Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

"Identifying as an attack helicopter" isn't the brilliant material that comedians like Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais think it is.

One of the worst stereotypes aimed at transgender people is that were all a bit uppity. In the soccer game of identity politics we are often characterised as the trigger(ed)-happy referees, just itching to call out anyone who deadnames or gets a pronoun wrong. One of the most policed places that this happens is in the world of stand up comedy. Trans jokes are big business.

Have trans people become the unwitting poster children of woke culture? Over the past few years a lot of red cards have been flashed at stand up comedians, and as a transgender woman I can definitely see why but as a transgender woman who also does stand up comedy I find myself genuinely conflicted.

When I watch a comedian saying something offensive about trans people Im more preoccupied with their technique than their offensiveness. A strange case of being offended as a comedian first and a trans woman second.

Its like inside me are two wolves; locked in eternal battle. One is a trans woman and the other is a comedian. They are both humping my leg.

Ive been doing comedy for 20 years (five of those post-transition) and Ive seen it change a lot. In the early to mid 2000s the aim of most comics levelling their wit at hot button topics was to make people laugh despite their politics. A punchline so clever it cut through any prickling social discomfort you might have felt during the premise or setup.

But for comics nowadays the audiences tastes have changed. And some might say for the better. Presently when I see a new comic trying to joke about school shootings, or pedophilia, or the Me Too movement, or even rape culture my sphincter tightens and I feel like an anxious mother watching her child try to do a Russian table cloth trick. Will the punchline justify the ugly tension Im feeling or will a tumult of offensiveness and cutlery rain into the audience and take out someones eye.

Inside me there are two wolves. One is a comedian and the other is a trans woman they are both blogging furiously about the show they just watched.

Theres no end of straight cis men (on Netflix) doing transgender comedy material. I think Ive watched them all (quarantine helped), and so Ive collected my thoughts about a few and thought Id share them with you all.

Like the thing today, the thing right now you cant make fun of, the thing thats too sensitive at this moment? Transgender people. See? You cant do it. Cant make fun of them. Its too sensitive. In fact, you cant even call them chicks with dicks anymore. No. No. You have to call them men who talk too much' Anthony Jeselnik

Anthony Jeselniks jokes never look good on paper. In a live setting though, (even one recorded on Netflix) you can still feel the sucker punch of his dark and black musings, but to pick at them from a page they lack any wit or surprise just their apparent danger. Jeselniks act can only be described as a cancel culture BDSM session. An offensive onslaught framed in a safe and comfortable environment. His audience knows what to expect and most (if not all) will lean into it. They expect to have their limits tested.

Saying the unthinkable is an often hilarious and cathartic way to rail against social mores (identity politics included) and Jeselnicks real skill is to accomplish this in as fewer words as possible: including his joke about transgender people. Jeselnik offends on two fronts (transphobia and sexism) in just ten words. Its a marvellous feat of economy and audience control.

Tracy Morgan in his post accident comeback special Stayin Alive says he would fuck Caitlyn Jenner (a bold move and the one thing the movement needs more than anything else: trans amorous men brave enough to say out loud they would fuck us) but Tracy cant leave it at that. He has to go into graphic detail about how he would fuck her. Graphic detail about the state of her body when hes done with her. Id fuck her pregnant! I know she doesnt have a pussy but she will when Im finished with her. Its as if Morgan has something to prove, as if he misguidedly feels he has to fuck the gay away.

So, the prime suspect in our criminal line up is Ricky Gervais. The arrows he has levelled at the trans community are noted and many. Gervais takes shots at Caitlyn Jenner both at the Golden Globes and in his 2018 special Humanity, albeit to make light of Jenners vehicular manslaughter case, and in particular the way celebrities arent held to account like the rest of us. He yanks the table cloth and leaves the cutlery and our indignation still standing. Being the medias newest trans darling doesnt make her exempt from critique is what hes saying. A hard but necessary pill to swallow. So far so good but where Gervais gets it wrong is in wrapping up this routine, where he tells us he now identifies as a chimpanzee called Bobo.

One thing I find genuinely upsetting about this is how trite and hack it is. Its nothing new for trans people to listen to the cis folk use our language and idioms against us. I identify as an owl! Im short but I identify as a tall person! I might be fat but Im actually thin on the inside; Im trans-slender. I identify as an attack helicopter (Fnar. Guffaw. Snort!!) To this last one my bog standard response lately has become Well why dont you fly away and fuck off then.

Find a new joke.

When Gruen host Wil Anderson came under fire in 2019 for suggesting that a Digital Avatar Instagram Influencer (read; fake-in-the-computer-made-up-bloop-bleep-person @lilmequila) identified as a robot I think the backlash was largely due to the joke feeling like more of the same. While I could see this as an attempt to utilise the currency of a zeitgeist buzz phrase for comedic effect its not lost on me that the trans community and our allies probably all rolled our eyes and thought Oh no, not this again. Any broader inference that both trans identities and robot influencers are actually fake feels like a long bow to draw, but as a comic my opinion is also that zeitgeist buzz phrases are not the only ingredient of which great jokes are made.

And then we come to Chappelle. First off I will say this he is really good. The tension he creates when bringing up taboos is electrifying. He owns what he says 100%. Chapelles mode of attack is often say the unthinkable and work back from there. He truly is a court jester dancing within the grey areas of public opinion. And while this does work to his benefit he really does seem to want to have his cake and eat it too. Again, much like Gervais, Chappelle wants to revel in his audiences ignorance of us. His routine is a laundry list of trans scare stories: surely sex with us means youre gay. Or Arent you all like Rachel Dolezal? Or I danced with one and I didnt know they were trans. I feel tricked!

Chapelle keeps saying how much he respects us and has no problem with us the smart persons way of saying Im not transphobic, but. yet once again this feels like misdirection. A way to get us on side while setting up for the punchline.

Chappelle is also under the impression that he has gained a free pass card because he met a trans woman (another comedian; the late Daphne Dorman) who laughed at his trans jokes. No mean feat Dave. Even I laughed at some of your trans jokes. Were not all the same and no one has to be trans to find your material problematic.. Like duh! This is about as genuine as saying Well, my one black friend doesnt mind.

Other comics with trans material include Louis CK, Joe Rogan, and Steve Hughes. They range from acutely transphobic (Steve Hughes) , to winkingly offensive (as is the case of Jeselnik) to even oddly compassionate (strange to say, but that honour goes to CK). While Louis says he envies us for being the only people who have fully worked out what is wrong with us and subsequently fixed it, he then includes a throw away gaffe about identifying as an owl.

The truth about all these routines though is that theyre simply not written for us.. Theyre written for cisgender people. And if we find them funny its usually by default. We laugh but we remain on guard because this humour still others us. The audience laughs because we remain alien and unfamiliar to them. Most of these comics are uniting the audience in their mutual ignorance of us and that isnt helping at all. No one goes home with any renewed insight into trans peoples lives. When people leave the comedy club we all still seem a bit uppity.

Chloe Black is a comedian, screenwriter and broadcaster. She tours regularly and is writer/ creator of web series Transferred, currently in development with Electric Yak Productions and Screen Australia

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What Offends Me Most About Transphobic Jokes Is How Lazy They Are - Junkee

8/10Director: Shaka KingStarring: LaKeith Stanfield, Daniel Kaluuya, Jesse Plemons, Dominique FishbackRunning Time: 2hr 6minRating: 15

In the ever-present wake of a turbulent year for Black Lives Matter, it seems appropriate for the story of Fred Hampton to be reignited and given new air to breathe in 2021. This historical account eerily soundtracks the current zeitgeist. BLM didnt start with the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain (to name but a few), and it certainly didnt end with a generous posting of a black square on Instagram. This is a fight for equality that has been happening for generations. Shaka Kings new flick takes an investigative look into the whereabouts and the circumstances leading up to Fred Hamptons assassination in 1969. The film sheds further light upon the racism which is deeply interwoven within Western society and demonstrates the terrifying power of a pig-headed government with censorship, at any and all costs, on its mind.

Judas and the Black Messiah follows the story of William Bill ONeal who, having been offered as a plea deal by the FBI, infiltrates the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther organisation, led by Chairman Fred Hampton. The story unfolds as we see the way in which the FBI utilise their informants as expendable pawns in a game of politics, capitalising off the financial desperation of blue-collar, black Chicago citizens in the late-60s. They use any means necessary to quash what they deem to be a terrorist organisation.

