Mick Hartley

Smoke city

Gordon Parks. "Harlem Rooftops, 1948."

[Photo © The Gordon Parks Foundation]

Gordon Parks previously.

Vietnam street

Photographer Adam Birkan in Hanoi:

[Photos © Adam Birkan]

Oil under the desert

After last week's Gas under the tundra, we're now in Saudi Arabia with Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company:

Saudi Arabia’s Shaybah oilfield is a key development in Aramco’s ability to maintain production capacity of about 12 million barrels a day. Facilities like the Natural Gas Liquids plant separate and process raw hydrocarbons to prepare them for transport and use.

Energy infrastructure traverses Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, transporting crude and gas from the world’s largest oil field, called Ghawar, to export terminals, refineries and chemical plants at Ras Tanura and Jubail on the Gulf coast.

To develop the offshore Manifa field in the Persian Gulf, Aramco built an archipelago of causeways connecting man-made drilling islands. The islands supported equipment while the elevated bridges allowed for normal flows of currents and sea life to continue.

Ras Tanura is the site of Aramco’s largest domestic refinery, a 550,000 barrel-a-day processing plant, and a major port for crude and refined products shipments. Here, tanks at the refinery hold oil products ready for transport.

Oil tankers calling at Ras Tanura load either by mooring alongside jetties or by connecting to pipes at remote buoys offshore, known as single-point mooring systems. The Juaymah tank farm supplies SPMs that let the largest crude tankers load where water is deeper, giving the bigger ships more clearance.

The offshore Manifa oil field is one of Aramco’s recent developments bringing new oil supplies to market.

Aramco employs about 70,000 people from engineers to drillers and nurses to pilots. The company, which started as a concession to American oil companies, has been fully Saudi owned since 1980. 

American oil companies won the first Saudi oil concession in 1933 and struck commercial quantities of oil at Dammam Well No. 7 in 1938. Aramco is working on new developments at the Dammam field located beneath its headquarters. Since that first well — now closed and commemorated in the middle of the company’s campus — Aramco's moved into the desert and off the coast to find new oil and gas.

More than two-thirds of Aramco’s crude is exported and the rest goes to meet growing domestic demand, run power plants and feed chemical facilities. Aramco is embarking on a plan to become a refining and chemical giant. It’s seeking to buy state chemical producer Sabic and the two are working on technology to turn crude oil directly into chemicals.

The Chinese-owned tanker Xin Run Yang loaded a cargo at Ras Tanura in early October and carried it to an oil processor in South Korea, a country where Aramco has another one of its own refining ventures.

While many energy watchers and analysts see the sun setting on the oil industry in the not too distant future as consumers pick alternatives and seek to limit global warming, Saudi Aramco sees oil and gas continuing to be the main sources of energy for decades.
[Photos: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg]

Jews and the Labour Party

David Toube, at Quilliam, on Labour and antisemitism:

There are two features which might be said to define British Left wing politics, and figure large in its mythology. The first is that the Left is the citadel of anti-racism. The second is that the Left has a monopoly on virtue. Neither of these myths are true.

However, the consequences of these delusions are as follows. When racism emerged on the Left in Britain, it was either minimised, or explained away as an aberration. By contrast, racism on the Right is regarded, including by those who are themselves active in centre Right politics, as a natural danger, a stumbling block to be avoided. For that reason, centre Right politicians have long been alert to the dangers of antisemitism, and have taken steps to establish a cordon sanitaire, excluding antisemites from positions of power and influence, and quickly expelling those who breach that boundary.

The Left, by contrast, has falsely believed itself to be innoculated against antisemitism. When antisemitism arose, therefore, the first reaction was to affect that the issue was irrelevant, confined to the fringes of Left politics, or something which was so wholly unlikely that its existence could be discounted altogether, or when it became undeniable, that allegations were made in bad faith, in order to prevent the electoral triumph of Jeremy Corbyn and the dawning of a new era of fairness and prosperity. There was, quite simply, a failure to get to grips with the nature and the scale of the problem, until it was too late.

