Mick Hartley

Sky trees

Behind Tate Modern:

Polk Salad Annie

Tony Joe White, with his rootsy swamp rock hit from 1969:

There are hints here of that other left-field slice of Southern gothic, Ode to Billie Jo from Bobbie Gentry, and indeed that turns out to have been an inspiration - for this, and for his other hit, Rainy Night in Georgia:

I heard "Ode to Billie Joe" on the radio and I thought, man, how real, because I am Billie Joe, I know that life. I've been in the cotton fields. So I thought if I ever tried to write, I'm going to write about something I know about. At that time I was doing a lot of Elvis and John Lee Hooker onstage with my drummer. No original songs and I hadn't really thought about it. But after I heard Bobbie Gentry I sat down and thought … well I know about polk because I had ate a bunch of it and I knew about rainy nights because I spent a lot of rainy nights in Marietta, Georgia. So I was real lucky with my first tries to write something that was not only real and hit pretty close to the bone, but lasted that long. So it was kind of a guide for me then on through life to always try to write what I know about.

More background on the singer, and on polk salad  - or rather, polk sallet:

His roots lie in the swamplands of Oak Grove, Louisiana, where he was born in 1943. Situated just west of the Mississippi River, it's a land of cottonfields, where pokeweed, or "polk" grows wild, and alligators lurk in moss-covered swamps. "I spent the first 18 years of my life down there", said White. "My folks raised cotton and corn. There were lotsa times when there weren't too much to eat, and I ain't ashamed to admit that we've often whipped up a mess of polk sallet. Tastes alright too — a bit like spinach."

"Sallet" is an old English word that means "cooked greens", not to be mistaken for "salad"; in fact, a great many cases of pokeweed poisoning result from this linguistic mistake. While it may be that record companies labeled the song "salad", the dish in question was a "sallet" made of pokeweed.

Elvis did a version in his Vegas years.

Tony Joe White died last month, aged 75.

The pinnacle of terrorism

Here's a sermon from Gaza imam Sheikh Musa Abu Jleidan, also known as "Abu 'Ubeida". Apart from the usual insults - "The Jews are treacherous and conniving cheaters...they are the pinnacle of terrorism" - he provides an interesting new translation of the Israeli national anthem:

This, apparently, is the second verse:

"May our enemies tremble with fear.
"May all the people of Canaan and Babylon tremble, and may their skies be clouded with fear and terror, when our arrows and spears pierce their chests.
"When we see their spilt blood and severed heads, that is where the Israelites will go to where Allah wants them to go."

The actual anthem, Hatikvah, is based on the poem Tikvatenu by Naftali Herz Imber. Read the text here. No mention of severed heads - or indeed of Allah.

Cultural Marxism

Samuel Moyn, in the NYT last week, argues that cultural Marxism,” doesn’t actually exist as anything more than a “crude slander,” a “phantasmagoria of the alt-right.” Talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable, he says, from “the most noxious anti-Semitism".  All it does is to update the old trope of “Judeobolshevism” that imagined a global cabal of Jews conspiring to undermine the West by spreading communist ideology.

Alexander Zubatov disagrees. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a phrase that's been used as an insult by the alt-right, but that doesn't mean that the writings of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Marcuse, Edward Said and others - who take much of their political and cultural analysis from the Marxist tradition - are not open to criticism, and haven't wreaked enormous damage on the contemporary scene: 

It is a short step from the Marxist and cultural Marxist premise that ideas are, at their core, expressions of power to rampant, divisive identity politics and the routine judging of people and their cultural contributions based on their race, gender, sexuality and religion — precisely the kinds of judgments that the high ideals of liberal universalism and the foremost thinkers of the Civil Rights Era thought to be foul plays in the game. And it is a short step from this collection of reductive and simplistic conceptions of the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” to public shaming, forced resignations and all manner of institutional and corporate policy dictated by enraged Twitter mobs, the sexual McCarthyism of #MeToo’s excesses, and the incessant, resounding, comically misdirected and increasingly hollow cries of “racist,” “sexist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “transphobe” and more that have yet to be invented to demonize all those with whom the brittle hordes partaking in such calumnies happen to disagree.

