Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

Annie Dillard, one of my favorite authors, has written the near-poetic prose that, by far, has most influenced my own exploration of nature. I have particularly been touched by her 1999 book For the Time Being, comprised of a series of all-so-perfectly-brief essays with one-word headlines.

As we celebrate Earth Day this week, I was inspired to write a column in that spirit. What follows is a tribute that inevitably will fall short in meeting what it attempts to imitate.

PROTEST The first Earth Day in 1970 was as much a celebration as a protest a joyful call to arms to protect our planet. Twenty million Americans participated, many of them college students, and the modern environmental movement was born.

In the United States, Denis Hayes was the national organizer of the first Earth Day. Through conversations and speeches, he helped build a movement. Now in his 70s, he lives in Seattle. He's still building things. Recently that included the Bullitt Center, which created a revolutionary model for constructing buildings so green that they actually have a positive impact on their surroundings.

It's sad that nearly 50 years after that first Earth Day, it is still a shockingly radical idea that we might be able to build our lives in a way that leaves the planet better off, rather than just less bad.

WALLS The American zeitgeist, on the right and left, is increasingly moving towards isolation. Trade deals are near universally despised. Whether in the name of peace or saving money, much of the public urges us to close our bases across the globe and bring our troops home.

It's not just here, but an entire world that is moving towards embracing and enhancing the man-made fiction of borders. Britain is exiting the European Union, an isolationist right is gaining steam in France, and terrorists are violently trying to create their own world walled off from modern sensibilities, like human rights.

Is globalism dead? In an age of nuclear weapons and climate change, it can't be. We act as though oceans divide us, when actually they concretely connect our lives. Our oceans, and what we do to them, have a greater impact than almost anything else on our lives on land. Their health shapes our weather and our climate. Even something that appears to separate us actually links our futures.

NOW "Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world." So begins the end of the first chapter of For the Time Being. I think about this as I walk along the Puget Sound in Seattle. I've started taking frequent long walks usually about 10 miles looking out over the water.

I watch people and ships, and sometimes nature. Just last week I encountered a bald eagle. It flew close. It reminded me of a trip to Alaska, where I had seen dozens of them fighting over fish in a harbor; their numbers somehow diminishing rather than enhancing the awe. But this singular bird was magnificent. It was a masterpiece that struck me like a powerful piece of classical music, or the rare painting that moves me.

When it comes to encountering my favorite art, I'm often not sure exactly what I think or feel. All I know is, it feels intensely relevant. It matters to me. I feel the same way about nature, and for that matter, my family. The relationship with those you were born surrounded by (or have chosen to live with forever) is just too complex, too messy, too personal to be boiled down to a single emotion. I suppose it's love, but it's a lot of other things, too.

It's just so much the Picassos, the symphonies, our families and ourselves. It all matters. And it's all on this little planet, for the time being. It's definitely worth celebrating.

John T. Reuter, a former Sandpoint City Councilman, has been active in protecting the environment and Idaho's Republican Party politics.

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Words to Live By - Pacific Northwest Inlander

As mainstream pop continues to shift and distort, turning its ravenous gaze towards the more obscure forms of dancefloor music often with remarkable results that seduce teenyboppers and hardened, cynical alternative journos alike the zeitgeist shifts that surround such movement still find ways to startle. Im going to come clean and admit to being something of a dumbass, because when I first heard The xxs debut album back in 2009, it didnt to me sound like the work of a band that would soon sweep the airwaves, crop up in TV commercials or cross over, Mercury Prize in hand, to widespread success. To me the album sounded too introverted, ephemeral and spectral; but if Vks debut album Figure is anything to go by, the zeitgeist has well and truly shifted into inward-looking and moody territory, the likes of which we possibly havent seen since the new wave/goth heyday of the eighties or that brief period when shoegaze captured the imagination of more than few whimsical young people.

There are no two ways about it: Figure would not exist without The xx. Its all in there: the muted take on bass-heavy dance music, the forlorn and romantic lyrics, the jangly guitar lines. A percussive line might be more beat-heavy here or there, but only to the same degree as The xx themselves have done on their recent I See You in an attempt to escape the straightjacket that was looming their way. The main difference, however, is that Vk have a solitary vocalist, Margrt Rn, and her airy soprano is, in fairness, very different to Romy Madley Crofts. Rns delivery is pristine, her high-pitched vocals soaring from muted whimper to keening wail, sometimes in the same line. But what she gains in intensity she loses in intimacy and sensuality compared to Croft, apart from on the odd occasion when she sounds eerily close to a Cooly G or Roseau.

I suppose Rns vocals will suffice to ensure Vks fans (and, to their credit, the numbers are growing) that Im full of shit and that the comparison doesnt stand. In answer, Id point to BTO, which follows the brooding dark ambient shuffle of opener Breaking Bones with an insistent backbeat and lush bursts of synth bliss. Its hook-laden and is sure to be a hit somewhere, but has The xx written all over it. Thats of course not a bad thing, in many ways BTO is what Dangerous might have sounded like without Jamie xxs overbearing production flourishes but it doesnt break new ground. When youre going out of your way, Rn moans, do you think about us? The romanticism is potent, but a little cloying, and the production, for all its timely swoops, handclaps and dreamy atmospherics, the production fundamentally lacks any of the unpredictability The xx often inject into their songs. Same goes for the futuristic, guitar-driven Figure, which sounds so much like the UK band I imagine some will assume its one of their outtakes until Rns admittedly awesome vocal kicks in and sweeps away that possibility.

Elsewhere, The xx influences dissipate somewhat as the album progresses, to be replaced with slower, less rhythmic textures. Vk cite Portishead and Massive Attack as influences, and that slowly becomes apparent on tracks like Floating, which carries a very portentous atmosphere. The problem is that a lot of the latter tracks on Figure are over quite quickly without making the kind of uneasy mark on the listener that the two Bristolian acts were so adept at. Margrt Rn certainly sounds at times vaguely like Beth Orton, but is often let down by a disappointingly slight production (Dont Let Me Go, Show Me). The album concludes with a trio of ambient pieces on which rhythm is stripped down to its bare bones and space is handed mostly to the vocals. By closer Hiding this becomes a bit soporific and not even interjections on sax or piano really distract from the fact that the second half of the album feels a tad unfinished.

In many ways, Figure sounds like the work of a band that was inspired by The xxs game-changing moment but too late realised that such change was ephemeral. The xx themselves are still wrestling with where to go next after their debut, so its hardly unexpected that other acts will find it a tough act to follow. On the more upbeat tunes, especially BTO and Figure, Vk show a real ear for melody and Rns vocals are generally effective. But as they try to negotiate new avenues, the quartet loses focus and fails to land any original blows. I imagine there are a plethora of similar acts out there trying to guide the zeitgeist in ways that will pay off, but Figure shows thats a lot harder than we might think.

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Vk - The Quietus

You dont often expect to get much juice out of a documentary focused on subjects like architectural modernism and city planning. But Matt Tyrnauers argumentative film is the cinematic equivalent of a particularly caffeinated op-ed about how to fix whats wrong with the modern city. As the films myriad urbanists and architectural experts opine at the start, given the seismic shift in urbanizing populations, there arent many greater problems to be wrestled with.

At the risk of oversimplifying the debate, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City divides the participants into two camps: the top-down city planners and the bottom-up activists. To illustrate that divide, Tyrnauer handily reaches back to the most famous urbanist debate of the 20th century: the fight between New York planning czar Robert Moses and journalist-turned-activist Jane Jacobs. The struggle wasnt always easily understood, but the stakes were for the future of the city itself.

