We’ve been on the interwebs what, 10, 12, a million years? The entire time I’ve wanted to be able to turn off the audio feed from the browser. Has nobody bothered to write that tiny-ass script yet? Fuck.
If you missed it in person, get viral with the online version. Over 600 books from across the disciplines, discounted up to 80 percent, in every subject category. Set a reminder for the remainders, baby: we’ve witnessed baby strollers packed from top to bottom, four giant boxes sent via media mail, and some Hyde Park-types schlepping pull carts packed to the gills at the sale in situ, so catch up while you can digitally! The spiel is below:
Open the PDF catalog (it will open in a new window so you can still see these instructions) for hundreds of scholarly and award-winning books at up to 80% off. For much more information about each book—including previews, tables of contents, and author bios—click on the book title in the catalog.
This week brought The Black Power Mixtape to Chicago, though the film was previously released in early September to audiences in Los Angeles and New York. A documentary pieced together by filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson from hundreds of reels of 16-mm interview footage produced by Swedish television journalists from 1967 to 1975, The Black Power Mixtape interlaces contemporary audio commentary revisting the Movement with many clips either unseen since they first aired in Europe, or lost to network archives. Organized chronologically by year, the film documents the rise of Black Power, from Stokely Carmichael’s earliest post-SNCC speeches and the founding of the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program to TV Guide’s (a publication owned by Richard Nixon’s then Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Annenberg) critique of Scandinavian television’s “negative” portrayal of American society, eventually trailing off into more-or-less vernacular pieces on Harlem bookstores and drug-treatment culture.To watch the movement’s rhetorical development and the increasing exile, imprisonment, and death of its leaders alongside the community’s—and nation’s—growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War, Nixon administration politics, and urban poverty, is a fascinating exercise in the nuances of discrimination and endemic societal problems. To watch all of this alongside a sometimes sympathetic, often curious, and largely culturally distanced assortment of Swedish journalists (drawn from over twenty televised broadcasts) leaves you pondering an almost inexplicable gap—between that time and the present, between these two societies (often united by their anti-Vietnam political stance), and between the roles of participant and observer. What sort of historical reading properly prepares you for a bus of blonde-haired Swedish investigative journalists being chastised about exploring Harlem, as their tour guide uncomfortably stumbles out a comment about how their fear is shared by better (“better?” “Can I say that?”) African American citizens?
In 2001, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, edited the collection Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism—thirty-five years after Adam Clayton Powell Jr. delivered, as part of his baccalaureate address at Howard University, an early version of the phrase: “To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power.” Is It Nation Time? collects new and classic writings on the Black Power Movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers—including Glaude, Cornel West, and Robin D. G. Kelley—in order to tackle contemporary issues such as the commodification of blackness, class tensions, and the larger discourse surrounding black nationalism.
A precursor to Is It Nation Time?, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, follows the literal arc of much of The Black Power Mixtape’s historical trajectory, offering a comprehensive account of the Black Power Movement’s rise and fall, from its preconditions to ideologies that straddled everything from labor and campus life to sports, soul music, theology, and nationalism. The book garnered the Gustavus Myers Center’s Outstanding Book Award (1993), and was praised by Bob Blauner in the New York Times as a “densely textured evocation of one of American history’s most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness.”
Angela Davis, who recently retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program, where she long served as a professor (she’s currently Distinguished Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University), has several key moments in The Black Power Mixtape (including one that demonstrated the journalists’ unusual access to Davis during her 1971-72 stay in a Marin County prison cell). The most pressing of these occurs during the conclusion of one interview, where Davis states (in response to a question about violence in the movement): “When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible,” she says. “A person asking that can have no idea about what black people have gone through in this country.”
To understand the raw emotion and power of Davis’s articulation, Is It Nation Time? and New Day in Babylon are fine places to start—but to place her words in the context of our own continued struggles for social justice and equality today, where institutional racism, economic disparity, the struggle for GLBTQ rights, and other issues play out in daily headlines, is to hear an echo of her furious intensity as part of a soundtrack whose audience continues to grow.
Babylone Caramel au Beurre, 2001 23cm x 35cm linocut print on 75lb paper (ed.11)
This is the fourth in a series of six linocuts.
I has this!
ALL I’M SAYING IS THAT YOU SEEM TO HAVE FAILED TO GRASP THE BASIC PARADOX THAT WITHOUT YOUR COMBINED WHITE AND FEMALE PRIVILEGE YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN GRANTED THE OPPORTUNITY TO ATTEND AN ACCREDITED UNIVERSITY TO MAJOR IN SOCIOECONOMICS AND GENDER STUDIES IN THE FIRST PLACE.
SO BASICALLY YOU PAID TO GO TO SCHOOL TO LEARN TO HATE THE FACT THAT YOU LIVE IN A SOCIETY THAT WILL SEND YOU TO SCHOOL TO LEARN TO HATE IT.
I JUST GOT A LIBRARY CARD AND CALLED IT GOOD.
ALL THIS TIME I THOUGHT IT WAS ‘PEAKED MY INTEREST’ BUT IT’S ‘PIQUED’.
NICE ENGLISH DEGREE YOU’RE HANDING OUT, BOSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE. I’VE GOT A SUPER BRIGHT FUTURE IN YOUTUBE COMMENTS.
Taking notes on bowling videos probably isn’t normal, unhermity behavior. After technique? Understanding physics of weighted-core balls. What?
Ambush Haircuts
GRACE KRILANOVICH
on the problems of framing punk culture.LA Breakdown © Ruby Ray, 1977
Dewar MacLeod
Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California
University of Oklahoma Press, November 2010. 240 pp.
Rock ‘n’ roll books have their own special set of challenges, the most important being: try not to reduce the wily, ridiculous, vibrant music of rejects and losers into a dry, studied word paste. But on the other hand, don’t try to mimic its high-energy squall with language either. Best not to engage with the music on that level at all; instead, point the tape recorder or pen in the direction of its makers and artists (but not its drummers … just kidding!), and let them tell stories about “what it was like.”
Granted, Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California is a sociology book, published by a university press, and the subjects that lend themselves best to study within this framework are the followers, the scenesters, the kids at the shows, the fanzine scribes, and the promoters, who sometimes made stupid rules and liked to squabble about what punk was and wasn’t. When the attention turns, however briefly and sporadically, toward the musicians themselves, a different punk history emerges — one that’s more eccentric and contradictory and endlessly weird, and one that starts to answer the question of why people started these bands anyway. What “made” the Screamers happen? In the face of universal apathy or scorn, when there was no place to play and when no one cared, what made them make the unusual sounds that so enthralled some people and so baffled others?