Worth reading in full.

Mauch Chunk revisited

Jack Delano. August 1940. "Old houses on Race Street in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration]

Now the lovely town of Jim Thorpe - the "Switzerland of America", aka the "Gateway to the Poconos."

Previously.

Ever Fallen in Love

One of the best punk bands without a doubt, the Buzzcocks. Spiral Scratch in particular was, as they say, a seminal moment, as punk moved out of London, and became truly DIY and independent of the big labels.

And now Pete Shelley's gone. 

Here he is live, on TOTP, 1978:

1981 synth-pop with Homosapien.

Obituaries: Guardian, Independent, NME.

Mouthing the same old lies

The latest response in Tablet to Paul Berman's three recent essays on the state of the American left comes from Tim Shenk, who cites Hannah Arendt:

If you want to understand American politics today, the single best source might be page 334 of Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism. No, that’s not because Donald Trump is plotting a fascist coup. He’s not nearly smart enough to pull it off. Even if he were, Arendt’s description of life under totalitarian rule is easily the least insightful part of the book. Her real genius was for explaining why liberal societies fall apart. It’s a question that should be on all of our minds.

Now, on to page 334. After running through a brief history of modern Europe, Arendt’s narrative brings her to one of the most puzzling questions of the interwar period: why were vulgar demagogues peddling ridiculous doctrines able to turn millions of people against the liberal order? She had, by then, already discussed the psychology of what she sniffily referred to as “the mob,” and now turned her attention to totalitarianism’s attractions for the elite. What especially interested Arendt, who turned 27 the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, was its appeal for younger intellectuals.

Her answer centered on the failings of the status quo. “What the defenders of liberalism and humanism overlook,” she observed, was that it had become “easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities.” Why was that? Well, people had eyes. They could see that elites who proclaimed themselves champions of civilization were “parading publicly virtues which [they] not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt.” Everybody knew the whole thing was a joke, except for the great men who bought into their own propaganda. Confronted with this hypocrisy, “it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” Sure, the alternative was farcical, but at least everyone would be able to stop mouthing the same old lies, and that offered a kind of liberation.  [...]

I keep coming back to Arendt because she tells us how to get started. We’re stuck in the same cycle that she saw in interwar Europe. Trump sells the patently absurd, and Democrats respond with clichés that not even they believe in. Coming up with nobler lies isn’t going to help. Telling the truth might.  

Basically, as I read him, he doesn't buy the idea of American exceptionalism that he thinks is behind Berman's approach, with appeals to the best of America from the founding fathers to Walt Whitman. The US is just another country. How about less of the grandstanding, and more simple truths? - about poverty, racism, corruption, and so on.

Certainly there's a cynicism about politicians nowadays, both in the US and here in the UK. In the US it undoubtedly contributed to Trump's election, as Hillary seemed like more of the same tired old bluster and the same tired old Washington establishment, while Trump could sell himself as a maverick, with the balls, as it were, to tell the people the truth.

Here? Well, there's the Brexit farce, obviously. The slow death of the Labour Party under Corbyn. The list goes on. It's been part of British culture for years, though, with so much open ridicule of our politicians on TV. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's part of a healthy democracy. But it does breed the kind of cynicism that can also eat away at a healthy democracy.

With Arendt, though, I can't help wondering why, if she was so perceptive about the crisis of liberalism in the Thirties, she failed to see through her one-time lover Martin Heidegger. As we now know Heidegger was a keen Nazi, yet somehow this failed to register with Arendt. Indeed he remained "one of the most profound influences on her thinking". Oh well.

Brutalism worldwide

Photos from the newly published Atlas of Brutalist Architecure. "This is the only book to thoroughly document the world's finest examples of Brutalist architecture. More than 850 buildings - existing and demolished, classic and contemporary - are organized geographically into nine continental regions."