A well-connected operator who built on the Jacob Riis-fueled urban reform movement of the 1930s and its zeal for cleaning up the slums, Moses used his unprecedented power and massive amounts of federal funding to massively reshape New York. In the postwar years, Moses and his car-friendly allies in other cities tried to implement the (not always correctly interpreted) ideals of modernist architect Le Corbusier and his plans for fantasy cities of regimented apartment towers and impossibly pristine parks. To them, the seeming chaos of New Yorks polyglot tenement neighborhoods and its jam-packed streets were messy and unsightly things to be swept away.

But to the likes of Jacobs, there was invisible order in that chaos. Jacobs wrote about how neighborhoods like her beloved Greenwich Village were not just densely ordered communities with rich and economically sustaining economic and cultural lives, but also safe places to live, due to all the eyes on the street. Jacobs saw the blank tower blocks of public housing sprouting in bulldozed downtowns across America in the 1950s as crime-inviting dead zones that made it impossible for organic communities to develop. As Citizen Jane staunchly argues, America would have been better served listening to Jacobs.

Tyrnauer assembles a gold-star panel from the architectural and urbanist communities (Mike Davis to Paul Goldberger and Geoffrey West, but surprisingly, not Moses biographer Robert Caro) to hail the prophetic wisdom of Jacobs views, which were hardly commonplace when she started organizing citizen groups to stop Moses bulldozing of New York neighborhoods and the vapid vulgarity of what he wanted to replace them with. The battles to stop the demolition of both large stretches of the Village and SoHo in the 1960sthe late Ed Koch reminisces about battling Moses with Jacobs, even though he later championed many of the same inhumanly scaled developmentsare repeatedly hailed here as totemic victories against the unexamined wisdom of urban renewal.

In a sense, the clash between Jacobs and Moses was a conflict between two different types of utopians. Jacobs urban ideals, as expressed in her 1961 call to arms The Death and Life of Great American Cities, could generally only be achieved on rare occasionslike Greenwich Village just before and for a couple decades after World War IIwhen geography, economics and the cultural zeitgeist came together in just the right mixture. The ideal city for Moses wasnt even a city at all, but a latticework of bridges, parks, towers and highways that looked fantastic from the air but was soul-crushing death to live in. (Not that he cared, of course; though the film doesnt note the irony, the great city planner Moses lived for many years out on Long Island.)

It isnt hard to tell which side Tyrnauer is going to come down on. There are few fans these days for Moses bullying arrogance; also, the film isnt called Citizen Robert. Some could argue that the films heroic portrait of Jacobs doesnt allow for much nuance. But after a brief but damning section on the humanitarian catastrophe caused by Moses Cross-Bronx Expressway project, its hard to see finding much fault with the woman who simply though that cities should be about people, and not buildings or cars.

Click here for cast and crew information.

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Film Review: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City | Film Journal ... - Film Journal

Christian Schneider, Syndicated columnist 6:51 p.m. CT April 17, 2017

Christian Schneider(Photo: Eric Tadsen/USA TODAY NETWORK)

Anyone who hasnt heard pop songstress Katy Perrys recent song,Chained to the Rhythm, is missing one of the most awful pieces of music to ever be inflicted upon the American public. By the time you hear Perry warble, So comfortable, we live in a bubble, a bubble/So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble, the trouble, your ears will have filed for divorce.

Yet upon its release, this aural Antietam received positive reviewsin large part because it reflected Perrys new political activism. (Indeed, this must be true for, on her Twitter profile, Perry describes herself as an activist.)

Perrys fed up with the complacency of the capitalist entertainment culture that she has thrived off, chirped The Atlantic, comparing the songs theme to that of Sinclair Lewis classic political novel Babbitt. (Lewis novel won a Nobel Prize, though the author evidently never wore a cupcake bra.)

But rather than some foundational political anthem, Perrys song is a series of microwaved liberal bromides repackaged and sold back to liberals. Its a tried-and-true formula: Masquerade lefty culture as consciousness, and you make your terrible art critic-proof.

Recently, liberals and conservatives alike mocked an Internet adproduced by Pepsi that tried to cash in on todays left-wing protest culture. In the ad, which stars the inexplicably famous Kendall Jenner, a multicultural group of young, thin demonstrators march to demand something. (Perhaps Cokes secret recipe?)

Wielding peace signs and offers to join the conversation, the marchers stare down a line of menacing police officers until Jenner offers a cop a Pepsi, at which point he seems to say to himself, this 50-cent carbonated beverage has rendered my crowd control manual obsolete, and I, therefore, will not tear gas these morons.

Liberals recoiled at the ad, accusing it of stealing imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement and minimizing the issue of police brutality. Pepsi apologizedand pulled the ad, whatever that means it is still readily available online and also apologized to Jenner.

But Pepsis only crime is making the lame repurposing of progressivism so nakedly obvious.

Corporations always try to capture the zeitgeist and monetize it; ask any child of the grunge era who began to see ripped jeans and large flannel shirts in J.C. Penney catalogs. And when political issues bubble up, they take their place next to the Geico gecko and the Most Interesting Man in the World as tools to move product.

Take, for example, Audis embarrassing Super Bowl adthis year that tried to tangentially relate selling cars to women being paid less in the workplace. A father watches his daughter compete in a soapbox derby-type race, wondering whether he should have to tell her that no matter her qualifications, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets. The ad ends by saying Audi of America is committed to equal pay for equal work.

Evidently, no members of Audis all-maleBoard of Management are aware that the wage gap is complete nonsense, having been debunked by scoresof fact-checkers.

The Pepsi ad went too far because the caricature was too broad, but its the same idea that has saturated advertising for decades: Lefty activism is hot, so lets try to sell it to younger people who dont know better!

Naturally, theres nothing wrong with using free-market capitalism to trick liberals into buying products. Anyone who bought a Coke in 1971 because a hippie sang them a nice songwas helping the economy and creating jobs.

But the left should realize these ads are meant to trigger the same basic response in them that videos of Big Macs are supposed to trigger in hungry people. Just dont be surprised when Mayor McCheese starts wearing a pink knit hat.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger.

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The selling of lefty 'consciousness' - Jackson Clarion Ledger

In this brave new world of corrosive alterna-facts and neo-nuclear heebie-jeebies, let us give thanks for Kendrick Lamar, a rapper brave enough to mop up Americas most pungent funk and blast it back in verbal laser light, sea to shining sea.

On his extrasensory new album, DAMN., our hero outlines the ills of the nation Its murder on my street, your street, backstreets, Wall Street, corporate offices, banks, employees and bosses with homicidal thoughts then points his finger at a really bad dude: Donald Trump is in office. Hes spraying red-hot invective, but his voice is a minty cool spritz. As the world grows more disordered, his vision clears.

And who better to trust than a California dreamer who can see beyond the madness of the moment while his Reeboks are still planted in it? For all of the introspection and self-doubt that makes Lamars body of work feel so exceptional, DAMN. radiates certitude from the tracklist outward. The albums song titles are one word apiece, rendered in capital letters and stamped with a period. So yes, hes still expressing the complexity of his humanity Watch my soul speak, he instructs during the staccato chest-puffs of HUMBLE. but, this time, with machinelike mettle.

