Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

When Vanessa Redgrave unleashed hertirade against Zionist hoodlums at the 1978 Academy Awards, she became one of themost notorious examples of how things can go horribly wrong when celebrities talkpolitics on Hollywoods big night.

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The hoodlums were Jewish groups who protested the acclaimed British actressfor helping to make apro-Palestinian documentary.Her belligerent, self-righteous rant didnt go over well. After Redgrave left the stage, author and Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky came out and blastedRedgrave and other celebrities who thinkits OKto get political at the Academy Awards.

He said, Im sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda.

The crowd broke intothundering applause. But dont expect that kind of affirmationthis year for anyone who saysstarsshouldnt make political speeches. Thats because somespeechesare likely to get political tonight very political.

And the tweets and headlines going viral will be less about red-carpet fashion disasters or surprising wins or snubs, but about which left-leaning celebrity delivered the most laceratingtakedown of President Donald Trump and his controversial policies.

This awards season has already been marked by viral political speech moments.At the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep drew enthusiasticapplause and a presidentialhate-tweet when she spoke out against Trumpsderogatory rhetoric against immigrants, people of color and people with disabilities.

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And at the Screen Actors Guild awards, Oakland native and supporting actor nominee Mahershala Ali moved hearts with hissubtle but powerful speech about diversity and inclusion. He tied his characterin Moonlight, a man who takes in a neglected child bullied for his potential homosexuality, with his own experience of being different notably hisdecision 17 years ago to convert to Islam.

The speeches by Streep and Ali, as well as Redgraves historic misfire, show why politically-mindedcelebrities need to take care in how they delivertheir messages tonight. That is, if their goal isnt just to indulge their own sense of self-importance but to genuinelywin hearts and minds to the positionsthey care about.

Following are some of themost famous political speeches from Oscar history, as well as reasons that some were more likely than others to win support for the speakers causes. No surprises here, butstars who whined, spoke condescendingly of opponentsor cameoff as self-righteous and self-indulgent turned people off, while those who displayed grace, humility and genuine emotionwere more likely to win theday.

1972: Jane Fonda scores by shutting up about Vietnam

Producers of the 1972 Academy Awards no doubt worried about what outspoken Vietnam War opponent Jane Fonda wouldsay if she won that years best actress award for Klute. But three months before her infamous trip to Hanoi, Hanoi Jane kept her acceptance speech short and gracious. But that doesnt mean that what she left unsaid didnt speak volumes. She addressed the proverbial elephant in the room by beginning her speech with: Theres a great deal to say and Im not going to say it tonight. And then she offered sincere appreciation Iwould just like to really thank you very much and left the stage.

1973: Marlon Brandos surprising victory for Native Americans

When most people think of political speeches at the Oscars, Marlon Brandos stunt at the 1973 awards usually comes to mind. Looking back through the lens of Brandos declining years as an actor morbidly overweight and massively overpaid for any film he deigned to appear in its easy to dismiss this Oscars moment as the product of a movie star indulging in the worst form of self-aggrandizing. But there was a lot more to it, as some accounts have noted.

To go back, Brando was expected to win the leading actor award that year for The Godfather.But when his name was announced, there was no Brando. Instead, a woman in Native American dress took the stage. She identified herself as Sacheen Littlefeather, president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.

She informed the crowd thatBrando was declining the honor to protest the stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans in film and television. She also referenced recent events at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where federal agents clashed with Native American protesters starting in February 1973.

While some in the audience booed Brando for daring to criticize the academy, and the academy thereafter banned winners from sending proxies to accept awards on their behalf, leaders of the American Indian Movement considered the speech to be a major victory for their cause.

According to accounts, Littlefeathers speech refocused media attention on the occupation at Wounded Knee. In turn, that attention may have stalled U.S. military against Indian protesters, and it possiblymadeAmericans more aware of longstanding injustices related to indigenous people in the United States.

1978: Vanessa Redgraves Zionist hoodlums bomb

As suggestedabove, Redgave didnt do hercause many favors with her speech, in which shealso was gratinglyself-referential in praising the academy forgivingher an award. She said, I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks youve stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic struggle against fascism and oppression.

Whether or not it was a direct result of her speech, or of Chayefskys rebuke, making political speeches at the Oscars became considered, well, bad form. This norm of polite Oscar behavior generally continuedthrough the next decade and a half.

1993: Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins hog the spotlight

This year marked the return of high-profile political speeches, but with mixed results.

It started with Richard Gere. The American Gigolo actorcame on stage to present the award for best art direction. But rather than pay tribute to the creative contributions of production designers and art directors, the actor, a high-profile friend of the Dalai Lama, condemnedChinas history of human rights violations in Tibet.

A little later on, former couple Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon kicked off their presentation of the best editing award by calling attention to Haitians being held in Guantanamo Bay, barred from entering the United States because they had tested positive for HIV. Sarandon asked for federal officials to admit that HIV is not a crime, and to admit these people into the United States.

In both cases, the audience applauded, probably because they found both causes to be noble.But Gil Cates, the producer that year, said it was distasteful and dishonest for presenters to use their time on stage to express political beliefs.

Hes got a point in the sense that Gere, Sarandon and Robbins essentially hijacked attention from the winners they were supposed to be honoring.

When it comes to Oscar speechifying, winners seem to have more leeway than presenters, the thinking goes. After all, winners haveearned their big moment on the Oscars stage, as well as some discretion in using that moment in away they see fit. But presenters should just do what they are asked to do: name the nominees and then announce the winner.

If nothing else, Gere, Sarandon and Robbins attention-grabbing maneuvers were disrespectful to the nominees and winners. Fortheir actions, the three stars were banned from presenting at future Oscars, though theyve been back since.

2002: Halle Berry squanders her historic moment

A fair number of lists of famous politically charged Oscarspeeches refer toHalle Berry andher emotional acceptance of the best actress award for Monsters Ball.

Yes, Berrys win made her the first black actress in Oscar history to win in the leading actress category. And for the occasion, she managed to say some memorable things:This moment is so much bigger than me.

She continued: This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. Its for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And its for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.

All this was moving, but these sentiments only came in the very first part of her speech, which, yes, was very emotional. As Berry continued to sob and try to catch her breath, things went downhill.

She went on for nearly four minutes an eternity in Oscar speech making and she used up the bulk of her timeto become famous for another reason: as one of the worstoffenders of aparticularly annoying Oscar speech habit. She ran through an exhausting list of various people to thank manager, lawyer, agent and other Hollywood types that the public would prefer not to hear about. So, Berry spent less time honoring Dandridge and Lena Horne than in thanking Lions Gate studios, CAA, Joel Silver and Warren Beatty.

And its probably not Berrys fault, but her win did little to open the doors of opportunity for African-American women in Hollywood, including for herself, as became clearas recentlyas2015 and #OscarsSoWhite 2016.

2003: Michael Moore proves prescient

After winning in the feature documentary category for Bowling for Columbine, provocateur documentarian Michael Moore wagged his fingerand chastised then-President George W. Bush for the Iraq War, which had started just days prior.

