erasmus boils over with students in two overlapping sessions, out of which a small stream of elite students are siphoned off from the raging river of Irish Lords, Pig Town Tigers, Gremlins, and Chaplains into the top tier. I fall into the lower one, a Blackboard Jungle minus Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Three days a week I take in the triple-feature cowboy movies at the Majestic Theater on Fulton Street instead of going to school.

Paul thought of himself as a budding gangster, fed by fantasies inspired by the pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins. After his father sent him off to Cherry Lawn, a progressive private school in Connecticut, he still saw himself as a rebel without a cause, but one with roots in Lord Byron as well as the mean streets of Brooklyn. After reading Freud, he discovers that being able to use his mind fills him with elation. “I am a wet chick burst from its shell.”

Paul’s latest book is a collection of poetry titled “Last Call at the Tin Palace” (available from Marsh Hawk Press), a reference to the jazz club that he ran in the 1970s. Here’s some background on the club from an interview with Paul in Perfect Sound Forever:

The legend was that the place [Tin Palace] had been a speakeasy run by (mob figure) Meyer Lansky. When we excavated the basement, I found in the rubble a copy of the New York Post announcing the end of Prohibition. It had deteriorated from a working-class bar to a real bum’s bar, abandoned and full of trash. That whole corner was like a no man’s land.

We took everything down to the brick. We re-supported the building with steel. We built offices downstairs, our own booths, our own tables—I’d learned how to set up a kitchen. We worked for about five or six months. There was a piece of sculpture out front by Bobby Bowles, a third-tier Abstract Expressionist. He bolted the steel into the sidewalk in front of the bar.

The Tin Palace was pitched to the artists in SoHo. Everyone who worked in the place had their own following, including myself. So by the time we opened, everybody from Max’s Kansas City, from St. Adrian’s, from Phoebe’s, they all came to check out this new thing.

“Big Charlie” was a bartender from the old Stanley’s who played saxophone and had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz. He put together the Murray Shapinsky Quartet—it was named for some unsung Jewish jazzman that Charlie loved—and we started having live music by the end of the first year.

Some months later, a flute player named Lloyd McNeil asked me if he could play at the place. I’d heard him with the guitarist Allan Gittler, who’d built his own kind of space-age guitars—there’s one in the Smithsonian. Lloyd and Allan played duos for a while, then Lloyd asked if he could bring in a larger group. They were all Brazilians: [guitarist] Amaury Tristao, [pianist] Dom Salvador, some really fine players. People began to flock to hear the Brazilians.

The groups would play three or four nights per week for months at a time, as the house band—I loved the idea of having a house band. It built a wonderful following, and The Tin Palace began to get noticed. We built a real stage, and then an outdoor café on one side of the building. It was a very diverse crowd from the start, as many black patrons as white.

Paul read from his book last Thursday night at the Ceres Gallery in Chelsea. He was introduced as somebody who had absorbed the jazz idiom through a lifetime of involvement with jazz, both professionally and as a connoisseur of the art form. This has had the effect of giving his poetry both the improvisatory quality of jazz as well as a kind of timbre that evokes the soloist. As might be expected, a number of Paul’s poems deal with jazz and his days and evenings at the Tin Palace. Here is one of them titled “Last Call at the Tin Palace”, which is the name of the collection as well:

Granada falling
at my feet

a Mayan princeling
in the service of his conquerors

or the buried time
between time before I was young when I saw
my life to come what it held in store and decided I would live…

whoever I was
in other lives
it doesn’t matter to me now

as it does to Nat in the kitchen
placing layer on layer
of paper thin dough to make his spinach pies
that he was once a woman
and way back
an apprentice to a scribe sanding down stones

or to Jim
closing down the bar that as a Nez Perce
he watched his people dying in the Montana snow
and that he was in tears

He says his name was Looking Glass
that he knows where he was born
and where he’s buried
says he’s stood
and said a prayer before his own grave

Several of the poems allude to Paul’s late brother Claude who was one of my closest friends at Bard College. I learned about 5 years ago that Claude had been stricken with schizophrenia fairly late in life and I regret not having made contact with him before he died of leukemia about 3 years ago. One of the reasons I make a point of following Paul’s writings is that it is like communing with Claude’s spirit.