Also new: The music surrounding his voice feels uncluttered, giving Lamar the opportunity to clear a few things up, including the fact that his politics which earned him a reputation as one of popular musics premiere zeitgeist-wranglers were never a pose. Last LP, I tried to lift the black artists, he raps during the climax of ELEMENT., citing To Pimp a Butterfly, his 2015 opus which became the unofficial soundtrack of the Black Lives Matter movement, but its a difference between black artists and wack artists.

Lyrically, the album establishes an old-school, shuffle-resistant continuity that connects one song to the next. Early in the proceedings, a sample of Geraldo Rivera interrupts the propulsion of DNA., during which the somehow-still-talking head scolds Lamar for protesting police brutality: This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years. On the next track, YAH., Lamar calmly bites back, accusing Riveras network of attacking him to goose ratings: Fox News wanna use my name for percentage. On the very next cut, ELEMENT., Lamar rues the fact that all my grandmas dead, so aint nobody praying for me, then repeatedly reminds us that aint nobody praying for him on the following track, FEEL. And so on and so forth, until DAMN. begins to feel like one continuous gush of rhythmic-rhyming thought, connected to the world, but ultimately connected to itself.

As a lyricist, Lamars gift remains extraordinary. You know it, I know it, and he knows it, too. I dont love people enough to put my faith in men, he confesses on PRIDE., a song addressing morality, mortality, God and craft. I put my faith in these lyrics. To believe in his words is to be dazzled by them.

And if you really want to make your cranium spin, cue up FEEL. and hold on tight during the five seconds it takes for Lamar to shuffle the following 18 words: Look, I feel heartless, often off this, feeling of falling, of falling apart with darkest hours, lost it. Looks clunky on paper, but itll make your eardrums dizzy. And thats the funny thing: Hes rhyming about what it feels like to go flying off the rails with a virtuosity that suggests hes incapable of losing control.

So yeah, sure, Kendrick is the GOAT, blah-blah-blah, who cares. The perpetual conversation about whether this man is the Greatest Rapper Who Ever Crip-Walked Gods Green Earth only threatens to monopolize our attention and limit our listening. And theres always more to listen for in Lamars music especially in his voice, which often expresses his humanity as vividly as his verses do.

He deploys different tones across DAMN., establishing varying degrees of intimacy along the way, but Lamars default timbre remains that raspy half-shout, where his throat sounds dry and his mouth sounds wet. You can hear wisdom and desire in that voice, regardless of the words hes forming. Hes hoarse from rebuking the universe, but still salivating, eager to tell you more.

Lamar knows his instrument, because he knows his body, because he knows himself. The closer we listen that soul speak, the better we can each understand our own.

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Kendrick Lamar gives a 'DAMN:' Hear him out - Press of Atlantic City

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Everything was quiet in New York City the day after the 2016 election. The city was stunned into silence. Matthew Breen remembers people crying randomly on the street, comforted by friends and strangers. We were totally blindsided, Breen says. People were trying to look kindly on one another. It was such a raw and fragile moment.

Breen, now the editorial director of LOGO, was in his final weeks at The Advocate, where he worked for nearly six years as the editor in chief. Having publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, Breen says that the LGBTQ publication was totally blindsided, and his last issue as EIC wasnt the one he expected. The December cover of The Advocate depicted an American flag in which two of the stripes have fallen off. Meanwhile, a man and a woman stare out helplessly into the distance, struggling to figure out whats next.

The blunt title sums up the sudden and unexpected fear that gripped the LGBTQ community in those early days: Time to panic, it read.

The election of Donald Trump to the White House has radically transformed the relationship between the press and the Oval Office, a shift felt acutely among LGBTQ media as the industry has taken on a more adversarial role. Prior to the Trump presidency, many in the community wondered whether there would be a need for LGBTQ-specific news outlets in the futurethat queer and transgender people would be so fully integrated into society that outlets like Out, NewNowNext, Washington Blade, The New Civil Rights Movement, and LGBTQ Nation would no longer be necessary.

But as publishers and editors tell CJR, that has never been the case. The past five months have illustrated the vital importance of LGBTQ media in US society, as these publications provided support, information, and comfort to a community forced to adapt to a drastically different political landscape. Theres an even greater responsibility to tell the stories of the marginalized, ones that might otherwise get left behind, in a news cycle dominated by Trump. And readers have responded by visiting LGBTQ media outlets more often and sticking around longer, editors tell CJR.

The past three months have been a call to arms for LGBTQ media, but five decades ago, The Advocatethe nations first monthly LGBTQ magazinewas founded in the wake of bar raids in Los Angeles. The first issue acted as a protest newsletter to help the community fight back. As much as the 2016 election was a wake-up call, it also represented a return to the movements roots.

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The fear of erasure in Trumps America

Merryn Johns knew the election would go badly. Born in Australia, the editor in chief of Curve magazine, a monthly magazine for lesbian and bisexual women in the US, came to the 2016 election as an outsider. While all of her friends went out on the evening of the election expecting to celebrate Americas first female president, she stayed in and began working on an editorial explaining why Trumpwidely expected to lose in a landslidehad won.

Any time I heard Trump speak, I could hear him saying what a certain number of people wanted to have been said, Johns explains. I felt it was going to swing in his favor. He was tapping into a zeitgeist Clinton wasnt.

Johns says that for LGBTQ-focused publications, having Trump in the White House has been a huge reversal from the previous administration.

LGBTQ advocates had been gaining attention and notching wins for the past eight yearsfrom Obama enacting nondiscrimination rights for federal contractors in 2014, to the Supreme Court legalizing marriage equality a year later. Many felt that progress would continue under a Clinton presidency, but feel President Trump has already begun to reverse those gains. On March 27, the POTUS overturned an Obama executive order preventing federal workers from being fired on account of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Many of Trump Cabinet picks, including Secretary of State Jeff Sessions, have noted anti-LGBTQ track records.

What we had under the Obama presidency was that he acknowledged us, Johns says. He mentioned us in his addresses. We were on the website. We were getting legislation pushed through. We were invited to the White House. That is all being rolled back, and its made us feel quite insecure. Its not only a fear of not being seen. Its a fear of being erased.

A changing media landscape

If Johns claims that the very concept of media has changed under the current administration, it has also shifted the role LGBTQ media sees itself playing during a contentious political moment.

Lucas Grindley, editor in chief of The Advocate, says it has been important for LGBTQ publications to reflect what the community is feeling during an emotional time. During the week following the election, Grindley wrote an editorial taking his Republican family members to task for casting their ballot for a politician who campaigned on rolling back same-sex marriage. Ive been betrayed by my own family, Grindley wrote. Odds are, so have you.

People felt like theyd been betrayed and it took awhile for people to be willing to say that.

His op-ed, which was shared more than 20,000 times on Facebook, clearly touched a nerve.

People felt like theyd been betrayed and it took awhile for people to be willing to say that, Grindley tells CJR in an interview. The goal of The Advocate is to make you forward on a story and say, Finally, someones said what Im thinking. I dont feel alone.

Although hard data can be difficult to quantify, LGBTQ publications report that traffic has been up as readers seek out spaces that reflect what theyre feeling about the Trump administration. The Advocate reports a nearly 25-percent increase in unique pageviews for the first quarter of 2017 over the first quarter of 2016, while subscriptions have held steady. (CJR requested subscriber information from other LGBTQ publications, but they declined to provide hard data.)