Milwaukee County War Memorial by Eero Saarinen, Wisc., 1957. Picture credit: Balthazar Korab Archive/Library of Congress

Noisy-le-Grand car park, France.

Water tower, Jørn Utzon, Svaneke, Denmark, 1952. 

Poplavok Cafe, Ukraine. Picture credit: Frederic Chaubin

College Life Insurance Company of America headquarters, Indianapolis. Picture credit: Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, by Le Corbusier, Guillermo Jullian de la Fuentes, and Josep Lluis Sert, Cambridge, Mass., 1963. Picture credit: Harvard University/ FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

Reading Pavilion, Jinhua Architecture Park, Herzog & de Meuron, Jinhua, China, 2006. Picture credit: Addison Godel

Rozzol Melara in Trieste, Italy. Picture credit: Roberto Conte

St Joseph‘s Hospital, Bertrand Goldberg Associates, Tacoma, Washington, USA, 1974. Picture credit: Goldberg Family Archives

Simmons Hall, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Stamp House by Charles Wright Architects, Cape Tribulation, Queensland, Australia, 2013. Picture credit: Patrick Bingham-Hall

Sunset Chapel, BNKR Arquitectura, Acapulco, Mexico, 2011. Picture credit: Esteban Suarez

Vulcania, Hans Hollein Architekt, St-Ours-les-Roches, France, 2002. Picture credit: Christian Richters

Synagogue, Officers’ Training School, Zvi Hecker; Alfred Neumann, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, 1968. Picture credit: Henry Hutter/Zvi Hecker Architect

Grand Central Water Tower, GAPP Architects & Urban Designers, Midrand, South Africa, 1996

Central Hall, University of York, by Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall & Partners, York, England, 1968. Picture credit: David Collingwood/Alamy Stock Photo

Night-time car transporters

Or, in American, auto convoy trucks.

April 1941. "Auto convoy trucks at service station near Chicago."

[Photo: Shorpy/Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration]

Indeed, we were terrified

More testimony from those who suffered at the hands of ISIS - this time a man identified as Ehab, with haunted eyes, from Saraqib, Syria.

"They would take us outside and slaughter someone before our eyes. There was a shepherd whose sheep used to graze in areas belonging to the regime. They accused him of being in areas controlled by the regime. He said that he had to in order to continue making a living. He said: "If you want me to stop, it will be the end of my flock." They took him to the emir and the shepherd spoke honestly: "I collaborate with the regime because the regime protects my livelihood." They forced him onto his knees, they said "Allah Akbar," put a knife to his throat, and slaughtered him. They cut off his head and threw it in front of us in order to terrify us. Indeed, we were terrified."

The photographer of Montparnasse

Émile Savitry was a French photographer and painter, active from the 1930s till his death in 1967, who had many connections in the Parisian art world ranging from Giacometti and Django Reinhardt to Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné. He co-founded the Rapho agency with Robert Doisneau among others, and reported for Paris Match on events such as the flight of refugees over the border during the Spanish Civil War.

Emile Savitry 1903-1967, Un photographe de Montparnasse

From here and here.

Portrait of the enigmatic Hungarian-born artist Anton Prinner, in her studio on the rue Pernety, close to Montparnasse, standing beside her sclupture , La Femme aux grandes oreilles (The Woman with Big Ears), 1946. Prinner, one of the earliest artists of the school of ‘Constructivist abstraction’, posed as a man from her arrival in Paris in 1927 at the age of 25 until her death in 1983.

Portrait of a woman and her protector in a bar in the Paris red-light district of Pigalle, 1938. The man is dressed in the manner of the savage underworld ‘Apache’ gang members who, especially in the early 20th century, roamed the streets of northern Paris robbing and terrorizing local populations.

