mashdownbabylon

Product Placement

 

I'll be the first to admit that I've done a mediocre job of keeping track of my clips. Though I've kept copies of nearly all of the magazine articles I've written, most of the book reviews and all of the travel pieces I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian between 2000 and 2004 vaporized when SFBG revamped it's website.

In the midst of putting the finishing touches on a brand new personal site (including a Word Press replacement for this blog) I came across a PDF version of this collection of micro-reviews, Sikkum: Tikkun Recommends, that I wrote for the September/October edition in 2005.

Traditionally the domain of the magazine's publisher, I ended up writing most of these interior back page book reviews my last year and a half as Tikkun's managing editor. I'll be posting a couple of more of these, including the color version we debuted with the magazine's re-design in 2006, shortly.

Click on the image for greater detail.

The Song Remains the Same

The best stocked section (aside from the Health and Diet shelf) in San Francisco's Green Apple Books bargain media annex.

Perhaps the single most frequently asked question posed by my interns at Tikkun was why we continued to receive so many books about Nazism and the Holocaust to review.

Indeed, every day, new books about the Shoah would inevitably outnumber arriving titles on Israel and Judaism. "It's one of the occupational hazards of being a Jewish magazine," was my stock reply.

Dubbing with de Gaulle

The cover of a January 1969 edition of the French weekly news periodical L'Express, featuring the face of former President Charles de Gaulle set inside a Star of David. Surrounded by an English translation of a letter de Gaulle wrote to David Ben Gurion in 1967, it's figured prominently in revisions to my book, whose 2nd draft I'm furiously working on finishing right now with my editor.

A scanned page from European Union official Francois Massoulie's idiosyncratic volume, Middle East Conflicts, the image is bordered on either side by the end of one of my own book's chapters, an open Real Audio browser loaded with a BBC page, and my most recent playlist, featuring the brilliant Sledgehammer Dub LP by the consistently overlooked roots producer, Niney the Observer.

On the Radio

Wednesday at noon, former Political Asylum singer and AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan will be hosting an hour-long discussion about the political legacy of The Clash on Against the Grain, courtesy of Pacifica flagship station KPFA, 94.1 FM in the SF Bay Area, and everywhere else, online.

Ramsey's guests include yours truly and Craig O'Hara, the author of The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise, a new edition of which is scheduled to drop in the new year. If you're interested in the band, in punk, or in how music and politics collide, we pretty much cover it all.   

Year End Top Ten: Books

Despite the fact that this was a book writing year, I still managed to pack in a few titles that were distinctly off-topic. For regular MashDown readers, of course, that means, unsurprisingly, I read a lot about politics, music and the visual arts, though not necessarily of the gallery kind.

This was also the first time in almost a decade that I was able to read for pleasure, and not for the purpose of assigning books for review. That, in itself, was a welcome change. Instead of scanning a chapter or two and then sending them off, I was able to take in new books in their entirety.

In no specific order, here are the ten tomes that made the biggest impression on me in 2007:

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land (Verso)

Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition (Princeton)

Jacqueline Rose, The Last Resistance (Verso)

Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country (FSG)

Judith Butler & Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? (Seagull)

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Harper Collins)

Michael Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (U. New England Press)

Jeff Chang, Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic Civitas)

Abby Banks and Thurston Moore, Punk House: Interiors in Anarchy (Harry N. Abrams)

Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways (FSG)

Liberation Theology

It's just about out, and the first reviews for Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, are starting to filter through.

Edited by my former Tikkun colleagues Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and Or Rose, and the Kavod House's Margie Klein, this inspired collection, documenting the new American Jewish social justice movement, is already receiving the recognition that it deserves. According to this week's edition of Publisher's Weekly,

While written for progressive Jews and their communities, anyone struggling with the age-old conundrum of "…but what can I do?" should sample this wonderful buffet of ideas, replete not just with tradition, but with innovative interpretations suited to a 21st-century approach toward social action and reform.

A slimmed down version of "Everything Falls Apart", the first chapter from my forthcoming book, Israel vs Utopia, has a home in Righteous Indignation's Israel section. A representative excerpt, The New Jewish Left, was posted to Mashdown last July.

Recommended Reading

The timing of this book's publication couldn't be better. As Israelis and Palestinians resume peace negotiations, its also an opportunity to consider what separation really means, and why there can be no such thing as a total break.

Using Jewish and Arab literature to demonstrate how their respective identities both overlap and inhere in one another, In Spite of Partition makes a compelling case against simple-minded and destructive notions of cultural difference.

If you live in Los Angeles, on October 14th, Gil Hochberg will be speaking about her new book with fellow UCLA professor Saree Makdisi. Click here for more information about the event.