Moore called him a fictitious president who won in a fictitious election and who sent us to war for fictitious reasons. He ended his speech with a message to Bush:Shame on you!

The audience reaction was a loud mix of applause and boos.

Doubtless, there would have been far fewer boos if Moore had delivered that speech a couple years later when it became clear that he had been right about the fictitious reasons the U.S. went to war.

And imagine how such a speech would go over this year. Someone telling President Trump he should be ashamed of himself? Its easy to guess how that would go over in this Hollywood crowd

2006: George Clooney confirms the worst out-of-touch Hollywood stereotype

At the Cesar ceremony Friday night in Paris, George Clooney delivered a powerful takedown of Trump and his policies while accepting an honorary award from the French film community. He mixed humor and gravity in a speech designed as a call to action, saying, Ascitizens of the world, were gonna have to work harder and harder to not let hate win. He added, Love trumps hate. Courage trumps fear.

But George Clooney was far less inspirational 11 years earlier when he accepted his award for best supporting actor for Syriana. His started with humor, joking about his People Sexiest Man Alive cover and his disastrous turn playing Batman.

However, when political Clooney took over, the best he could do was offer lame criticism of theout-of-touch Hollywood stereotype; his criticism only confirmed the reason the stereotypeexists.

He said being out of touch was probably a good thing because it supposedly made filmmakers more courageous and visionary in tackling issues that society shies away from. Were the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasnt really popular, he said.

His points are highly arguable. Plenty of film and culturalhistorians would say that Hollywood has a pretty sketchy record on presenting noble stories with controversial subjects taking on importantissues too late or taking them on in the most non-confrontational way possible so as not to upset the sensibilities of mainstream audiences. Just one of many examples: the whitewashing tendency in the late 1940s and 1950s to cast white actresses in the roles of biracial heroines battling prejudice.

Clooney even went so far as to praiseHollywood for being brave in giving veteranblack actress Hattie McDaniel an Oscar for 1939s Gone with the Wind, when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters, he said.

In referencing McDaniel, Clooney missed a key point in the story that makes him sound out of touch. It is that the ceremony for the 1939 films took place at the Cocoanut Grove, a favorite nightclub for Hollywoods elite. The club had a strict no-blacks policy, which was in place until 1959.

That night, McDaniel couldnt sit at the table with the rest of the GWTW crew, including nominated co-stars Vivien Leigh, Clark Gableand Olivia DeHavilland. Instead, she had to sit at the back of the room, at a table next to a far wall.The only reason she was even allowed into the building was because producer David O. Selznick called in a special favor.

2009: Sean Penn, Dustin Lance Black give shout-outs to gay rights

Sean Penn and Dustin Lance Black captured the progressive zeitgeist of the timeswhen they took their separate turns accepting their awards for, respectively, best actor and best original screenplay. They were being honored for their work in Milk, the biopic of pioneering San Francisco gay rights leader Harvey Milk.

While Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, the other news that yearwasnt so good for progressives or for CaliforniasLGBTQ community: Proposition 8 passed in the state, banning same-sex marriage.

Penn, who portrayed the slain activist, said those who voted for Proposition 8 shouldsit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildrens eyes if they continue that way of support. He added: Weve got to have equal rights for everyone.

For Black, the issue was more personal, and he spoke movingly of how Milks story gave him hope when he was a teenager, letting him believe he would one day be able to live openly as who he truly was and even get married. If Milk had not been killed, Black said, I think hed want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight, who have been told they are less-than by their churches, or by their government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value.

2015: John Legend, Common and Patricia Arquette hit the right notes

The emotional highlights of the Oscars this year included John Legend and Common celebrating their win for best song for Glory from Ava DuVernays film Selma and supporting actress winner Patricia Arquettemaking a powerfulplea for wage equality and equal rights for women.

These moments touched on long-simmering issues in Hollywood: the dearth ofopportunities for people of color and for women. And the speeches showed how celebrities can use their platform to speak out on issues in personal, heartfelt ways that resonate with audiences.

The speech by Legend and Common followed their stirring performance of the song Glory, with its message of inclusion and diversity. Their speech was especially relevant that yeargiven the outcry over Selma director DuVernay not being nominated for best director and for actor David Oyelowo not scoring a nomination for his portrayal of the films hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In his speech, Common said: Recently John and I got to go to Selma and perform Glory on the same bridge that Dr. King and the people of the civil rights movement marched on 50 years ago. This bridge was once a landmark of a divided nation. Now its a symbol of change. The spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and social status.

Legend added this call toaction. We wrote this song for a film that was based on events that were 50 years ago. But we say thatSelmais now, because the struggle for justice is right now. We know that the Voting Rights Act that they fought for 50 years ago is being compromised right now.

As for Arquette, after winning for her performance in Boyhood, she first ran through the traditional list of Hollywood thank yous, then spoke forcefully on behalf of womens rights.

To every woman that gave birth, to every taxpayer in this nation, [women] have fought for everybody elses equal rights, Arquette said. Its our time to have wage equality, once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.

Excerpt from:

When Oscars speeches get political: the best, worst and most annoying in Academy Award history - The Mercury News

The latest wave of populism is alarming because contemporary world politics is experiencing resurrection of majoritarian identity politics intertwined with populist zeitgeist

Donald Trump is amongst the many who personify populist zeitgeist in the West.

More than a decade back, Dutch political scientist, Cas Mudde argued today populist discourse has become mainstream in the politics of Western democracies. Indeed, one can even speak of a populist Zeitgeist. In linguistics, the term zeitgeist means spirit of the times, however in combination with populism the term has a specific meaning: it connotes an ideology that values politics of identity based on ethno-cultural and religious superiority. The observation made by Mudde has proven prophetic; for now, the grand theatre of world politics justifies the claim.

Populism, as the name suggest, focuses on the people. However, populists have a very exclusive definition of the people that precludes certain identities being labeled as others. This rationale us versus them fuels populism. Furthermore, within the ideology there are two camps: far-right and far-left.

Populists on the political right tend to view the people sharing a common religious-ethno-cultural background. As in the case of contemporary world politics the people refer only to the white European and of Anglo-Saxon origins. Thus, all those who do not share these particular social, cultural, physiological traits are not considered the people.

On the other hand, the far-left populist discourse excludes a certain class of those elites who favour liberal values of freedom, equality and liberty for all, irrespective of class, gender, age, colour, religion and culture. It does not matter if the excluded elite have the same social, cultural, physiological attributes as the people they are disqualified because they belong to different economic class and have liberal attitudes.

Far-right or far-left, in populist way of thinking the people are fundamentally monolithic, a single entity devoid of any divisions across social, cultural, physiological, economic and religious lines. Populists argue liberal and multi-culturalist elite denigrate communitys values and promotes inflow of immigrants from hostile cultures. Furthermore, they contend liberal representative democracy has undervalued the monolithic cultural and social identity of the people.

Ironically, they are the majority but are now forgotten. Since political institutions in liberal democracy necessitate procedures in which plurality of views is included; such procedures however neutralise the people. Populists strongly believe liberal democratic arrangements devalue vox populi: political institutions, therefore must proceed based on the identity of the majority.