Paul Pines reading a selection from “My Brother’s Madness”

In reading through Paul’s poems, I found another personal connection. In his “The Ghost of Mother’s Day”, he communes with the spirit of his dead mother. As it turns out, my mother died on May 12, 2008 just one day after Mother’s Day. I had one phone conversation with her a day or two before in which she told me that the end was near and that I should not be sad at her passing. Unfortunately, I did not see her or speak to her after that. I feel bad about that and often find myself talking to her in my dreams. If I was a poet rather than a politician, I might have found the words that Paul Pines did in addressing his own late mother in the poem:

“Mama” I said
“what shall I do?
The ground keeps shifting under me
and I’ve left no tracks.
The women I touched I quickly left.
Those I loved I hardly knew.
As a father I withdrew
into my father’s sadness.

“Close your eyes” she told me.
“Where are you?”

“Miami.
I’m a child again.
The earth smells like chocolate
and the wind is peppermint.”
“And now?” she placed
her fingers on my forehead.

“I’m a young seaman
walking up a gangway in Mobile.”
Then she removed her hand
and I started to cry.

“Where are you?” she coaxed.
“Where are you now!
Saigon? Subic Bay?
Try and guess.
Guess!
Try!”

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll

From time to time, people question my right to blast a movie that I walk out of after 5 minutes, and occasionally refuse on principle to see. Well, this is a twist on that. I am going to recommend Elijah Wald’s new book “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll” without having read a word of it. How can I do something as outrageous as that, you ask? Okay, to start with Wald worked with folksinger Dave Van Ronk on “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”, a book that really knocked me out when I read it as background research for an article on the folk music revival of the 50s and early 60s. That plus an interview with Nora Flaherty on WFUV that you can listen to in its entirety here convinces me that this is a book for anybody with an interest in American popular music and who enjoys a good read.

Here’s how Wald summarizes the points made in this book on his website, which get a lively presentation as well in the WFUV interview:

1. Most music histories concentrate on jazz or rock, and on artists the writer thinks are great, rather than on the most popular and influential stars (for example, we get Louis Armstrong rather than Paul Whiteman, and Buddy Holly rather than Pat Boone). These canons are fine as far as they go, but leave us with a warped sense of the world that produced all of those artists. Wald tries to leave his own tastes out of the picture and instead understand the tastes of mainstream dancers and listeners, and the changes in lifestyles and technologies that shaped the evolution of American popular music.

2. Wald puts dancing and dance music at the center of his history, arguing that shifting fashions in dance–for example, the appearance of public dance halls and, fifty years later, the appearance of record-driven discoteques–often had more to do with the ways music changed than any musician did.

3. Pop music is almost always driven by female tastes, but almost all the history has been written by men–and not just by men, but by the sort of men who collect records rather than going dancing, and consider most mainstream pop to be junk. This book puts women’s tastes at the center of the story, from the flood of young female office and factory workers who sparked the dance crazes of the Jazz Age to the early 1960s when “twisting girls changed the world.”

4. Another central story is the evolving technologies–records, radio, juke boxes, television, LPs–and how they affected both listeners and musicians. The recording strike of the 1940s is placed at the center of a larger story of live musicians being replaced by mechanical devices, and Mitch Miller is given his due as the man who realized that this could open the way for records that would be more than simply sound-pictures of live performances.

5. The Beatles’ success marked a split between older rock ‘n’ roll and modern rock–and the moment when the interracial world of rock ‘n’ roll was divided into rock (white) and black (soul) styles. Wald argues that this ended a pattern of interracial give-and-take that had produced every previous major American pop style, from ragtime to rock ‘n’ roll.

Many historians have described that “give-and-take” as white musicians taking from black musicians, but Wald paints a more complicated picture, in which black jazzmen aspired to play classical music, Duke Ellington defended Paul Whiteman’s title as the King of Jazz, and Harry Belafonte was America’s most popular folksinger–while also tracing the bitter fruit of racial segregation, and the extent to which racism shaped the music both black and white fans were hearing.