A Canon (of Sorts)

Working feverishly on my next to final chapter, here's a brief list of the cultural product I'm presently fretting about:

Film

Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (Israel, 2004/US, 2005)
Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad (France/Israel/Palestine, 2005)
Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg (US, 2005)

Books

A Little Piece of Ground, by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 2003/Haymarket, 2006)
Palestine, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2001)

Music

Magnetic Storm, Smartut Kahol Lavan (CD-R, Boshet, Israel, 2005)
Discography, Dir Yassin ( LP, Alerta Antifascista, Germany, 2006)
Vote Hezbollah, Muslimgauze (Soleilmoon, 1993)

Local Knowledge

A discarded book found on the sidewalk two blocks south, in front of a pretty tough housing project the cops always seem to be raiding. Click on the image for more detail.

Frigging in the Rigging

The commercial success of Christopher Hitchens' most recent book, God is Not Great, is generating a lot of interest abroad. Many people are asking whether, in the wake of Bush, and his combination of military violence and Evangelical piety, a new secularism is now formally in the making.

From this vantage point, though I absolutely support such an endeavor, I am not so certain that this is indeed the case. A lot of extremely overdue noise about the political need for secularism, yes, but a broad-based social movement in the US, I remain skeptical. At the moment, its just a cultural exercise.

In this article in the July 27th weekend edition of Maariv, Israel's largest-circulation daily, I was one of several folks journalist Vered Kellner spoke to about the issue. Though not frequently available in English, if you read Hebrew, Vered's thoughtful work is always worth catching up with.

Thinking Ahead

When I first began working in publishing, it was the mid-1990s. The 'zine explosion was already well underway, and the first web periodicals (such as Bad Subjects) were just starting to build the first substantial online readerships. Conversely, in the world of books, traditionally academic, non-fiction publishers such as Verso were beginning to chalk up serious successes with crossover political titles, such as journalist Doug Henwood's legendary Wall Street.  For the intellectual left, it was a time of immense creativity and ferment.

Compared to the past, according to the headlines, all we currently have to offer is a culture of continuous crises and closures. Music consumption is at an all time low, magazines and newspapers (both in print and online) point to dwindling (and, to be quite frank, aging) readerships, and book publishers keep issuing reports of mounting losses. After my new book is done, one of the things I would definitely like to explore is writing a cultural history of this period. Say, 1989-2009.

Bass Materialism: Grievous Angel Presents Dubstep Sufferah Volume 3
 

Book Report

A short excerpt from "Changing Partners: America or Europe?", the fifth chapter of my forthcoming book, Israel vs Utopia:

To many Jews and Israelis, however ideologically inclined, the charge of colonialism became a symptom of a much larger European about face that expressed itself in a deepening of both east and western European relations with the Arab world, an increase in Muslim immigration to France and the United Kingdom, and the routinization of Europe as the number one foreign site of Palestinian revolutionary violence.

Transpiring to the backdrop of the previous decades’ final regional colonial divestitures by France and the United Kingdom, and Europe thus becomes the right-wing Jewish caricature that it is portrayed to be today: the primary breeding ground of “Islamo-left” anti-Semitism, irrefutable proof that outside of Israel, America is the only place a Jew can truly be safe, if not call, however uncomfortably, home.

No Future

In his highly provocative Only Pinter Remains, Terry Eagleton argues that the utopian impulse in British literature has died. Tracing this tradition from playwright Howard Pinter all the way back to Blake and Shelley, for those not automatically inclined to ascribe left sentiment to the authors Eagleton assembles for this article's canon, the op-ed, published in Saturday's Guardian, is a marvelous example of how to encounter politics within culture.

Though Eagleton could (and should) definitely be upbraided for the limited catalogue of 'approved' authors that he provides, (and his characterization of the ideological pliability of immigrant writers), Eagleton does a brilliant job of indicting several contemporary authors for aligning themselves too closely with the powers that be. His damning appraisal of Salman Rushdie's fate, and Christopher Hitchens' post-9/11 political trajectory hits particularly hard.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

June 1967: The endless remix.

Jerusalem Calling

CBS Records, 1967

With last week's news of Jennifer's grandmother's death, it seems as though all of the sudden, there's many places to travel. To LA on Wednesday, for Dorothy's funeral. And then to Manhattan, next Monday, for Jennifer to begin an impromptu six to eight week stay on behalf of her firm. If we can afford it, before the end of the month, I'll try and join her for a weekend.

All of this talk of traveling is also an important reminder that I am leaving for Israel at the end of this month, and have to start putting my own professional house in order. Flying out there together with Vance, we'll be spending two weeks conducting interviews and making field recordings for both my book, and our new album. My parents will, of course, be hosting us.

We'll be arriving a week before the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, and the ensuing occupation. That will of course add its own hue to the proceedings. I've been giving much thought to how we might commemorate this occasion in audio format, by reviewing numerous old documentary LPs I have, commemorating such things as Israel's capture of east Jerusalem.

Part of me thinks it would be an interesting exercise to simply "cover" one of these records, like one would an older musical recording. Another option, of course, would be to make a facsimile, only with slight differences to indicate the 40 year change in time, as refracted through our own distinct political orientations. We'll see. Clearly, we have a lot of work to do.

Tanya Reinhart RIP

I just received word that Tanya Reinhart passed away this weekend in New York. She was sixty-three. What a terrible tragedy. My condolences go out to her family and friends. It was only today that I learned she'd moved to Manhattan towards the end of last year, in order to assume a teaching position at NYU.