On the flip side of the coin, King pays tribute to Chairman Hampton and the Panthers, maintaining a poise and a delicacy in the treatment of their legacy. The violent imagery in some of Hamptons public speeches remains, the kind of imagery that Right and White history books will cling on to, but so does the necessity of these messages. Sure, there may be talk of killing pigs, but only to emphasise the fatigue of being an ignored and non-existent entity underneath a fascist system. It is also not only the shoot-outs with Police that are being remembered in the film, but also the Panther-led Free Breakfast for School Children programme, the creation of a Rainbow Coalition in a unifying movement across all oppressed ethnic communities, and the Panthers doctrine of respect towards women. It becomes clear that preconceptions of the Panthers are dangerous and frequently do not paint the entire picture.

We see Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield reunite from their days in Jordan Peeles Get Out. Both actors performances in Judas and the Black Messiah have been recognised with an Academy Award Nomination for Best Supporting Actor for each of them. Kaluuya is a tour de force. He more than fills the large shoes of portraying Chairman Hampton, carrying an air of enormity with him on screen. He manages to create this empowering feeling which washes over when he delivers Hamptons public speeches; his vocal mimicry is astonishing, almost entirely replicating the eternally rolling forward cadence of the real Hampton.

LaKeith Stanfield has commented on the difficulty he found in having to portray ONeal. He reports breaking down on set on multiple occasions, due to the guilt he felt in playing this character. Despite these difficulties, Stanfield delivers a stand-out performance. Whilst ONeal is seen as a traitor by many, I found an element of pity and sympathy being created toward his character. Shaka King discusses in a podcast with IndieWire that there was an attempt by the writers and by LaKeith to demonstrate the apolitical nature of ONeal he was not motivated by politics in his role as an FBI informant. He was, in many ways, trapped. He was part of the struggle of the time. His motivation was to try and create a better life for himself. It takes quite some mastery and a high level of skill to create so many dimensions and layers to a character; a set of chops which Stanfield has in apparent abundance.

Whilst Kaluuya and Stanfield are especially strong performances, they by no means run away with the show. Dominique Fishback gives a beautiful voice to Deborah Johnson, Chairman Hamptons significant other. She gets in touch with the human aspect of Hamptons messianic personality and, through exposing Fred to his own vulnerabilities, gives him more power and drive than ever. Furthermore, Shaka Kings directorial eye must absolutely be commended. Exposition is spared and instead moments and conversational exchanges inflate any required context. This drops you right into the film and whisks you away on the ride with no seatbelts.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a memorable film. It is engaging, exciting, cerebral and empowering. It is certainly an important film in an age where we begin to question the motives and the actions of those whom we elect to speak for us. Judas and the Black Messiah I hope will stir the people into questioning and inspire change where the people see fit. For, as put by Chairman Hampton himself, where theres people, theres power.

Editor's Note: Judas and the Black Messiah is available to rent on the BFI Player

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Review: Judas and the Black Messiah - Nouse

Lives and ways of expressing emotions have witnessed a pronounced shift during these past 12 months. Normality has been replaced by a dehumanising reality that has regressed the traditionally mundane into a warped counterpart. Devices like the computer and the mobile phone have become windows, opening up into our minds and souls.

The externalisation of our thoughts, opinions, emotions and hopes have become intricately dependent on social media. Human interaction has on occasions been reduced to a Zoom meeting, virtual hugs, kisses and all. The most basic instinctive human behaviour of sincere endearment has become a forlorn travesty, emoticons and such. However, this outward expression of repressed feelings is still a necessity for some, even though reduced to a most empirical and elemental digital format.

Pawlu Mizzi, in his mission statement for his Wi Imb Wi exhibition, clearly expresses this: The pandemic is a protagonist game-changer that has manipulated how we behave; how we eat, how we relate, how we have sex, how we breathe, how we experience our innate human senses. It is as if life has been suspended in a virtual, simulated nether space, compounded by an impotence and an apathetic despondency. Our frustration is vented through the urgent clicking away on a computer keyboard or through the frantic caressing of a screen.

Going through the online comment boards of newspapers can be regarded as a litmus of frustration levels. Arguments at times degenerate into a demonstration of our mother tongues ability at the most colourful of expletives. Hate speech is showing a more dehumanising pathway, augmented by the relative safety offered through this inhuman impersonal interaction. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, was insightful and prophetic when he declared that I like being myself. Myself and nasty. It is so exasperating when one cannot put a face to an offensive or insensitive comment.

Whoever coined the term keyboard warriors was certainly on to something; he or she captured so effectively the zeitgeist of our times, particularly these pandemic ones. Sometimes, confinement and solitude bring out the worst in us, that which former human interaction somewhat mellowed. Those who lived in the pre-internet age, and who were more temperamental and impulsive, often resolved a squabble via strong words, followed, in the most extreme of cases, by a fist fight. The argument hence would many times be resolved, and bad blood would not curdle into lingering, simmering hatred and distaste that might fester into something dreadful; an invitation to forego the safety of ones home and venture outside into the real world, to deliver on ones keyboard threats.

Mizzi has transposed multiple exposure to a contemporary digital setting that integrated images from social media into totally new 21st century narratives

The photographic technique of double or multiple exposure has been used since the early days of photography, way back in the 1860s. These early photographers used this novel manipulation of the medium in double portraits of the same sitter, thus creating an otherworldly image that was intriguing and somewhat upsetting. Eadweard Muybridges pioneering photographic work, via his studies of motion and motion-picture projection, explored the possibilities of recording multiple images of the same subject in various stages of movement and abandon. In the 20th century, master photographers like Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and John Deakin poetically exploited the surrealistic possibilities of the technique.

Mizzi has transposed multiple exposure to a contemporary digital setting that integrated images from social media into totally new 21st century narratives. The protagonists are people who have agreed to participate in a project that the artist defines as a social exercise of collective portraiture. This was launched via The (Facebook) Portrait Project II Fading Social Distancing Facebook group on December 27 of last year, having an end-of-the-year deadline for any interested individuals from all around the world.

Each participant was consequently tagged and invited to share his/her thoughts and reactions about the modern ostracisation of social distancing, and the itch for the human touch, lost through the imposed solitude of lockdown.

The outreach transcended geographical boundaries, bringing the whole world together into one global village. A total of 363 people replied to this request, who were game to the project. Chronology was the only non-variable that Mizzi considered in the improvised juxtaposition of the profile pictures. The exercise is slightly reminiscent of Tristan Tsaras 1920s Dada experiments in spontaneous poetry, and of the much later Burroughs-Gysin cut-ups of articles and their impromptu rearrangement into new unconventionally structured narratives.

Mizzi factored in the chronology regarding the enrolling progression of members to the Facebook group as a springboard for the finished pieces. A collective portrait was created for every 10 consecutive group members who enrolled and who had to furnish the artist with one of their Facebook profile pictures to be used as fundamental material for the artist to work on. Thirty-seven composite Auerbach-like deconstructed portraits were thus created, which democratically merged physiognomies, emotions, disabilities, traits, cultures, races and ages into the blurred, schizoid, out-of-synch collective portraits, seemingly thriving amid multiple personalities.

The pandemic has deprived us of our identity and of our corporality, reducing our individuality to a mere shadow lost in the many pathways of the internet. Mizzi has exploited the mediumistic idiosyncrasies of social media to summon pixelated ghosts, together with their stories.

The artist has printed these composite portraits on aluminium dibond, for his third solo exhibition. His preoccupation with dualities has defined the artist along his career. Wi Imb Wi builds on his 2013 masters research project, titled (Facebook) Portrait Project. This current exhibitions title, loosely translated into English as face to face, investigates the metaphor by actually transposing and integrating multiple faces and identities. Absolute strangers, with no connection to each other, are merged into metaphysical, virtual alternatives.

The early photographers, even Muybridge, enjoyed the playful magic of a new technology which enabled them to create multiples of singular subjects in various ways and manners. Photographers like Beaton and Deakin created multiple exposures which are like ripples, most of the time originating from one single human face. Mizzis portraits are eddies that interact between themselves, through concealment and through selective revelation. These manifestations, captured on aluminium dibond, seem to embody the famous biblical verse: I am Legion, for we are many, a Boschian contemporary devilish nightmare of loss of identity.

Wi Imb Wi, curated by Melanie Erixon from Artsweven, is open at Il-Kamra ta Fuq, Mqabba, between April 27 and May 18 and can be visited by appointment. Visit the events Facebook page for more information.

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The intimacy among strangers - Times of Malta

Alice Neel painted the human comedy.

