Petes' Radical Poetry Site

May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford Studies in Modern European Literature, Film & Culture) (Paperback)

Smokestack Books and Tour

2008-07-09T08:16:00.001-07:00

http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/

Dylan Lyrics

2008-07-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

http://orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dylan/song.html

May 68

2008-07-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

Detailed study of events of May 68 by Dave Broder

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/07/04/class-struggle-france-may-june-1968

Who belongs to Glasgow -by Mary Edward

2008-07-08T05:19:00.001-07:00

A landmark publication in 1993, this study of Glasgow immigration was used in all schools throughout the city. Now thoroughly revised and updated with a new chapter, this timely publication is an essential insight into the historical background of Glasgow's migrant groups and their interactions with the indigenous population.

In this insightful second edition, Mary Edward traces the history of immigration to Glasgow over the past 200 years. From Highlanders to exiled Jews and asylum seekers, the Irish, Poles, Chinese and Asians’ experiences of Glasgow are all covered. There is an initial chapter on Glasgow’s roots as an industrial city based on the slave trade analyzing how the merchants and tobacco barons used profits from the Southern plantation system to exploit an abundant workforce fleeing economic destitution and political persecution. This turned Glasgow into “the second city of the Empire”.

There is a final chapter discussing the discrimination recent Asylum seekers have faced in Employment and Housing and there are details of the work of some of the campaigning groups who have tried to address the different forms this discrimination has taken.

ISBN: 9781905222872
Publisher: Luath
Publication Date: 11 March 2008
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Pages: 192 p.

Words 205

Peter Burton

Chinese Whispers: The true story behind Britain's hidden army of labour, by Hsiao-Hung Pai

2008-06-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

Chinese Whispers: The true story behind Britain's hidden army of labour, by Hsiao-Hung Pai

“If you don’t want to do the whole session, you can just buy parts. Three pounds for touching her face and hair, £10 for touching the upper part of her body, £20 for fondling the lower part of her body. Would you like a cup of tea first ?

- a Chinese female housekeeper at a brothel in Cheam , Surrey- February 2007

From brothels in London to a lettuce farm in Sussex and Chinatown kitchens, this courageous and heart-wrenching book documents the super-exploited lives of the army of undocumented Chinese workers living in the UK. Hsiao-Hung Pai goes undercover for the Guardian to expose the secret hell of fear and sweat that exists in a subterranean twilight world .Everywhere she goes, Hsiao-Hung Pai finds that illegality itself multiplies the misery and that all attempts to improve their lives are doomed as ‘illegal’s’ move from one terrible job to another.

Gangs attack "massage" joints with impunity robbing undocumented workers who have been paid in cash, dishing out example beatings to workers who have done nothing wrong. Waiters earn far below the minimum wage, and invisible labourers fall sick in hellish factories. Exorbitant fees are charged for overcrowded accommodation and essential documentation . Amidst all of this Britain still spurns the UN convention that aims to protect all migrant workers.

Britain is one of the many developed countries that has so far failed to sign up to the 1990 UN International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, which states that human rights and certain minimum standards of welfare should be extended to all migrant workers, regardless of their legal status. In Britain, "illegals", as the tabloids call them, have no rights. Contacting the police or accessing the health service are not options as this means deportation-a fact that is used routinely by the gang-masters and agencies. Blocks on giving agency workers equal rights compound the misery.

Cockle pickers drown, people die from exhaustion after working 24-hour shifts on production lines, and families back in china are forced to take on more debt once the existing debt is paid off .Families receive no compensation and the chains of organizations supporting the trade in cheap labour continue to flourish. There's political capital to be made prosecuting gangs bringing illegal immigrants into Britain, but very little to be had protecting the rights of those "illegal’s" once they are here. In fact the expose reveals a carve up between gangmasters , agencies, factories and the government to super- exploit illegal immigrants using the fear of deportation at any time to keep it all in place.

Hsiao-Hung Pai also explains why so many Chinese workers risk their lives to work in Britain, having been driven out of China by economic reforms implemented since it joined the World Trade Organization (nearly five million workers in state-owned factories were made redundant between 2001-2006 in the north-eastern provinces alone); and demonstrates the ways British consumers benefit from their labour.

The book humanizes the workers by relating their own personal stories throughout and there is a concluding chapter on the role of the unions and what direction campaigning organizations ought to take making ‘Chinese Whispers’ an essential book for both trade union activists and anti-sweatshop campaigners .

Peter Burton
563

Stanley Kubrick

2008-06-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

Stanley Kubrick

Author: Clive Bradley

Blatantly recognisable, but with a style which never overwhelms the content. His films are individual, personal - yet awesome in scale and power. So protective was he of his artistic vision that he lived for most of his career in self-imposed exile from the Hollywood system in Britain, even reconstructing Vietnam here because he didn't like flying. He was idiosyncratic, maverick, reportedly very difficult and perfectionist; but that is frequently the mark of an artistic genius.

Beginning with small, noirish thrillers, Kubrick made his first major feature, Paths of Glory, in 1957. It's a war film; but here there is none of the platitudinous sentimentality of Saving Private Ryan or a host of other, even lesser stuff. During the First World War, a French general given impossible orders passes the buck down, and the buck is continually passed until three men, one of them black, are on trial for cowardice. It is the task of Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) to defend them at the court martial. In a beautifully simple drama, the horrors and evils of the battlefield are evoked - but more importantly, the evils of the powers behind the war are centre-stage. Unlike the standard "war film", Paths of Glory doesn't just condemn war for its brutality, or pay homage to the ordinary Joe caught up in terrible events: it puts the system which caused the war on trial. Like all Kubrick's films, it is innovatively shot, almost expressionistic, but never just as a gimmick.

When Douglas was executive producing Spartacus and the original director, Anthony Mann, was sacked early in production, he turned to Kubrick to fill his place. Kubrick was still largely unknown, and Spartacus was the only film he was ever hired to direct (as opposed to seeing it through from its inception). Evidently Kubrick's experience on the film, and particularly with Douglas, were so bad that he resolved never to be controlled like this again, and from then on did his own thing this side of the Atlantic.

But Spartacus is one of the most astonishing, powerful, marvellous socialist films ever made. Kubrick achieves in it one of his characteristic tricks: to take a well-known, hackneyed genre, and utterly, unrecognisably transform it (he was to do the same, for example, with science fiction in 2001, and horror in The Shining).

Based on the novel by Howard Fast (and of course on historical events in the first century BC), with a script by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten who went to prison rather than testify to McCarthy, Spartacus is the well-known story of the slave revolt. It's in the tradition of all those sword-and-sandals fifties epics, the best of which is Ben Hur. But no Bible-story this. I've seen Spartacus more than a dozen times, and every time it reduces me to tears. It is a marvellous story of the unquenchable human struggle for freedom, even against impossible odds, which culminates in an extraordinary dramatic feat: we want the hero to die.

It is a deeply intelligent, humanistic film, in which all its central characters are multi-dimensional and fundamentally honourable. The antagonist is Olivier's Crassus; but even he is motivated by his sense of honour, and we are asked to condemn not the evil man, but the evil system which he cannot but support, and which makes him terrified of slaves, who he must destroy.

The climax, the extraordinarily staged battle on the hillside between the slaves and the Roman legions, is vintage Kubrick -spectacular, terrifying. We know the slaves are doomed, but understand why they have to fight. It is followed by the famous scene in which the entire vanquished slave army declares "I am Spartacus!" rather than allow their leader to be crucified, one of the great moments in film.

Kubrick's next work was the opposite end of the scale, and no doubt closer to his natural instincts - his weird, quirky adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita. In Kubrick's hands (Nabokov wrote the screenplay), this becomes a tragi-comic satire on smalltown America. If you saw Adrian Lyne's awful recent version, put it out of your mind and see Kubrick's funny, discomforting little gem.

Then came Dr Strangelove (Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), Kubrick back again in anti-war territory, and once again focusing on the insanity of power. A lot of the energy comes from the virtuoso performance of Peter Sellers (in three roles); but notice also little touches like the documentary style in which the siege of the US army base is shot. It's cheaper, and a lot more effective, than the lauded opening of Saving Private Ryan - a savage indictment of imperialism's world-destructive drives, done with anger but wit.