Given that demand, many LGBTQ publications have shifted greater resources to covering the daily happenings of the Trump administration and telling community members how to take action. In the days after the election, The Advocate started The Resistance, a Friday newsletter listing protests taking place in your area; that newsletter morphed into a video series. NewNowNext created Five Dollars/Five Minutes, a recurring feature that offers quick and easy action steps for readers who want to get involved. Go Magazine, which covers queer and lesbian nightlife, includes demonstrations and political activities in its monthly calendar.

One challenge is striking a balance between taking a hard look at the current reality and offering healthy escapism for readers, says Trish Bendix, editor in chief of GO Magazine.

Its an everyday battle, Bendix says. Theres definitely people out there who arent just interested in going out and dancing, but you dont want to be too depressing and to pump out stories that make us feel things are hopeless. Our community has enough problems with suicide, depression, and self-harm as it is, so there has to be a way to keep it positive while being very clear about what our missions are and what we have to do now.

Our community has enough problems with suicide, depression, and self-harm as it is, so there has to be a way to keep it positive while being very clear about what our missions are and what we have to do now.

Bringing everyones stories to the table

The Advocate has aimed to balance not only levity and advocacy but coverage of topics that arent traditionally viewed as specific to the LGBTQ community. During the 2016 primaries, Grindley sent out a memo to staff to treat Donald Trump as an LGBTQ issue, meaning anything he does is news for Advocate readers. Since that time, the publication has covered the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority nations, and Trumps stated intent to increase the deportation of undocumented workers.

Because the Trump administration is attacking different marginalized communities, its brought all those communities together, Grindley says. Were all combating mutual opposition.

LGBTQ media has been criticized in recent years for marginalizing issues that affect people of color. #GayMediaSoWhite, a hashtag that went viral in 2016, drew attention to the fact that the covers of Out, The Advocate, and Attitude, a British gay publication, regularly feature straight white celebrities to sell magazines. Critics claimed that bottom line is calculated at the expense of non-white people, women, and transgender people yearning for the same platform. A Fusion survey found that between June 2011 and May 2016, 85 percent of the faces on the covers of these three magazines were white.

Les Fabian Brathwaite, a senior editor at Out who is black, admits that LGBTQ publications have done a terrible job of racial inclusion in the pastand stressed that fixing these issues is crucial to addressing the intersectional problems posed by a Trump presidency.

People are well-intentioned, but if you only have a bunch of gay white men talking about diversity, you have to have other people to in the room to address that as well, Braithwaite says. Our responsibility is to bring everyone to the table, tell everyones story, and make sure, as much as possible, that everyone has a chance to tell their own. To speak truth to power, you have to make sure everyones voices are represented in the conversation.

We need LGBTQ media because no one else is going to speak for us.

RELATED: Whats the right way to ask whether someone is gay?

Its particularly important for LGBTQ publications to be more inclusive watchdogs because, as Breen argues, many stories impacting vulnerable subsections of the community may get lost in a media cycle dominated by Donald Trump. Trump has swamped the news, and it has crowded out stories about all kinds of populations, marginalized or not, he says.

Three months into the new year, eight transgender women have been murdered as hate crimes against the LGBTQ community increase across the country. Nearly a dozen LGBTQ centers have been vandalized in 2017, and an employee of Casa Ruby, which offers support and services to Washington, DCs trans community, was attacked by two men who targeted the building. These stories have received attention in mainstream press, but they have yet to receive the traction such important subjects deserve. It is not only the responsibility of LGBTQ publications to fill that gap, as Johns argues. Its why these outlets will continue to be irreplaceable.

We need LGBTQ media because no one else is going to speak for us, she says. We are planting a flag in the sand to say: Were here, we exist, and you cant get rid of us.

RELATED: Covering gay marriage when its really, really personal

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'No one else is going to speak for us': LGBTQ media rise in age of Trump - Columbia Journalism Review

APRIL 17, 2017

WE FIND ABSURD, and deserving of total disdain, the religious, racist, and nationalist prejudices that make up the tyranny of certain individuals who, drunk on their own temporary omniscience, seek to subjugate the destiny of the work of art. So wrote 37 Egypt-based artists and writers in their 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, expressing solidarity with their counterparts in Europe suffering under fascism. This was the beginning of the Art and Liberty Group, an avant-garde movement also known as Egypts Surrealists.

Modern art in Egypt was always a pale copy and a delayed copy, says the contemporary Egyptian painter Adel El Siwi, but for the first time in our history, we have this very rare moment where what was going on in Paris was in parallel to other things going on in Cairo. The Art and Liberty Group forged connections with Surrealists and Trotskyists abroad while shaping their own identity. Working in tandem with their European peers, they also grappled with the circumstances of an increasingly militarized Egyptian capital, where trends in art and publishing remained conservative. They responded to the fault lines of interwar Cairo and were of a piece with them.

By the time of the 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt, which led to the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the rise of a new Egyptian nationalism and later pan-Arabism, the members of the Art and Liberty Group had been dispersed: many were exiled or imprisoned. All that is left of their experimental exhibitions in wartime Cairo are catalogs and reviews. A couple of their canvases hang in the permanent collection of the state-run Egyptian Museum of Modern Art and others in private collections, but the full extent of their legacy, which extends beyond drawing and painting into political criticism and radical publishing, has until recently been largely overlooked.

Two efforts to curate this revolutionary art movement from the archive have sparked debates about the Art and Liberty Group and Surrealism in the Middle East. In October, the Centre Pompidou launched the exhibit Art et Libert: Rupture, War, and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-1948), with support from Qatar, which will tour Europe throughout 2017 and 2018. It is now showing at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa in Madrid. A few weeks earlier, in September, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Egyptian Ministry of Culture opened a sprawling show in Cairo, When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938-1965). This was associated with Cornell Universitys three-day academic conference on Egyptian Surrealism, convened at the American University in Cairo in November 2015.

Art et Libert portrays a discordant group that both broke with the establishment and also contained a multitude of perspectives, eventually leading some younger members to break away and form the more folkloric Contemporary Art Group and others the more militantly political Bread and Freedom. By contrast, When Art Becomes Liberty imposes a sense of continuity within the group and suggests that its impact can be felt in the work of many successors. The substance of Art and Liberty Groups revolt their Marxist critique of Egyptian tyranny, their antifascist bent is concealed. Instead, Sharjahs curators emphasize how Surrealist motifs persist in the folk nationalism and social realism of midcentury Egyptian artists. The fact that the show was co-hosted by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture might explain this narrative of continuity, which obscures the groups radicalism.

To grasp the Art and Liberty Groups rallying cry against anything that impedes expression, one need only look at the catalog of their Second Independent Art Exhibition in Cairo, from March 1941. The painter works on ruptures, it reads. In fact, he obeys the summons to play a double game of the most radical nature: he crushes what he sees, undoes what he generates, exorcizes what he invokes. All edifices are continually dissolved in order to reveal something new, and this spirit of experimentation was alive in the Art and Liberty Groups late-night gatherings held in the depths of the old Islamic city. After some sessions, they would set their own works aflame. Their public exhibitions involved games and performance. Unfortunately, in the contemporary exhibition spaces of Paris and Cairo, the paintings of this revolutionary movement were frozen in time, divorced from current politics and contemporary art practice, and put on display by wealthy benefactors. The tension between the desire to present the Surrealist movement to an international audience and the concomitant instinct to commodify the movement undermined the power of both exhibitions.