This year when citizens in Netherlands, France, and Germany vote for their prime minister, president and chancellor respectively; the citizens choice in these countries will have an unprecedented effect on world politics.

Though, politics of identity certainly has legitimate space in any functional democracy, however, if identity derives its strength from within the democratic framework. The advocates for politics of identity ought to frame their concerns within the democratic principles such as political equality, liberty and freedom for all. But if adherents contrive to supersede and subsume democratic principles it is death knell for the prized pluralism in liberal democracy.

This latest wave of populism is alarming because its adherents believe it is their existence that shall rein in unruly liberalism. The populist idea that the good, homogeneous people are betrayed by evil minorities and corrupted elites is potentially very attractive to voters. For example, rise of the alternative-right (Alt-Right) movement in US is one such example the movement is led by so-called white nationalists who believe in nativism and demand creation of separate, racially exclusive homelands for white people. Furthermore, what makes the recent wave exceptional is its semblance to fascism.

It seems, contemporary world politics is experiencing resurrection of majoritarian identity politics intertwined with populist zeitgeist. By reviewing the election manifestos of the populist political parties, such as Front National in France, British National Party in UK, Party for Freedom in Netherlands, and Germanys Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD) through them we can ascertain the extent of nativist zeal in this latest populist zeitgeist in the West.

With this long prelude, let us look at what is happening the worldover.

The episode of Brexit was the first episode that signaled majoritarian version of the politics of identity. Surprisingly, long before Brexit we witnessed the Scottish Referendum. The result of the referendum (though) was positive in a sense that the British Isle remained a unified political entity. The result of the Brexit referendum, however, was negative in its effect. And, the result further stoked populist zeitgeist in Western democracies.

Traditionally, identity politics was considered to be the politics of marginal groups. However, contemporary rejuvenated politics of identity can be conceptualised as majoritarian version of identity politics. In the West, the majority among the people claim to be the new minority.

For example, a recent book The new minority: white working class politics in an age of immigration and inequality by a US-based political scientist Justin Gest looks into white populists distrust towards their political elite and liberal institutions. His findings are indicative of the rise of populism in a sense that all his interviewees (white working class in US and UK) strongly believe their political institutions have betrayed the majority natives (i.e., white population). They fault political correctness of the institutions, and democracys inclusive framework.

Gest contends political entrepreneurs thrive on this purported betrayal by fanning fear amongst the white working class. What more? This populist wave thrives on narratives constructed by conservative zealots that demonise the dynamics of free speech in democracy: terms like Islamisation, mass immigration, and leftist agendas serve to frame hysterical narrative and is endorsed by an exclusive the people just look at what right-wing Breitbart News website produces on regular basis. According to a US-based civil-rights think-tank Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of anti-Muslim groups in US has increased from 34 in 2015 to 100 in 2016.

The undeniable fact of contemporary world politics is that Donald Trump is amongst the many who personify populist zeitgeist in the West. Others like him are unified in their abrasive demeanour and disregard for democratic institutions. Trump is not the only in Western democracy to spearhead the course against immigrants; the others in Europe are in pursuit to emulate him.

This year when citizens in Netherlands, France, and Germany vote for their prime minister, president and chancellor respectively; the citizens choice in these countries will have an unprecedented effect on world politics.

Netherlands witness elections next month, and there are pre-electoral surveys that put populist leader Geert Wilders in carving a comfortable position for his far-right Party for Freedom in the Parliament. In France, the political party Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, rides on the populist wave. Experts believe she will make to the second round of presidential elections (a feat that was never achieved by her father).

Germany is a rather an interesting case for there are signs that incumbent Merkels Christian Democratic Union of Germany (the center-right, conservative party) might be ousted by the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany. Though the two parties seem to have favourable policy towards refugee influx and on the EU, how will they campaign on these issues will only be unfolded in due course. A lot now hangs on several European elections this year. Wait and see what unfolds in the upcoming elections in Netherlands, France and Germany.

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The age of the people | TNS - The News on Sunday - The News on Sunday

The greatest weapon the colonial powers have used in the past against our people has always been his ability to divide and conquer. If I take my hand and slap you, it might sting you because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together. Malcom X

In mid 17th century Virginia, long before civil rights or even abolition, poor whites and black slaves came together to demand justice from the ruling class. The rebellion failed but not without a valuable lesson for the elites: a unified citizenry is dangerous.

The ruling class managed to divide and conquer the poor whites and the slaves by changing the social hierarchy. The indentured whites were given more rights and privileges, ensuring that no matter how marginalized they were, theyd still believe themselves above the slaves.

Future alliances were a long time coming as attitudes would have to change amongst more of the white population, but they did come. Each time, different groups, divided by race and/or social class, converge to achieve a greater human goal. Usually restoring some sort of balance before the hegemony divides and conquers again.

As the Civil Rights movement wound down in the late 1960s, the people were less divided by overt Jim Crow racism, but still divided by race. America declared a victory for equality even as whites ran from cities to the protection of middle-class suburbs, where poorer minorities couldnt follow.

The once secular communist boogeyman has becomea symbol of the conservative movement and made nationalism popular again.

During this time, racist ideologies evolved and the language became more subtle. The new post-racial narrative was devoid of racial overtures yet still played off white fears. Politicians effectively used this white fear to make policy, strengthen their base, and stay in power.

At the start of Nixons drug war in 1971 (the drug war has been around in one form or another since before prohibition), the post-racial zeitgeist introduced law and order, a phrase that treads carefully around race. It became a rallying cry all across America, starting in white suburbs where fear of spreading inner city crime was strongest. Though, by the mid-1990s law and order policies had garnered some wary support in the black community.

[White] America quickly focused on its new enemies: drugs and crime.

Politicians of the day did their part, painting bleak pictures of inner cities without having to resort to racially charged rhetoric, while white TV screens were inundated with images of the dangerous black criminals.

To absolve itself, white America pointed to its black friends and colleagues as evidence of being post-racial, and brushed off the hypocrisy. They also kept their hypocritical and irrational fear of the black man passing them in the street quietly to themselves.

Today, the post-racial narrative sports Internet memes of white cops playing withblack kids, black and brown faces on mainstream television, and prominent black conservatives claiming that racism is a thing of the past. The period at the end of this post-racial story is a popular two-term black president. Problem solved.

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The Old Divisions, They Do Divide Us - The Good Men Project (blog)

Updated / Saturday, 25 Feb 2017 17:05

In the first of a three-part series, RT Europe Editor Tony Connelly examines Britain's complicated history with Europe.

"The British Empire was built by power, and sustained by power," the Daily Mail declared on 16 June 1961. But, the next lines are shocking in their frankness: "When that power was removed the edifice began to crumble."

The Mail continued its sobering analysis. Since World War II Britains empire had collapsed. It was dwarfed by America and Russia. It had been humiliated in the Suez Crisis. The only way for Britain to retrieve its greatness was to join "Europe".

"Britain is essentially a European country. She has derived her strength from Europe, and the Empire was built up through her assertion of power on the Continent."