The legendary Montparnasse restaurant and bar La Coupole, circa 1935-1939. Between the two world wars, La Coupole became a buzzing night-time venue for artists, writers and singers, including Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Edith Piaf and Josephine Baker, and was later adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway. Its interior was decorated by several dozen Montparnasse artists.

La Coupole, 1939

A coal merchant pushing his cart on the boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris, during the 1940s.

Self-Portrait, ca. 1950

Oscar Dominguez in front of his sculpture « Le Défi », Paris, 1950s

Refugees from the fighting in the last stages of the Spanish Civil War arrive in Perpignan, southern France. The date is thought to be probably early 1939, after the Republican forces were defeated in Barcelona.

The Paektu Protection Squad

It's not just American youth who display an alarming nostalgia for the fantasy delights of Communism. South Korea too has its share of useful idiots. But whereas in the US the chances of any kind of Communist take-over are laughably remote, and Communist chic is a kind of unfortunate indulgence of the new left, the South Koreans face an actual aggressive Communist state just across the DMZ, which makes...well, let's just say a significant difference.

The Daily NK, which publishes informative articles on the reality of life inside North Korea based on its network of informants, has recently been running a series of videos by Thae Yong Ho, the former North Korean diplomat who defected while serving as deputy UK ambassador. This has upset a group of young South Koreans who call themselves the Paektu Protection Squad, in homage to the sacred Paektu bloodline of North Korea's Kim dynasty.

Members of the Paektu Protection Squad, which was created to welcome North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to Seoul, last week visited the offices of the Unification Media Group (UMG) to demand that a regular column written by former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho for Daily NK be cancelled.

Daily NK and UMG have jointly published Thae’s column in print and video formats every week from July, with the latest being published earlier this month.

The two members of the Paekdu Protection Squad visited the office with pickets and told Daily NK staff that “the column is interrupting the period when the Republic of Korea must head towards peace and unification” and that they “came here to shut down Thae Yong Ho’s column.”

A Daily NK staff member calmly responded to them that “the publication of columns and the production of videos is the inherent right of the media and attempting to restrict that right is violating the freedom of the press.” One of the protesters responded to that statement by saying, “There are limits to the freedom of the press.”...

Lee Kwang Baek, who now heads UMG and was formerly a key member of a left-wing organization called National Liberation (NL), noted that “their arguments are almost the same as those put forth by NL, which saw Juche ideology as their ruling ideology.”

“It’s unfortunate that young people [today] are still taken in and being impacted by the blind support toward North Korea espoused by some far-left Juche supporters of the 1980s,” he said.

“Juche supporters at the time believed that America was the source of division and was preventing unification from happening and that South Korea was a colony of the US,” Lee explained, further noting that the Paektu Protection Squad’s ideas toward the US mirror those espoused by Juche supporters in the 1980s and 1990s....

On November 29, the Paektu Protection Squad posted on its Facebook page five emails it had sent to Thae. The emails contain various statements including, “North Korea is better than South Korea because it’s at least working so that all people can live equally,” “We’re eager to see how much more you [Thae Yong Ho] will rave wildly” and one that says that Thae “must not interrupt independent unification [or else].”

Communist chic

Yes, Communism is making a comeback among today's hip young people. Just yesterday, in the Times (£), Kevin Maher was writing about Boots Riley, "the communist rapper who is the new toast of Hollywood", with his film Sorry to Bother You, which has been hailed in the US as a masterpiece (“A must-see,” says The New York Times; “A knockout,” says Rolling Stone):

He joined the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labour Party at the age of 15, but says that it’s no big deal. America is more socialist, in reality, than anybody realises, he says before launching into another dense disquisition, this time on the history of US socialism that encompasses everything from a socialist takeover of Louisiana in the 1880s to the reality of “red” state communism in the 1930s, to the failure of Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign (“She was too similar to Jeb Bush”), to a recent Harvard survey that suggested that more than 50 per cent of millennials believe in a socialist society. [...]

