I keep the memory of the old humanity alive, and I will keep learning more. The banality of evil must be opposed. It has seeped into our very capacity to remember memories and moods. Poetry marks out our moods, in the past, and the present, but in so struggling, we seek to make a new language for the future to come, with no referents to the past as something to be repeated, but as a passageway to an unknown and infinite future.
Frantz Fanon talks about the need to make a new man. A new woman. A new humanity. The pains of racism and colonialism are carried for several generations at this point. With poetry we can create new communities unlike any other that have ever existed and we can support one another, encourage one another to grow and change, and to really grow into and inhabit our beings.
Love and War (All’s Fair)
The bits of resistance And Love That we got from our parents That they from theirs before Not their resentments at Being treated as subhumans But the joy we tasted Once For a while Before it all changed We never forgot it It was pure unbridled humanity Pure only because it was Was once a being In the fullest sense Of that stupendous word-concept We carry those bits Like they were chits That marked us as damned Or so our vanquishers presumed Little did they know…
… Little did we know Our tokens of love Not our Love itself But its tokens only Were to be the ties that would bind Us to them And them to us Giving the lie to victories Gained through flashes of maneuver Revealing them Empty technological gestures And nothing more Eris’ maniacal laughter Reducing our order to dust With its sonic boom Echoes through the valleys Of Palestine And Israel And India and Pakistan And Kurdistan and Turkey And Syria and Burma And Iraq and Thailand And Bangladesh And the American Southwest Where clowns play the role of patriots And lovers of the land And of beings Are tarred ‘terrorist’ Only because we refuse To control our Love Our capacity for Love To relate across the great chasm The same chasm our parents Crossed With almost nothing They didn’t forget their humanity They taught it to us Imperfectly of course But we got the idea…
… The great idea Of our time Is something called Globalization For the tourist who seeks a photograph To confirm their being’s being The world is now A theme park Replete with exotic destinations Relaxing vacations Massage therapy And professionalized cuddling…
… For the old humanity There is nothing left There is concealment There are blind-alleys and lost paths There are concentration camps And psychotropic medicalizations Metal detectors and radiating scanners Killer robotic drones And an economy at the whim Of foreign bankers And an overwhelming Social directive TO STAY WHERE YOU ARE ANYTHING YOU SAY WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU ANYTIME THAT SUITS US
All nations Are now afflicted by this curse The desire to sublimate all of life And gain perfect security
Against this source of inhumanity And terrorism We the lovers Will remember; Resist; Communicate Our Memories; And build A New World
In early May of 2014, my debate coach, Richard Sodikow, passed away in Florida, where he had retired to after a long and distinguished career at the Bronx High School of Science. He was a pivotal figure in my becoming who I am, and was the first teacher in my life who took me seriously as an independent intellect, as a formed person with something to say, with a window on reality worthy of being shared – and more than anything, he saw my geeky, history-obsessed, geopolitical, the economist-reading, confused postcolonial self and recognized me long before I even recognized myself. He was such a brilliant teacher, and without his intervention, I am unsure I would have finished high school, gone to college, and driven myself to become what I have become in this little life. Without debate, I would have never found my voice, found outlet for my information-absorbing mind, I would have never made real friends in high school, I would have never met my college friends at Redlands – many of whom were debaters, I would have never gotten into college in the first place since I was a rather unremarkable student in high school, and I would not have the honest, daily, subtle, powerful, at times awesome courage I have to remain faithful to my senses, my instincts, my knowledge, and my reasoning.
As Mr. Sodikow says in the lecture from the following clip from 2013, debate is an essential component in the teaching of democracy. When I hear his words tonight, he sounds like the Oracle and the Philosopher-King all rolled into one.
This man was a teacher, from back in the day when the City University of New York was the Proletarian Harvard, and when a democratic wave swept society and revealed who was truly talented. As such, Mr. Sodikow fine-tuned his instincts as a teacher, sifting through the bullshit of the young to discover their inner talents.
Thank you Mr. Sodikow. I fear to contemplate what my life would have been without your eternal lessons.
Reading this brilliant exposition of Friedrich Hölderin’s “Heimkunft: An die Verwandten”
(Homecoming: To Kindred Ones), by Jennifer Bajorek, entitled “The Offices of Homeland Security, or Hölderin’s Terrorism,” I encountered the following selection:
“we might say that if for Hölderin home, if and insofar as it is a place, can only be a place to which one returns, and more precisely to which one is always returning, this is not only because the home that man makes on this earth is not a dwelling place (“Wohnen ist nicht das Innehaben eine Wohnung”). It is because, for Hölderin, “being-there” is always a “being-elsewhere” and first “takes place” by way of a departure. The fact that, in the poem’s framing stanza, the water that figures this movement of departure and return takes the form of the falls only literalizes this displacement of the homeland as a place of origin and as a place to which one might return—and to which one would begin returning only after having left it.”
This leads me to an absolutely liberating synthesis of elements, not a resolution, for such things are illusions, but a fleeting, but joyful, synthesis of elements. So indulge me.
First. These are two songs about becoming homeless, and in the process, becoming oneself, and then, ultimately, declaring a love for life on this earth, between the earth and sky, between beast and god, as a human person, an animal, and a buffalo.
Love and Love Lost
To Love Again in the Face of the Nothing
Second. This is a song about being free.
I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have enjoyed thinking about it. And living it.
We did a show on saturday in Los Angeles. Much love to Ed Keenan, Bobby Musgrave, and everyone in our crew, and everyone at the show. We love you all!
Part 1
Part 2
Also check out this awesome video for ‘Underwater Funk’ shot by a super-awesome anonymous fan!
Endangered Species live in LA!
Ravi Shankar’s passing has produced a profound reverential emotion in me. Love and blessings to all those who love Ravi Shankar. Click the picture below for a link to Sandip Roy’s article ‘Ravi Shankar was our Columbus.’ If you are an Indian anywhere in the world today, or a lover of music, or both, this man’s life marks a pathway towards infinity – an infinity of being, an infinity of existence. His courage and genius are rare. May we live to see the fruits of those who he has inspired throughout the world.