I want to linger one moment on this last point, as Moyn, in his New York Times article, in tarring the idea of cultural Marxism with the charge of “anti-Semitism,” has done precisely what I just described. That charge, surely, is deployed for the sole purpose of leaving those who would otherwise dare to speak of cultural Marxism cowed and intimidated into silence lest they be accused of perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope. Moyn’s article, however, offers not a shred of evidence that talk of cultural Marxism is anti-Semitic in any way, shape or form. What we are offered, instead, is slippage from a flat and unsupported declaration that “talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from” anti-Semitism to a more extended discussion of what is, on its very face, a genuinely anti-Semitic, older charge of “Judeobolshevism.” But, of course, there is no necessary connection between the two...  [...]

Cultural Marxism was no conspiracy, but it is also no mere right-wing “phantasmagoria.” It was and remains a coherent intellectual programme, a constellation of dangerous ideas. Aspects of these ideas, to their credit, brought the West’s dirty laundry into the limelight and inaugurated a period of necessary housecleaning that was, indeed, overdue. But their obsessive focus on our societal dirt — real and perceived “injustice,” “oppression,” “privilege,” “marginalization” and the like — quickly became a pathological compulsion. We started to see dirt everywhere. We cleansed and continue to cleanse ourselves tirelessly but are never satisfied, always eager to uncover more dirty deeds and historical sins and stage more ritualized purges. We end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And all our hard-won collective attainments and achievements, all that is great and good and glorious in our midst, gets swept up, spat on and discarded with the rest of the trash.

Gas under the tundra

Where gas comes from.

The Russian Arctic’s Yamal Peninsula, home to one of the largest gas fields in the world, photographed by Charles Xelot:

Gas factory. Part of the facility used to liquify gas. © Charles Xelot

Fedor Litke. LNG tanker at berth in an arctic port. © Charles Xelot

LNG Tank. The interior of an LNG tank under construction. © Charles Xelot

Nenets family. Family of Nenets with their party clothes for the day of the celebration of the reindeer, in Noviy port in the Yamal peninsula. © Charles Xelot

Reindeer race. The reindeer race is a traditional Nenets life event that takes place every year in almost all the villages of the Gida and Yamal Peninsula.This race was organized in the village of Noviy Port by Gazprom, which used it for its communications. © Charles Xelot

General view of the Sabetta industrial site on the Yamal Peninsula in 2016. It is currently the most ambitious industrial project in the Arctic area. Gas will be extracted from more than 15 wells before being shipped by sea around the world. © Charles Xelot

Sabetta in 2018. © Charles Xelot

Tank inside an LNG tanker intended to receive the gas extracted from the tundra. Fifteen icebreaker tankers are built specially for the industrial plants of the Yamal peninsula. © Charles Xelot

Aurora Borealis. The powerful lights of an icebreaker illuminate the white sea. Artficial light is mixed with that of a northern aurora. In the distance, we can distinguish the luminous halo of a city. © Charles Xelot

Valves. Outlet of a gas well not yet connected to the network. In the background, caravans sheltering the workers working on the site. © Charles Xelot

Polar fox. Bears and polar foxes frequently visit the Sabetta site.The latter feed on garbage and carry rabies. Draconian measures are taken if a worker gets bitten. © Charles Xelot

Above the cloud. Aerial view of a gas factory. © Charles Xelot

Screaming anti-semitic slurs

And I thought the Germans were now an example to us all, having learned the lessons of their history.

From CNN - 'The word Jew was not a common insult when I went to school...it is now.':

Rachel always thought it was best to hide her religion from her high school students. The trouble started a few years ago when she let slip to a student that she was Jewish.

"I found swastikas scribbled in their textbooks, they drew penises around my name on the blackboard, and they'd yell like 'Hey, Jew' at me during class," said Rachel, a teacher in Berlin. "It became harder... to do my job."

Rachel, whose name has been changed because of safety concerns, went to her headmaster, and then to the police, but she said neither took her complaint seriously and would not intervene.

She said things got worse. The students saw Israel as a menace, an oppressor of the Palestinian people and viewed her as a stand-in for the Jewish state, she said. They took out their frustration by screaming anti-Semitic slurs at her.

Last year, she decided to switch schools for her own safety. She has not told her new students she's Jewish.  [...]

Berlin's Department of Research and Information on Anti-Semitism (RIAS) said serious incidents affecting Jewish students and teachers in Berlin's schools doubled from 15 to 30 in 2017 and the rate is on a similar pace this year. RIAS said most episodes still go unreported. Those that were reported included a 16-year-old girl taunted by classmates who chanted "gas for the Jews." A 14-year-old boy who was bullied, kicked and shot with an air gun because he was Jewish. And a Jewish student at a prominent international prep school who had cigarette smoke blown in his face while his assailants asked how it felt to be sent to the showers.

Comparing Corbyn and Sanders

In response to Paul Berman's three-part series in Tablet on the American left, James Bloodworth takes a look at the differences, as he sees them, between Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. 

As Paul Berman notes in the first part of his perceptive series of essays on the left and the Jews, “there is pressure on the Western left to accommodate, in the name of anti-racism and Third World solidarity, as many Islamist principles as possible, in regard to blasphemy, gender roles, and the iniquity of the Jews.” This is an apt description of the political tendency that Corbyn represents but it does not apply Sanders. Nor does Berman suggest it does but it has become a commonplace among political commentators to conflate the two distinct forms of socialist tradition. In so doing, they obscure a vital distinction in the political choices we face and Corbyn and Sanders have fundamentally different ideas of what politics should accomplish and whom it should serve.  [...]

Corbyn himself is not of a theoretical bent. Yet the Labour leader’s career-long flirtation with militant, religious fundamentalists—so long as they are anti-Western—fits perfectly with the political tradition he was blooded in. For Corbyn, opposing western military action and political hegemony requires soft-soaking the west’s enemies, whatever they happen to profess as their own cause. This is where the New Left and its fixation on the global south blends with the toxic, residual legacy of Stalinism. The lionization of authoritarian regimes like Cuba, Venezuela, and even North Korea, by Corbyn and his allies derives from the notion that any society with nationalised property, however repressive and backward, is a historical advance on the capitalist west. Meanwhile, Corbyn’s reflexive solidarity with ‘national liberation’ movements, regardless of whether they are anti-Semitic or harbor bigots, owes to the overriding fact that they oppose Western imperialism. This extends to movements which do not wish to liberate people but enslave them, such as Islamism.

Sanders’ class-rooted politics has its faults, including an occasional monomania. But historically it has been far better at avoiding the trap of crude anti-imperialism that afflicts romantic Third-Worldists such as Corbyn, who throw any class analysis out the window when it comes to movements that oppose the United States and Israel. On a psychological level the Labour leader seems to share the vicarious attraction certain mild-mannered left-wing men have for the allure of revolutionary violence. Of course, Corbyn may have been on the ‘right side of history,’ as his supporters like to claim, from time to time. But then, if you have opposed everything the West has done for 40 years, you are invariably going to be right occasionally.

There can be little doubt that Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have each tapped into a widespread disillusionment generated by the failures of free market capitalism. Yet the two men come from distinctive political traditions that, if brought to power, would create very different societies and impacts for the ordinary people who lived within them. Look to the past to understand the present; and look at where today’s socialists came from to understand where they wish to take us.