How surreal to read those words today given the Mails chest-thumping nationalism.

As Britain brutally reverses the sentiment expressed all those years ago, the psycho-drama of her post-war attitude to Europe, as it played out over seven decades, seems bafflingly contrary to the current zeitgeist, yet at the same time all too familiar.

From 1945 until the late 1980s, it wasthe Conservatives who were the champions of Britain in Europe, not Labour. The great Tory statesmen who played their part in the drama Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath more or less saw Europe as Britains only hope of retaining influence in a rapidly changing world.

Anti-Europeans convinced themselves that Britain was the unbound, free-trading Titan, leading the world to a civilised future. She enjoyed a sacred bond with the US, and she presided over the Commonwealth.

A number of books have explored Britains tortured relationship with Europe. The standout has been This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, by the late Guardian political journalist Hugo Young.

But a new book explores in greater details the internal contradiction in Britains political class.

Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism, is an exhaustive study by Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, a British-born historian and current American diplomat, of how the UK agonised its way into the EEC in 1973, and then tumbled out of the EU 43 years later.

Grob-Fitzgibbon, who has written works on Ireland during World War II and the Irish War of Independence, depicts a political class shocked into re-assessing its role at the end of the war, then finding itself frantically trying to weigh up its best course of action as, one by one, the certitudes of the nations storied majesty fell away: its empire was faltering, the six founding members of the European Community were beginning to forge a future that looked economically stronger, and the bipolar struggle of the Cold War was rapidly dwarfing Britains importance on the world stage.

One well worn trope, oft repeated since the Brexit referendum, is that whereas the rest of Europe has an emotional, romantic attachment to the EU, Britains has always been hard-headed and transactional.

Grob-Fitzgibbon has trawled a thicket of diaries, correspondence, primary and secondary sources in order to arrive at a perhaps more pungent conclusion: Britains attitude to Europe has been neither emotional, nor pragmatic, but neurotic.

Rather like an insecure lothario, Britain between 1945 and 1970, when its third and successful bid to join "Europe" got under way, was, having been spurned by the Prom Queen, fretfully casting about for a plain Jane terrified that it would be left on the shelf.

An imperial superpower at the turn of the 20th Century, Britain was victorious at the end of World War II, with a strong sense of its own defiance and heroism.

In This Blessed Plot Hugo Young portrays the unquestioning sense of Britains transcendent greatness.

This illusion permeated official and literary Britain; even a writer like George Orwell, who was viscerally critical of Britains class-ridden society, remained convinced that his country would claim a great role in the world.

"Victory," wrote Young, "confirmed a good many things that the country wanted to know about itself. The expression of it of the assurance it supplied to an idea of nation that long preceded it reached beyond economists, generals and politicians.

"If you look at what British writers were saying about England before and after the war, you read for the most part a seamless paean to the virtues of the nations strength and identity."

And yet Britains economy was in ruins and it was hopelessly in debt. It was only those at civil service level who recognised this and who dared speak a word of warning.

One was Sir Henry Tizard, chief scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defence. In a memo he wrote: "We are not a Great Power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation."

Both the physical destruction of Britains cities, and the benighted European landscape had, in fact, weighed heavily on Winston Churchill.

To the East was emerging a baleful Soviet Union, and to the West the capitalist United States. Nevertheless, Churchill still saw Britain as the natural leader of Western Europe and had done so as far back as 1938, when he posited the notion of a "United States of Europe".

Churchill had intellectually conflated the traditions of empire and Christian heritage as giving Europe a world "civilising" role.

Remove the ancient irrational hatreds, and the "tangled growth and network of tariff barriers designed to restrict trade and production", he wrote, and a new Europe could be born.

Britains place in it was ambiguous, however.

Churchill saw Britons as of Europe, and apart from it. The country had an extra-European responsibility as the head of a huge empire.

The two werent mutually exclusive; indeed Britains colonies, and those of France, could provide the manpower, resources and genius to help Europe on its way, and to rival the US and USSR in the balance of power.

Britain had to lead both the Empireand Europe. Furthermore, with America threatening to taper off economic support to Europe, a united Europe led by Britain was the only way to counter the rising Soviet threat.

This was the message that Churchill as Tory leader carried into the general election in 1945, an election he promptly lost.

The Labour government, which won by a landslide, faced a world in flux.

Russian troops were brutally underpinning the Communist ascent to power in eastern Europe, no one knew what to do with a destroyed Germany, and in the Middle East the violent birth pangs of the state of Israel were threatening a key front of the British Empire.

This was a period of grand, panicky ideas. The replacement of one totalitarian system (fascism) with another (Soviet communism), the existential threat of atomic warfare, the destructive legacy of the war, all convinced desperate thinkers to conceive of organising humankind along a new concept of world cooperation.

For Churchill, now enjoying the dubious luxury of life in opposition, it was a period of florid policy explorations and speeches. In an address to the Belgian senate he talked of Britains "special associations". Europe, America and Russia had an "interlocking"character.

In Fulton, Missouri, he made his famous Iron Curtain speech. But he also spoke of Britain, America and the Commonwealth pooling their resources to provide over-arching security for the world.

In further speeches, most famously in Zurich in 1946, Churchill repeatedly fantasised about a United States of Europe, of a Europe rising again in "glory".

Warming to his theme he urged reconciliation between France and Germany, the equal treatment of small and large nations, spoke of a common defence and currency, and the creation of a Council of Europe.

For the first time Churchill located Britain at the centre of such arrangements, while at the same time being head of a world Empire.

"In Zurich, and in Colliers Weekly," writes Grob-Fitzgibbon, "Churchill firmly attached his flag to the mast of European unity."

The new Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin was galled by Churchills visions.

He was much more convinced of the pre-eminence of the British Empire than any new European arrangements, although he believed, like Churchill, that as colonial powers, France and Britain should act in concert.

In the following years British politicians, civil servants, diplomats and the press all warmed to European unity with Britain at its heart.

The Empire or Commonwealth would somehow be on board as a counterweight to American imperialism and Russian dominance. In a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Churchill wrote: "Britain has special obligations and spiritual ties which link her with the other nations of the British Commonwealth. Nevertheless, Britain is an integral part of Europe and must be prepared to make her full contribution to European unity."

Such visions infused the embryonic British United Europe Committee, later the United Europe Movement. The public, desperate for a guiding light in the post-war darkness, was enthusiastic.

It received a massive boost when the American Secretary of State George Marshall announced his eponymous aid package for Europe on 5 June 1947.

With Marshall urging Europeans to come together to make the Marshall Plan work, Churchill seized the opportunity.

He encouraged similar European movements elsewhere, and they were springing up in Belgium, France, the Netherlands.

A Congress of Europe was held in The Hague in May 1948 attended by leading British parliamentarians, novelists, poets, philosophers, industrialists and religious leaders.

Europes hour appeared to have arrived. Out of the process led by Churchill was born the Council of Europe, whose federalist notions, such as an elected European Parliament and a European Court, were later crystallised into the European Union. (The Council of Europe remains a separate organisation to this day).