For Ravi – Rest in Power
In death there is trembling rebirth This life is all its ever worth Living for dying for singing more You are not here but always here The pathway through the cosmos Illuminated by the eternal bard The poet of destiny busy making Something out of nothing Over and over again Mysterious cosmic cycle I am your servant and you my guide Revealing to me the beautiful light In the darkest of places where I left Not a trace of myself my caravan We trekked through the dunes Through the desert of the real But we found our way home In a language of love A language of the universe Just a vibration A disturbance in my soul Most sublime Most divine Everyone can feel it And I will show them For I love them all and know something How to make something Out of nothing I hope I have taught them well Has my message been understood? I have stated it clearly With a heroic boldness That love blessed me with Crossing the sea she was my fuel Flying across the planet And off to others You didn’t know? My adventure is a mark A passageway to being A celebration of life An homage to the New Mysterious cycle of life I did it all for you No questions asked Or if asked eventually retired In the name of Love For the Love of the World It’s all we have There is only One Love
The Naked Girl by Danny Roberts
This is one of my favorite songs that me and Bobby have done since we’ve formed Endangered Species. Bobby has had death on his mind for a while now, and I have been slowly returning to the world of the living in the last year and a half of my time among the humans.
We combined our verses into this song ‘Dawn on Her Side’, which tells a story of reaching the very limits of existence, being deeply frightened and anxious, and then returning to life. Why? Because we have no choice but to live.
Click here to hear ‘Dawn on Her Side’
Arundhati Roy is the most important political philosopher of this era. This is her being interviewed by Avi Lewis for Al-Jazeera English’s excellent ‘Faultlines’ program.
I dedicate this post and this song to my mother and father who are now leaving New York behind forever and will return to their natural nomadic state. Unleash the Barbarian, the Intellectual Caliban, the Global Soul, the Hostel Bum, be free from New York City.
occupy motherfuckin’ new york city the land of men with nice suits and women with fake pretty…….
These next two songs feature incredible lyrics and flows from my man the Pensive Blue Polar Bear – but the video cuts off during his verses, which makes me a very sad buffalo. Still my friend Sandii did a great job in capturing this footage so I wanted to share it. That, and also I’m a narcissistic artist discovering the joys of art, so peep how fly we are as performers. And you can really get a sense of what an awesome DJ my man the California Condor is.
Mad Love to Biko House, to TheatreMutiny & The Outcome, to our new DJ the California Condor, and to my comrade the PBPB(P?).
Big servings of love to all our friends and family who came through and rocked the house with us! This was a one for the ages. Check out Endangered Species!
‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’ – not even New York. BB.
Playing Capoeira has been a wonderful experience for me. I learn more about myself, my body, and my consciousness every day. Endangered Species’ new track ‘Circle (Roda)’ is a meditation on the power of circles, and the circle of power.
I grew up in OLD NEW YORK. This is a song about my experiences there. Click here to hear ‘I Can Believe It If You Can Believe It‘ – BB
Sometimes its best to remember where you’ve been. Wolf Parade Live, Oakland, CA. July 2010. My little golden age.
Endangered Species back with a new jam for all the people we love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love. Click here to hear ‘Underwater Funk’. And click here to hear ‘Peaceland’.
The Possum Posse have produced a simply outstanding work of art. Enjoy.
Part 3
Part 4
This is why I do everything I do. Erykah Badu’s words in this song inspire me and clarify my existential confusion – and create an identity that is nothing less than a revolutionary infusion – at this point brothers and sisters, revolution is the only solution.
Hear the words of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the world’s most important political theorists. From her unbowed closing statement at the conclusion of the show trial Putin commenced to silence feminism and liberation fighters for all beings in Russia. (English Subtitles available by clicking on the ‘CC’ link in the player).
Click here for the text of her speech. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova – Closing Statements
Murder, Authority, and the Heart of Whiteness
August 6th, 2012
by S. Jovian Radheshwar, Independent Journalist
My heart is very heavy this afternoon. Yesterday in the state of Wisconsin a white loner with long-standing ties to the White Supremacist movement in this country attacked a congregation of unarmed, innocent, Americans while they were engaged in worship commemorating the importance of children to human communities. Yes, on children’s day, this loser opened fire on a group of Sikh Americans including many children, who had gathered for morning rituals and community activities.
I am not quite registering this event in my head yet, but it feels very similar to the aftermath of the 9.11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC in 2001. Directly after that attack my main reaction was one of vulnerability and fear that people would be too ignorant to fathom the dialectical historical processes that led to that fateful day, instead choosing to allow blame to fall along conventional lines – and our conventions of ‘reasoning’ and ‘logic’ are indeed in total disrepair in America.
All too often linear – and rather thoughtless, ignorance-inspired notions of linearity – thinking, causally connecting unrelated discrete events to one another have allowed simple-minded people to place blame on those who they imagine to be responsible for bad events. This has had the effect of licensing violence in the name of authority and security against those perceived to be outside the social norm. Because of course those within the social norm couldn’t possibly in their normalness be responsible for the violence flowing through the veins of America. Sikhs wear turbans, so does Ayman Al-Zawahiri, they MUST be in cahoots with each other! Just like all Muslims, too, they share the same religion as Ilyas Kashmiri (recently killed in a drone strike in Pakistan), who because he has dared to attack American soldiers MUST be a terrorist, and Muslims MUST share his beliefs and values to the letter. And better to be safe than sorry, those South Asians from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and those Arab Muslims, too, like those ungrateful Iraqis, must all be treated as potential threats unless they obsequiously prove otherwise.
And part of that is that they have to always remind us white folks how thankful they are to live in America, the best place on earth, to which we have an exclusive sovereignty over. Otherwise they can go back to their stinking hole where they belong.
And if this narrative is not adhered to, to varying degrees, varying whites spread across the social spectrum in American society, will take it upon themselves to be ‘the decider’ and relegate us people of colour, and in the context of post 9.11 America especially us South Asians, to the status of what Noam Chomsky has called the ‘unpeople’. In the Vietnam war the ‘unpeople’ were Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and eventually given the anti-socialist and anti-humanist nature of the domestic political discourse, hippies, radicals, and American revolutionaries like Angela Davis, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X (three of whom were killed by the state and one who had to fight with unparalleled bravery to remain alive). Today many of these groups remain ‘unpeople’, and to that list we should add Native Americans, women with the audacity to break gender norms, homosexuals in most of America (and who are only tolerated as a museful curiosity in ‘liberal’ America), and now South Asians of all religious backgrounds.
Some South Asians, especially Americans from a Hindu background, have done their best to try and fit in and to become mainstream. Especially younger folks in this community, since many can adopt enough of the tokens of being white in order to shield themselves from discrimination in social, professional, legal, and other settings. But there is a cost in terms of individual dignity in all of this, and furthermore, no amount of performed whiteness can obviate the fact that your last name is Krisnamurty, Gopalacharian, Bhagawan, Lakhwani, or Radheshwar. When the racist murdering brigade is in town looking for bodies, yours will suffice as much as Muhammad, Singh, Zafrullah, or Al-Arian. Ultimately, in America, until White Supremacy as a political ideology is relentlessly confronted and made into a shameful belief system, and until Whites themselves join in this necessary crusade, any pretensions to rational governance, liberalism, and yes, even to this being a free country, are utterly laughable.
Whiteness is a system of privilege that reinforces the historically-contingent belief in racism and racial hierarchies, which are long proven to be without any scientific basis, such that those with a certain pigmentation of skin can dare to act as though they are islands to themselves, individually-constituted and not formed through macro and microsocial processes (like all humans), and bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions, thoughts, words, and beliefs. Those who challenge whiteness, for whites who buy into whiteness as their historical inheritance, must either be defeated in varying forms of rhetorical denunciation ranging from shouting down, groupthink enforcement, and through being characterised as irrational (and therefore as not fully human), or, if this fails, must be destroyed through violence.
Firearms are a particularly effective way of doing this. So are nuclear warhead-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (China and India, with their colonial humiliations, have long been eager to prove how worthy of being ‘white’ they are on the global stage – a stage long set up by and managed by whites from Europe and America operating on an ideology of White Supremacy) that can annihilate whole cities without a worry of retaliation from ‘lesser powers’. And with the end of the ‘Cold War’ and the global geopolitical competition between nation-states and the large territories they encompassed and held the right of sovereign violence over, and the replacement of those political coordinates with the triumph of Western notions of human nature and capitalism (practiced by Western and non-Western peoples, sad to say) in the context of what is now called globalisation, with the ‘war on terror’ against non-conformists that entails (Muslims, Indigenous peoples, Radical Homosexuals and Transgendered Peoples, Anarchists, Environmentalists and Deep-Ecologists, and of course, Transnational Socialist Political Solidarity and Activist Networks), we have now witnessed the reintroduction of medieval technologies of torture (updated for modern times), and that hallmark of the ‘liberal’ Obama government, the Predator Aerial Drone aircraft, capable of delivering death from above with zero accountability in either legal forms, or the traditional form of having to be present for the firefight itself and thus putting oneself in physical danger in order to carry out the writ of the (now transnational) state.
But back on the ground in the good ol’ US of A the majority of people of colour are disarmed, especially immigrant communities who have not had experience of repeatedly tasting the organised violence of White Supremacy and who have for careerist reasons done all they could to avoid questions concerning the persistence of White Supremacy in order to more safely facilitate their ‘getting along’ and climbing of the ladder. Bred out of a colonial bureaucratic meritocracy, the Indian-American elite, Sikh and otherwise, and their brand of community media (such as the ubiquitous India Abroad), vaunt the achievements of Indian-Americans who play the game of gaining wealth and educational success, seemingly getting them closer to that goal of white privilege. We believe in the state, in meritocracy, and think ourselves quite capable of assimilation.
But this all ignores what whiteness is all about. It’s about maintaining an irrational, non-meritocratic system of skin-colour privilege that is more about acting out audacious and hubristic claims of being ‘normal’ and then enforcing the norm by whatever means necessary. When low-minded white people (there are high-minded white people, I have many white friends, and I truly love them and they are largely in agreement with all my points herein) feel cornered they reach for rhetorical hatred, fighting words, a mask of fearsomeness, group-censure/groupthink/othering, and failing these tools, violence, to enforce and reinforce their supremacy, their inability to be wrong, their ignorance of which they are proud, and in the final analysis, their audaciously claimed right to determine what the normal and accepted form of life is in their surroundings. This is the metaphysics of whiteness in a nutshell, and it must avoid contamination by the physis that surrounds it always already, panoptically disciplining the becoming of being from a shifting and arbitrary vantage-point of white supremacy.
Giorgio Agamben, the Italian political theorist of space and civilisation, has argued famously that the European metaphysical notion of civilisation has required the designation of a figure as homo sacer, or sacred man, a being whose life can be extinguished without ceremony; an act for which there would be no penalty under the law. He builds this idea through his reading of the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty and violence, on the one hand, and the supposed nature of the political space as being defined by the exclusion of enemies via the ‘friend-enemy distinction’ on the other hand. In addition to this manichean world view, which through its arbitrary reinforcement over time in different circumstances MUST become relativistic in regards to its supposed ‘values’, as theorised by Agamben in his discussions of Walter Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt, we can add Friedrich Nietzsche’s insight that the social sciences are the rituals of theology and explanation that we moderns in the West have created in order to explain to ourselves that which the concept of God could no longer suffice to explain. This means something very scary in our modern times: namely, that because when the racist George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in Florida a few months back he was not immediately arrested and tried despite confessing to the killing, and that in light of that event it was revealed that there are NO DATA ON POLICE KILLINGS OF INNOCENT PERSONS MAINTAINED BY THE FBI, and that in the wake of yesterday’s tragedy in Wisconsin that there are NO DATA MAINTAINED BY THE FBI ON HATE VIOLENCE AGAINST SIKH AMERICANS, we can maintain that young black boys and Sikh Americans both are potentially homines sacri. This despite the fact that Amardeep Singh, the President’s outreach coordinator to South Asians in America, has vociferously lobbied for such statistics to be maintained on Sikh-Americans for many years now, including in his role as a prominent Sikh activist in civil society organisations prior to his work in the Obama government.
All criticism of people of colour who sell-out aside, and Amardeep Singh IS NOT one of them, he is a champion of our South Asian American communities, this essay invites all Americans, all peoples, to reflect on the nature of sovereign violence and its role in the maintenance of privilege. In America, for historically-contingent reasons and NOT ‘RACIAL’ ones, whiteness has been that system of privilege that is maintained undemocratically, irrationally, and with terrorist violence. In each case of mass shootings with only one or two exceptions (there have been 57 in the past 30 years, according to reports in major media today), the perpetrator has been a person of European descent, often experiencing a breakdown in their psychology due to a loss of privilege. Just to cite the other important recent example, James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter, was recorded as having stated antipathy and even racially-charged anger towards ‘rap music’, and was a privileged young white man confronting his own failure. Just down the road from there in 1999 in Littleton, Colorado, two young white boys chose the day of Hitler’s birth, a man they admired, to target people of colour and women who had insulted them in the infamous Columbine massacre.
In order to avoid confronting the reality of what America’s neoimperialist, British-role-inheriting foreign policy has done in South Asia and the Middle East, we now bomb those countries and call those driven to counter-violence there ‘terrorists’, denying their political claims of having any historical basis, and ignoring our own terrorism there. It comes as no surprise, sadly, to me, that the murderer in yesterday’s horrific massacre in Wisconsin was himself an Army veteran, fed a myopic worldview of white privilege and American exceptionalism.
What truly makes America an exceptional nation is its many immigrants and immense diversity; all have contributed to this beautiful, historically-unique social fabric. America is NOT a white nation, it never has been, and the only thing currently exceptional about white Americans is the arrogance some, all too many, of them have in closing their eyes to history, reality, and their everyday surroundings, and their neighbours.
What up friends, enemies, ex-lovers, mother, brother, soul sisters…….
here’s a big fat juicy link to Endangered Species’ Soundcloud
Nothing:Being
Am I always going to love her? No, but I used to I used to love her a lot I woke up every morning With her eyes fixed on me Her smile gracing my being With her brightness She was powerful And happy When I met her And thereafter happier Than she ever was In her entire life And regardless Of how it ended I know with certainty This was because Of me
It ended badly Worse than I ever imagined She lied to me Treated me like A basket case Someone who was beyond Any hope or redemption She was wrong
Do I still love her? No, not really Not very much at all There is some fondness There is some memory But what happened Means nothing Because Of that nothing It made everything nothing And now I Am also nothing
That part of my mind That holds her In any way at all Is like a poisonous Venomous Virus
But I am learning How to fight it Put it in its place And transform It into Art And believe you me I glory Glory In the violence The violence The blood The tears Of this process
All doctrines I ever saw in life Said the same thing
There is no God But God There is no Love But Love There is no Buffalo philosopher But Jovian
You must negate yourself To become yourself
When the ego holds Onto pain as a marker Of measures of justice And rightness And wrongness The being is trapped The self is imprisoned
Art transforms The self From an ego Into a being By the simple act of doing Which is a becoming Which is always already The essence of being
She lied to me But in that lie Lay her freedom Her violence was strong Its marks Run the length Of my body And the expanse Of my soul
My violence Works differently The negation that I am The space I occupy And the time I take up Has been for a long time A being at war A grizzled and grizzly veteran Fighting the lies of nations Those lies That trap us all In a trap of the ego Connecting the being To the nation And the being To the identity Understood As timeless essence
Long ago I freed her From the nation of nothingness Freed her Sexually Intellectually Existentially
But the world I showed her Was bleak and unadorned By the effects Of the ego
I got over this Self as ego business Long ago
She couldn’t take it And went back Into The Matrix Of identity understood As essence
I stand alone In the nothing In the midst of nothingness But nonetheless Always already surrounded By beings Busy being alongside me
In the nothing I revel in my non-being In my blood-soaked baptism That has been The fortune of my tale
My harvest of nothingness Pours forth thereafter Through the power of my will And the blessings Of the Gods and the Earths The being That I posit over and against The nothing
And off in the distance I hear The operatic overture Of Schiller’s Ode to Joy
Deine Sauber binden wieder Was die Möde streng geteilt! Seid Umschlungen Millionen! Diesen Kuβ den ganzen Welt!
Your magic reunites What stern custom once divided Be embraced you millions! This kiss for the whole world!
S. Jovian Radheshwar (2011)
I dedicate this song to the Goddess Eris, Discordia, and her mysterious ways…….
MC Bitter Buffalo is a benevolent spirit.
Me and Dustin performed this song together some time back before I developed singing skills. In the meantime, Dustin has really gone all out and has turned my old classic poem, ‘A Long Train Ride’, into a beautiful guitar song. Oh and the dude can sing and whistle too!
Mad love to Dustin Foster
Dustin Foster – A Long Train Ride
The Bitter Buffalo was only really bitter and barely being a buffalo after he became homeless again in April 2011. Meeting the music and briefly and with great fortune in person once (leaving me stammering like a fanboy), the beauty of MC JNaturaL, her music, her being, the bitter buffalo began to regain his footing. This song was originally inspired by the theme of being thankful and the Bitter Buffalo is supremely thankful to MC JNaturaL.
Thanks Janelle.
Click Here to hear “Thankful”
BB
MC JNaturaL Live in December 2011. Project Blowed Anniversary Show, House of Blues, Los Angeles.
We’ve got some new songs for all the beautiful beings…..
Bleep Blorp (ES remix)
(Bitter Buffalo in) Heaven & Hell
Life in a Day
Look for a couple of new songs in the next few months…..
I was lonely and bored so I practiced a little tonight.
Endangered Species, Bobby Musgrave and Jovian Radheshwar, got a new song for y’all. Entitled ‘Nujabes’, this is a song done in honor of a special lady, ripping through space time but succumbing to the limits of the space-time continuum and its inherent mysteries (Bobby has pretty cool lyrics), complex and creative wordplay, and that wonderful sought after thing we can all appreciate: profound catharsis following the end of an intense long-term relationship that left the everyday world shattered into pieces. Mad love Pachira….
Together we are Bitter Buffalo (Jovian Radheshwar) and Pensive Blue Polar Bear (Bobby Musgrave) a.k.a. – Endangered Species, a.k.a. – Arctic Circle Ballerz, a.k.a. – Bloody Bison, a.k.a. – Perverted Polar Bear, a.k.a. – a.k.a. (weren’t expecting that were ya?)
This song is also a worshipful tribute to Nujabes, whose music contains more layers than one could ever go through. Rest in Power – we’ll honor your sound and transmit your aesthetic.
Click the link.
Bitter Buffalo and Pensive Blue Polar Bear – Nujabes
Bang.
Bitter Buffalo’s verse from ‘Bleep Blorp’, a collaborative project with Bobby Musgrave aka tbd.
On September 11th, 2011, a tragedy befell my family, especially my Mother, whose dear friend from college in Bombay, India, was killed in her home by thieves. This is a poem written by my mother, Damu Radheshwar, in loving memory of her friend, Bharti Shah.
Click here for a link to a story about Bharti’s murder.
Bharti Shah, RIP
September 2011
Tribute to you, Bharti, my friend As the years went by, our friendship blossomed The girls that we were, teasing and all that, personalities Simple and complex, different yet influencing- growing Tenderness of our friendship binding us together for ever
Bharti, of all of us, you were different, the selfless saint Not a mean bone in your body, ever ready to accommodate, It is not just I, check with the masses, they will all say the same You could never keep time because you were not the one to say no
The meticulous artist that you were Whether with great Rangolis, or perfect Attire or the great practical spaces designed For the many doting clients, all loved you dearly
Bharti, you worked hard to be independent of bonds You did not walk away from the burdens bestowed upon You sacrificed the happinesses gladly and willingly, ungrudgingly Your life foundation was the confidence-solid rock that you had become
You fulfilled yourself with beautiful music and art and Travels, through new friendships and honest relationships Self assured, confident professional who filled her time with Work, attention to detail however mundane, until satisfactorily done
Dear dear Bharti, I was proud to know you in your life Your murder is devastating not just for me but all I know And all that you know, all that live after brutally removing you Every one must know the tragedy that struck us, your story has to live
MY FRIEND you will live long with me, until the dying day.
Damu Radheshwar
Reflections on Ten Years of War
September 10th, 2011
I never lived in the midst of war in the first 22 years of my life. Like most middle-class Americans I prioritized myself and my own pleasure above broader social concerns, even though I had always studied those larger issues, nevertheless as a young man sheltered from the unfoldings of life and the struggles of being-in-the-world I treated these concerns as pleasantries. Yes, that’s right. Pleasantries for the mind to ruminate upon, to think about, to write about and for me to show off my intellectual prowess in collegiate and social settings. I know how callous I must sound writing these words. People in America the whole of my life prior to the last ten years all seemed to run this way, on their own gas, their own dreams, call them delusions if you will. I had my own version of all this, and was content as an armchair analyst of international affairs, war and peace issues, and global economics. T’was an idyllic age and it was not meant to last, and it never could if we examine the bases on which it had all been constructed.
I got a wake up call when I watched the buildings fall. I was in Redlands, California, and I happened to be sharing a bed that morning with someone I care very very much about. I heard the phone ring over and over, and when I finally answered it one of my dearest friends was on the other end hollering at me, ‘they attacked the twin towers!’ My shock and disbelief initially upon hearing this cannot be overstated – indeed it is crippling to think about. The television in the next room beckoned me, and on switching it on I was greeted by the now infamous file-footage of Palestinians in the West Bank supposedly celebrating the attacks by singing and dancing in the streets of their refugee camps that many of them have been consigned to since the Nakba many years ago. I am ashamed to say that that morning, and for many mornings after, many aspects of my critical faculties were suspended. I am most ashamed of punching my television screen repeatedly in anger whilst those images cycled through on the pre-programmed insidious loop that for some reason passed as news that morning, when the world was on fire. A question mark hangs over that one and certain answers are unlikely. Did the pro-Israel factions in the nation’s politics and media circles decide to ‘seize the day’ as it were and ratchet up their agenda as well? Are our journalists so stupid and racist that groping for any explanation they reached for something that seemed obvious to their limited worldviews? Keep in mind I was duped by all this too and these criticisms apply to me.
And the same should be said for any criticisms I am making of the American reaction to 9.11 and the onslaught of ten years of war we have all been enduring ever since then. I favored the Afghanistan operation, although I was never taken in by the lies surrounding Iraq – those were a little bit too obvious. Those associated with Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’ more generally, had a more subtle quality in accordance with the prevailing notions of human nature and progress that I had been acquainted with most of my life: women’s rights, the defense of modernity against backwardness, all punctuated by an overriding belief in progress as a natural way of organizing our expectations about human life. Indeed I wrote more or less the same at the time, but I maintained the reservations about modern warfare I always had, taking special exception to the likelihood that aerial bombing would be used in the coming wars against innocent people out of course with little consideration authentically given to their lives’ inherent sacredness. I was myopic to say the least, but I will maintain that if the government never used air warfare against civilians, and opted to follow the advice I and many other thoughtful people had at the time – to use police powers and investigations to bring the perpetrators of 9.11 to justice – then there would be no wars, no economic collapse, and America’s tradition of rights and freedom wouldn’t have been destroyed by massive expansions of government power to arrest, torture, kill and censor thought and communication. But this is backwards thinking in the most literal sense.
What we have actually lost, and I can attest to this as a front-row seat-holder, is the concern for other people besides for ourselves. In the midst of the 1990′s rapid individualism and the expansion of modern capitalism there still remained an underlying desire on the part of most people for connections with other people, save for insular fundamentalists and other psychopaths. In the wake of the 9.11.2001 attacks fear has become our most powerful emotion, and this emotion finds its locus of expression first and foremost in the presence and being of other people in our surroundings as their ambiguous being will always find a way of manifesting itself in a fearsome manner to the essentially fearful.