In the WFUV interview, the discussion of point 5 begins around 30 minutes into the podcast. It was the most interesting observation for me, having been a huge fan of Black music in the mid 50s just as rock ‘n’ roll was taking shape. In putting “women’s tastes” at the center of his narrative, Wald’s version jibes with my own experience as this would indicate:

It was probably 1956 when my classmate Joan Seleznow invited me to listen to the new 45’s her father had been stocking in his hardware store. Now these weren’t pistols, but 7-inch pop records that were played at 45 rpm, as opposed to the 12-inch 33-rpm mostly classical records.

I remember the records to this day. She first put on Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and followed up with Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill”. I told her that I loved the sounds. They were nothing like the insipid songs that were featured on the weekly television show “Hit Parade” like “How Much is that Doggy in the Window”.

But she saved the best for last: Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. I didn’t know it at the time but Big Momma Thorton, who recorded the song before Elvis, was an African-American like Fats Domino and Little Richard. That being said, the song was written by a couple of Jews, Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber.

A few months later I joined the RCA record club and got Elvis Presley’s 33-rpm debut album, which had “Hound Dog” and his other greatest hits that still had the immediately recognizable influences of African-American rhythm-and-blues and white country-and-western.

In the late 50s, do wop was king at my high school. We had parties once or month or so where slow dancing was a substitute for sex. The parties were always at girls’ houses since they were the ones with the best record collections. We didn’t distinguish between African-American and white groups. All that mattered was the music. This was around the time of dance shows on television hosted by either Alan Freed or Dick Clark. The dancers were racially integrated, even if this only meant that black couples and white couples shared the same dance floor.

Interestingly enough, the only place where interracial dancing took place back then apparently was at functions organized by civil rights activists connected with the Communist Party, as historian Thomas Sugrue points out in his “Sweet Land of Liberty: the forgotten struggle for Civil Rights in the North”:

The intense rights consciousness of wartime black workers moved seamlessly from support for public housing, to demands for black union leadership, to efforts to integrate union-sponsored bowling leagues. Over the course of the war, black workers became increasingly confrontational, engaging in walkouts over shop-floor discrimination. Black and white Communists, who made up a small but highly influential minority in the UAW, socialized after union gatherings, part of a deliberate strategy to build interracial solidarity. Even interracial dancing—which could provoke a lynch mob in the South—was not taboo at UAW events. At a meeting of workers at the Dodge Main plant, just before a union-sponsored dance, a Communist official pronounced, “If whites and Negroes want to dance together at the social, they will dance… Those who don’t want to see this don’t have to come.

Just around the time that Joan Seleznow was introducing me to rock ‘n’ roll, Communists in my little village in the Catskill Mountains resort area were joining the UAW in terms of breaking racial taboos. A local couple Lou and Rae Young, who had been witch-hunted out of New York City, launched an NAACP chapter that included dances at the Young’s home. In junior high school, racist kids would gossip about how “the niggers” were dancing with white people at such occasions.

The Youngs had a son named Allen who would go on to edit Liberation News Service in the 1960s and become a founding father of the gay liberation movement later on. In 2000, Rae died at the age of 89. The local paper’s obit mentioned a bit about her involvement with civil rights and the trade union movement:

She was a sales clerk at Macy’s Department Store and participated in the labor organizing movement of the 1930s in New York City. An active member of the American Labor Party of New York State in the 1940s and 1950s, she helped organize a successful civil rights campaign in the 1950s to improve the conditions of migrant African-American laundry workers in Woodridge.

Ironically, that laundry was owned by the grandfather of a woman named Laura who was a close friend in high school and who joined the beat generation just around the time that I did. Unlike me, she failed to be radicalized by the war in Vietnam and veered instead toward the post-hipster milieu around Andy Warhol. She would eventually move into the Hotel Chelsea with her husband Frank Cavestani, a Vietnam veteran who was credited for directing the street protest scenes in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July”. At one point, Frank and Laura were working as screenwriters in Hollywood and had a pet project that never got off the ground. That was to write a screenplay about the Brill Building in New York, the home of some of America’s greatest pop music composers, including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

A couple of Jews, Leiber and Stoller pretty much epitomize the halcyon days of early rock ‘n’ roll when it was all about dancing and when collaboration between Black and white musicians was a given. This is from the Wiki on Leiber and Stoller:

Leiber came from Baltimore, Stoller from Long Island, but they met in Los Angeles in 1950, where Stoller was a freshman at Los Angeles City College while Leiber was a senior at Fairfax High. Stoller had graduated from Belmont High School. After school, Stoller played piano and Leiber worked in a record store and, when they met, they found they shared a love of blues and rhythm and blues. In 1950, Jimmy Witherspoon recorded and performed their first commercial song, “Real Ugly Woman.” Their first hit composition was “Hard Times,” recorded by Charles Brown, which was a rhythm and blues hit in 1952. “Kansas City,” which was also recorded in 1952 (as “K. C. Loving”) by Little Willie Littlefield, became a No. 1 hit in 1959 for Wilbert Harrison. In 1952, they wrote “Hound Dog” for Big Mama Thornton, which became a hit for her in 1953; it became a much bigger hit for Elvis Presley in 1956, although in a bowdlerized version. Their later songs often had lyrics more appropriate for pop music, and their combination of rhythm and blues with pop lyrics revolutionized pop, rock and roll and punk rock.

They formed Spark Records in 1953 with their mentor, Lester Sill. Their songs from this period include “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” and “Riot in Cell Block #9,” both recorded by The Robins.

The label was later bought by Atlantic Records, which hired Leiber and Stoller in an innovative deal that allowed them to produce for other labels. This, in effect, made them the first independent record producers. At Atlantic, they revitalized the careers of the Drifters and turned out hit after hit for The Coasters, a spin-off of The Robins. Their songs from this period include “Charlie Brown,” “Searchin’,” “Yakety Yak,” “Stand By Me” (written with Ben E. King), and “On Broadway” (written with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil), among numerous other hits. (For the Coasters alone, they wrote twenty-four songs that appeared in the national charts.)

Those were the days.

The Girlfriend Experience

Despite arriving with a lot less fanfare than “The Informant!”, Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” is a far better movie with a much sharper take on the dry rot that characterizes American capitalism in its senescence. Despite its no-name cast and mumblecore sensibility, “The Girlfriend Experience” is dramatically gripping as it tells the story of a young and very attractive Manhattan couple who would fit into a “Sex in the City” episode. Chris, the male, works as a trainer in an upscale health club and his girlfriend Christine—known to her clients as Chelsea—is a high-priced call girl. Both are creatures supremely adapted to commodity production, in her case the ultimate commodity of all—the human body.

If Christine markets her own body, Chris is in the business of marketing his services to well-heeled clients, mostly middle-aged men who seek nothing more than to have a six-pack abdomen. Ever the salesman, he is always making a pitch to his clients that it will cost them less per session if they sign up for 25 or 50 at a time.

The title of the movie comes from a term used by insiders in the sex trade as this wiki article relates:

The “girlfriend experience” generally involves more personal interaction than a traditional call girl or escort offers. There is a focus on not just completing a sexual act, but also having more of an experience. Often sessions last longer and are “no rush,” which means the call girl spends the full advertised time rather than rushing out after a climax. Common activities usually offered by GFE escorts include kissing and/or french kissing, cuddling and foreplay. By contrast, non-GFE prostitutes typically refrain from kissing because they consider it more emotionally intimate than sexual intercourse without kissing. A call girl advertising the provision of a “girlfriend experience” is implying that she provides deep french kissing (DFK), “full service” (intercourse) usually with protection, and fellatio and cunnilingus, both with or without protection. Advertising a “girlfriend experience” is sometimes used by call girls to promote business.

Evidently, Chris has become a kind of pet to his clients, so much so that he is flown in a corporate jet to a weekend of booze and whoring in Las Vegas at their expense. The movie takes place during the primaries in 2008, when the financial crisis was taking shape and is on everybody’s mind. One of the passengers, an African-American, frets over Obama’s plans to stimulate the economy. How will we be able to afford it, he whines.

Meanwhile, Christine is all business herself. She has ambitions to be one of the city’s top escorts and is using the Internet to make connections with clients and business partners, including a pimp who has plans to send a delegation of call girls to Dubai where a sheikh, he tells her, will pay $2000 just for the privilege of shaking her hand. This is not a typical pimp, however. As she enters his loft to talk business, he pounds the keys of his piano haphazardly and asks her jokingly if she would like to hear an impromptu Schoenberg concert.