Another hugely impressive chunk of economic theory that tackles racial stereotypes and implicates the tenets of capitalism in their perpetuation. “The tropes of blackness say that these people are lazy, that they are insufficient, to say the least,” he says. “And that their poverty is the result of bad choices, as opposed to the real explanation of poverty, which is that under capitalism you must have a certain amount of unemployed people or else wages go up and stock prices fall.”

So there you go. Blacks under Communism would of course prosper and shine, as history so clearly shows. Whereas, in America, an eloquent radical black man like Boots Riley here would never be allowed to spread his dangerously subversive ideas. [Well OK, maybe just this once It must be that old repressive tolerance again.]

Now here's Cathy Young, in the latest Tablet look at the state of the American left, inspired by Paul Berman's series of essays:

Commie chic is cool again.

Teen Vogue, which now serves its beauty and lifestyle tips with a heavy dose of progressive politics, celebrated Karl Marx’s 200th birthday in May with a feature lauding the father of Communism as a bold and relevant thinker. “His writings have inspired social movements in Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Argentina, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and more,” the article noted, coyly omitting any mention of how those “social movements” turned out. More recently and on a more highbrow note, Boston Reviewgives us an essay exploring Jean-Paul Sartre’s blend of existentialism and Marxism as a “philosophy for our time,” complete with a photo of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a 1960 tête-à-tête with Che Guevara.

Kirsten Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers Communist nostalgia with a feminist twist in her recent book, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, which trots out a few East German sex surveys as evidence for its dubious claim. (Yes, the “socialism” in her title refers to the pre-1991 Soviet-bloc variety.) Meanwhile, left-wing Twitter accounts increasingly sport not only the socialist rose emoji but the Communist hammer-and-sickle—and, in real space, Communist symbols and Soviet flags have been a mainstay at “anti-fascist” protest rallies.

In part, the new Communist chic reflects the rise in the popularity of socialism. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that, among Democrats, Democratic-leaning independents—and, perhaps most significant, among all American adults under 30—socialism is now viewed more positively than capitalism. To some extent, this is a consequence of capitalism’s falling stock: more than half of respondents in both groups have reported a positive view of socialism since 2010, while approval of capitalism has dropped by more than 10 percentage points in two years. Most Americans who profess to like socialism associate it with Western European welfare states; still, even Communism is viewed favorably by more than one in four young adults. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are shaking up the Democratic Party. And hip new intellectuals and pundits with a soft spot for Communism are everywhere.  [...]

But logic or no logic, facts or no facts, the left’s rekindled love affair with Communism persists. In large part, it’s driven by disaffection with the existing order and the growing sense that radical change is possible. It is also fueled by the increasingly common perception that the modern left is battling “fascists” and “Nazis.” In this scheme of things, the Communists are the good guys who beat the Nazis. One popular far-left meme depicts the 1940 “extreme right” as Nazis declaring “We should gas all Jews,” the “extreme left” as a heroic Red Army soldier with the slogan, “We should gas zero Jews,” and the “‘rational’ center” as splitting it down the middle with “We should gas half of the Jews.”

The invocation of Jews is particularly ironic given that the rise of Communist sympathies on the left has gone hand in hand with the rise of a strident anti-Zionism that has deeply anti-Semitic hues informed, not incidentally, by Soviet ideological critiques of the Jewish state developed in the context of Cold War geopolitical conflicts. (The most obvious example of this tendency is the British Labor Party, where the now-dominant Jeremy Corbyn faction is steeped in both Soviet apologism—Corbyn chief strategist Seumas Milne has been called a Stalinist with only slight exaggeration—and Jew-bashing.)

Worth reading in full.

New York panorama, 1908

From Shorpy. "Manhattan and East River bridges from Brooklyn." The Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge (under construction) and Williamsburg Bridge as seen in a panorama made from five 8x10 inch glass negatives.

[Photo: Shorpy/DPC]

Click picture to view.

Lock art

On the Hertford Union Canal, Hackney Wick: