Charismatic philosopher and mystic Alan Watts muses on the meaning of time and change, causality and the significance of being driven, and how in reality, the past is a result of the present.
In honor of the 92nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution, we present the first in a three part series, beginning with Ian Birchall’s talk, “The Rebel’s Guide to Lenin” from Marxism 2005 and available, along with many other informative talks, at Resistance MP3. For a collection of Ian Birchall’s articles for the IS, check here. Next week, we’ll devote to a talk on another significant participant in those momentous events, Leon Trotsky.
Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson – Time Come Leroy Smart & Friends – Sufferation in the Ghetto Pete Seeger – Eyes on the Prize Linval Thompson – Mr. Bossman Rage Against the Machine – Year of Tha Boomerang Mark Blitzstein & the New Singers – The Internationale
Original version broadcast on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 8 PM EST on WXOJ-LP 103.3 FM Valley Free Radio Northampton, MA
“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorney or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We were in a really bad way before the white man came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without the basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.” — Lakota Sage Lame Deer (from John Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions)
“I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.”- Abraham Lincoln Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)
The inside story on transcending the brain, with David Lynch, Award-winning film director of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mullholland Drive, Inland Empire (filming); John Hagelin, Ph.D., Quantum physicist featured in “What the bleep do we know?;” and Fred Travis, Ph.D., Director, Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition Maharishi University of Management.
Lawrence Krauss is a professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. His lecture entitled Life, the Universe and Nothing was recorded at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto on March 27th, 2009.
The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts,goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the “freedom” that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.
The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, “an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine.” And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.
The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapman’s photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg “didn’t say a word for two years” because he wanted to be “invisible” and to document the scene as it actually happened.
In the film, Chapman’s photographs and stylized dramatic recreations of his stories meld with the recollections of Elliot Rudie, a Scottish artist, whose drawings of his time in the hotel offer a poignant and sometimes humorous counterpoint. The memories of Chapman and Rudie interweave with the insights of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, author Barry Miles, Danish filmmaker Lars Movin, and the first hand accounts of Oliver Harris, Regina Weinrich, Patrick Amie, Eddie Woods, and 95 year old George Whitman, among others, to evoke a portrait of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and the oddities of the Beat Hotel that is at once unexpected and revealing.