Its a phrase she repeated often in interviews and in text, throughout her life. It is the title of one of the sections of Alice Neel: People Come First, her outstanding and moving retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In one sense, what she meant is obvious. Memorable and interesting characters abound in her paintings, running from her many lovers to the luminaries of New Yorks Depression-era political and literary Left; from art celebrities like Andy Warhol to her acquaintances in the East Harlem neighborhood where she toiled in obscurity for decades; from the feminist activists and critics who championed her work in the 60s and 70s to her own self, shown naked, at 80, paintbrush in hand and gazing skeptically out at the viewer as if sizing them upone of the most indelible of all 20th-century self-portraits.

Alice Neel, Self-Portrait (1980). Photo by Ben Davis.

The text in the Mets The Human Comedy gallery explains that she meant the phrase as a reference to French author Honor de Balzacs story collection La Comdie humaine, which examines the causes and effects of human action on nineteenth-century French society. It notes that Neel wanted to chronicle suffering and loss, but also strength and endurance, as Balzac did.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, and falls in line with the shows framing of Neel as an anarchic humanist. But the effects of human action is a pretty vague phrase. As opposed to what? The effects of the movement of the planets?

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

The truth is that the words the human comedy had a lasting magic for Alice Neel because Alice Neel thought of herself as a Communist intellectual. Every artist with an interest in Marxism would have gotten the reference, becausealmost all of Communist aesthetic theory looked for legitimacy, in one way or another, to Marx and Engelss approving remarks on Balzacs La Comdie humaine.

The authors of the Communist Manifesto thought Balzac captured not just the spirit of his time, but provided a portrait of the pathologies of bourgeois society, the toll that money took on human relations (despite Balzacs aristocratic personal politics).

Alice Neels Pregnant Woman (1971) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Interviewed by the Yale Press podcast, the exhibitionss curators, Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, seem very concerned with emphasizing that Neels politicswere independent, non-dogmatic, and that her affinities for Communist ideas softened as she aged. Which may be true: Times change, people change, art and politics and how they intersect change.

You see, its not so much that I am pro-Russia as that I am pro-dtente, she said onstage towards the end of her life. But she also said, around the same time, Reagan has said the government doesnt owe anybody anything. In the Soviet Union you get free medical careeverything is free. There the government owes you everything.

In 1981, just three years before she died, she contributed to a fundraiser for the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, a depository for Communist Party history located in the headquarters of the attenuated CPUSA. The same year she actually did a show in Moscow at the Artists Union, organized by Philip Bonosky, the Moscow correspondent for theDaily World, which was the successor to the CPs Daily Worker.(She had painted him three decades earlier, when he was editor at the Communist magazine Masses & Mainstream.)

Alice Neel, Phillip Bonosky (1948). Photo by Ben Davis.

Interviewed at the age of 82 by art historian Patricia Hills, Neel was still making the case for the significance of her portraiture by referencing Vladimir Lenins respect for Balzacs The Human Comedy (she kept a poster of Lenin in her apartment all her life, according to Phoebe Hobans 2010 biography) as well as Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukcss advocacy for Thomas Mann.

Neither Lenin norLukcs were names you brought up in the 1980s to win points for being with-it, artistically or politically.

Rather than trying to fit Neel into the framework of a rose-colored contemporary progressivism, it seems much more interestingand more accurateto consider how the artists actual, passionately felt, difficult allegiances shaped her: the sacrifices she made in her life; the specifics of her art; and her relation to the New Left feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s that pulled her from obscurity, and that now probably overdetermine the reading of her work still.

Born into small-town Pennsylvania respectability in 1900, Alice Neel went to study art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women looking for a more interesting life. I came out of that little town the most depressed virgin who ever lived, she remembers in a 2008 documentary directed by her grandson. She met and married Carlos Enrquez, a soon-to-be-important Cuban painter, and travelled to Cuba in 1926, where the sight of poverty in pre-revolutionary Havana radicalized her.

Alice Neel, Futility of Effort (1930). Photo by Ben Davis.

Returning to New York, she suffered the loss of her first child, Santillana, to diphtheriathe subject of the ghostly Futility of Effort (1930), later featured in a 1936 issue of the journal of the Artists Union, Art Front, retitled asPoverty. The couple would separate, and Enrquez would take their second child, Isabetta, back to Cuba.

New Yorks Greenwich Village was where Neel found her most lasting community, in the demimonde that swirled together leftist radicals and artistic strivers amid the hardship brought on by the Great Depression.

Alice Neel, Kenneth Fearing (1935) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

When the New Deals art projects started up in 33, Neel seized the opportunity as a lifeline, painting a canvas every six weeks on government wages, her eye turning for a time to urban scenes and public demonstrations in the mode of the day.

(An anecdote she liked to tell later in life is that Harold Rosenberg, the critic of abstraction, schemed his way onto the government payroll by submitting two Neel paintings as his own, before becoming an art writer.)

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

The Communist Party was enthusiastic about the New Deal Arts Projects and a force in pushing for their expansion, and Neel soon joined the Party. It might surprise us now that a figure of Neels scrappy, bohemian independence would be drawn to the CP, even given the fact that she joined in 35, when the USSRs foreign policy needs aligned with Roosevelts agenda, and the turn to the Popular Front opened the doors for fellow-traveling artists of all kinds.

Alice Neel, Nazis Murder Jews (1936). Photo by Ben Davis.

But Cold War dogma and our knowledge of the actual evils of the Soviet system cloud our assessment of the Communist Partys on-the-ground profile at the time. Its opposition to US social order led it to engage with both racism and sexism in ways that mainstream institutions often wouldnt. As Andrew Hemingway writes in his great history of the time, Artists on the Left, Neel is representative of that type of woman artist and intellectual who gravitated to the CP becausewhatever its limitationsit offered the most sustained critique available of class, racial, and sexual inequality.

Alice Neels Death of Mother Bloor (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neels role model would have been someone like Ella Reeve Bloor, aka Mother Bloor, the most well-known female leader in the CPUSA in the 20s and 30s. Born 1862, Bloor was a formidable organizer who supported six children while divorcing and marrying as she pleased. She was a comrade of Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair, and her labor journalism inspired Woody Guthries song about the Ludlow Massacre. In her sixties, during the Great Depression, Bloor toured the Great Plains with her son, organizing farmers.

Detail of Alice Neels Death of Mother Bloor (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neel painted Mother Bloors funeral in a 1951 work. She is pictured, sainted, in a coffin as a multiracial crowd of mourners files past. A wreath above her head reads COMMUNIST, the word PARTY vanishing as it wraps around a bouquet of roses.

The curators of Alice Neel: People Come First cite approvingly a line by Neel saying that she was never a good Communist, because she hated bureaucracy and the meetings used to drive me crazy. But a distaste for bureaucracy or political meetings doesnt mean she didnt imbibe the party line. (It just means she was an artist.)

In the very same interview Neel also stresses that it [the Communist Party] affected my work quite a bit.

Its one thing to join the Communist Party at a time when Communist ideas were in vogue with the artistic mainstream, and capitalism was in a crisis that was plain for all to see. Many did in the Depression years. But Neel remained faithful to the movement long after.

Alice Neel, Alice Childress (1950). Photo by Ben Davis.

In the 40s and 50s, she studied philosophy at the Jefferson School for Social Research, an adult education school in New York run by the Communist Party. She delivered some of her first slide lectures about her art there.

One of her teachers, V.J. Jerome, chair of the Partys Cultural Commission, was convicted under the Smith Act for his 1950 pamphlet Grasp the Weapon of Culture!, which described mass culture as anti-human and a narcotic polluting the masses, arguing the need for a revolutionary art to bring down capitalism. Neel made sure to visit Jerome to show support after he was released from jail.

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

This was the high tide of McCarthyism, when most others of the so-called New York Intellectuals were abandoning their earlier, 30s-era Marxist commitments and turning hard towards Cold War liberalism and anti-Communism.

And yet the very title of the Met show, People Come First, comes from a line in a 1950 Daily Worker interview with Mike Gold, the foremost propagandizer of proletarian art in the United States. Even as Abstract Expressionism was being coronated at MoMA, Gold had quoted Neel: I am against abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings.

(Incidentally, when figuration reemerged in the art world in the late 60s, it was in the form of Photorealismand Neel hated that too. She argued that it also sinned by treating humans the same as things, replicating capitalist ideology. She thought special attention should be reserved for the human. Her particular Marxist aesthetic, therefore, gives insight into the ways she set her subjects off from less defined backgrounds and the meaning she gave to the expressive, painterly qualities of her paintings in that era.)