Christine arranges a meeting with a web developer who will help enhance her presence on the Internet. He explains that the more links to her own website, the higher up she will appear in a google search for “escorts”. Can he help make that happen, she asks. Of course, he answers. But it would be best for her to retain his services on a long-term basis to make sure that her website and the google traffic gets the proper attention. Like Christine and Chris, the web developer is fixated on deal making—with no regard for what is being bought and sold apparently.

In one of the more powerful scenes, Chris has a discussion with his boss about how he can become a manager at the health club or share in its profits. With his client base, he is ready to jump ship and take a job with the competition. His boss, a heavily muscled man towering over him, explains that he is reluctant to promote Chris because he is not a “team player”. What does that mean, Chris asks. The boss explains that he never wears a t-shirt with the club’s logo, as the rest of the staff does. Chris answers that he doesn’t like wearing that kind of shirt, an ironic declaration of independence for someone who has the same kind of relationship to the world of brand names and commodities that a maggot has to a piece of rotting meat.

Christine is also finely attuned to brand names. As she departs from a client, she rattles off the designer labels she is wearing, from Michael Kors to Manolo Bhlanik. Although she enjoys her work after a fashion, there is not the slightest indication that the fancy restaurants or luxury goods she purchases do much to elevate her mood. There is something slightly vacant about her, as the operator of a kind of upscale version of Craig’s List geared to the sex trade states after a session with her (he agreed to put her name at the top of his list, if she agreed to a complementary fuck.)

As stated earlier, the movie appears influenced by mumblecore conventions despite Soderbergh’s lack of membership in its ranks. As I have stated elsewhere, this is a genre that generally features young (and mostly white) people dealing with highly quotidian situations. In Andrew Bujalski’s “Beeswax”,  for example, two women haggle with each other about the disposition of a second-hand clothing store in Austin that they co-own. The acting in such movies has an improvisatory feel, with the characters interjecting ‘y’knows’, ‘er’s’ and ‘ums’  into the dialog.

While it is doubtful that there is a direct lineage between his films and the mumblecore crowd, the resemblance to John Cassavetes’s movies is obvious. The goal is to capture the rawness of life unmediated through conventional story-telling elements. In movies like “Beeswax”, there is a deliberate attempt to avoid situations that might break out of the mundane while in a typical Cassavetes movie, you are dealing with extreme situations. “The Girlfriend Experience” is somewhere in the middle. There is no great drama as such in the movie, except for a possible split between Chris and Christine that generates few sparks. The real drama comes from Soderbergh’s clear understanding that the very fabric that knits together all his characters is in the process of unraveling and from his ability to infuse his story with the grim sense that perdition is knocking at the door of a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

(I viewed this film as a DVD screener from Magnolia Films in conjunction with the 2009 NYFCO nominations. To my knowledge, it is now not playing in movie theaters but it is available  from Netflix.)

Annals of rock and roll

Bono wishes Bill Gates a happy birthday

From Harper’s Magazine Blog:

Sting: Obama, Synchronicity, Hypocrisy

By Ken Silverstein

The biography of a celebrity asshole, in three short chapters. Excerpts below all come from news stories published in October of 2009.

From the Associated Press, on Sting’s deep thoughts on Obama:

The former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and “found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world.” Sting, 58, said he’s hopeful that the world’s problems can be dealt with, but is frustrated that “we seem to be living in a currency of medieval ideas.” “My hope is that we can start talking about real issues and not caring about whether God cares about your hemline or your color,” he said. “We are here to evolve as one family, and we can’t be separate anymore.”

From EurasiaNet, on Sting’s visit with the daughter of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime killed one prisoner by immersion in boiling water:

Tickets to see British singer Sting perform in Tashkent will cost between $1,000 and $2,000 dollars, organizers say. The former Police front man will play at the Alisher Navoi Theater on October 18 as part of Art Week Style, a fashion and art event masterminded by Gulnara Karimova, President Islam Karimov’s daughter. Even the cheapest ticket will cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan, the report notes. Previous entertainers at Karimova’s showcase include Rod Stewart and Julio Iglesias.

