Category: history

061926 or the general strike

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Juneteenth, the holiday that heralds the day in 1865 when those enslaved in Texas first learned that they were free, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

“the general strike of the slaves” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, 1935.

i.e. self-emancipation.

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’, Simon Skinner. (LRB) Jonathan Wilson’s history of the World Cup–a commercially dominant tragi-comedy.

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Andreas Gursky, EM, Arena, Amsterdam I

Brazil – Haiti, 3 – 0

050426 or making meaning of freedom

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Central Park. ??

Carol Bove at the Guggenheim.

Travel -travails. ?????

considering the bursts of revolutionary time when profound and unimaginable changes explode, […] we know that when it proceeds from below, the good example of freedom struggles spreads in unpredictable ways.

Change erupted when slaves, drawing on skills and commitments made in the long decades of circumscribed possibilities, withdrew themselves from plantation labor, sometimes by fleeing and sometimes by staying sullenly put.

Change then reverberated across lines of race, gender— as Coffin’s insertion of Sojourner Truth illustrates— and class. How the resulting hydra of liberation movements emerged and how each ran into its own sobering limits, confronting the fragility of alliances, the strength of enemies, and the limitations of friends, structures the final sections of the book.

via Seizing Freedom.

freedom of the reader

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PXL_20260422_185249111.RAW-01.COVER

JH Prynne, born June 24 1936, died April 22 2026 (The Telegraph Obituaries)(also, in The Telegraph).

“One reason why he was so resistant to reading in public was his concern that audiences “believe so readily that some special insight has been communicated to them because the poet’s voice is authentic and true and inward, and so the whole mystery of the poem is presented to the ear of the audience. This belief is completely false, in my impression totally misguided, misleading, untrue and false.” He considered the memory of a poet’s voice to be “a really serious obstacle, and I detest to present obstacles to the freedom of the reader.””

Paris Review. Prynne Bibliography.

Walker Art Center, Collections.

never let the charm be broken

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Haiti Inter sur Johnny Nicholas (Jean Marcel Nicholas). The Search for Johnny Nicholas, Hugh Wray McCann, David C. Smith, David L. Matthews (1982/2011).

Yesterday we walked apart, 
Separate and cold and mortal. 
Now the mystic kiss has joined us, 
Now we stand inside the portal

That permits of no returning,
And my heart is strangely burning. 

I know not what the word may be, 
Or what the charm, or what the token, 
That has filled us with this glory. 
But never let the charm be broken. 

Let it stay a mystery
For all time to be. 

Yesterday, with lighter joys,
We wantoned at the outer portal. 
Now, with love’s old alchemy, 
We have made ourselves immortal.

Sudden Friendship, Elsa Gidlow

011926 or Remember this

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MLK day!

Kevin Rodgers. YYZ Artist’s Outlet. Modern Fuel.

Andor!!! Finaly saw the last two episodes.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.

(Cassian listens to Karis Nemik’s recording…) S1E12

strange fire of forgiveness that flares & fights

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You should know

that after you ready

      to meet the far,

stony shore, it is not hope

but the strange fire

      of forgiveness

that flares & fights

_____

there—not wanting

      to go, hoping only

you’d said so

long to all you know—

      to the elms

who also know what it means

to be told you’d die

      & survive.

Hereafter, Kevin Young

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/789820071432290304
https://www.tumblr.com/blackwolfman-music2/789819525748097024/black-sabbath-paranoid-official-video

Access to food is extremely difficult. In Gaza. Please help them, those not ready.

AG2025_2100255c or don’t you see

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AG2025_2100255c

“I love ya! I love ya all. Don’t act like that. You women. Stop it. Don’t act like that. Don’t you see I love ya? I’d die for ya, kill for ya. I’m saying I love ya. I’m telling ya. Oh, God have mercy. What I’m gonna do? What in this fuckin world am I gonna dooooo?” (TM)

Fragments d’histoire ou Hier et aujourd’hui : à la faveur d’une promenade dans les rues et aux environs de Fort-de-France. Baude, Théodore, 1866-1949. 1940. WikiSource. Manioc.

« Chaque pas sur un pont, sur une place rappelle un grand passé. À chaque coin de rue s’est déroulé un fragment de l’histoire ».

GŒTHE

Baude, le premier Martiniquais à recevoir, à titre civil, la cravate de commandeur de la légion d’honneur. 1940 (during the Vichy regime?).