Alice Neels Mike Gold (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Gold championed Neel as a pioneer of socialist-realism in American painting, and she returned the love with a portrait from 1951. His weathered, tan features appear thoughtful and ready for debate. Depicted on the table before Gold in Neels painting is a copy of the Communist intellectual journal Masses.

Detail of Alice Neels Mike Gold. Photo by Ben Davis.

Beneath that is a newspaper. In what I take to be a deliberate suggestion of Neels continuing alignment with Golds output as a writer and propagandist, she has placed her own signature as if it is a part of the newspaper.

Neel had moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938 with her lover, the singer Jos Santiago Negrn (whom she had met when she was 35 and he a decade younger). For her, the paintings she did of neighbors, acquaintances, and comrades from the Puerto Rican community werent just sentimental or picturesque. Works such as Mercedes Arroyo, The Spanish Family, and T.B. Harlem made their debut in a show at the Communist-controlled New Playwrights Theatre, with an essay by Gold, and were presented explicitly as part of a Communist political-cultural project, bound up with the Partys advocacyand sometimes fetishizationof Third World struggle.

Alice Neel, The Spanish Family (1943). Photo by Ben Davis.

Gold quoted Neel like so: East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there, and they inspire my painting.

In the popular imagination, the story of the 60s New Left movements is that they raised issues of race and gender that the Old Lefts idealization of a white male factory worker had ignored. But its a little more complicated than that.

An interesting twist highlighted by recent museum shows reconsidering this period is that, as it turns out, the artists who were adopted as the most vital, heroic exemplars by the insurgent 60s social movements had, in fact, often been forged by the Old Left artistic scene. It was in terminally uncool Social Realism that the idea of an art that honored the experiences of the suffering, oppressed masses had been preserved and could be picked up again when new social movements rebelled against the reining formalism.

Charles White, the masterful social realist who was affiliated with the CPUSA until 1956 and was nurtured in some of the same Communist spaces and periodicals as Neel, was an example for the Black Power generation. Neel was an example for Womens Liberation.

Cover of Time magazine featuring Alice Neel painting of Kate Millet, on display at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

The Communist Party had all but imploded after Khrushchevs secret speech in 1956 revealing Stalins crimes. Without the new feminist movement, there would have been no Neel revival.

Neel, in turn, helped shape the image of the ascendant movement, doing a steely painting of writer Kate Millett for the 1970 cover of Time magazine on The Politics of Sex, just as Womens Liberation was moving into mainstream consciousness.

Alice Neel, Cindy Nemser and Chuck (1975). Photo by Ben Davis.

She painted the luminaries of the feminist movement as faces of their time, just as she had painted the earlier Communist intellectuals: art historians Linda Nochlin (with daughter Daisy) and Cindy Nemser (nude, with husband Chuck, also nude), Redstockings founder Irine Peslikis (described as Marxist Girl), and many more.

Alice Neels Nancy and the Twins (1971) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neel also did numerous images of women nursing and pregnant nudes, among her most celebrated works. Here, her eye for honoring the realities of ordinary peoples lives hidden beneath bourgeois ideology met the feminist project of honoring the hidden world of womens work beneath the sentimental domestic cliches.

But Neel also had a famously difficult relationship with the Second Wave of feminism, even as she reveled in its attention and clearly believed in the importance of Womens Liberation. Partly, this was generational. Like Georgia OKeeffe (though a quarter-century younger) or Joan Mitchell (though a quarter-century older), Neel had spent a lifetime trying to escape the stigma of being patronizingly reviewed as a lady painter, and was suspicious of being touted for her gender.

Alice Neel, Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) (1972) in Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

But this was also partly political, inscribed in the very creed that had allowed her to hack it out all those lonely, unrecognized, pre-feminist-movement years. She had chosen a life of poverty out of an ideological belief in solidarity with the working class and the oppressed. With a combination of insight and narrow-mindedness, she considered a lot of the preoccupations of the new feminist artists she encountered to be self-absorbed and tritein a word, bourgeois.

In 1970, her work was included in the Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin-curated Women Artists, 15501950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show had been the product of actual protests by feminists, who had threatened a Civil Rights complaint against the museum for not showing women.

Alice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.

Yet reflecting on the shows reception, Neel was characteristically salty and dismissive of those who didnt share her fundamental political outlook:

What amazed me is that all the woman criticsyou see, you are very respected if you paint your own pussy, as a womans libber. But they didnt have any respect for being able to see an abused Third World. So nobody mentioned that I managed to see beyond my pussy politically. But I thought that was really a good thing if they had a little more brain.

There is ego here: Alice Neel was never shy about saying why her art was better than anyone elses. But the judgement flowed directly from the Marxist theory she used to understand her practice, which held that capitalist life kept us wallowing in immediate subjective experiences, unable to generalize and so unable to change the world.InGeorg Lukcss 1938 essay Realism in the Balance, he had written:

[I]f we are ever going to be able to understand the way in which reactionary ideas infiltrate our minds, and if we are ever going to achieve a critical distance from such prejudices, this can only be accomplished by hard work, by abandoning and transcending the limits of immediacy, by scrutinizing all subjective experiences and measuring them against social reality. In short it can only be achieved by a deeper probing of the world.

You can see how this artistic theory of hard looking would resonate with Neels sense of what a portrait should be.Lukacsian realism was about neither simply life-like description nor the depiction of ordinary experiences in an accessible way; it was about art that moved through the specific case to a revelation of the overall social context that had shaped its meaning and identity.

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

When, in the Hills interview, Neel says that what she values most in her own art is that she tries to paint the complete person but also, though that depiction, to capture the spirit of the age, it is just such an operation she seems to have in mind.

The favorite author of Georg Lukcs was Thomas Mann, Neel continues, because Mann could see how sick the world was. But the sickness has now been transformed into junkiness. You see, the character of this era is its utter lack of values.

Alice Neels Dominican Boys on 108th Street (1955) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

How seriously did Alice Neel take the mission of her art to capture its time, which went considerably beyond the personal satisfaction she got from organizing paint on canvas or communing with her many interesting sitters?

So seriously that, when it came time to paint the character of the 70s and its utter lack of values, she would show it in the face of her own adult son.

Having lost two daughters, Alice Neel raised two sons on welfare, in poverty, all while committed to making unsellable art. In the 2008 documentary, Richard Neel remembers Alice tolerating a lover, Sam Brody, who beat him, because she was dependent on him for money and he flattered her artistic ego. Burned by the dispiriting instability of their upbringing, both sons would reject her communist and bohemian values, steering clear of the new movements of the 60s even as they elevated their mother. They became, respectively, a doctor and a lawyeras solidly middle class as you can get.

Alice Neel, Richard (1962). Photo by Ben Davis.

She had painted Richard warmly in the handsome Richard (1962), when he was 24, with five oclock shadow and a casual sweater.

By the time Richard evolved into the late-periodRichard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79), the real Richard had become an ardent Nixon supporter and chief executive council for Pan Am Airways. In the year she made the painting, Pan Am was okayed by Jimmy Carters Airline Deregulation Act to snap up National Airways for $437 million.

There are very few people as right-wing as I am, Richard says in the 2008 documentary. His mother would say that Richard in the Era of the Corporation was her attempt to capture how the corporation enslaved all these bright young men.

Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

Now 40, Richard is shown again on a chair, this time in suit and tie. Compared to the earlier composition, this one is one step farther back, less intimate; the warm brown palette has yielded to a slightly icy climate.

Splashes of green linger around the mouth. Green veins trace his hands.

Detail of Richard in the Era of the Corporation. Photo by Ben Davis.

The 1979 Richard projects cool assurance, his legs casually crossed as beforebut the foot is suspended at a strained angle. Hes literally twisted.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

The white patches in the hair in both the figure and his reflection suggest a man graying into middle age, but also make him look as if he is fading away or that something is literally missing from him.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

But its his eyes that I notice. Childhood malnourishment had left Richards eyesight damaged. Uniquely among her bespectacled sitters (compare her own self-portrait from a year later), Neel has given Richard shark eyes, all pupils. His glasses, strangely left unfinished, float unevenly around them, agitated halos, as if he were spellbound or hypnotized.

Neel rightly gets credit for painting aspects of female experience that hadnt gotten a lot of play in art before, in her pregnant nudes and nursing mothers and scenes of childbirth.Richard in the Era of the Corporations depiction of political estrangement between mother and son is another intimate experience I am not sure had ever been depicted.