But the euphoria of The Hague was shortlived.

Churchills greatest opposition was to be found at home, in the Labour government.

Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, was hostile to a United States of Europe, as it precluded the Soviet Union and could even lead to war with Russia.

Labour was deeply suspicious of anything which eroded sovereignty, and wanted Germany out of any new European framework.

But Bevin had other problems to worry about. In February 1947 Britain was forced to hand Palestine over to the United Nations, and to announce that British rule would end in India just over a year later. The Empire was beginning to crumble.

The Soviet Union was also becoming more belligerent, flatly opposing the US Marshall Plan and tightening its grip on central and eastern Europe.

Bevin was not opposed to European integration as such, but he wanted a more modest approach. His response was a Western Union of countries which would become with the help and resources of the colonies a bloc to stand between Russia and America.

While Britain waxed and waned, France grabbed the initiative.

The Schuman Plan, named after the French foreign minister, would create a supranational authority in Western Europe to control all coal and steel production. Bevin was shocked: the French had kept London in the dark, and for the first time sought explicitly to draw West Germany into its embrace.

The British general election of 1950 deepened the disconnect.

Whereas every election campaign that year across Europe focussed on European integration, in Britain the parties were fixated on the crisis facing Empire.

A young Conservative candidate called Margaret Thatcher ran for the first time.

That disconnect would be decisive. Within six weeks the French cabinet formally endorsed the Schuman Plan with German, and, crucially, American support (Washington was simply desperate for some kind of European unity to get off the ground).

The new, much reduced Labour government had been kept entirely out of the loop and at a stroke the notion of an Anglo-French engine of leadership had been replaced by a Franco-German one.

The Tories pounced on Labours indecision, hailing, not for the first time, the idea of European unity and praising the Schuman Plan.

The future prime minister Macmillan described it as "an act of high courage and imaginative statesmanship".

The British press was largely in favour: the Daily Mail attacked the government for not supporting it, but the Daily Express called it a deliberate and concerted attempt to force Britain into a United Europe.

France held out the prospect of Britain joining what would become the European Coal and Steel Community, but the notion of pooling sovereignty, even in such a narrow field, was a bridge too far.

With Britain a major coal producer, sharing such a resource wouldnt fly either. In the famous words of the deputy prime minister Herbert Morrison, "the Durham miners would never wear it".

France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg forged ahead "to pursue a common action for peace and European solidarity".

Britain stayed out.

In October 1951, the Conservatives returned to power, and Churchill was once again prime minister.

It was a period of global instability with the Korean War and deepening revolt across the British Empire.

Churchill had still been, during the election campaign, a firm believer in European Unity, even canvassing the idea of a European Army.

But once in office his tone changed. Civil service briefing papers were peppered with terms such as "active part" and "leading role", but there was always the qualification that Britain could not accept any joint authority in Europe.

In a cabinet memorandum, Churchill acknowledged he had given the spark to European unity with his 1946 Zurich speech but he tutted that federalism was gathering strength, and that was never his intention.

Britains need to straddle multiple spheres of influence was also proving difficult.

Churchill had, during the campaign, wanted the Commonwealth to be somehow bound into any new European structures, but the notion was given a chilly response by both European and Commonwealth leaders.

Churchills foreign secretary Anthony Eden was even more hostile to any notion of Britain merging in a federative process.

He caused consternation among his own civil servants and the Council of Europe also alarming the future president and current Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe Dwight D Eisenhower when he appeared to slam the door on Britains participation in a European Defence Community, the entity Churchill himself had actually proposed a year before.

Churchill appeared torn, but left Eden in charge of a policy which would contradict much of his post-war idealism on Europe.

Britain would fully support the integration of Europe, but would always stop short of anything that smacked of federalism. "There was, however" writes Grob-Fitzgibbon, "no question of a full embrace of Europe".

In sentiments which appear astoundingly similar to Theresa May's today, Churchill was claiming to support European integration as much as possible, but not fully embracing it because Britain would always prioritise the United States and the Commonwealth.

Britains slow detachment from the ideals and aims of European unity, which Churchill had done so much to foster, was becoming clear.

Eden repeated to the new US Secretary of State John Dulles that Britain would have a "leadership" role in Western Europe, but could never pool sovereignty precisely because of its leadership of the Commonwealth and its special relationship with America.

Compare this to May's Davos speech in which she claimed that leaving the EU would allow Britain to become even more global.

But in the early 1950s Washington was growing impatient with French and British posturing, especially over the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC).

Squabbles over Britains lack of involvement, and West Germanys post-war rehabilitation, were holding up the kind of European integration the US believed was vital in resisting the Soviet threat.

The EDC had been regarded as an alternative to West Germany joining NATO, but the French were alarmed at any prospect of the German rearmament.

When the EDC collapsed (Britain was never going to be a member), Macmillan, then housing minister, proposed the establishment of the Western European Union (WEU) that would build upon the aims of the Treaty of Brussels, a mutual defence pact signed by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1948.

With the WEU also promoting economic and social recovery in Western Europe, Italy and West Germany were effectively brought into the fold (West Germany would enter NATO through the back door of the WEU the following year).

France reluctantly ratified the WEU in March 1955. One week later Churchill, aged 80, resigned as prime minister.

As a vehicle that would reconcile Britains conflicting interests, Americas craving for European unity, and West Germanys entry into NATO, the WEU as a high point in post-war integration was short lived.

Almost immediately the six founders of the European Coal and Steel Community felt that the WEU was not strong enough to facilitate deeper European integration.

The Six, as they became known, (France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg) met in Messina in Sicily in June 1955 to discuss, among other things, the idea of a European Common Market.

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Tony Connelly: Britain's tortured relationship with Europe - RTE.ie

Janette Beckman, "The Rivera Bad Girls, East L.A. 1983," 1983. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

In partnership with theVincent Price Art Museum:The mission of the Vincent Price Art Museum is to serve as a unique educational resource through the exhibition, interpretation, collection, and preservation of works in all media.

"Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943 2016" is a multimedia exhibition that traverses eight decades of style, art, and music, and presents vignettes that consider youth culture as a social class, distinct issues associated with young people, principles of social organization, and the emergence of subcultural groups. Citing the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots as a seminal moment in the history of Los Angeles, the exhibition emphasizes a recirculation of shared experiences across time, reflecting recurrent and ongoing struggles and triumphs.

Through a series of articles, Artbound is digging deeper into the figures and themes explored in "Tastemakers & Earthshakers." The show is on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum through February 25, 2017.

[Left] "View of Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles just before dusk on September 9, 1979, where the cruisers were out as usual. A section of the street was closed at 9:30 p.m. to prevent gang violence." | Photo: Anne Knudsen, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library || [Right] "Night view of Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, where a section of the street has been closed at 9:30 p.m. to prevent gang violence." September 9, 1979. | Photo: Anne Knudsen, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Prominent cities are often characterized by their streets. Whether its the iconic passage known as Sunset Boulevard on the west side of Alamedaor Cesar Chavez Avenue to the east, boulevards have the practical function of ordering commerce and traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular. But they are also curated displays of a citys identity simultaneously, destinations, as well as, transitory spaces where culture, in its flow, is publicly shaped and performed.