This crippling fear takes a number of forms, and the genesis of these new mutations certainly preceded 9.11. Racism and divide and conquer politics used to keep neighbors and potential friends apart, the suppression of worker-rights and the use of terrorism to ensure labor discipline, domestic terrorism of husbands against wives long rampant in American society, an imperial legacy steeped in all of the same anxieties and pressures that gave rise to the prior listed concerns, and many other various factors influence the phenomena of this fear and its appearing manifestation. But the events of 9.11 and the following political practices and apolitical fear-ridden retreat from consciousness of many Americans mark a new chapter in a sordid history of puritanism, imperial expansion, racialized slavery of Africans, exploitation of Latinos and Natives and Asian laborers, etc. The attacks, in their spectacular form, rendered in a most theatrical and powerful manner the lurking fear that had long been taught and passed-down from generation to generation in America. The attacks made it clear who would be an American according to the old-fashioned, fear-driven nationalist criteria and who wouldn’t be for whatever expedient reason might be needed for their exclusion.
This is what the ‘war on terror’ has come to be all about: the need to preserve fear as a justification for order not merely at some over-arching governmental level or broad social level manipulated by managerial elites behind closed doors, but as an individually-world-structuring coda for individuals who cannot face a reality in which the possibility of authentic meeting between self and other exists.
My PhD adviser, the illustrious and brilliant Cedric Robinson, has prophesied such a state of affairs in his own Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, in which an existential insecurity is posited as the basis for the ‘order of politicality’ such that the question of politics arises in the first instance. The issue, then, is not necessarily one of politics understood as an institutional fora for the administration of society’s affairs, but politics on a more fundamental level of the radical question: ‘how will we live together?’
The answer to this is hardly a foregone conclusion, but the balance of forces as a result of a particular socialization and education for followership favors a majority that coalesces around the lowest-common denominator, in this case fear. The camaraderie of fear, then, has the effect of precluding certain kinds of connections from happening organically in society, and accentuates the likelihood and salience of other kinds of connections. In this simple scenario, if we extrapolate a little bit about the fallout of the 9.11 attacks on people who have already been reared in a fear-worshipping manner, we can see that their instinct was, and will continue to be, to reinforce the identity, or being, of whatever it is that may deliver them, however temporarily or chimerically, from fear. In fact, an authentic and radical solution confronting the fear itself is precluded in such a response to terror, as the memory of the incident itself becomes so strong as to be nearly-worshipped as a source of all meaning in reality. This is the case, again, because this is precisely the axis of being along which the battle over what constitutes ‘meaning’ is waged.
Some of us want to remember 9.11 as a terrible event, and wish to see its connection to a string of tragedies so that we can explain its radical violence to ourselves. Others wish to see 9.11 in complete isolation from other events, deifying the event in a macabre half-worship of a half-death not experienced by the living who worship it thus but who are nonetheless jealous of the certainty afforded to the dead by it. Their retroactive deification of the dead themselves with petty monuments that do no justice to the actual circumstances of the deads’ deaths is sufficient evidence to make this case. Others still want 9.11 to disappear from our consciousnesses altogether such that they might no longer have to deal with it, as they generally seek a retreat from politics.
But with news of Arab-Americans and Indian-Americans being harassed and mistakenly persecuted on 9.11.2011, on the tenth anniversary of 9.11, Obama’s statements about ‘us’ preserving ‘our’ values ring hollow. All that Americans have learned in ten years is how to better follow orders and how to truncate their minds’ spontaneities in favor of prescriptions for certainty. All that Americans have preserved is their deep-seated fear of confronting a reality they have long ago sought to avoid for good or ill. Needless to say that these main narratives I am suggesting fail to account for all possibilities, including more radical possibilities that might call into question American values altogether or which don’t conform to the Western temporalization of time and spatialization of space, thus imagining the world-historical significance of 9.11 in an entirely different manner than is being presented in this essay.
An example of the error in thinking that our spatio-temporalization of 9.11 is always uncontroversial and therefore ostensibly ‘correct’ is the basic and repeated error on the part of media professionals, government elites, common citizens and peoples, and others as well, that on 9.11 ’3,000 Americans lost their lives’. Leaving the exact number aside here, the fact of the matter is that in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, on the morning of 9.11 as on any other morning during the work-week, many hundreds of persons whose origins and citizenship are scattered across the globe reported for their daily labor. And many of these persons died in the ensuing conflagration and building collapse. Therefore, this common-sense and commonplace approach to counting the dead is itself not one-hundred percent believable, save for the individual whose own worldview is confirmed by its repeated utterance – and I would suggest that such an individual cares only for American lives and not at all for the lives of persons from any other country – and this neatly dovetails with their similar non-care for the lives of people on the receiving end of America’s retaliatory terrorism waged in the wake of the 9.11 attacks.
As Americans, however, we are committed for the time being to a particular spatio-temporalization of existence such that the 9.11 attacks are of the utmost significance and our treatment of the response to these attacks will determine our fate as a people. Those who casually dismiss concerns about innocents dying as a result of our attacks globally, especially according to the outmoded ‘laws of war’ which permit the killing of collateral individuals so long as their specific targeting is not official policy, care nothing for the dead of 9.11, who themselves were similar ‘collateral damage’, as well.
The tide of war has overtaken our values, our society and our love. The promotion of individualism on the level of a war of all against all, wherein we constantly surveil ourselves and others for advantage or the presence of threats, has been the modus operandi of the ‘war on terror’. We no longer trust one another, unionization rates are falling, social spending is rapidly being cast-aside by large swathes of Americans as being dangerously naive, wasteful and threatening to accumulated privileges. Knee-jerk responses to these threats, where already permissible, verge on the brutally violent by default, and, all the while, where limitations have existed (such as within America’s domestic space) these boundaries are being undermined by the phenomena of mission creep and its psychological consequences, which have brought more and more Americans and residents of America within the ambit of state control and surveillance. This has deleterious consequences for our political rights, to be sure, but also negatively effects our social world, with various forms of interaction increasingly proscribed and even forbidden. The great suburban war has began, and in our desire to defend our right to have any desire we wish to desire, our chief desire has become our private prisons which afford us the microcosm of security which our government defends at a macrosocial level through its seizure of the reigns of political economy via militaries and central banks – which taken together are merely reminders for the rest of us of the powerlessness we each experience when we are isolated from one another.