Though I didn't agree with all of her positions, Reinhart's tireless efforts to end the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are worthy of the utmost respect. In the last issue of Tikkun that I edited (Jan/Feb 2007), Jerome Slater wrote an absolutely outstanding meditation on Reinhart's most recent book, The Road Map to Nowhere. You can read it here.

Aside from a brief email exchange we'd had in the Spring of 2005, the last time I talked to Reinhart was almost exactly three years ago, when I interviewed her for LiP Magazine. An eight hundred word excerpt ended up running in the Summer 2004 issue. I just found a copy of the unedited transcript, and thought these following words would be good to remember Reinhart by:

LiP: Is there an Israeli left at this point?

Reinhart: What’s been extremely encouraging – my ray of light in these bleak days – is to observe that in the young generation there is a movement of resistance that is completely new and courageous. It’s the same generation that got its roots in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. You first noticed it with the draft resistance movement, which is now bigger than it ever was.

Another amazing new development is that there is a whole new popular resistance movement initiated by Palestinian farmers along the line of the new fence whose land is being stolen by Israelis for the fence. Along that line, in village after village, you’ll find the entire village sitting on the ground in front of the bulldozers. Together with them you’ll find young Israelis.

For the first time in the history of the Occupation, you’ll find the Israeli army facing Palestinians and Israelis together sitting together defending Palestinian land. For me, it’s a big source of hope.

This blog entry can also be found on Alternet.

On the Road

Reading flyer, Portland, Oregon, November 2002.

My New Job(s)

Its been nine days since I left Tikkun. Unwinding has not been easy. As I imagined, there would be email and calls to answer, and loose ends to help the accountant and staff sew up. I'd wager that at least three days were devoted to helping the office out, which is actually less time than I anticipated would be the case. Having spent six weeks at the office after resigning on November 22nd, I dedicated myself to wrapping up as much as humanly possible. I'm sure that there will be more calls and emails in the future. But for now, until the magazine hires a new managing editor, its my assumption that my major post-Tikkun work is complete.

Every time I find myself growing impatient with my inability to get going on my next projects faster - a book, a record and two essays - I always look back at my "To Do" list for December to remind myself of why I'm so damn beat. (That does not include the fatigue accumulated from having worked six days a week for two and a half years.) Ranging from IT, distribution and general business tasks to editorial planning, writing, updating the website and employee training, the six week period during which I undertook my concluding work sums up everything that made my former job so draining. I'm really grateful for the experience, but I'm also extremely relieved to be moving on.

The best part about being home is how comfortable it is to write in. Ever since we moved into our new house in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood two years ago, unfortunately, given my work schedule, I've had a devil of a time finding any real occasion to spend time here. Every weekday morning, when I'd get up to make coffee before work, I'd stare into my beautiful office, wondering whether I'd ever get a chance to enjoy the space and take advantage of what it ideally could afford me. Lined with books and vinyl LPs, and a large desk bearing my home studio set-up, sitting in my decrepit Berkeley office, I'd frequently find myself daydreaming about importing old records bought at foreign flea markets into my rapidly aging computer.

Now that I'm truly here, I can't say enough good things about it. The sun shines through my window for the better part of the day, giving my room some of the best light of any spot in the house. Sitting in my father's old office chair, typing away while my favorite BBC shows stream through my Mac and my two dogs chill on the floor beside me, I can't quite recall a time that I felt so at home. Really, anywhere. Though this definitely will not last forever -  essentially five months from today - it feels like I won the lottery. And I don't feel the least bit guilty about this opportunity either.

As much as this all might seem like its about finally doing what one really wants to do, that's not quite it. It's about having a decent quality of life, and the time to take care of the kinds of things that we ignore, delay, or put off when we work sixty hours a week. Like spending time with one's family, paying bills promptly, returning phone calls from friends (the same day, as opposed to two weeks later), and doing laundry.  And, most importantly, cooking dinner for my wife.  Seeing the smile on Jennifer's face as she sat down to a freshly-grilled flank steak last night summed up exactly why this was one of the best decisions I've ever made. All I can say in response is "Sweetie, there's a lot more meat where that came from."

Just Say No to Emo

Anarcho-punk nostalgia has finally kicked in. Perhaps the only kind of 80s retro that's remotely acceptable, this beautifully pieced together compilation CD released late last Fall (the 4th in a series issued by the UK's Overground label) is an absolute must-buy for anyone interested in the intersection between music and radical politics. Written by former Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud, the liner notes are worth the price of admission alone. Get it in the US from AK Press.

For those looking for an excellent monograph of the genesis of the UK anarcho-punk scene, the American edition of Ian Glasper's excellent The Day the Country Died is forthcoming from Reynolds and Hearn in March. Hallelujah.

The 1980s marked the most profound political rationalization of popular music ever. Given how absolutely dire the events of the past five years have been, (and how impovershed most musical responses remain), the rise of anarcho-punk historiography seems utterly appropriate.