I think he's right about Corbyn, but I struggle with sentiments such as "it had been apparent for some time that capitalism as we know it is broken". Had it? What does that even mean? Of course there are problems - when are there not problems? - but such a formulation only ever comes from those who envisage a socialist alternative. Like, um, Venezuela, perhaps?

The Mighty Mongrel Mob

New Zealand's Mongrel Mob, photographed by Jono Rotman:

The infamous Mongrel Mob of New Zealand is known for extreme violence and has long been regarded as the nation’s “monsters.” Founded in the ‘60s by a group of primarily European youth, in the ’70s the gang expanded to include numerous indigenous Māori. Today the gang’s members are largely Māori.

Mongrelism, a new book by Jono Rotman “offers a communion with this impenetrable fraternity,” writes the publisher, Here Press, in a statement. Portraits of the Mongrels illustrate their pride in both membership and identity, and the book examines how the gang brands itself to uphold its hierarchy and history. The values at the core of the gang are those generally praised by society: perseverance, resilience, and loyalty.

Taking the form of a gang handbook, the order and grouping of images were determined by Mongrel Mob members and align with their geographic, familial and hierarchical relationships. “Rotman’s images have become a part of Mob history and their visual mythology,” writes Here Press. His collaboration with the members was essential to access and integral to the process.

Bung Eye Notorious, Te Poho O Rāwiri, 2008 © Jono Rotman

Greco Notorious, South Island, RIP, Tapairu, 2008 © Jono Rotman

Chu Dog Hawkes Bay Captain, Heretaunga, 2017 © Jono Rotman

Denimz Rogue, 2009 © Jono Rotman

Shano Rogue, Lifer 2010, © Jono Rotman

Breeze Notorious, 2008, © Jono Rotman

Zap Notorious, 2008 © Jono Rotman

Toots King Country, 2009 © Jono Rotman

Willy Mighty Mongrel Mob, 2014, © Jono Rotman

The Collapse of Venezuela

From Vox Borders - Why Colombia has taken in 1 million Venezuelans:

On Preventing the Defamation of Religions

Pakistan PM Imran Khan - something of a playboy in his youth, but now a man who loudly proclaims his Islamic values - speaks out on the subject of blasphemy. "Freedom of speech cannot be used as a pretext to hurt the world's 1.25 billion Muslims".

"There were prophets of Allah other [than Muhammad], but there is no mention of them in human history. There is negligible mention of them. Moses is mentioned, but there is no mention of Jesus in history. But the entire life of Muhammad, who was Allah's last prophet, is part of history. […]

"Today's [great] civilization, the West, learned from the Muslims in Spain. They started reading. Aristotle and Greek philosophies reached Europe through Muslims, and then European civilization rose. […]

"Every few years, in some Western country, our dear Prophet is blasphemed against and dishonored. What is the consequence of this? Muslims become angry. We take to the streets in protest, [protestors] break things in our country. But what does it achieve? It enables the enemies of Muslims to tell people in the West: "See, Islam is a big religion that spreads violence." They get an opportunity to spread propaganda against Islam. […]  

"We raised this matter in the OIC – that all the Muslim countries should together tell the West… Their people do not understand. They can't comprehend how much our Prophet resides in our hearts. They can't understand, so we should make them understand. We talked to the OIC, and our foreign minister raised this issue in the U.N. for the first time, and something happened that had never happened before. The European Union's Human Rights Court [sic] said for the first time that you cannot hurt somebody's religion under the pretext of freedom of speech, and especially it said that you cannot blaspheme against Muhammad's honor.  […]

"We want the countries of the world to sign a convention which will be called the International Convention on Preventing the Defamation of Religions, which means that freedom of speech cannot be used as a pretext to hurt the world's 1.25 billion Muslims. Allah willing, [my special envoy] will now go to various countries, and talk to people, meet lawyers, and prepare the convention. Allah willing, we, Pakistan, will spearhead [this effort], and for the first time in the world get this Convention signed."