In the 1930s and 40s, the Art and Liberty Group agitated the hierarchies of fine art and sought to extricate it from nationalism, moving it out of the stodgy halls of officialdom. In five annual shows, the group introduced Egyptians to works that defied the bon ton of the academy. Some played with photography, others with installations, sparking curiosity among local audiences and involving Egyptian artists in international debates about modern art. And yet, today, this cast of cosmopolitan characters remains largely unknown outside of erudite circles in the Middle East. New details emerge in an academic study by Sam Bardaouil, co-curator of Art et Libert, entitled Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (I.B. Tauris, 2016).

Each individual could be the protagonist of his or her own study. George Henein, the provocative poet and radical publisher, brought the Art and Liberty Group to international publications and European galleries, corresponding with Andr Breton, among others. Painter and patron Amy Nimr connected the group with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and prominent British Surrealists. Ramses Younan, the painter and theorist who translated Rimbauds A Season in Hellinto Arabic, reworked Pharaonic mythology in his canvases. There are also the Brothers Kamel: Anwar, the Marxist journalist who put out several publications that were quickly banned by Egyptian authorities, and Fouad, the painter and poet. Kamel Telmissany, the painter of grotesques, taught a young woman named Inji Aflatoun, who went on to become one of Egypts best-known painters and spent the 1950s in prison for her communist views. Aflatoun and friends worked closely with the novelist Albert Cossery, who left Egypt in 1945 but continued to write fiction about his homeland from his home at the divey lHtel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain until his death in 2008. Bardaouil has also dug up little-known collaborators like Mayo, a Greek-Egyptian painter who was trained in Paris. Just as many of the names associated with the group remain mysterious, having seemingly vanished from history.

The show Art et Libert concentrates on the turbulent decade of 1938 to 1948. Curators Bardaouil and Till Fellraths selection emphasizes that the movement cannot be subsumed by the master narrative of Western Surrealism. The rooms introduce the group in reference to various themes, including a focus on the body, war, and women, as well as genres like photography, poetry, and literature. In nine rooms, about 130 paintings, drawings, and photographs gathered from the curators extensive fieldwork and never before seen together are accompanied by scores of original documents, snapshots, and periodicals, as well as engaging texts and quotes from the artists. Political cartoons and video reels capture the interwar zeitgeist; this is, after all, not only the story of a long-lost vanguard, but also of the North African front of World War II, the twilight of Egypts monarchy, and the fading days of francophone Egypt.

The curators present the movement and the period through the lens of rupture. Aesthetically, the Art and Liberty Group split with the traditional European-style portraits and landscapes replicated in early 20th-century Egyptian art by drawing crude bodies, dream sequences, and abstractions. These aesthetic choices resonate with the political ruptures of the time, especially conflict between British colonial soldiers and German fighters throughout World War II. There were also ruptures among colleagues. In 1948, the groups founder, Henein, broke with his longtime associate Breton. That same year, a group of young artists broke off to form the Contemporary Art Group, seeking to inform their work with an Egyptian national character.

The exhibition and the monograph Surrealism in Egypt emphasize the movements intrinsic value separate from the legacy of French or British Surrealism, while showing its active participation and communication with leading Western theorists and artists. In spite of the curators underlying claim that the Art and Liberty Group represents a rupture from French Surrealism, a Pompidou press release pegs the exhibition to the 50th anniversary of Bretons death.

Art et Libert, perhaps the first group show of an Egyptian modern art movement held at an international museum, will only tour European cities. Where would you show it in Cairo? says Fellrath, the co-curator. No exhibition space in the Egyptian capital could accommodate the paintings and archival documents, he maintained, adding that few lenders would feel confident that their prized pieces would be able to enter and exit the country freely; six years after the revolution, the political conditions in Egypt are too volatile. So the closest Bardaouil and Fellraths contributions will come to reaching Egypts art community will be through the translation of their exhibition catalog into Arabic.

In Art et Libert, Bardaouil and Fellrath never connect the free art of the war period to the current bout of authoritarianism in Egypt, where a military strongman has muffled expression and choked politics since 2014. Yet the works they have painstakingly uncovered from private collections speak for themselves. In particular, a large 1937 painting by Mayo leaves little question as to the relevance of the Art and Liberty Groups work to todays Egyptian audience. From afar, the canvas Coups de Btons is a playful geometric composition. Upon closer inspection, it is a street cafe scene, with blue skies and latticed white fences overflowing with foliage. But the viewer can scarcely distinguish between each abstract, squiggly human on the cafe terrace. White characters wield batons at the denizens. One man is choking, his red tongue hanging out of his mouth. Another has fallen face down; chairs are strewn about, a cigarette pack lies on the floor. Do the batons belong to the police? Or to hired thugs? Its a scene that is all too familiar for Cairenes of the 21st century, who know to avoid street cafes on the anniversary of the January 25 uprising for fear of violence from the police or from thugs operating with impunity.

Of Art et Liberts thematically curated rooms, Women of the City left the most questions unanswered. The room was framed around the active role women played in the group, and aimed to show the artists critique of prostitution in wartime Cairo. A video of archival photographs and footage played to the St. Louis Blues, which included a newspaper photograph of belly dancers in gas masks, emblematic of the contradictions of wartime pleasures and objectification.

Yet the room featured works by mostly male artists, including Ramses Younans woman fractured in three ways and Fouad Kamels and Kamel El Telmissanys grotesque nudes, in which faces of dogs and wolves pop out of the womens chests. The most famous piece, La Femme aux boucles dor, was the portrait of a prostitute with golden locks, peering out of the canvas with a sultry stare. It is by the pioneer of Egyptian modern painting, Mahmoud Said, a former judge and Alexandrian aristocrat; he was not a member of Art and Liberty, but his portrayal of unconstrained libido exerted a huge influence on their work, and this painting appeared in the groups first exhibition. Gazing into the eyes of Mahmoud Saids iconic prostitute, one longs for commentary on how these paintings contributed to a counter-narrative of empowerment rather than engage in run-of-the-mill objectification.

And what about the women of the movement? The catalog indicates that women were patrons and participants in the Art and Liberty Group, but painters Inji Aflatoun and Amy Nimr, and photographers Ida Car and Lee Miller were sidelined. Even the obvious question of why the so-called Surrealists were primarily male was not broached.

In Egypt today, the art establishment against which the Art and Liberty Group rebelled is still ascendant, though its form has evolved. The Egyptian Ministry of Culture, a massive bureaucracy with tens of thousands of employees and dozens of museums and cultural palaces, remains a major benefactor of local artists. But in the past decade, ultra-wealthy institutions from the Persian Gulf have come to dominate the world of Middle East art. Writing of these tensions last year, the Egyptian critic Ahmed Naji described how the Ministrys newfound interest in Egyptian Surrealism is a response to outside forces. Since its inception, the ministry marginalized and rejected what have come to be known as the Egyptian Surrealists, Naji wrote. The resurgent interest in Surrealism results from a cutthroat race underway between the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. The two are competing to present the heritage of the Egyptian Surrealist movement to the world.

Sharjah launched their exhibition first, but the results were decidedly mixed. On the opening night of When Art Becomes Liberty: TheEgyptianSurrealists (1938-1965), the Egyptian Minister of Culture and his entourage walked through the airy atrium alongside the sheikha of Sharjah as scores of journalists snapped photos of VIPs standing in front of 150 works, mostly paintings, in the two-floor labyrinthine cultural palace on the Cairo Opera House grounds.

Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, president and directorof the Sharjah Art Foundation, had worked closely with the Ministry to extract a slew of paintings from the ministrys neglected depositories and ill-maintained museums. Many of these paintings are foundational works of Arab modern art, yet they rarely see the light of day. The ministrys storage places are afflicted by humidity, conditions that are heartbreaking, says Al Qasimi. They dont like works to come out of their storage. Its like high security when it comes to the art world. But I kept saying that it was important for people to see these works.

Some of the paintings by Younan, Kamel, Rettib Seddik, and Abdul-Hadi Al-Gazzar were perhaps stronger than the ones on display in Europe. But without a catalog or accompanying book to add context or history to the show, visitors to the gallery were essentially left adrift on the Nile. The vitrines of the movements vast publications featured Photostats, not the originals. No artists were profiled.

The first room contained rare and significant paintings and drawings, some of which appeared in the groups radical publications, but with limited descriptions. The wall text explained the exhibitions goal:

Documenting their relationship with western counterparts, especially the French Surrealists, and their contribution to internationalism, anti-fascist global protest, and decolonization in the 20th century, this exhibition provides a glimpse of the complex and nuanced story of artistic and literary modernisms as they are staged and performed outside of the West.

But When Art Becomes Liberty contained neither a discussion of French Surrealism nor of other modernisms. This was peculiar, given that Sharjah, Cornell, and the American University in Cairo had convened a three-day conference to launch this inquiry into Egyptian Surrealism in November 2015. It seems the questions raised by the international scholars simply havent been considered by the curators, who basically threw the works up on the zigzagging walls.

The very nature of Surrealist imagery, however defined, was left un-discussed, although most observers would note that the paintings actually demonstrated a variety of influences social realism, folk art, and abstraction, to name a few. A section called The Afterlife of Surrealism featured pieces from the 1970s and 80s, which displayed Surrealist techniques more in line with the European avant-garde than with the early Egyptian artists, who had developed their own visual language.

The tacit argument put forth by the Sharjah exhibition was continuity from decade to decade, from the core group to later spinoffs, and across generations. Absent were the ruptures of 1948, when Art and Libertys founders went their separate ways, with some jailed and others expatriated. By obscuring this dramatic demise with the distasteful euphemism a short-lived experiment, the exhibition masked the groups and the nations dynamics and politics.

The hastiness of the staging was also evident on opening night, when a label from Ibrahim Massoudas The Sacrifice, an undated painting of Jesus at the cross, fell to the ground. Weeks later, when we visited the exhibition again, a young Egyptian university student stood puzzled in front of the painting, and asked if we knew anything about Massouda. Although a half dozen of his works were on display and one of them was even on the shows posters and flyers, there was no text on the artist anywhere in sight.

When Art Becomes Liberty is due to open in the Emirates later this year, hopefully with a more fully developed curatorial vision worthy of the revolutionary paintings.

These two exhibitions signal the entrance of Egyptian modern art into the international canon. This in itself is laudable. According to Adel El Siwi, in the 1980s, an exhibition in Milan on global Surrealisms neglected to even mention Egyptian artists or writers. Of course, the current turn toward Egyptian Surrealism on the international scene is inextricably linked to market forces. When it comes to Egyptian Surrealisms new benefactors, the main players are the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Qatari royals. The latter are also behind Dohas Mathaf Arab Museum of Arab Art, and own a vast private collection. They are buying all of Egypts history, the contemporary Egyptian artist Mohamed Abla says of the Gulfs deep pockets.

The sanitized representation of the Art and Liberty Group is a case study in how a radical movement can be reappropriated by and for the establishment. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates share an authoritarian politics anathematic to free artistic production: both countries are ruled by undemocratic dynasties that limit expression, jail dissidents, and forbid many forms of political activity. Even drawing a caricature of a ruler can land you in prison. That so few of the reviews of both Egyptian Surrealism exhibitions have acknowledged that the Gulf drives the Arab art world is a testament to capitals power to suppress discussion of contentious political dynamics which are nonetheless apparent to the naked eye.

The long-neglected artists of Art and Liberty, some of whom held radical views that would be forbidden in the contemporary Persian Gulf, have become collectables in the circles of conservative royals. Younan, Kamel, Telmissany, and Aflatoun, among others, are highly sought after at international auctions, often selling for much higher than the estimated gavel price. Exhibitions in Europe and the Middle East have also raised the price and profile of Arab modern paintings. In this market, dealers and curators are competing to promote specific artists or sell specific art works, says May Telmissany, a literary scholar and the niece of one of Art and Libertys founders. This in my opinion is deplorable because it simply betrays the principles of the Art and Liberty Group, who fought against the bourgeois and capitalist rhetoric and called for total freedom, including freedom from art market impositions.

It is little wonder that Egyptian galleries have sought to profit from the newfound interest in local modern art. For Art et Libert, the private Al Masar Gallery lent about a dozen paintings and drawings by the Contemporary Art Group. Concurrently, Al Masar held a small show in Cairo to sell further works from this period, and from the very artists on display in Europe. Similarly, Safar Khan Gallery, which also lent items for Art et Libert, recently hosted a show of sketches from Inji Aflatoun entitled Freedom After Prison. The buzzword Surrealism now appears in many gallery promotions in Cairo for artists whose works are anything but.

Gulf money is art power, the unacknowledged political force that is defining the way that Arab modernism is being exhibited in the Middle East and conveyed to the world. Perhaps that is why neither exhibition noted the parallels with the current political moment in the Middle East region, where expression has been stifled and artists have been censored.

Some 80 years later, we are again in a period where terror and conflict have come to define Egypt. The Art et Libert show devoted its second room to the theme of art grappling with war and destruction, while When Art Becomes Liberty barely touched on the groups antiwar sentiment. Yet, in the parking lot of the Cultural Palaces grounds, not far from the Sharjah exhibit, were a couple of life-sized cannons being prepared for a theater production. It was a sort of cosmic joke and reminded us of the Art and Liberty Groups raison dtre. In this hour, when the entire world cares for nothing but the voice of cannons, wrote Henein in the leaflet of the First Exhibition of Independent Art, held in Cairo in 1940, we have found it our duty to provide a certain artistic current with the opportunity to express its freedom and its vitality.

Jonathan Guyer is a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs and contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

Surti Singh is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo.

Originally posted here:

The Double Game of Egyptian Surrealism: How to Curate a Revolutionary Movement - lareviewofbooks

50 years after hippies, free love, getting high and flower children entered our cultural lexicon, Indrajit Hazra looks back at the legacy of that short summer in 1967

Well, lets face it. Most of us rewatch Woodstock, the 1970 documentary film, not just to refill our dipping musical quotient, but also to see those acid-tripped out women dancing naked and displaying their ample bottoms. (Please do note how effectively Ive made the collective of us come in handy to cover my own derriere.)

There was a time when all this counterculture free love, peace and joss sticks part-outraged, part-titillated a generation that was as dogmatic about family values and tradition as their instigators were about turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Today, 50 years after American mainstream media first caught the zeitgeist to effectively introduce the world to a (21st century jargon alert) lifestyle choice, the Summer of Love of 1967 in San Francisco and its many descendants come across as cute, silly, and fun(ny), like one of those PG rated films you saw with a thrill as a kid, but which now looks not just tame, but Nat Geo-worthy.