From Fashion Week Daily:

Sting made it all way to Uzbekistan for the event, where he joined beautiful Dr. Gulnara Karimova at fashion shows and beyond. The superstar closed the week with a concert at the Tashkent Sate Opera and two giant screens were positioned in the square outside the State Theater to accommodate all of those who couldn’t get tickets to the charity performance. And believe it or not, the entire city knew every word to nearly all the songs in the set.

Succumbing to Paypal

(An article by Gilles d’Aymery, editor of Swans Commentary, an online publication that I have been contributing to for a number of years. In addition to considering his very interesting observations on the problems of fund-raising in cyberspace, I strongly urge you to make a contribution to this invaluable publication.)

Jan Baughman and Gilles d'Aymery, co-editors of Swans

Succumbing To PayPal

by Gilles d’Aymery

FUNDRAISING TIME: As a reader-supported publication we are totally dependent on the solidarity and generosity of our readers. Quite a few have often asked us to get a PayPal account. Well, we finally did. So, you can use PayPal or send us a check or some cash. We need to raise $3,000, without which we won’t be able to continue to bring to you and the larger community this cogent bi-weekly magazine. Please, Donate now!

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasures where there is only trash. . . Too much sanity may be madness, and maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

—Miguel De Cervantes

(Swans – November 2, 2009) Ever since we began asking for financial help in 2005, as Swans needed to either become a reader-supported independent publication or try to turn into a commercial endeavor with advertising galore and different content (which we could not fathom to do) or simply fold down (neither could we fathom), we have been advised by many readers and well-wishers to set up an account with PayPal — a step that we have persistently resisted…until today.

From the day Swans was launched in May 1996 we’ve always operated with two aphorisms in mind. “The only way not to play a game is to not play”; and “attempting to solve problems using the tools, techniques, and thoughts which create them is silly” — both came from our good friend Milo Clark. (Albert Einstein once said something similar: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”) In this vein, we’ve always tried to think out of the box and, while fully aware of the socioeconomic system in which we live, we’ve been using as seldom as possible the most flagrantly destructive and exploitative tools that the system uses to enrich its elites, impoverish the masses, and gut local communities. Anyone who’s familiar with the publication cannot miss our long-time advocacy in favor of local businesses, community banks, labor unions, etc. A careful look at the front page of Swans should make it plain and simple. We’ve consciously chosen to stay away from big boxes and megastores, as well as to the extent possible the financial markets including the dreaded credit cards. In that context, PayPal, a wholly-owned subsidiary of e-Bay (which we have never used), was an instrument that deserved to be utterly shunned, as the company makes huge profits on the backs of people who use it for their own “convenience.”

So, every time a reader recommended that we take a PayPal account we kept responding with the same explanation: As we do not want to shop at Amazon, or Home Depot, or Wal*Mart, etc., we wish to avoid PayPal — and we kept asking instead that contributions be sent by check, cash, or money order, to sadly little avail. Most people who recommended PayPal would not hear our request, and quite possibly would not agree with our reasoning, which might appear too quixotic and stubborn.

Swans Commentary now has a PayPal account.

What made us take this step with dire reluctance?

First of all, we are desperate — or perhaps should I write, “I am desperate” — to cover at least the operating costs of the publication. Jan Baughman, my companion and wife, has been sustaining this endeavor and supporting me through her work and sacrifices (and her devoted editing help). Both financially and emotionally it is taking a toll on me. Moreover, the lack of overall revenues forces us to call upon our modest savings year after year (except in 2007, when a reader from England put us over the top with an amazingly generous $2,000+ donation) and forbids us from developing Swans. The publication depends on a bevy of intriguing, talented, and thoughtful contributors, none of whom we can afford to compensate financially — and, evidently, the lack of resources prohibits us from attracting a wider pool. (As Jeff Huber wrote to me recently: “If you ever reach the point where you can pay for exclusive content, I’ll be more than delighted to write it for you.” Of course, Jeff is not in the solidarity “business,” but he sure is a good writer…on the libertarian side of the chessboard.)

