Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint — Hart Crane

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July 21– Hart Crane
Gay American modernist poet, cultural pariah.

JULY 21, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Cap Breton, Canada: Scottish Clans gather for festivities and the election of chieftains for the next year.

ALSO ON JULY 21 IN HISTORY…
1796 — Scottish national bard Robert Burns dies, Mill Hole Brae, Scotland.
1899 — American macho novelist Ernest Hemingway born, Oak Park, Illinois.
1899 — American modernist poet Hart Crane born, Garretsville, Ohio.
1911 — Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan born, Edmonton, Alberta.
1981 — Creationism law requiring equal teaching with evolution passed, Louisiana.
1983 — Martial law lifted in Poland as overthrow of Soviet dominion advances.
1983 — World’s coldest temperature (–127°F) recorded, Vostok, Antarctica.
2004 — Palestinian-American journalist Farouk Abdel-Muhti dies, Philadelphia.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

WHOA: Pink Floyd jamming in BBC studio during Apollo 11 lunar landing coverage, 1969

Description from YouTbe of clip: “An instrumental piece used for a tv-programme on the evening of the first moonlanding July 20, 1969. uninterrupted.”

This clip was apparently made by a fan in an attempt to simulate what s/he’d seen. The footage here is from a 1972 landing, the audio is from a bootleg recording of the TV broadcast.

David Gilmour tells The Guardian:

“We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23.

“The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead — it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.”

More from David Gilmour at The Guardian, here.

More coverage at the New York Times

"write with the tv on"

untitled poem by Angela Jaeger

write with the tv on
building the houses
finance the education
save the nation
fraud the credit
use my number
file a claim
get a new card
find a new password
keep it a secret
forget about it
fall in the house of still
the tall frame no blame
listening to a voice within
the secret number
the subway train
the snow is god
and the snow is falling

Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint — NAM JUNE PAIK

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July 20– Nam June Paik
Korean Neo-Dadaist video artist, Fluxus member.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjxG_k0VDo

JULY 20, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Moon Day.
*Binding of the Wreaths.

ALSO ON JULY 20 IN HISTORY…
1925 — Psychiatrist, revolutionist Frantz Fanon born, Port-de-France, Martinique.
1929 — Moorish Orthodox leader Noble Drew Ali dies, Chicago, Illinois.
1932 — Korean neo-Dadaist video artist Nam June Paik born, Seoul, Korea.
1939 — Prominent Spanish anarchist Francisco Ascaso Abadia dies, Ataranzas.
1969 — American Neil Armstrong becomes first man on the moon.
1975 — Viking I, first spacecraft from Earth, lands on Mars.
2004— Jewish anarcho-pacifist Toma Sik dies on Hungarian commune.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Early Persian: 78rpm-era Iranian Music on the Web

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Among the most elusive recordings in the realm of non-English language 78 rpm discs for Westerners are those of Iranian and/or Persian origin. But there are two websites with particularly amazing information and sounds. Pooyan Nassehpoor’s Iranian Library of Recorded Sounds includes a trove of nearly a dozen jewel-like performances of Persian music of the the first half of the twentieth century.

And Amir Mansour’s breathtaking Persian Discography gives an authoritative history of the early history of the recording of Persian music as well as the history of recordings of regional ethnic minorities and key later recordings.

Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint — AMADOU BAMBA

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July 19– AMADOU BAMBA
Senegalese mystic, pacifist, anti-colonialist, Sufi poet.

JULY 19, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Dunmore Piory, England. Flitch Day. Beginning in 15th century, the monks offered a flitch of bacon as prize for any married couple who could prove to a jury of bachelors and maidens that they had lived together in harmony and fidelity for the past year. Very few took home the bacon.
*Ancient Egypt: New Year. Season of the Nile’s rising, season of inundation.
*Nicaragua: Revolution Day.
*Festival of Sirius.

ALSO ON JULY 19 IN HISTORY…
1500 — Hailstorm brings down ceilings of the Papal Palace, Rome.
1692 — Five women hanged as witches in Salem, Massachusetts.
1898 — New Left Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse born, Berlin, Germany.
1927 — Senegalese Sufi poet, mystic Amadou Bamba dies, Touba, Senegal.
1979 — Sandinista rebels overthrow Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint — Hunter S. Thompson

hunter1

July 18– Hunter S. Thompson
American gonzo journalist, druggie, counter-culture hero.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT2c3lwidkw&feature=related .

JULY 18, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*U.S.: Railroad Day. The grand trunk line completed, 1853.

ALSO ON JULY 18 IN HISTORY…
1610 — Master painter of street life, Caravaggio, dies, Port Ercole, Tuscany, Italy.
1870 — Infallibility declared for Catholic popes speaking ex cathedra.
1922 — Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn born, Cincinnati, Ohio.
1937 — Iconoclastic bullshitter-slaying essayist Hunter S. Thompson born in Louisville, Kentucky.
1969 — Ted Kennedy offers Mary Jo Kopechne a lift home, Chappaquiddick, MA.
1998 — African-American activist historian John Henrik Clarke dies, New York City.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

NYC – The films of ROBERT KRAMER retrospective begins tonight at Anthology

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Above: a still from Ice (courtesy: Kramer Ink)

We don’t often run straight press releases here on the Arthur blog, but we’re gonna make an exception here. From our friends at New York City’s great Anthology Film Archives:

RETROSPECTIVE: THE FILMS OF ROBERT KRAMER
July 17-23

* First NYC retro in a decade devoted to committed radical American filmmaker
* Prime mover behind Newsreel movement

BRAND NEW 35MM PRINT of 1975’s MILESTONES will be shown!
The circulation of a new print of Robert Kramer’s 1975 film MILESTONES provides the perfect impetus for the first NYC retrospective in almost a decade devoted to one of the greatest and most committed of all radical American filmmakers. Among the prime movers behind the Newsreel movement, an underground media collective which produced some sixty documentaries and short films about radical political subjects and the anti-war movement, Kramer’s own early films are remarkable reports on revolutionary struggles in Latin America and Vietnam. Increasingly turning his attention to the state of the radical movement in the United States, he developed a highly distinctive approach, an intermixing of fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, which he would continue to pursue following his departure for Europe in the early 1980s. Based in Paris for the rest of his life (he would pass away in 1999), he nevertheless maintained a dialogue with the U.S., most memorably in his epic masterpiece, ROUTE ONE/USA.

Along with the new print of MILESTONES, this series will include all of his early American films, as well as ROUTE ONE/USA.

Special thanks to Adam Sekuler (Northwest Film Forum), Keja Kramer, Audrey Hilaire (Capricci Films), Kitty Cleary (MoMA), Richard Copans & Gaya Jiji (Les Films d’Ici), Marie-Pierre Lessard (Cinémathèque Québécoise), and Haden Guest & David Pendleton (Harvard Film Archive).

To be screened:

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Diggers Papers No. 6: "Busted"

Arthur is proud to present a set of scans of essential documents produced by and about the San Francisco Diggers, who were in many ways the epicentral actors in the Haight-Ashbury during the epic, wildly imaginative period from late ’66 through ’67. The Diggers’ ideas and activities are essential counter-cultural history, sure, but they are also especially relevant to the current era, for reasons that should be obvious to the gentle Arthur reader.

This sheet was probably distributed after February 6, 1967 along the Haight. It would seem to be a direct follow-up to earl;ier broadsides warning of a “festival of busts” that the cops were supposedly planning (see “Storm Warning”, “Second Notice”). Evidently some folks got busted anyway. Click on the image below to see this document at full size…

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