2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1968, has been blamed for everything bad that's happened since in American film because of its use of state-of-the-art special effects. Yet there is no other science fiction film anything like it. It's an enigmatic, awesome, philosophical account of the first meeting between humanity and extra-terrestrial life. Some people complain they don't understand it: but a civilisation this advanced would seem magical and beyond understanding. The idea of staging the meeting between astronaut and aliens in a familiar little room, without meeting the aliens at all, is to my mind a stroke of brilliance.

The film has dated somewhat, rooted as it is in the days of moon-shots and the Space Race. But at its heart is a prescient meditation on the nature of artificial intelligence which is more relevant now than it was in '68. HAL, the computer (a warm red light in a cold human environment), goes mad, while the human beings rarely show any emotion at all - and goes mad because its/his creators were unable to grasp the moral complexity of his programming.

Mention should be made of the tremendous cut from the distant past to the near future. An early hominid, who just discovered the use of tools, tosses a bone into the air; as it spins in the sky, the image is transformed into a spinning space station. It's a fantastically economical cinematic image. But more than that, it expresses the very essence of humanity - the role of labour, so to speak, in the transition from ape to man.

Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange (1971) from circulation in the UK because of fears of copy-cat killings. As a result, in this country it can only normally be seen on crappy pirate videos (when a London cinema screened it a few years ago, Kubrick sued) - which is the only way I've seen it myself. Based on Anthony Burgess' novel, the film is an almost cartoonish stylisation of inner-city violence, of moral emptiness, and of the equal moral void in the state's efforts to address the problem. Again, Kubrick goes for complex, ambivalent material: who is worse - the violent thug, or the state which "deals with him" by robbing him of emotion, of humanity?

Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray's novel, is one of Kubrick's least seen and least liked movies, because it is extremely long and slow (and it bombed commercially, I think). But it deserves to be seen. Once again, you have the distinctive Kubrick style and attention to detail - here addressed to lavishly recreating on the screen eighteenth century paintings, even where this required technical breakthroughs in lighting.

It was followed by one of his most popular movies (although at the time it didn't do that well in the cinemas): The Shining, adapted from a Stephen King novel. Kubrick takes a traditional and rather corny ghost story, and turns it into a terrifying indictment of the nuclear family. A man, his wife, and possibly psychic child spend the winter looking after a hotel. There, the conflicts, frustrations and repressed emotions of their family group erupt into violence. For most of the film, you can read the progression of the father (Jack Nicholson) either as his response to the hotel's ghosts, or as simply the development of his own mental instability. If the film has a fault, it is that this "two-level" interpretation is occasionally violated, and only the supernatural explanation is possible. But even at the supernatural level, we are given a powerful metaphor for America: the hotel is built on a graveyard.

Visually, the film is pure Kubrick (the famous tracking shots following the kid around the corridors on his bike; the set-piece "visions", blood pouring out of the elevator) - and there is Kubrick's typical use of classical music, rather than an original score (here it is mainly Bartok).

But the real question which demonstrates the film's strength is simply this: can you think of another horror movie which is even vaguely similar? Poltergiest takes a similar basic idea - the angry spirits of the dead beneath the housing estate; but to compare the films for a moment is to realise how in Kubrick's hands this is not merely a "horror" device, but a statement - something with real meaning. This was Kubrick's greatest skill - to take something familiar and transform it.

Full Metal Jacket does the same thing with the "Vietnam film". Formally, it's unusual, as it is divided into equal halves - first in a training camp, then in battle. (The standard Vietnam film gets you into the jungle a lot earlier.) And this is because, again, of Kubrick's real concern: not just "war" in the abstract, but the relations of power between people. At the film's climax, the Vietnamese sharpshooter who has been scaring the US soldiers to death, and whom they finally kill, turns out to be a teenage girl. The faceless sniper, "the enemy", is just a child. It raises, in very simple dramatic form, the crux of the matter politically: why is a teenage girl prepared to risk her life to fight American soldiers? It might not have the grand epic quality of Apocalypse Now, but it is powerful stuff nonetheless.

Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, will be released later this year. Apparently, it's Kubrick's look into the world of sexual fantasy. In fact many of his films have little or no sexual content at all, which is unusual in itself (some do, of course, most obviously Lolita). It sounds, therefore, like something of a departure. Much has been made of the obsessiveness of Kubrick's demands on the actors (50 odd takes of Cruise coming through a door). The real point, however, is that actors whose standard fee is millions of dollars don't decamp to England for two years and live in near hiding for just anybody. Even Tom Cruise, offered the chance to work with Stanley Kubrick, jumped at it at whatever cost.

A lot was made, in his obituaries, of Kubrick as the last of the "auteurs". This idea, which comes out of 1950s French film theory and the directors who developed it (Jean Luc Goddard, Francois Truffeau), was to do with the director as sole "author" of the work of art. In so far as directors have clear, individual voices, Kubrick was plainly an "auteur"; but the idea has limited meaning. No director is really sole author, as they depend heavily on writers, cinematographers, designers and editors to create their films (not to mention the actors). To detach Lolita from Vladimir Nabokov, or 2001 from Arthur C. Clarke (who co-wrote it) is stupidly to diminish their contribution.

Workers' Liberty 1/55

Eyes Wide Shut
Submitted by Jason on 7 June, 2008 - 19:33.
was in fact very disappointing from the maker of The Shining, Spartacus, Dr Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, 2001 A Space Odyssey- all of which are brilliant. I agree that Full Metal Jacket, Spartacus and The Shining are tour de forces- and very divers as well!

Barry Lyndon is I also agree well worth seeing but not as great. A Clockwork Orange- brilliant book, very disturbing film but still very worth seeing (now widely available) though it is unpleasant in paces- I guess was th epoj t but I personally found it somewhat gratuitous. I haven't seen Lolita.

Eyes Wide Shut has its moments but its overlong, self-indulgent and almost meaningless in my humble and utterly subjective opinion. Unless I missed something.

Never quite sure about artisitc criticism in socialist publications except to say 1) I think it is worth including 2) party lines should not be followed (witness the crass criticism common in the SWP and related tot his 3) there ar eno right answers in art. Despite some fairly fundamental disagreements with the AWL I think this article is quite interesting (though now very dated!)

Submitted by Clive on 8 June, 2008 - 09:31.
It also has a factual error. None of the defendants in Paths of Glory is black. For some reason it was strong in my memory at the time I wrote this that this was the case, but watching the film since, it isn't. Memory is weird, isn't it?

I agree Eyes Wide Shut was pretty awful. It struck me as a film made by someone who really needed to get out more.

You *must* see Lolita.

Harry Benson Photography Exhibition-Glasgow

2008-05-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.glasgowmuseums.com/venue/showExhibition.cfm?venueid=4&itemid=196

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Benson

2008-05-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

For the background and controversy over Pastor Martin Niemöllers' famous Poem see :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...

Original

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

Translation

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,there was no one left to speak out.

MAY 68

2008-05-08T06:47:00.001-07:00

http://www.marxist.com/french-revolution-may-1968-part-one.htm

http://www.marxist.com/french-revolution-may-1968-part-two.htm

Special 40th Anniversary Supplement on May 68 plus article on Miners' Strike

http://www.workersliberty.org/system/files/WL3%3A19.pdf

May 68 at GFT

2008-05-08T06:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.gft.org.uk/content/default.asp?page=s4_1&filmid=4417&weekid=2&date=5/17/2008

A woman’s touch

2008-04-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

Writer and broadcaster Mark Cousins salutes the British documentary movement’s unsung female voice, Stirling’s Ruby Grierson.

http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/arts/display.var.2228443.0.a_womans_touch.php

Santa Cruz- Great Labour Video Film Festival

2008-04-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.reelwork.org

New Film on Pete Seeger " The Power of Song"

http://www.reelwork.org/films.htm#peteseeger

Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’

2008-04-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

Its over 60 years since Orwell wrote the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ -yet its warnings are as relevant now as they were then.Orwell argued that the decline of the English language as a useful tool reflected the political conditions of his time. But far from being an inexorable process he thought the abuse could be stopped and believed journalists had a particular responsibility amongst writers to show their dissatisfaction.