And this painting was telling, not just in terms of capturing a mood among the Neel family but in terms of capturing the larger zeitgeist.

The story of the backlash against the movements of the 1960s by the rising generation and the consolidation of corporate hold over life was indeed the story that defined the decades to comewith so many horrible consequences.

I love, fear, and respect people and their struggle, Neel told Hills in 1982, especially in the rat race we live in today, becoming every moment fiercer, attaining epic proportions where murder and annihilation are the end.

Banner for Alice Neel: People Come First outside the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Finally, why bother spending so much time on Alice Neels Communist affinities?

Theres enough Neel to go around in this show: Theres an erotic Neel; a familial Neel; a Neel as painter of wonky domestic still-lifes. But clearly we are more comfortable with these aspects of her work and are embarrassed by the Communism, rendering it as a soft-focus radicalism or classless feminism that she herself would have hated.

The topic is worth lingering on, but not because you need to defend Communism to defend Marxism or activism. The opposite is closer to the truth, in my opinion. For the entire period Neel was working, there were Marxists and activists who were critical of the CP, critical of the Soviet Unionthey were just much less visible than the CP.

But Communism was a motivating passion for Neel. Its sense of destiny kept her going. Its theory offered a model of intellectualism that was committed to speaking to ordinary people. It offered critical insights that werent easy to find elsewhere along with tragic blind spots. (If you are interested in what it felt like to live these difficult dynamics, Vivian Gornicks The Romance of American Communism cant be beat.)

Neels politics were bound up with all that other stuff that made her remarkable. The art-historical dilemmas they leave us with are heritage of the fact that the society she was trying to survive and depict was actually full of awful dilemmas. The best way to honor her as a painter of difficult truths is by not smoothing these over.

Alice Neel: People Come First is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 1, 2021.

Continued here:

Alice Neels Communism Is Essential to Her Art. You Can See It in the Battlefield of Her Paintings, and Her Ruthless Portrait of Her Son - artnet News

The Tank watch is Cartier elegance embodied, a pure and precise design, an uncompromising line. From its very creation in 1917, Louis Cartier made the distinct aesthetic choice of a rectangular shape, as opposed to the round watches of his generation. The Tank was already an avant-garde piece when launched and continues to be today. The two parallel brancards are its signature. Inspired by the design of a combat vehicle viewed from above, this watch follows one clear graphic principle: the brancards were the treads, the case was the turret. For the first time with the Tank, the case attachments were aligned with the strap to maintain the rhythm of the design.

Wearing it becomes a statement. Vanguard Andy Warhol and his Tank were inseparable, he said about it: I dont wear a Tank watch to tell the time. Actually, I never even wind it. I wear a Tank because it is the watch to wear! By refusing to wind his watch, the leader of pop art sanctifies the elegance of the Tank.

Timeless, sure of itself and of the purity of its design, the Tank watch captures the zeitgeist in 2021. After more than a century, it has been reinvented with the Tank Must. Tank and Must, the fusion of two Maison icons: on one hand, Tank, essential and dandy, and on the other, Must, a name immortalised at Cartier in the 1970s that revisits the classic conventions of luxury. The Must watches are part of the Maisons heritage and legend (). They have withstood the test of time thanks to their instantly recognisable style, but also their excellent craftsmanship, which Cartier applies to all its creations right down to the smallest detail. Pierre Rainero, Director of Image, Style and Heritage at Cartier.

Tank Must Watch Cartier

Tank Must is a chic watchmaking feat worn by many. A Maison signature whose design and movements are continuously evolving, driven by Cartiers watchmaking commitment to constant progress. The Design Studio has reworked the design of these new Tank Must with monochrome versions and an original version based on a new photovoltaic movement.

Taking direct inspiration from the Tank Louis Cartier, the design of the Tank Must has been developed while staying faithful to the historic model. Rounded brancards, revisited dial proportions: finesse is the guiding force behind this new design. A watch that dares to return to great classicism down to the smallest detail, with a precious pearled cabochon winding crown and the return of a traditional ardillon buckle on the leather strap version.

A watchmaking classic from the Maison whose sophistication is measured on every level, from its steel strap with curved links, entirely redesigned and interchangeable, to the latest high-efficiency quartz movement - autonomy of around 8 years.

With the launch of the Must watches in 1977, the Tank watch, a Maison watchmaking icon created sixty years earlier, was made available in a vermeil version. With a burgundy or all black dial and a large gold-coloured logo, it freed itself from traditional watchmaking codes, opting instead for elegant simplicity. Faithful to the spirit of the 80s, the new Tank Must watch is available in three monochromatic colours that are embedded into Cartiers DNA: red, blue and green. Steel watches that favour minimalist dials with no Roman numerals or rail-tracks and a fully chromatic look with matching straps.

Since the very beginning, Cartiers watchmaking ambition has been to constantly strive to improve, relying on technical progress as well as the Maisons response and commitments to the environment and biodiversity. Pioneering since the invention of the first watch worn on the wrist with the Santos watch (1904), or the one with the folding buckle (1910), Cartier Watchmaking has always been committed to anticipating its clients needs. Whether its the QuickSwitch patent (2018), which allows straps to be interchanged at home, or the latest photovoltaic dial found on the Tank Must watch, a modern alternative with a quartz movement with no need to change the batteries, the approach is the same; improve the lives, and satisfaction, of Cartiers clients.

Tank Must Watch Cartier

The challenge lies in applying a new technique to the watchs aesthetic and shape every time, finding a confluence between modernity and watchmaking tradition, a challenge and commitment crystallised by the Cartier Manufacture at La Chaux-de-Fonds. More than simply a production site, the Manufacture is a research hub, a creative and innovative laboratory that has succeeded in applying the photovoltaic principle to the Tank watchs dial, without altering its aesthetic. A true technical feat that relies on the delicate and invisible perforation of Roman numerals, whose openings allow solar energy to reach the photovoltaic cells hidden under the dial. It took two years for the development team to integrate this SolarBeatTM movement, with an average lifespan of 16 years, into the Tank Must, the first watch to benefit from this technology.

A pioneering watch that also introduces a bracelet produced in an innovative material that guarantees a high level of both quality and comfort. It is composed of around 40% plant matter, produced using waste from apples grown for the food industry in Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

The production procedure represents a step forward in preserving the environment by reducing our carbon footprint (6 times less), saving water (up to 10 litres) and energy (up to 7 megajoules, or approximately 200 smartphone charges) compared to the manufacture of a calfskin strap.

Weve taken a local, European approach: the apples are grown and their waste collected in Europe, from the material production site in Italy, to the strap maker in Portugal and the watch assembly in Switzerland.

Loyal to its reputation as an avant-garde timepiece, the Tank watch hasnt quite finished telling us what it has to say. Its creativity is limitless. Once again with the Tank Must, Cartier dares to make its timepieces evolve with the times while looking towards the future.

Created in 1917, the Tank watch very quickly spawned several variations. Louis Cartier reworked its design from as early as 1922. Its case was stretched, brancards refined and edges softened: the Tank L.C. had arrived. (Louis Cartier). A classic was born.

Tank Louis Cartier Watch Cartier

Rail tracks, cabochon sapphire, Roman numerals, Louis Cartier laid the foundations of a signature watchmaking aesthetic, with its very latest version perpetuating this tradition to within a few subtle nuances.

The Louis Carter Tank cultivates its timeless elegance in colour. The choice of blue and red was a must, as these colours are a part of Cartiers DNA. An intense red and a bright blue highlight and enhance the watchs pure lines.

Cartier has added sophisticated details to these two precious versions, including Roman numerals and gold-coloured rail tracks, which help to enhance the dials graphic intensity.

The blue version is in pink gold, the red in yellow gold, both coordinated with the straps, these two watches come with a Manufacture 1917 MC movement with manual winding.

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Cartier - Tank - Watches and Wonders - WorldTempus

Every decade or so anarchism seems to find its way back into the limelight for another 15 minutes. Were usually roundly vilified but it still offers us a rare window to attract the non-political class and shop around our ideas. In the late nineties, we had the Anti-Globalization Movement and the Battle of Seattle. About a decade and change later we had the Occupy Movement and today I believe we may be approaching another 15-minute window with the uprisings against the grotesque overreach of our post-modern police state. The seemingly unique thing about this latest upsurge in stateless insurrection is that it appears to have two bipolar sources, one on the left and one on the right. On the left we have the rise of an old but reinvigorated movement known as Antifa, engaging in fantastic displays of direct action with the state across the Pacific Northwest. On the right we have the more libertarian Boogaloo Movement, creating their own powerful brand of confrontational street theatre with their heavily armed and well-organized marches on state capitols across the heartland. Both groups are autonomously decentralized and stateless in nature and outlook. But both groups represent opposing ends of the ideological anarchist spectrum.