Janis Joplin performs in Golden Gate Park

In the summer of 1969, over 40,000 people gathered over four days at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in upstate New York. With it, the counterculture movement had reached its apogee, that apogee decided by Life magazine and other mainstream media publications. But it was two years earlier that hippies, free love, getting high and flower children firmly entered the American cultural lexicon. It then quickly, via media, spread its grooviness in the country called London, and then to other parts of the world where the term gap year was yet to be invented.

Hippies the term having the same source as todays hipster, which, in turn, came to initially describe liberal-minded young folks moving into New Yorks arty beatnik haven of Greenwich Village or San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district had existed before The Summer of Love. Inspired by the Beat movement of the 1950s and its protagonists like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the hippies method-acted life in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, with more than just a solitary child-like couple and plenty of great music thrown in.

The Summer of Love, with its numerous bed-ins and events and its emphasis on being part of a collective (that ironically rejected the herd), was the culmination of all that was gathering prior to The Beatles coming out with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Timothy Leary presenting his The Death of the Mind lecture in colleges across the US describing the joys of the LSD experience.

Communal living, rejecting authority, and turning ones back against consumerist society was the credo. The Summer of Love was seen as the natural result of a new generations Winter of Discontent.

In 1960, the Pill, the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP), did far more to usher the sexual revolution than the ones Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit mentions makes you larger and makes you small. Poet Philip Larkin was as right as any Baby Boomer who came after him insisting that liberation came with free love and howling at the moon, when he wrote in Annus Mirabilis in June 1967: Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) -/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles first LP.

But it was far easier to capture in pictures the Beautiful People than the Pill, or the words of a poet from Hull.

The anti-consumerist tag was somewhat ironic, considering that the Summer of Love itself was a product to be consumed through fashion, music, the stage, advertising, and the shimmering billboard of sex and drugs and rocknroll or, at least gentle strumming and/or incredibly long jam sessions that could be appreciated only with a generous amount of marijuana intake. And, there had to be long hair, as a counter-uniform.

Hippies dawdle at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, in San Francisco in 1967

In London, the Summer of Love took upon itself to be more openly consumerist, a throwback to the era of the Dandy. And if Austin Powers version of Londons Swinging Sixties is a comic exaggeration of what was really going on in Paradise with its centre at Carnaby Street, it is only a slight exaggeration. Rebellion was no longer confined to the slightly dangerous Marlon Brando-ian Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? Whadda you got? (That Teddy Boy switchblade cockiness would resurface with punk.) Now, it was Peace, man, Live and let live, and about sharing accommodation, food, recreational drugs, bodies. This was New Testament-style Christian brother/sisterhood with dollops of pagan intercourse.

As all collective movements go, the birth of the Summer of Love was as imaginative as its death, announced prematurely in typical exhibitionist fashion when a ceremony was held on October 6, 1967, with the funeral notice: In the Haight-Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted son of mass media. It is with reason that own-man Bob Dylan refused to take part in the Woodstock festival, even though he actually lived there. Ostensibly, as he wrote later in Chronicles Volume One, he was upset with moochers showing up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry.

But Dylan also mentions why The Counterculture could be as stifling as The Culture: all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul nauseating me the streets exploding, fire of angel boiling the contra communes the lying, noisy voices the free love, the anti-money system movement the whole shebang [I] didnt want to be in that group portrait.

But plenty of others will be in that (re)group portrait this summer. Throughout the year, San Francisco will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Retired Baby Boomers will reconnect and recollect when their bodies were beautiful and before they made a Silicon Valley out of All You Need Is Love. According to organisers of the celebrations, there will be a wealth of events, ranging from wine tastings to sailboat regattas, a 60s dance party, featuring a Beatles cover band and more groovy stuff, Folsom Street Fair this sub-culture festival attracts leather fetish enthusiasts from around the world. Sounds groovy.

But the Summer of Love did do something that for all its fun, flakiness and ephemeral quality (read: double-standards) has left its mark as the new normal: emphasising more than anything else the value of individual freedom.

It was also there in 17th century Paris, 18th century Awadh, 1920s Berlin and New York. But the Summer of Love democratised free spirit. It was no longer the monopoly of aristocrats, nawabs and flappers. Love, and much more, suddenly was there to flaunt for the middle-classes. One day, perhaps, our very own Romeos and the youth could also come to the same happy, far out conclusion, without being tied to their parents aprons.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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One swallow that made the Summer of Love - Times of India (blog)

Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar has emerged as the most celebrated Indian leader, thinker and social philosopher of the 21st century. Celebrations marking his 125th birth anniversary last year were said to be more wide-spread than those in his centenary year. One of the leading mainstream magazines even termed him as the greatest leader of Modern India. One must see these as physical manifestations of the fact that over the years, ideas of Ambedkar have emerged stronger and more relevant to contemporary discourse.

Freedom was the zeitgeist of the country before that dawn of 1947. Freedom for India was the meta-narrative that bound the country which was bubbling with multiple narratives at that time. One such narrative was prescribed by the Congress. It emphasised freedom of India from British colonisers and can be said to have been the dominant narrative of the time. Among other such collective ideas though weaker or marginalised in comparison was the one that was nurtured by RSS. This was the idea of national reconstruction one that saw India as a glorious nation since time immemorial and aimed for its rejuvenation by strengthening its socio-cultural institutions.

Another powerful narrative of the time came from Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar. He talked about freedom of India from social evils like inequality and untouchability. This can be seen as a subaltern narrative of indian nationalism which looked at upliftment of downtrodden, deprived and marginalised sections that did not have any participation in the public life of the colonial India. Dr Ambedkar became the voice of these 60 million deprived and untouchable sections of the society. Without emancipation of this segment, Indian freedom struggle was deemed incomplete. The Indian national struggle in the first half of the 20th century was not merely a struggle to wrest political power from foreign rule but also a struggle to lay the foundation of a modern India by purging the society of outmoded social institutions, beliefs and attitudes.

Ambedkars struggle constituted a part of this internal struggle, one of the divergent and sometimes conflicting currents, all of which helped to secure freedom from external and internal oppression and enslavement. Without Ambedkars opposition to mainstream nationalism, the process of internal consolidation of the nation would not have been carried out sufficiently enough to strengthen and broaden the social base of Indian nationalism.

Ambedkar elaborated upon the idea of Nationality and Nationalism in his book Pakistan or the Partition of India. He describes nationality as a, consciousness of kind, awareness of the existence of that tie of kinship and nationalism as the desire for a separate national existence for those who are bound by this tie of kinship. Ambedkar had immense faith in the bright future and evolution of this country. Even when he spoke of attaining freedom for India, his ultimate goal was to unite the people.

Ambedkar was not against the idea of nationalism but against the Congresss version of it, which entailed freedom of India from British colonialism but not from Brahmanical imperialism under which millions of Scheduled Castes had been yoked for hundreds of years. It was Ambedkars political challenge which compelled the Congress to appreciate the national significance of the problem of castes and to adopt measures which significantly contributed towards strengthening the social base of Indian nationalism.

Indian nationalism in its initial stages, by the very nature of its historical development, was an upper class (upper castes) phenomenon, reflecting the interests and aspirations of its members. Naturally when nationalists spoke in terms of national interest they certainly meant their own (class) interests. The evocation of nation was a necessary ritual to ensure the much needed popular support for an essentially partisan cause. This sectarian approach to nationalism could be seen in the writings of none other than Pt. Nehru in his seminal work Discovery of India, That mixture of religion and philosophy, history and tradition, custom and social structure, which in its wide fold included almost every aspect of the life of India, and which might be called Brahminism or Hinduism, became the symbol of nationalism. It was indeed a national religion.