In Southern California, car culture became both a symbol of transcendence over socio-economic and racial boundaries, and played a significant role in shaping the identity of West Coast art. Artists, such as Frank Romero and Ruben Ortiz-Torres, have made cars the subject and object of their work. For Chicanos and Mexican Americans, constructing and riding a tricked-out car became a way to turn vehicles into a cultura, which in its specific insularity could turn its back on a mainstream society thatdenied them. Cultura, as many barrio sages know, is a way to keep your head up, to smile now and leave the crying for later when the rancheras and beer in the company of your most trusted homies split you too wide.

Gusmano Cesaretti, "Mosca, 1974 East L.A.," 1974, archival pigment print. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Cruising, a prominent pastime of Chicano culture, elevates riding a car to a performance a public ritual of the street. For Eastside communities, boulevards have been a destination for car cruising and low-riding. To highlight its movement and flashy materiality, low-riding drops everything to a lower wavelength. It slows its speed to crawling, reduces its height to nearly scraping. Even the bass drops in sound systems to revel in its sonorous depths. To cruise is to ride a vibration at its heaviest. The car itself is a crown, often laden with precious urban metals, chrome and steel, and crafted with gem-toned fiberglass. The work of Ortiz-Torrez highlights the low-rider and its aesthetics by reconstructing them and re-engineering its hydraulic mechanisms to emphasize its cultural vernacular.

As a transitory public space, boulevards are also locations in which rites of passage are exhibited. On barrio streets, a quinceaera will take the gravity of a queen. In the act of cruising in her limo or decked out ranfla, she presents herself to the streets she had walked most of her life, as a rubber-soled kid, skipping down the gum-stained sidewalk to buy a bag of chips or walking alongside her mother to church on a given Sunday. On her 15th birthday, she navigates on her own terms, cruising down the boulevard. While in church she received the blessings of a priest before the eyes of God and her family, now on the streets, she becomes her own priestess evoking power through the broken asphalt with the wheels of her slow-riding limo. If she is inclined, she may ascend through the sunroof to reveal herself and see the world from these new heights.

And though rites of passage, such as quinceaeras, affirm our location within a social order, in some cases, the act of solely asserting the presence of marginalized bodies of color in public space is an act of political resistance. Over the decades, boulevards have also been used to enact social and political subversion.

Rafael Cardenas, "Quinceaera Limo Swag," 2014, digital archival print. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

The 1968 student walkouts and the Chicano Moratorium in 1970 were two key moments that asserted the presence and power of Chicanos in history, culture and politics and established East Los Angeles as a symbolic cultural homeland for Chicanos in the Southwest. The blowouts captured the zeitgeist of a rising Chicano movement and represented a political initiation for young Chicano activists who experienced their first taste of political empowerment and would, in the following years, grow to become significant figures in policy, education and art.

Some young participants of the walkouts would also come of age as artists using the streets once again as a platform for their politics and aesthetics. ASCO, the East L.A.-based Chicano arts group that mainly consisted of Patssi Valdez, Gronk, Harry Gamboa and Willie Herrn, initiated their public performances on Whittier Boulevard with The Stations on Christmas Eve of 1971. Much of their work took place in public spaces, most notably Whittier Boulevard, including Walking Mural (1972), Instant Mural (1974) and Decoy Gang War Victim (1974), which eventually landed on the cover of Art Forum magazine in 2011.

[Left] Two young men hold a banner which reads, "National Chicano Moratorium, East Los Angeles, August 29." | Photo: Sal Castro, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library || [Right] A newly wedded couple march in the National Chicano Moratorium which took place in East Los Angeles, August 29, 1970. | Photo: Sal Castro, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

The Chicano movement reached a momentous yet entropic climax during the Chicano Moratorium in 1970. By then, many teenagers that had walked out of high schools had become politicized college students and rising professionals that were fully self-aware of their political strength. Planned by seasoned activists, the moratorium was a highly organized protest, however, this event erupted into chaos and violence as police shot tear gas canisters to disband the unlawful gathering. Students and protesters ran, taking refuge in nearby homes. According to numerous testimonies, police entered homes and private businesses in search of protesters. Most notably, police officers and riot police entered the Silver Dollar Bar where they fired three canisters, striking and killing prominent Mexican American journalist Ruben Salazar.

The unraveling of these events is useful in understanding a crucial function of the boulevard and the gridiron layout of the city to conduct police and military enforced discipline. In fact, critics of the grid or gridiron layout have noted that its design intentionally prevents and helps control uprisings. In the mid-19th century, Paris reconstructed its city after a brutal French revolution with a new urban layout that employed the modern boulevard as its centerpiece. The controversial author of this layout, Georges- Eugne Haussmann, noted the military value of his design as it prevented the outbreak of riots that had previously plagued Paris and revived not-too-distant memories of the bloody revolution.

In addition to political dissent, the mere presence of brown bodies in a public space has been criminalized in Los Angeles. Loitering laws have been known to target young people and people of color, preventing them from gathering in public spaces. More pernicious gang injunctions make the public gathering of people of color illegal, particularly in historically Latino neighborhoods such as Echo Park that are experiencing aggressive gentrification.

Another function of L.A.s predominant urban layout, as it is exemplified in the unraveling of the Chicano Moratorium, is its swift disciplinarian reach that could extendfrom public to private spheres.

Ricardo Valverde, "Boulevard Night," 1979/1991, hand-colored photograph. Collection of Esperanza Valverde and Christopher J. Valverde.

In a city known for being largely comprised of countless distinct suburbs, private spaces become increasingly important as subversive arenas for cultural production, transformation and resistance. When authoritarian powers clamp down on public spaces and privatized cities relinquish public space to strip malls and corporate plazas homes, backyards and even small businesses become necessary social platforms.

Punk culture has survived and thrived in a network of backyard gigs and homespun venues with the lifespan of a flower, not only in East L.A. but perhaps most notably in the conservative hinterlands of San Bernardino and Orange County. Underground electronic music scenes throughout greater L.A. have mushroomed from fog machine-enhanced house parties to a sophisticated economy of warehouse raves connected to an international electronica scene. Even modest family baptism celebrations in cleared-out garages or quinceaera parties in decked-out backyards or church halls serve as intergenerational, inter-genre mix spots. Its where many poor and working-class kids learn to dance cumbias and norteas with their tas and later find ways to mix these with new, more diverse styles that reflect an increasingly cosmopolitan lifestyle, even in the suburbs.

Social media collapses both private and public spheres to create yet another space for alternate cultural narratives. Artist Guadalupe Rosales Veteranas y Rucas Twitter project documents party culture of the 1990s using social media as a widely accessible public forum. As such, social media like Southern Californias boulevards will continue to be useful in organizing critical mass movements in the physical world, and, in some capacity, serve the function of public squares, where communities have gathered to celebrate one another.