The power of the written word was being under-minded by an adoption of Politician Speak. He gave five examples of bad language accusing the authors of ‘Ugliness’’ ‘Staleness of Imagery’, and ‘Lack of Precision’. Political writing was the most guilty of having those characteristics.

Prose construction was avoided by the use of lazy “ metaphors”,
“Verbal false limbs”, “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words”-
Important precise concepts like Fascism and Democracy had become distorted and were being used in a consciously deceptive way.

Modern writing shunned originality and was the product of lazy uncritical methods of work. His anecdote: Writers should ask -

1 What am I trying to say ?

2 What words will express it ?

3 Could I put it more shortly ?

4 Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly ?

He argued there was causal link between clichéd phrases and the defence of the political status quo, euphemisms numbing the public as words got sanitised by colourless concepts such as ‘pacification’ to describe Genocide.

Orwell’s’ goal was not to straightjacket writers . His key was to let the “meaning choose the word” . It’s almost twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall . WMD’s and “45 minutes” are only the most infamous of many examples that could be given that show Orwells’ essay is, sadly , as relevant as ever.

Peter Burton

Fred Wiseman

2008-04-03T10:00:00.001-07:00

Time for Wiseman

Technological changes in the sixties led to the introduction of lightweight portable
16 mm cameras , the new technology changing the nature of documentary filmmaking.

Cinema Verite minimised voiceover commentary and non-diegestic music. The style and form appeared observational but in fact a film would be culled from days of footage, the selection of shots having deliberate intended effects on the audience.

One of the key exponents of the new style Cimema Verite ( Cinema Truth)
was Fred Wiseman .In the case of Wisemans’ High School 80 minutes of film was selected from 40 hours of footage. On the surface the film looks like a slice of High school life, but through the use of long shots, editing, extensive dialogue, close ups, conflict, and an absence of continuity, a representation is made of power and conformity to that power by students and parents. And “ No one in power loses an argument” to quote Wiseman.

Regimentation of school life is conveyed through association or montage techniques.
The power of both content and form saw Wisemans’ first film Titticut Follies about
the criminally insane at a Massachussettes Institute banned from 1967 until 1991.

Wiseman destroyed stereotypes , and combined tenderness , brutality ,apathy
dedication of purpose and integrity in a way that other Cinema Verite filmmakers struggled to match. To watch a Wiseman film is to go through a real experience. His main films in addition to High School were Hospital 1970 and Near Death 1969. Other must see Cinema Verite films include Salesman 1969, Gimme Shelter 1970, Primary 1960 Grey Gardens 1973 and Don’t Look Back in 1965.

Peter Burton

The Land Where Blues Began

2008-03-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Land Where Blues Began PG
Friday, April 25, 2008 Glasgow Film Theatre

7.00
A self-described "song-hunter," the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and 40s. In the late ‘70s he returned with filmmaker John Bishop and black folklorist Worth Long and made this film, narrated by Lomax and including remarkable performances and stories by J.T. Tucker, William S. Hart, Bill Gordon, Belton Sutherland, Reverend Caeser Smith, James Hall, Johnny Brooks, Clyde Maxwell, Bud Spires, Jack Owens, Beatrice Maxwell, Walter Brown, Wilbert Puckett, and Othar Turner.

Certification (PG)
Director John M. Bishop
Starring Various
Year 1979
Running Time 1h 0m
Country of Origin USA
Language English

Great Book on 65 to 72 in US

2008-03-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

“There’s a riot going on, revolutionaries,rock Stars and the rise and fall of ‘60s counter-culture” by Peter Doggett’

Peter Doggetts “There’s a riot going on, revolutionaries, rock Stars and the rise and fall of 60’s counter-culture was one of the best featured books at the recent Aye Write festival in Glasgow .

The book recalls in detail ( its 525 pages) the uneasy relationship between rock stars, political activists and the counter –culture in the 8 years between 1965 and 1972.

Doggetts’ raison d’etre for the book:-

“ In an era when Bono, the hand in glove darling of the global political establishment and Bruce Springsteen, the personification of cosy liberalism, are revered as rock and pop icons, its timely to be reminded of an era when artists were prepared to court popularity ( And worse) for their ideals.