Second, money orders do not work. Last year, Walter Trkla, a reader from Canada who’s followed Swans ever since the unjustified, illegal, and brutal air war against Serbia in 1999, sent a US$100 check drawn on a Canadian bank. Our credit union (Redwood Credit Union) refused the check, alleging that it was not drawn in bona fide USD. We went back and forth over a few weeks. Every time I had to address the issue, I also had to drive back and forth 25 miles to the nearest branch. (One year earlier, Walter had sent me C$100, suggesting that since the Canadian dollar was higher than the USD, I would get a larger cut. It cost me (and Walter) a fee of $25 and they credited me for only $75 — not taking into account the spread between the two currencies.) So, I eventually gave up and told Walter: “Look let’s forget about it. Next time do send me a money order drawn in USD.” He just did that this year (2009), taking the trouble to go to his bank and make sure it was a USD money order. Yet, when I tended the money order to the teller, once again it was disputed. Yes, it was in USD, but it was drawn from a foreign (Canadian) bank. I felt so darn embarrassed that I paid the $25 fee and did not let Walter know. In the eye of the capitalist beast, a local community bank cannot figure out the international banking system. I once asked a teller there, in Ukiah, Mendocino County, California, if she knew anything about the Euro. Her answer: “Euro? What is that?” To say the least, money orders are an expensive proposition!

Third, a reader from Sofia, Bulgaria, in Eastern Europe, sent an e-mail telling me that he wanted to send some money our way. Problem was, he had not written a check in ten years, had no US$ bills in his possession, and could not send a money order. He recommended: “Get yourself a PayPal account. Très facile. I’ll send you 50 bucks.” Thinking — erroneously, as it turned out — that he was a young man, I answered that I was in the process of getting a PayPal account, adding: “You know: I am getting real old, because I pay by check or in cash for all my expenses. I have only one credit card and use it at the very most 5 or 6 times a year.” He answered:

Quand vous êtes dans le ventre de la bête, vous devez manger ce que la bête se nourrit. [When you are in the belly of the beast, you must eat the beast's food.]

PS: Je suis aussi vieux. 76 ans. Mais je dispose de 20 cartes de crédit, et de nombreux comptes en ligne. [I am old too. 76. But I use 20 credit cards and have numerous on-line bank accounts.]

Whether he was facetious regarding the number of credit cards and on-line bank accounts is beside the point. A 76-year-old reader was telling a youngster (I’m 59) to go on with life as it is (not as it should be).

Which is what various other friends and contributors have kept telling me, the latest being my brother from Africa, Femi Akomolafe. He wrote me:

My Yoruba people are very practical people. Among our wise saying is: omo ina la nra sina. Literally it means that you send a message to the devil via its offspring. I don’t think that you should hate yourself for using PayPal to keep doing the great job you and Jan are doing editing and publishing Swans.

But the one who broke the camel’s back has been Mark Lause, an assistant professor of history at Cincinnati University, a once-contributor to our publication, a third-party political activist in the Marxist tradition, and a member of and almost daily contributor to the Marxmail list owned and maintained by another Swans friend and contributor, Louis Proyect.

full: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/ga275.html

The latest developments in the Jared Diamond scandal

Jared Diamond

There have been some important developments in the legal and political struggle to make Jared Diamond and New Yorker magazine pay for their defamation of Papua New Guinea highlander Daniel Wemp, whom Diamond falsely named as a killer in its pages.

For the latest, check Rhonda Shearer’s Stinky Journalism website where you can find one recent article dealing with the legal aspects and another on the politics. In the former article, titled Jared Diamond, The New Yorker Deny All: New Guinea Tribesmen Wemp and Mandingo File Amended Libel Lawsuit, Katie Rolnick brings us up to date on where the suit stands today:

Last Friday, New York attorneys Jack Litman and Richard Asche filed an amended complaint for their clients New Guinea Tribesmen Daniel Wemp and Isum Mandingo in the New York State Supreme Court.

Wemp was the main source and character in Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article, “Vengeance is Ours,” in which Diamond depicted Papua New Guinean Wemp and his co-plaintiff Isum Mandingo, as murderers. Previously, Wemp — who claims that because of Diamond’s story, he cannot return to his PNG highlands village — and Mandingo sought $10 million in damages from Diamond and Advance Publications Inc., The New Yorker’s publisher, both of whom were named as co-defendants on the suit.

In September, 2009, following their original suit filed in April, 2009, Wemp and Mandingo served Diamond and Advance Publications with an amended complaint (as opposed to filing through the court system). When attorneys for the defendants filed an answer with the New York State Supreme Court last Wednesday October 14, 2009, Litman (a highly acclaimed criminal trial lawyer whose clients have included Robert Chambers) proceeded by filing the amended compliant with the Court on Friday, October 16, 2009.