In our isolation, in our failure of trust, in our asocial pursuit of enjoyments, we ignore the suffering of the world, and further justify the repression of the expression of the political dreams of the sufferers insofar as we repeatedly resort to the political ontology of exclusion through increasingly devastating technologies of separation.
As an instinctual non-conformist, freedom-loving and other-regarding being, I feel the loss of the post world war 2 dream acutely, and the difference between my youth and the world of today couldn’t be sharper. In the 1990′s, despite all their contradictory impulses, people in society were moving into an era without fear. This was the great promise of the liberal revolutions of the 1960′s, which always admitted their debt to Marx and socialist thinking. In the wake of the Twin Towers, this dream collapsed and we have been bequeathed a permanent war to defend our private prisons of privilege, to which we have become so addicted that authentic connection with other persons has become cripplingly difficult for most and has even become cognitively unfathomable by default.
The first performance of Moloko Veloczech, consisting of Dustin Foster and Jovian Radheshwar. Check out Dustin Foster’s blog the milkbar for some excellent insight about the state of the world.
Pink Floyd’s ‘Outside the Wall’
….” the bleeding hearts and the artists take their stand and when they’ve given you their all some stagger and fall after all its not easy, banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall “…….
This is an amazing article which inspires me to write about the battle for preserving the human race and indeed the very idea of ‘being’ itself as a possibility. A truly remarkable piece.
It is also essential that this article posits a question about what exactly constitutes freedom in the modern age. The moderns in India have exhausted the possibility of freedom bequeathed to them from the British, and must seek radically new form if their society is to stand. Without this sort of a political re-thinking, the politics of freedom in modern India threatens to continue being a politics of the rich against the poor, the educated and westernized against the majority of Indians who remain more Indian than Western. India is fighting its own ‘war on terror’ and the betrayal of India’s poor at the heart of it makes India’s middle and upper-classes sound as retrograde as American conservatives and liberals in the common excoriation of Muslims, luddites, leftists and anyone else they consider to be a recalcitrant of modernity.
Modernity is a political ideology that disciplines temporality. It is not progress.
Click here for the article or on the picture
Arundhati Roy and Maoists in Dantewada
Its been ten years since September 11th, 2001. These last ten years of my life have been full of adventures, taking me from New York to Southern California to the Pacific Northwest to the San Francisco Bay Area to Europe several times and to the place of my birth and the land of my ancestors, India, on one occasion. The world has changed completely. Globalization has marched forward to the point that in San Francisco you more or less have to make restaurant reservations on the internet, something you can do while walking down the street using a google search product to show nearby cuisine to your liking. In Bangalore, India, housewives desirous of the lifestyle of Western women, lobby against the city passing a law to reduce motor fumes in the shopping district by cutting the number of cars – the women wanted to be able to have their drivers deliver them directly to their favorite stores! In Europe I saw on many levels the increasing multiculturalism of the continent, still highly flawed to be sure, but one that is a fact and is growing. The young Turks in Germany and the Algerians in France, the Pakistanis in Britain and the Tunisians in Italy – the continent is changing and the culture is changing. Change is the commonality, unsurprisingly, in all my travels, and in my own being, the wheel of time, beyond the comprehension of a mere human.
One alarming change since September 11th, 2001, that has literally shaken me to the core as an American, a human being, and a person believing in love and freedom, has been the wholesale shift in our societies beyond the experience of freedom, towards new values and ideals in greater currency. Change. Now the world organizes itself around power pure and simple, rather than power disguised, power transformed and tamed, but rather power in its own realm. For its own sake. Nietzsche truly is the prophet of the West, as has been recognized by all great thinkers. When he refers in Ecce Homo to the ‘great war of spirits’ he is being infinitely ironic – at least to those of us schooled in his ideas. In the first instance, he is critical of the idea of ‘spirit’ as this is a metaphysical trap for the becoming of the body – a becoming he sees entrapped by the idea that being is a solid essence. Nonetheless, the will to power itself, that aspect of existence Nietzsche prophesied to be the essential cause of all reality, cannot itself stabilize the process of any particular becoming – and as a result the world bequeathed to us by the force and dissolvent power of his criticism is an inherently illusory one, where strength and weakness readily switch places, where ‘proper recognition’ of the excellent is hardly guaranteed, and where chaos reigns in the hearts of all people be they strong or lacking in the necessary fortitude. In such a world, surely, freedom can begin to seem a quaint, dangerous and lacking in practical utility. Power, security, and station, instead, come to the fore as compliments to being prioritized in the current era.
And hence the sadness ensues from a wholesale disregarding of freedom, even on the part of those who proclaim freedom to be their highest value. Indeed, what these people refer to is not freedom but identity understood as a secure vantage from which existence can be guaranteed, free-ing themselves from interference externally in their ongoing performance of identity. This means essentially that with regard to the unfolding of reality and the being of all the beings in the midst of the ‘free’ person, the ‘free’ person must always be securing itself against others. The result of this is that certain individuals and groups with a greater material and institutional ability to accomplish this will have more freedom than others – and with enough power, these groups can exchange the actual ability to act with freedom for the sake of maintaining their status as the ‘free’ ones, who can simply then enjoy decadence at the expense of others. Freedom can only be enjoyed in a shared world, as without this world, the human idea of being free, rather than a radical confrontation with reality, becomes instead the ability to pursue individualized releases of sensation. As Hobbes famously concluded, this form of liberty is perfectly compatible with public despotism, which, as seen in later theorists of freedom subsequent to Hobbes, always threatens the general franchise of liberty by divesting it of any stable social and communicative content.