Dogget also attacks some of the myths that have been created by the artists themselves about the period citing the documentary ‘The U.S. against John Lennon’ as sanitising the role of an artist who gave both money and publicity to the IRA, Black Panthers , The Vietnam solidarity Committee, Zippies, Yippee and ,not least, the “Dylan Liberation Front “.

The book begins with an account of how a key figure like Jerry Rubin began to channel the Berkley Teach- in - in May 1965 for free speech against the war using artists like Phil Ochs . Rubin also attempts to revive and use a by now disgruntled Dylan through Alan Ginsberg. He describes the role of Ginsberg, Ed Sanders and Tulin Kupferberg and their musical ensemble “The Fugs ” exploring the limits of censorship as they travel across America.

Dylans' attitude by 65 is described in discussions with Ginsberg and quotes from Dylan himself. The more Dylan tried to distance himself from the political activists the more they, in turn, tried to reclaim and re-activate him. This took on bizarre proportions as the Dylan obsessive A J Weberman makes it his sole mission to “ liberate Dylan “ launching a “ Dylan liberation Front “ campaign . One of the more unsavoury of Weberman’ tactics was raking through Dylan’s garbage to find incriminating sell-out evidence about the artist.

And Black Panther leaders like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton read coded hidden messages into Dylan’s' lyrics on’ Bringing it all Back home’ and ‘Highway 61 revisited’ supposedly telling them what tactics to use in their war against “ The Man”.

There are recurring chronological accounts of the relations between artists like ,Dylan, Mick Jagger, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe McDonald , The Who, Joan Baez etc and the key underground activists of the time. This is interspersed with arguments that took place within the counter -culture between Abbie Hoffman , Jerry Rubin ,Elridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, John Sinclair, Michael X and key organisations like the SDS, The Weathermen, The Black Panthers over tactics, aims and the very nature of protest itself.

(Mick Jagger comes in for particular criticism for all the tax exile stuff)
Though others are also exposed -( like Jefferson Aeroplane making excuses for not going to the Chicago convention ) where there was likely to be police violence. This is the central ongoing theme of the book.

Doggett is particularly sharp on the absence of women from the revolution. Joan Baez notwithstanding, they were largely expected to roll joints and throw themselves into the cause of sexual freedom.

Asked about the position of women in the black consciousness movement, Stokely Carmichael, “honorary prime minister for the Black Nation”, replied “prone”. Women were not allowed to bear arms in the Black Panthers but would have found a role in the British underground press.

One advertisement in The Black Dwarf read: “Dwarf Designer Seeks Girl. Head girl typer to make tea, organise paper, me. Free food, smoke, space. Suit American negress.”

Dogget also recalls the stories of the big events of these years,Kent state, Woodstock, the Isle of Wight festival, Altamont, Biafra , Attica, the Chicago democratic convention, the Newport Folk Festival , Grovenor square and the Prague Spring - sometimes taking time out to talk about the civil rights protests in the fifties.

There is an ongoing invaluable discography informing readers of seminal albums and individual songs and the affect they had on different individuals and a number of great anecdotes -Country Joe McDonald bursting into anti --Vietnam song at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial having being been primed by pranksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to do so- Dylan cycling after A J Weberman to beat him up after one too many intrusions.

There are also details of meetings between Tariq Ali , Robin Blackburn and Lennon and Yoko and the relationship between Hoffman, Rubin and the Lennon’s in the early
70’s .

“There's a riot going on” is an invaluable book about the counter-culture in the US at a crucial time and the limits of the New left . There are also many lessons for us about successful and unsuccessful tactics through his examination of both the underground activists methods and the American states’ response.

Peter Burton

British Poets and the French Revolution

2008-03-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

The attitudes of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Burns to the French Revolution

http://www.marxist.com/art-revolution.htm

May 68 Photos,Film and Info

2008-03-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

http://brownsoundclothing.com/sla/blog/6868/6868.html

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.ExhibitionDetail_VPage&pid=2TYRYDKUU22I

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbhxy-A22aQ

http://www.photos-mai68.com/index.php?x=browse