All in all, this need not be a bad thing and it really isnt that unusual either. Anarchism has always been a movement that defies and transcends the traditional left-right spectrum. But attempt to suggest as much online and just wait for the bricks to fly.

Contrary to the popular caricature of the tattooed green-haired vagabond like myself, anarchism is an almost mind-bogglingly diverse ecosystem of fantastic radical freaks. Travel into this jungle online and you will find yourself amidst a teeming forest of colorful countercultures. You have your modern day barbarians of anarcho-primitivism, your cyber punk geeks of crypto-anarchism, your dandy nihilist outlaws of egoism, and your maligned heathen LARPers of National-Anarchism. But most of my fellow anarcho-freaks can find themselves beneath one of two major ideological umbrellas. The red leftists of anarcho-communism and the right-libertarians of anarcho-capitalism, and here is where my beloved stateless ecosystem finds itself in the eternal conflict that threatens to spoil our latest fifteen minutes of zeitgeist defining public imagination.

The internet is lousy with ancoms and ancaps wasting their precious intellect shitposting on each others perceived flaws, to the degree that many have foolishly come to see the other as a bigger enemy than the state itself. According to your average ancom keyboard guerrilla, an anarcho-capitalist is a greedy, self-absorbed, commodity fetishist who wants nothing less perverse than to hand over the reigns of power to major corporations and usher in a new era of puppy eating Social Darwinism. And according to your average ancap social media maven, an anarcho-communist is but a knuckle-dragging, quasi-Maoist, rube out to round up everybodys private property and declare the year zero. Both of these representations bare little resemblance to reality and both sides would likely quickly realize this if they could get past their kneejerk revulsion to heavily loaded labels like communist and capitalist. The anarcho-interpretations of both are far from incompatible and even farther from anything youll find in a mainstream history book, and this is where anarchy without adjectives comes into play.

Developed in a time of far greater social upheaval than ours, anarchism without adjectives was designed by a couple of Spaniards named Ricardo Mella and Fernando Terrida del Marmol in the 1880s to end the eternal bitching of their eras own communists and individualists, and unite them under a single game plan to annihilate the state they both despised first and then sort out the less dyer details along the way to a new stateless society. It was always intended to be more of a strategy than an ideology and it ended up being adopted by some of the eras greatest and most diverse anarchist minds, like the so-called Italian Lenin, Errico Malatesta, and the mother of American Individualist Feminism, Voltarine de Cleyre, before their 15 minutes blew up into an unfortunate fit of headline-grabbing assassinations.

To me anarchism without adjectives always made sense as more than just a strategy because Ive always been something of an anarchist with a thousand adjectives. DeLeonist libertarian socialism will always be my first love because of my childhood infatuation with Marxism and my lifelong fixation with the full spectrum direct democracy of radical syndicalism. But my devotion to a stateless Queer nation has come to be the most significant motivator for my continued dedication to smashing the state and in a twist even I didnt see coming, Ive come to see typically ancap philosophies like the Non-Aggression Principle and Agorism as the best ways to achieve my goals for a new humane society without fucking it up like my forefathers did with a bunch of dick-wagging initiatory violence.

And thats what I love about anarchism without adjectives. It allows us to erase silly ideological lines and allows everyone with something stateless to offer, a place at the table. Its a veritable market place of non-dogmatic ideologies competing in real time. The only real absolute is that everything must be voluntary. Nothing must be coerced. As long as every idea, every new society, remains a choice, it remains kosher for a new revolutionary era of exploration. Wanna live like a barbarian in a torch lit cave without the evils of polyfibers and plumbing? Fuck it, make it voluntary and give it a shot. Wanna create a new Kowloon Walled City of cyberpunk capitalist debauchery? Fuck it, make it voluntary and give it a shot. Wanna create a post-apocalyptic red light republic of genderfuck neon haired syndicates? Fuck it, Im gonna make it voluntary, and give it a shot.

The future is simply too unpredictable for doctrinaire model building bullshit and dogmatic absolutes. When Western Society finally collapses beneath the weight of its own imperial hubris, you and I will see more revolutionary changes evolve in the first 15 seconds than weve seen in the last 1500 years. The only way for anarchism to survive the coming cataclysm is to remain united by a collective open mind to the endless possibilities of the greatest upheaval this planet has seen since the dinosaurs. Antifa and Boogaloo both have all the right ideas, they just need to respect each others right to approach those ideas from different directions and remain open to the possibility that somebody outside their circle might know something they dont. Otherwise, were just going to blow another 15 minutes on shitposting and ballyhoo and it might be the last 15 minutes we got.

If humanity has a future, its anarchism. If anarchism has a future, its without adjectives. Lets make it fucking happen people. Some tattooed green haired vagabond believes in you.

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Anarchists Need to Drop the Adjectives - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

Workers at the Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama, voted not to unionize. The margin, 738 in favor of joining theRetail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to 1,798 opposed, was a great disappointment. But should that result have been a surprise?

At The Nation, Jane McAlevey argues that the danger signs were there for all to see. She does an excellent job cataloguing the company's many attacks on the organizing effort, some putting up anti-union signs everywhere, intimidating organizers and mounting an effective counter-campaign. The company, one of the richest in the world, practiced the art of union busting with aplomb.

McAlevey points to the many ways in which the organizers mounted a bad campaign. First was the timing: An employee at the Bessemer plant, Jennifer Bates, testified before Congress about the atrocious working conditions at Amazon, but who noticed when Congress was also looking into the insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, the pandemic and other clamant needs? The union also was not even sure how many workers were eligible to vote when the effort started last year, so it seems like everything about this campaign was a bit premature.

McAlevey also faulted the messaging from the organizing campaign. "In the many videos flowing out of Bessemer on social media, activists and organizers regularly talk about 'the union,' as if a union is something other than the workers who are trying to form one," she writes. "A better slogan would have been, 'When workers unite, real change happens,' or anything that didn't make "the union" sound like a building name or street address."

She also wonders if the results would have been different if the organizers had been co-workers, rather than paid union staff, and if the outreach had occurred away from the plant gate. The RWDSU should hire McAlevey to help with their messaging before the next effort to organize!

The final consideration was the degree to which the campaign was, you will pardon the expression, outsourced. "The media often played up the faith-based aspect of the campaign, with key staff of the effort being faith leaders or people of faith themselves," she notes. "But there was a near-total absence of Bessemer or local Birmingham faith organizations on the endorsement list of the campaign. Although news reports often highlighted that meetings started with prayers, there was an absence of major local faith leaders publicly supporting the workers."

Washington is filled with well-meaning organizations, faith-based and otherwise, that exist to get media hits for their executive directors. They have full-time staffers who have reporters on speed dial. It is easy to overlook the fact that the local support may not be in place, and that it is the local support that is critical.

I was horrified, but sadly not surprised, to read McAlevey observe, "There's also been a lot of emphasis in the media coverage of the percentage of workers who are Black in the Amazon warehouse, suggesting that demography is destiny." When will liberals learn that when someone tells you "demography is destiny," they are guilty of intellectual sloth and, by now, willful ignorance.

It is also by now an instance of willful ignorance to fail to recognize that the rules are stacked against union organizers and you need a strategy for overcoming that fact. Last month, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which would level the playing field for union organizers, but companies like Amazon that have figured out how to make billions of dollars are not going to spare any effort to subvert worker democracy. Unions need to be prepared for a fight each and every time.

Fortunately, the cultural zeitgeist might be turning in ways that will help our country change the rules that govern organizing campaigns and restore workers' rights to organize as a foundational, moral building block for a just society. In New Hampshire, Robert Dunn, public policy director of the state's only diocese, testified before the state legislature in opposition to a proposed "right-to-work" law. Three years ago, the U.S. bishops' conference issued an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME in which the bishops articulated long-standing church doctrine on workers' rights to organize.

This is important because ever since Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic control workers' strike in 1981, the stigma that once attached to union busting has withered and vanished. The public shaming of Amazon is a good thing and it should continue. Religious leaders can help re-create that stigma.

The Biden administration can do a great deal to help strengthen the labor movement, in addition to pushing for the PRO Act. Joe Biden's infrastructure bill will entail billions of dollars in green technology and infrastructure, and the government should require that all such work be done with union labor.