According to Forbes magazine, Wemp and Mandingo’s 30-page amended suit details what they claim to be false and inaccurate information in Diamond’s story. “The latest filing identifies 24 separate passages in the story Wemp and Mandingo say are bunk. For example: Diamond’s account says 30 people lost their lives during a three-year clan war that began after a pig ransacked someone’s garden. The complaint says only four people died, the war lasted three months and the conflict didn’t start over a pig in a garden, but an argument over a card game. The filing claims Wemp wasn’t even a participant in the clan war: “At the time of the fighting, Wemp was working some 200 miles away at the coast, in a city called Madang.”

For those who still might have some illusions in Jared Diamond’s scholarly credentials (at least on human beings; he is much more reliable when writing about birds), they would be shattered by Valerie Alia’s Jared Diamond in the Rough: Media, Misrepresentation, and Indigenous People.  Alia’s article does something I think is essential for putting this scandal into perspective. She shows that demonizing native peoples is a very old story:

In 1991, the national British newspaper, The Telegraph, sent a team of journalists to Holman Island in the Canadian Arctic to prepare a photo essay for its weekend magazine. Headlined “Dressed to Kill: Hunting with the Eskimos of Holman Island,” it told thousands of readers that an Inuit hunter has “no code of honour” and “is merciless and self-interested, gathering food only for himself and his family …” That was pure fabrication. The strong sense of community, interdependence, and centuries-old Inuit food-sharing system are well-documented in academic studies and Inuit oral histories.

The story mentions a “young white man who stepped off a train to stretch his legs,” whose “frozen body was discovered the following spring.” Perhaps someone had a joke at the journalist’s expense. Or maybe the journalist just made it up. Either way, he never checked the facts, and the editor never verified them. No one has ever stepped off a train at Holman – the nearest railhead is more than a thousand miles away

While the fight for native rights has advanced in recent years, largely due to the efforts of activists in groups like Survival International, there is still a large reservoir of hostility that can only be attributed to 5 centuries of colonialism. In seeking to marginalize indigenous peoples often to the point of genocide, the colonizers bent on wholesale extraction of minerals from native homelands, it was convenient to turn the victim into the criminal and the criminal into the victim. What better way to make the European or American invader look enlightened than to turn his victims into wanton killers. In Diamond’s New Yorker article, he compares people like Daniel Wemp to a Nazi storm-trooper and argues that Papua New Guinea was “rescued” from tribal warfare once the British came in and put the savages under their control. Of course this killed two birds with one stone since it made it all the more easy to extract minerals from the soil without interference.

If you click http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/category/jared-diamond/, you will find all my articles dealing with this latest violation of scholarship and progressive values by Jared Diamond but this does not exhaust my inventory of critiques of the UCLA superstar professor. And if you go to http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/my_ecology.htm, you will find a series of articles on “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel”, two of his best known books and a harbinger of the polluted nonsense that would make their appearance in the New Yorker Magazine. Despite his reputation as a fair-minded friend of stone age peoples, he is anything but.

For those who have been reading my series of posts on Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomami (I will be putting this on the front burner shortly), you will be aware that many of the same issues are involved. Like Diamond, Chagnon had a vested ideological interest in making these Amazon rainforest Indians look like something that walked out of a horror movie. Both Chagnon and Diamond adhere to a view within the dubious sociobiology discipline that amounts to an update of Hobbes. They argue that stone age peoples, unimpeded by courts and cops, have an unbridled appetite for mayhem in pursuit of the basest instinct, namely to control and own female bodies in order to spread their genes. This is a neo-Darwinian worldview that people such as the late Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin have eviscerated and one that refuses to go away because it satisfies an imperative of late capitalism, namely that white Europeans and Americans have the right to rule the world in the same way that dinosaurs became extinct: it was an act of nature.

Ironically, as long as the ruling class and its mouthpieces such as Jared Diamond have their way, humanity and nature will face the very extinction they supposedly want to prevent. Ultimately, the collapse that confronts us is one based on the private ownership of the means of production, a system that certainly deserves to become extinct.