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Cruising Down SoCal's Boulevards: Streets as Spaces for Celebration and Cultural Resistance - KCET

Like the US and Europe, Japan developed an experimental documentary movement in the 1960s and 70s that reflected and influenced the social, cultural, and political changes of the time. The Harvard Film Archive program Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers presents a trio of the more significant artists.

Motoharu Jonouchi, who was at the organizational forefront of the movement, is represented by Gewaltopia Trailer (1969) and Shinjuku Station (1974). Both are part of the so-called Gewaltopia series in which shots of spaces, objects, and clips from old movies including a political demonstration, an eyelid inscribed with calligraphy, a nuclear blast, and the 1920 silent movie The Golem are assembled into metaphorical statements.

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Masanori Oe and Marvin Fishmans Great Society (2016) presents a collage of images of events from the Lyndon Johnson era, such as the Vietnam War, antiwar demonstrations, the counterculture, and the civil rights movement as well as the inevitable nuclear bomb blast.

Perhaps the most significant film in the program and certainly the one with the most portentous title is Rikuro Miyais Phenomenology of Zeitgeist (1967), which records a happening in front of a bookstore in the city of Shinjuku. It is projected on multiple screens.

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The Globe's top picks for what to see and do each weekend, in Boston and beyond.

Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers screens Friday at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive. The films will be introduced by researcher and curator Go Hirasawa.

For more information go to hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2017marmay/radical.html.

One of my favorite documentaries of 2016, Tickled started out as a short, lighthearted feature about competitive endurance tickling. The gripping end result, by New Zealands David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, is a descent into an alternative universe of paranoia, power, and sociopathy. Its like a graphic novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Tickled airs Monday at 10 p.m. on HBO.

For more information go to http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/tickled.

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The blues dont get much more authentic than the music of Fred McDowell (1906-72), a Mississippi sharecropper who was discovered by the legendary Alan Lomax in 1959. McDowell toured with the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, was a guiding light for Bonnie Raitt, and influenced the music of Taj Mahal. Joe Yorks Shake Em On Down: The Blues According to Fred McDowell compiles interviews and never-before-seen performance footage of McDowell to tell the story of this giant of American music.

Shake Em On Down can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. as part of the Reel South series on PBSs World Channel. It will stream online the day after broadcast at WORLDChannel.org.

For more information go to http://www.scetv.org/reelsouth.

A documentary that Ive been hearing a lot about and am looking forward to seeing is Mr. Gaga by Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann. Its about Ohad Naharin, a choreographer and the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. It won the audience award at last years South by Southwest Film Festival and was nominated for a European Film Award. A critic friend tells me, I dont want to give too much away, but there are narrative developments from the you-cant-make-that-up realm. Sounds like my kind of picture.

Mr. Gaga can be seen March 5 at 5 p.m. at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport.

For more information go to http://www.firehouse.org/see-a-show/116-mr-gaga.

Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey (the latter less intimidating than he sounds like a more hirsute version of Will Ferrell in Elf) had a dream to perfect their act a kind of low-tech, burlesque Cirque du Soleil and become stars. In her film aptly titled Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey, documentarian Kirsten DAndrea Hollander follows their sometimes tempestuous, sometimes triumphant progress for seven years, including a stint at the New England Institute for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vt. If you dream it, you can be it, especially if youre willing to wear funny fake ears.

Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey debuts Tuesday on DVD, VOD, and Digital.

For more information go to usnakedthefilm.com.

What better place to analyze how capitalist organizations work in a conspicuous consumption economy than in a Dallas Neiman-Marcus department store in the 1980s? Thats where auteur Frederick Wiseman sets up shop for The Store (1983), a surprisingly funny and fully engrossing documentary that covers every department in this department store from cashier to corporate office, from chi-chi customers to smile exercises for salespeople showing how it all works, and sometimes doesnt.

The Store screens as part of the Frederick Wiseman: For the Record series on March 5 at 12:30 p.m. and March 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Museum of Fine Arts.

For more information go to http://www.mfa.org/programs/series/frederick-wiseman-for-the-record.

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Looking forward to a rad week for nonfiction film - The Boston Globe

Every once in a while an art exhibition seems to so perfectly tap into the nations zeitgeist that it takes on a kind of urgency. Occupancies, the ambitious new show currently on view at three BU galleries, is such a show.

Displaying the work of 22 emerging and mid-career artists, the show, at the 808 Gallery, the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, and the Annex, explores the ways individual and collective bodies create, negotiate, and inhabit space. The physical body takes on a kind of heightened political weight here, as the artists use it to express ideas about visibilityor the lack of visibility. The politically and sexually charged exhibition packs a wallop.

The very titleOccupanciesconnotes images of direct action and nonviolent resistance: think the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the recent Black Lives Matter protests, this years womens marches in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, and the countless rallies protesting the Trump immigration ban.

Occupy can mean many different things, says Lynne Cooney, (GRS10,16), artistic director of the Boston University Art Galleries, who curated the show with Kimber Chewning (GRS17). We were interested in the different real and symbolic dimensions of the term. The exhibition is not really about protest movements, but alludes to acts of protest in some of the works.

Cooney says the exhibition, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, video, and mixed media, asks whether certain individuals have different kinds of access to public and private spaces than others and the various ways bodies read in different spaces. From these questions, the exhibition considers how creating and inhabiting space or making oneself visible is in itself a form of resistance, she says.

Occupancies is notable for being the first exhibition to be held concurrently in both the 808 and the Stone Galleries, as well as the Annex. We wanted the show to feel as full as possible, taking up all of our gallery spaces and presenting a multitude of different bodies and mediums, Cooney says. There are so many mediums and methods artists are working in, and we wanted to represent them as best as possible.

Not the Nightmare, Not the Scream, Just the Loving Human Dreamof Peace, the Ever-flowing Stream, Bring the Message Home, gouache and graphite on tea-stained paper, by Ellen Lesperance. Courtesy of Isabella Hutchinson. On view at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery.

The show abounds with images of resistance that are by turns personal, poignant, and urgent. At the Stone Gallery, the viewer encounters artists who engage with the absent body. For example, a series of drawings by Ellen Lesperance was inspired by sweaters worn by female activists who committed their lives to fight for womens rights. Her geometric works on paper, which straddle figuration and abstraction, address the invisibility of female protesters.

Similarly, in Jonah Groeneboers multichannel sound installation Double Mouth Feedback, 2015,a circle of six speakers mounted on scaffolds serves as a stand-in for corporeal bodies. The artist recorded the voices of 37 people providing vocal responses to a series of prompts, like Make a genderless sound, or Make the sound of your gender yesterday. The varying frequencies and pitches have been woven together to collectively imagine a new language freed from current rigid biases about genderand the sound produced is haunting.