Recently, a West Virginia solar company announced it was now a union shop, working with the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers. When people in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, who were left behind when the coal mines closed,realize that there are good-paying, union jobs in the clean energy sector, the result will be good for the climate, good for the common good, good for ending gross income inequality. In short, there is no downside.

Antitrust action is another avenue for the Biden administration to pursue. European regulators have already begun investigating Amazon on antitrust charges. The company's business model is built on the premise of an unfair playing field: By being the principal distributor of online merchandise, the company collects valuable information that allows it to buy out the companies that show the most promise, and then further grease the skids by giving those products privileged access to the information gleaned from the distribution arm of the company.

The vote in Alabama was a loss for organized labor. There is no way to sugarcoat that fact. Like every loss, there are lessons to be learned about future organizing efforts, both at the Bessemer plant and beyond. The Catholic Church and all religions that enshrine the common good as a central, moral objective of their social teaching has a role to play in helping to revive the labor movement in this country. A battle was lost in Alabama, but the fight against corporate exploitation of workers and manipulation of our society and our government goes on.

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Lessons from the Amazon unionizing defeat - National Catholic Reporter

When I was a kid, I had my life all planned out, Chase Hudson or as he is better known to his 30 million TikTok followers, LilHuddy tells us over Zoom. I wanted to build rollercoasters. He laughs as he recounts drawing whimsical rides on paper, exuding the warmth and effortlessness that has helped make him one of TikToks biggest stars. For Chase, the humour in the anecdote is in the randomness of this career interest. To the outside world, however, it seems to be an apt prophecy. Despite being just 18 years old, Chase has spent the past few years riding a professional rollercoaster of his own creation one characterised by unthinkable speed, dramatic twists, surprising turns and the enthusiastic screams of passengers along for the ride.

Chase grew up in Stockton, California, which he describes as a town where you get made fun of for being different. At age 16, he headed for Los Angeles since becoming a quietly revolutionary figure in the industry and a leader among a new generation of media talent. I didnt embrace the artsy side of myself until I came to LA and wasnt ashamed of it anymore, Chase says. Since then, its just kind of exploded. Hes racked up numerous impressive identifiers in addition to TikTok star since the 2019 move, including Hype House founder, E-Boy style icon and teen heartthrob.

But these accolades of social media mastery were merely pit stops on his ascent towards an alternative professional climax: the launch of his pop-punk music career. The opportune timing of the pivot made his musical debut this January feel like a rare eclipse, when the star of the moment and the sound of the moment perfectly aligned, amidst a fertile cultural landscape. But just how far will 30 million followers get you these days, as an aspiring musician?

TikTok has only recently overcome its pre-pandemic reputation as a cringey and questionable playground for teens, and established itself as the definitive platform of both the present and the foreseeable future. This widespread shift in perception in the wake of Covid has dramatically benefitted early adopters like Chase, whose followership has more than tripled since January 2020. And while TikToks ability to catapult lesser known artists to the top of the charts has been well documented since the apps first big splash of popularity in 2019 (Lil Nas X, case in point), it seems the music industry is only just now grasping the true value of a pre-existing TikTok fandom and how effectively a position of power on the app can translate to record sales, streams and (one day, perhaps) tours.

Last year, music agent Adam Mersel, who has worked with artists like Bebe Rexha and Robin Thicke, signed Chase to Immersive Records, a new subsidiary of Interscope Geffen A&M. Ive been looking for people to work with in the music industry since I arrived in LA. Then I just happened to meet the right people at the right time, Chase says. Though he had no experience or background as a musician at the time, Adam calls the decision to take him on a no brainer.

There isnt anything like it in the business, Adam says, explaining how valuable TikTok is to the music world. TikTok has the most active engagement Ive ever seen on a platform. Not only is music a pillar of the apps identity (making it an ideal place for promotion), TikTok has also given rise to a legion of alluring performers. Unlike Instagram influencers, who mostly garner attention and clout with still images, TikTok creators succeed by creating captivating videos, making them somewhat ideal contenders for offshoots into various sectors of the entertainment industry. Thats the thing about influencers turned artists: theyve built their audiences from no one outside of themselves. Theyve earned their visibility, Adam adds. And I think, for [Chase] especially, that was an incredible place to start from.

Chase entered the scene having already earned the endorsement of the leaders of Gen Zs pop-punk revival: Machine Gun Kelly, who cast Chase as the lead in his 45-minute music video Downfalls High, and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, who has produced all of the tracks on Chases upcoming album (due out this summer). Chase describes the process of working with one of his childhood idols as surreal: Travis is a big fan of the work that Im creating, which is something I couldnt have even dreamed up. I really looked up to him as a kid.

Capitalising on the zeitgeist of pop-punks second coming, LilHuddys first single, 21st Century Vampire (which he dropped just days after MGKs film premiere) embodies both the nostalgic sounds and deceptively simple lyrics of some of the most iconic high school tracks of yesteryear, like Im Just a Kid and Teenage Dirtbag. In February, Chase followed his debut (which has already been streamed over 10 million times on Spotify alone) with an infectious breakup song, The Eulogy of You and Me. Elegantly capturing Gen Zs twist on the late 90s/early 00s musical movement, the track marries the darker lyrical themes and gothic imagery of emo with that brighter, danceable pop-punk sound. Its on regular rotation on SiriusXM Hits Radio, who also named Chase their latest Hits 1 to Watch artist.

Although Chase is one of many elite TikTokers alongside Addison Rae, Dixie DAmelio, Jaden Hossler, Nessa Barett and Ondreaz Lopez to sign record deals in recent months, his musical ambition and persona seems the most authentic of the bunch. Thus far, Chases transition from TikTok royalty to rockstar appears remarkably unlabored, even natural, rather than executive-engineered. Though he tells us of a gruelling schedule that demands 12-hour stints in the studio, in addition to voice and music lessons, the teen is glowing with a fervent optimism and a sense of genuine fulfilment. Social media was always a fun thing for me to do, but I dont feel the same reward or passion in making a video as I do when I make words on paper into a song, Chase says. It gives me something to invest myself in fully, and truly be proud of.

Chase opens up about how bizarre its been to watch the digital benchmarks of his career success (like follower count, streams, views, likes, merch sales, etc.) skyrocket, while the physical world remains motionless in Coronavirus limbo. Ive actually broken down about it a little bit, he says. It doesnt feel real to me in a way, because Ive just been surrounded by numbers and stuck at home for such a long time. Im not able to meet the people that love and support my stuff, or to even live this so-called fame. As we continue to wait for indoor gatherings to be safe again, Chase and his team are attempting to bridge the gap to the stage, by creating content for fans thats reminiscent of the live music experience, like a recent acoustic performance he did at the iconic (and empty) LA rock venue, Whisky a Go Go.

When asked why Chase has managed to captivate so many young people around the world, Adam Mersel attributes it to his willingness to be flawed and vulnerable with his audiences. I think some of the songs on the album might shock people, he says, describing Chases lyrical candor. The fact that he has the bravery and vision to share it all, and bear it all, is whats really going to make him stick with this next generation and become a timeless artist. And for Chase, the potential reward of connection is what makes the risk of transparency worth taking. Talking about your feelings online is always something that people are going to joke about or look down upon. But when you can say it the right way through music and not be corny, its like preaching to the choir.

Though we are still in the early days of Chases career experiment, the takeaway is already clear. Industry gatekeepers and TikToks general naysayers can no longer afford to reject, overlook or devalue the power of the platform and those who are most influential on it. Thirty million TikTok followers will certainly give you a head start in the music industry today, but when a platform that imposing is matched with genuine zeal and determination, its enough to go the distance. Anything can be built off of TikTok. If you want it and are willing to work for it, its there, Chase says. You just have to have the right heart for it.

Follow i-D on Instagram and TikTok for more music.

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LilHuddy's evolution from TikTok royalty to rockstar - i-D

Lime, Bird, Flask, Vogo, Grin and Yellow, Skip, Spin All are multi-million-dollar (or even billion-dollar) companies whose every move is being pored over by car makers desperately appraising what the future of transport actually means.

All are at the heart of the e-mobility revolution, itself a contradiction as it is underpinned by scooters and the bicycles albeit powered by electricity rather than legs and feet.

The frenzy around these firms has been driven in part by fashion and disruption, because investors love a bit of both. They offer a chance to dismantle the status quo and make fast bucks and anything that drives down emissions and congestion is also a positive.