This brings us to the ‘war on terror’, which has always been in the forefront of my mind since September 11th, 2001, when the attacks on New York and Washington happened. America was always a really conformist country, and I always felt a little bit out of place, but the air in the 1990′s had something very different about it – and the air in the early 21st century before 9.11 was also a sweet mist. The late 1990′s saw a high degree of cultural fluidity and a near-completion of the triumph of the 1960′s in popular culture with increasing levels of marijuana use, sexual promiscuity, tolerance and acceptance of homosexuals, increasingly diverse cultural forms in the arts reflecting diasporic and immigrant traditions mixing with long-standing ‘American’ traditions, and while not in any way above criticism, increasing levels of wealth in society along with rapidly increasing levels of college-educated persons. The interregnum following the Cold War and the ‘War on Terror’ was a rather idyllic age for many Americans, and many of the ills of our society were beginning to be addressed by public political action and increased levels of political awareness on the part of the population. In 1999 there was the ‘Battle of Seattle’ which nearly mainstreamed anti-globalization protest, there were increasing levels of awareness of environmental issues, and in the universities, especially, a critical practice which subjected racism, empire, capitalism, patriarchy and other systems of oppression to systematic analysis aimed at freeing minds from psychological totems. Many problems still persisted and were even getting worse all the while, such as increased police brutality, increased racial profiling of many groups for various reasons associated with ‘threat-management’, and a painful anti-intellectualism that dominated much of the country relegating the intelligent to anti-social professions and uninfluential positions. But, I felt, at least, that the trends were positive and a profound political opening was there to be seized by liberal and freedom-loving forces.
Few people shared my vision. Most people instead sought refuge in their private fantasy lives, their romantic affairs, their social circles and the inevitable ‘he said she said’ voyeurism attendant to such groups, their love for entertainment and distraction, and, in the mask of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘globalization’, a shallow appreciation of ‘other cultures’, often through the experiencing of cuisine. This state of affairs has enervated me, although I find sources of inspiration, miraculously, from time to time to get moving again. After 9.11, though, this problem has intensified, with fear governing people’s choices to such an extent that all other factors are rather insignificant, and all the while those same people seek to cover up the fact that fear is their God through moral grandstanding that objects to anything that brings to the fore their fear for them to bear witness to. Bearing witness, indeed, is something most shrink from in all cases. Fear even prevents this from occurring.
This is a major problem, well, for all of us. If we cannot be in the world we ourselves have made, then surely the ensuing collapse of that world is a foregone conclusion. The inevitability of this is further enhanced by the fact that we are actively destroying our world now, as all forms of interconnection have come under intense scrutiny by those proclaiming individuality and freedom to be their highest goods. Little do they know that their valorization of the self above all other units of existence threatens and endangers the continuing existence of that very self. The ‘war on terror’ declares that all forms of political persuasion, from the violent to the rhetorically-effective, are all proscribed from the realm of legitimate political action – and this undercuts the very liberalism that underlies our notion of freedom. That set of policies, institutions and social practices which defined liberalism in the Cold War, in the post Cold War era, and in our society’s various educational institutions has been forgotten, has now been replaced with the absence of policies and programs as these are seen as forms of ‘despotism’. Of course, this can only be the case if those who deem policies intended to aid society deem the benefit of society to be opposed to their interest.
Freedom, then, cannot be experienced entirely within oneself, although this experience is possible within certain limits which are beyond the control of the individual. Freedom must be a social experience, as it is a concept emergent from our languages. Indeed, the concept of freedom exists globally in all societies in some manner or another – suggesting an important evolutionary and psychological adaptation. In societies where freedom has been repressed, it nonetheless eventually finds expression. This should both warm our hearts and frighten us out of complacency, making our urgency and anxiety come to a fever pitch. If we feel, that is.
Many of us do not have feelings as grand as the ones which used to inspire people. Our desire to help others is often caught up with intensely tangled strands of guilt and alienation, our desire to improve our own lives essentially linked to an ongoing comparison we make with others whose normal appearances have become the mechanism by which we measure our own self-worth, and our desire to feel increasingly categorizable and reducible to sensory nodules interchangeable across activity. We can go skydiving and we can bake organic cupcakes, we can go see a special-effects laden movie and then go and consume the natural world through a securely cordoned off natural area safe from the city and real predators. We have the souls of tourists and the morality of calculators. Some of us who are more guilty than others aspire to creating morality as a slide-rule to be used as a universal guide for action. All of these people miss the point about the origins of morality in bio-physical adaptations and the inherent plurality of situations and circumstances in which moral decisions must be made. This incommensurability requires that we are more authentically liberal and individually-reflective than most of us have been, as we have settled for pacification in the stead of freedom.
Sadly then I feel the ‘war on terror’ has become a social consensus not only among conservatives, but among liberals and most apolitical people, and not only in America, but increasingly so globally as well. This is directly connected to the extent to which we have abandoned valuing freedom. Freedom has been, luckily, safeguarded and expanded in other parts of the world, most prominently and recently, in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, with several countries in rebellion and leaders on the run and facing charges for crimes of their regimes. The same thing has happened, although not sustained, in Pakistan on more than one occasion. So there may be some chance in the current moment to seize the opportunity to challenge the definition of terrorism that has been set forth – namely the use of coercion to influence the politics of a target individual/group.
What constitutes coercion has been the pivot along which the arbitrary definition of terrorist has shifted since the inception of the ‘war on terror’ – and the power to coerce has resided in the hands of a fickle and capricious elite, at the same time influenced by their paranoia and guilt; they see enemies around every corner. Anybody could potentially be made the enemy at any time, and coercion can be anything from violence to unwanted and pesky arguments. Liberalism requires being open to argumentation, however, in the current society, a failure to acknowledge the possibility of being improved in interactions with the Other, for the sake of preserving the identity of the self at all costs, unhinges the most essential elements of liberalism as a culture from liberalism as a political form. In fact, we have a culture of conservative individualism, in both temperament and in actual transpired fact, and any remaining pretensions we have towards liberalism as our public ideology are nothing but farcical charades aimed at providing for ourselves the legitimacy we imagine necessary to continue our imperium.
This is what we have traded for our freedom.
This is my talk on Indian-Americans and 9.11 from the PRIEC 2011 conference. Two parts.
PRIEC 2011 – Presentation Notes
Click on this link for an essay I wrote on Indian-Americans and the post 9.11 environment in America:
Indian Americans and 9.11
Note – I will be presenting this essay at 12:15pm on Friday this week, McCune Room, HSSB at UC-Santa Barbara for the PRIEC conference. Please read and comment candidly!
Since my brothers and sisters have already said so much, we should listen to their brilliant influence:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/06/09/137067390/the-rap-songs-of-the-arab-spring