The sectarian character of Indian nationalism persisted even after the nascent upper castes movement developed into a truly mass-supported anti-imperialist national liberation movement. And, it is because of this failure to change its basically pro-upper class/castes orientation that the Indian national movement in due course helped the rise of new parallel sectarian socio-political currents. Ambedkars emergence on the Indian political scene in 1920s, commencing the advent of Dalit (the scheduled castes) politics, was simply the manifestation of the same process.

At that time, Ambedkars Dalit politics posed no really significant threat to the overall domination of the traditional ruling class, yet it exposed the hollowness of the Congresss claim to represent the whole nation. The nationalist leadership remained unwilling to attack long unresolved social contradictions at the base of the Hindu social order and propelled people like Ambedkar to contest the INCs claim that it represented the whole society.

It was in the backdrop of this escapism of the Congress brand of nationalism that an alternative subaltern nationalism was born through Ambedkar. Ambedkar took up this question from the social below and brought it to a political high by linking the question of caste with that of democracy and nationalism. Such an effort to prioritise society over polity and then linking them together was unprecedented in India before Ambedkar. Gandhi can be said to have made such an effort but his approach was obscure and primitive.

There is no doubt that Ambedkar was vehemently opposed to unjust social stratification in India, but to say that he was against the nation is wrong. He was definitely against the Congress version of Nationalism. Ambedkar was neither an anti-national nor just a leader of the Scheduled Castes. He was a national leader who understood the problems of the most exploited communities and tried to bring them into the main stream. He expanded the social base of Indian nationalism which helped first to attain freedom and later to put the country on path of progress. Today, when all thought converges around inclusive politics, Ambedkar has become more relevant than ever.

The author teaches Political Science in Satyawati College of Delhi University

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Read this article:

How Indian nationalism is indebted to Ambedkar? - Times of India (blog)

The big thumb of corporatism left two of Americas most iconic companies completely blind to their own missteps.

What do Americas tone-deaf twins, Pepsi and United, tell us about whats wrong with corporate leadership today?

For anyone who wasnt in the Hermit Kingdom for the last two weeks, we had back-to-back incidents of self-inflicted social slaughter. First, Pepsi had to yank its fatally-conceived commercial featuring Kendall Jenner handing a can of the sugary stuff to a fake cop, a gesture which was almost universally seen as trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement through an unjustifiable apotheosis of the brand as a cultural peacemaker. Then, United Airline sent real cops onto a plane to yank a paying customer out of his seatand the CEOs initial reaction was to defend the ejection maneuver.

Deconstruct these two seemingly disparate disasters and what emerges is a surprising continuitybroken management was trapped in a one-dimensional view of the landscape, when we are living in a multi-dimensional Rubiks cube.

What blinded Pepsi? The existential imperative to be emotionally connected to their consumers; the brandosphere is filled with talk about how products must be culturally relevant to prosper today. The decision to insert Pepsi into the conversation about Black Lives Matter came from that place, but ended up in a horrible spot because they looked to the past for their model, and misread the lessons.

That past was 36 years ago, and also the pivot point of the final episode of Mad Men. In that reality-bending moment, the fictional Don Draper is credited with creating one of the most memorable commercials of capitalist history. As the Hollywood Reporter wrote: The last scenesfeature Don hugging a stranger at a retreat and meditating with hippies before the episode cuts to the 1971 Coca-Cola Hilltop commercial.

This commercialwhich captured a group of young, earnest global citizens gathered on a mountaintop in Italy, singing a folk-tinged anthem, was such a beloved statement of unity during a divisive time that the anthemic score, I want buy the world a Coke morphed into a popular song retitled I want to teach the world to sing.

Some context: Just a year earlier, in 1970, the Kent State shootings and the invasion of Cambodia rended the nation. That was only three short years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. The hated draft was in place; there were 334,000 troops in Vietnam; the Pentagon Papers were published. All in the Family, that breakthrough bottling of the zeitgeist, premiered in 1971.

It sure seemed like the right time for a soft drink to be a national healer. Pepsis own retraction confirms this parallel ambition; they wrote Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark

They missed the mark because their rush to relevance blinded them to a literalized, conceptual disaster. Compared to Coke, the Pepsi spot was a ham-handed check of every box, down to the hijab-wearing photographer. This scene-by-scene breakdown in the Washington Post is a triumphant take-down, walking us through to the conclusory locus of the mockeryKendall Jenner handing her Pepsi to the stone-faced young policeman. Which led to the most devastating response of all, a tweet from Bernice KingIf only Daddy had known about the power of #Pepsijuxtaposed with a shot of her father being strong-armed by a state trooper.

Pepsi defaulted to every risible trope of lifestyle advertisingquick cuts of cool people in prettified urban environmentsgentrification on steroids, another level of cultural insensitivity. And the entire staging of the protest felt unbearably fake and inauthentic; just a lot of beautiful people in a celebratory mode, badly feigning political fire. They could have been on their way to a sample sale.

Cokes spot was elegantly allusive, requiring no visual telegraphing. It was celebrity-free and modest. As Giep Franzen wrote in the The Science and Art of Branding, its meaning of universal brotherhood is immediately understood without any announcer proclaiming the obvious. It was a plaintive cri de coeur in a troubled time, a hymnal that well-masked its commercial intent.

Just how hard was it to anticipate the firestorm of criticism? Only management that feels threatened to the bone could be so struthiousand Pepsis business is decaying in real time. Coke and Pepsi are facing a terrifying reality, is how Business Insider put it. Under that one-dimensional pressure, desperately seeking relevance wins over common sense.

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Uniteds blindness came from a different kind of hyper-focus. When Oscar Munoz first defended his employees actions after dragging a bloodied Dr. Dao off the planeand then doubled down on that supporthe was trapped in a disastrous recursive paradigm. He pitted his employee manual against his consumers. A zero-sum spiral to the bottom.

Pepsis leaders were unable to see out of their own relevance obsession; Uniteds were locked in an obsession with process, unable to react to what everyone else saw was just plain wrong.

Munoz finally struck the right chord in his belated apology, where he said that a system failure created a horrific situation where the company didnt provide the right tools or resources to allow Uniteds front-line managers to use their common sense. In other words, the airline didnt liberate its employees to act humanely and intelligently.

Which is all that matters. We want the people we interact withUnited employees, telemarketing automatato come off the script and live in the world of Sesame Street fairness. Thats the same animating impulse behind todays populist surge; we dont want to be ground down by the big thumb of corporatism. The applies whether its the fabrication of a grandiose commercial that clumsily attempts to win our coolness approval without realizing the offensiveness of the content. Or whether its a WWE smack-down example of bureaucratic brutality. This is one domain where non-partisan rage prevails.

Generalization alert: Are we creating a generation of leadership who can operate fluidly and intuitively in this new multiverse, where you must unlearn (at least) half the things youre taught in business school, where 100 million people in China will view a video of Combat in Coach and crush your enterprise value because its easier to express their frustration on United than Beijing? Do the people in charge understand they arent talking to interest groups or clusters or cohorts but raw and ready individuals? Do they know how to create and assess a new calculus of consequences?

I doubt it. There are real questions as to whether modern leaders, despite being surrounded by phalanxes of expertsor perhaps because of itare well-suited to succeed in this dimensional, crazy-faceted modern world. Unfriendly skies ahead.

Originally posted here:

Why Pepsi and United Got It So Wrong - Daily Beast