Urban e-scooter schemes have caught the zeitgeist. This app-accessible mode of transport has been deemed by users to be cheaper than a cab, less effort than a bicycle and more convenient than a bus. Paris set itself up at the vanguard of the movement in 2018, then its legislators watched in awe and horror as 20,000 e-scooters took over its streets in a manner that one government official described as anarchic. Speeding, drink-riding and collisions were rife, plus there was the trip hazard of hastily discarded scooters.

Such was the popularity of the scheme that authorities had to backpedal somewhat, revoking rights of 12 operators and reissuing them to just three, each allowed to provide 5000 scooters as of this year. Best-case predictions suggest mass adoption will reduce traffic by 50% and pollution by 30%, but that remains a target rather than reality.

Momentum among suppliers is building. A market estimated to be worth 15bn today is expected to hit 30bn by 2030, but that feels conservative. In the UK private use remains illegal, but trials of subscription services are under way.

Joining the fray, arguably less controversially, are e-bikes, where human effort is typically supplemented by a battery-powered electric boost. E-bikes are a pandemic success story: 3.7m e-bikes were sold in Europe in 2019, but that figure that rose 23% last year and is set to hit 10m a year by 2024 and 17m by 2030 at that point a higher figure than new cars sold.

No wonder the car makers are watching closely, and its no coincidence that Toyota is remodelling itself as a mobility firm and Volkswagen is pushing itself as a digital one. The price point of e-scooters and bikes may be different but the message is clear: electrification, especially in cities, is set to change far more than how our cars are powered, striking to the heart of transport and therefore society itself.

READ MORE

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Inside the Industry: How urban e-scooters are riding the zeitgeist - Autocar

UndarkApr 12, 2021 13:05:22 IST

By Rachel Love Nuwer

Todays conservationists are taxed with protecting the living embodiments of tens of millions of years of natures creation, and they face unprecedented challenges for doing so from climate change and habitat destruction to pollution and unsustainable wildlife trade. Given that extinction is the price for failure, theres little forgiveness for error. Success requires balancing not just the complexities of species and habitats, but also of people and politics. With an estimated 1 million species now threatened with extinction, conservationists need all the help they can get.

Yet the past a key repository of lessons hard learned through trial and error is all too often forgotten or overlooked by conservation practitioners today. In Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, journalist Michelle Nijhuis shows that history can help contextualise and guide modern conservation. Indeed, arguably its only in the last 200 years or so that a few scattered individuals began thinking seriously about the need to save species and its only in the last 50 that conservation biology even emerged as a distinct field.

Beloved Beasts reads as a whos who and greatest-moments survey of these developmental decades. Through the eyes and actions of individuals, it portrays the evolution of the surprisingly young field from a pursuit almost solely of the privileged Western elite to a movement that is shaped by many people, many places, and many species.

Its in the gray area of the personal, though, that the book is most fascinating. Even the most celebrated and successful conservationists had human flaws, and Nijhuis does not shy away from these details. As she writes, The story of modern species conservation is full of people who did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.

In one chapter, for example, Nijhuis tells the story of William Temple Hornaday, an American taxidermist who served as the first director of what is now the Bronx Zoo, and who is credited with saving the American bison from extinction. By the late 19th century, evidence clearly pointed to the fact that bison, a species that once numbered tens of million, were set to disappear due to wanton overhunting. Yet at the time, most people assumed that species were static and enduring, Nijhuis writes, and those who did catch wind of the fall of the American buffalo mostly responded with a shrug.

Strangely for his time, Hornaday became obsessed with the animals plight. He decided that the only way to preserve the species from extinction was to establish a captive herd to, as he wrote, atone for the national disgrace that attaches to the heartless and senseless extermination of the species in the wild state. With Theodore Roosevelts backing, Hornaday established a small bison herd in the Bronx in 1905, one whose urban descendants became founders of some of the 500,000 bison that survive today. More than just save a species, Hornadays work helped bring public recognition of extinction as a needless tragedy rather than an inevitable cost of expansion, Nijhuis writes.

Yet despite all the good he did for the natural world, Nijhuis points out that Hornadays successes like many conservation gains of the 19th and 20th centuries were built on a foundation of nationalism, sexism, and racism. For Hornaday and his allies, the rescue of the bison had nothing to do with the people who had depended on the species and a great deal to do with their own illusions about themselves, Nijhuis writes.

Bison were slaughtered en masse in the 1800s, not just for their hides but also as a convenient way to control Native Americans who depended on the animals for food, Nijhuis writes. At the same time, White men like Hornaday and Roosevelt began appropriating bison as a symbol of rugged Caucasian masculinity, both for the animals association with a strenuous life and as the target of choice for of wealthy White male hunters. Despite evidence to the contrary, Hornaday placed partial blame for the bisons demise on Native Americans, and his Bronx-raised bison, Nijhuis points out, were released on land seized from the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa. Protecting bison, therefore, meant protecting a perniciously exclusive version of natural progress, Nijhuis writes.

With each subsequent generation, though, the conservation field has gradually improved in terms of its scope and ethics. In his older age, Hornaday, for example, supported and encouraged the activism and ecological education of Rosalie Edge. A bird-loving New York socialite, Edge helped to reform the Audubon Society, which, at the time, supported the eradication of raptors and opposed tightening of hunting restrictions.

A year before the term ecosystem was coined in 1934, Edge discussed with Hornaday a groundbreaking realization she had come to: that species should be protected not only because they are of interest to humans as had motivated Hornaday and the men of his time but because each forms a vital link in a living chain. A decade after Edge and Hornadays conversation, the centrality and fragility of ecological connections would become all the more apparent when Rachel Carson pondered the impacts of the pesticide DDT on raptors at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, a protected area Edge founded.

Ideas and connections continued to build. Around the same time Edge was campaigning for birds, Aldo Leopold popularised the idea that ecosystems, not just species, need to be protected, and that game is a public trust that should be managed by science-based law. This zeitgeist shift resulted in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Leopold believed it was possible to love other species and use them wisely, too, Nijhuis writes.

The conservation movement gained momentum in the wake of World War II, Nijhuis writes, when the word global came into wider use, and the interconnectedness of the world both ecological and human became glaringly apparent. Data compiled by the newly established International Union for Conservation of Nature also revealed just how many species faced extinction, and shifted the movements focus to emergency relief. But as conservation spread to other continents, especially Africa, it continued to work through various growing pains, including racist views about independent Africas inability to manage its own natural resources. Many foreign conservationists saw the African landscape as John Muir had seen Yosemite as an extraordinary place meant to be visited, not lived in, Nijhuis writes.

This so-called fortress conservation approach perpetuated in the 1950s and 1960s a top-down enterprise in which global authorities ultimately inform national and local agendas has since come under fire and has been increasingly replaced by a version of conservation that acknowledges that humans are an inextricable part of the landscape. Additionally, time and time again, conservationists have learned (oftentimes the hard way) that protection of wild places can never succeed without buy-in from the people who live there. To protect biodiversity to provide other species with the resources they needed to adapt, survive, and thrive conservationists, including conservation biologists, had to persuade some of their fellow humans to make some sacrifices, at least in the short term, Nijhuis writes.

The problem, Nijhuis continues, isnt inattention to human needs, but inattention to human complexity. Conservationists too often view humanity the same way they would a population of species that fits into a single ecological niche with set relationships and dependencies, Nijhuis argues, rather than as thinking and technologically endowed beings aware of our place among other species and each other. Nor are we passive players. As the future perfect turns into the present perfect, we can apply ourselves to creating a tolerable present and future for ourselves and for the rest of life, Nijhuis writes.

The decisions we make are often unpredictable, though, informed by a vast array of social, cultural, and individual factors. Conservation biology, in other words, cant be left only to the biologists, Nijhuis writes. Its for this reason that the field has begun to draw upon other realms of expertise outside of pure ecology, including economics, politics, social science, and more. This need for diversity not only in nature but also within human endeavors to protect it is something that Leopold and others recognized decades ago, but has only just started to come to fruition in any practical way.

History is an integral part of that complexity, too. Just as we cannot protect something that we do not know exists, past failures and successes likewise cannot be taken advantage of for future gains if history is forgotten. Beloved Beasts is therefore compelling and necessary reading for anyone interested in the field of conservation. As Nijhuis writes, We can move forward by understanding the story of struggle and survival we already have and seeing the possibilities in what remains to be written.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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In Beloved Beasts, Michelle Nijhuis shows that history can help contextualise and guide modern conservation - Firstpost