If the Stone Gallery focuses on the absent body, the works on display at the 808 Gallery more specifically addresses the performative body and the archival body and historical memory. Ramiro Gomezs Laborers at Lunch, 2015, is a tribute to the workforcelargely Hispanicof the more affluent Los Angeles neighborhoods, people too often rendered invisible. Gomez presents the laborers as cardboard cutouts, surrounded by objects from the real worldcoolers, thermoses, Tupperware containers, a lone paint can. Their faces are nearly featurelessparticularly their eyesunderscoring the way society ignores these laborers. Similarly, the arresting painting Blue Evening, 2015, borrows heavily from David Hockneys famous California pool paintings. Like Hockneys work, Gomezs painting features heavily saturated color. But here, Hockneys affluent Caucasian swimmers and homeowners have been replaced by a dark-complexioned pool cleaner, again presented as nearly featureless to stress how certain segments of the population are ignored.

Laborers at Lunch, 2015, mixed media installation, by Ramiro Gomez. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. On view at the 808 Gallery.

Also at the 808 Gallery are self-portraits by a number of artists using their naked bodies to make a political statement. Internationally acclaimed artist Shen Wei, based in Shanghai and New York, says his photographs allow him to explore his sense of security through understanding the tension between freedom and boundaries, each image at once a moment of introspection and rebellion. By capturing the juxtaposition of his body to his environment, he explores questions of confidence and sensualitycharacteristics, the show notes, that are often not attributed to Asian males.

Photographer Nona Faustine uses her body as a conduit to the past. In a triptych of self-portraits shot outside the Lefferts House in Brooklyn, N.Y.a site that has deep associations with the slave tradethe African American artists half-naked torso becomes an act of solidarity with women who were objectified and commodified through slavery.

Ann Hirschs mixed media installation horneylilfeminist, 2015, a series of 14 videos shown on simultaneous monitors, centers around female desire. While many of the videos focus on self-pleasure, mimicking the how-to format popularized by YouTube, others reflect the artists ambivalence about participating in the kind of submissive female roles promoted by pornography. (A sign warns viewers that the videos contain adult content.)

Sideline, 2017, mixed media installation (paint, tape), by Marlon Forrester. Courtesy of the artist. On view at the 808 Gallery.

Other works in the 808 Gallery consider the body in more abstract terms. For example, Indira Allegras digital installation Blackout weaves testimonials from the families of victims of police violence with twill, the fabric used to manufacture police uniforms, to examine the ways certain narratives are obscured while others arent. And then theres Marlon Forresters Sideline, 2017, a mixed media installation that uses the conceptual and geometric frameworks of a basketball court to examine ideas about race. The work evolves over time, with visitors invited to add a mark, shape, or some kind of form that, the accompanying text notes, responds to boundaries or constraints, real or imagined, that impose or inform racist stereotypes. A stack of rolls of masking tape, along with scissors and a ruler, are stacked on a table. Visitors are asked to construct some artistic symbol that addresses the question: What does resistance and community mean when your body is a tool?

Cooney acknowledges that the showwhich she and Chewning began planning more than a year agohas taken on a heightened meaning with todays changing political climate. In the wake of recent political events in the United States, we feel it is more important than ever to provide space for underrepresented individuals to assert themselves, she says. Making art is a way for underrepresented people to be seen and acknowledged, and our hope is viewers will come away from the show considering their own positions and with a desire to make room for others.

A special symposium tied to the exhibition, Making Room: Practicing Feminisms Today, will be held tomorrow at the 808 Gallery from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., free and open to the public (RSVP below). It will consist of a roundtable on gender and equity in higher education, and two panels, The Archival Body and the Feminist Voice, and Intersectional Feminisms.

Occupancies is at the 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave., and at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery and Annex, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through March 26. Gallery hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., Thursday, noon to 8 p.m., closed Monday. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

The symposium Making Room: Practicing Feminisms Today is tomorrow, Saturday, February 28, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the 808 Gallery. Find more information about the three panels here. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so please RSVP in advance here. The panels will be followed by a community lunch and a group discussion.

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Occupancies Explores the World of Our Bodies - BU Today

Every writer hopes his prose will persist, but James Baldwin made an especially solid bet: As long as the disease of American racism, resentment of homosexuals, and the nations strange relationship with social class and capitalism lasted, his work, he knew, would matter.

But when Baldwin died 30 years ago, it would have been hard to predict that books such as The Fire Next Time written as a letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of black emancipation or Giovannis Room a slender, once-obscure novel about a purportedly straight American and an Italian bartender who fall in love in Paris would half a century later sit at the center of the zeitgeist. Baldwin is back, says Harvard literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates. Bigger and badder than ever.

The African American author feels as central as he has since he landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1963, amid turmoil in Birmingham, Ala., for the poignancy and abrasiveness he brought to the nations dark realities. Some of this is because the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement recalls Baldwins own, and because the rising visibility of homosexuality over the last few decades made a resurgence likely if not inevitable.

But part of it is because Baldwin has stirred artists and writers in ways that no scribe of any color has done lately. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates whos become ubiquitous over the last two years based his award-winning book, Between the World and Me, explicitly on Baldwins Fire.

The years best reviewed film, Moonlight, is not simply about characters alienated gay black men who resemble Baldwins heroes. It also has some of the writers sensibility. The film, like much of Baldwins work, feels as European as it does American: Its dark, oblique lyricism seems to come straight out of MichelangeloAntonioni or Ingmar Bergman.

But the debt to Baldwin is direct. I describe Moonlight as sort of the child of Giovannis Room and The Fire Next Time, says Barry Jenkins, the films director. What I love about what Baldwin does is that the plot is important, but the emotions are much more what hes about. Thats the way Moonlight works too.

The last few months have seen an explosion of work that either deliberately or subtly riffs on Baldwins life and work. In December, the eclectic and questing musician Meshell Ndegeocello brought her church-themed piece Can I Get a Witness?, based on Fire, to Harlem Stage. About a week later, Stew and the Negro Problem performed Notes of a Native Song what the singer/ songwriter calls just a bunch of songs with banter in between at REDCAT. (The show has played in a handful of other cities, including New York, where Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison attended.)

Most directly is I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Pecks Oscar-nominated documentary about both the writer and a project he never completed on the deaths of Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and civil rights activist Medgar Evers. We hear Baldwins words, spoken by Samuel L. Jackson, over footage of the Rodney King beating, over protests in Ferguson, Mo., and shots of young black men in prison.

So Baldwin is not just a writer for the ages, but a scribe whose work as squarely as George Orwells speaks directly to ours.

For a long time, the Harlem-born, France-dwelling Baldwin was an august figure in the literary world, but not one whose books were especially well read. (Ironically, Baldwins books, notably The Fire Next Time and the companion book of I Am Not Your Negroare both Amazon bestsellers.)

He was a kind of little brother in the holy trinity that also includes Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, both half a generation older. None of those figures was simple, but among them, Baldwin was the most idiosyncratic and, in part because he was openly gay and a European exile, one who seemed furthest from the center of the black arts movement and the larger struggle. The militant black writer Eldridge Cleaver, in his influential Soul on Ice, called Baldwins homosexuality a sickness and described him as a self-hating black man for his interest in white literary models.

Baldwin was hard for the liberal consensus or black establishment to embrace: He dismissed the Kennedys civil rights efforts, attacked the narrowness of mainstream black Christian culture, and sharply criticized Wrights work. In Native Song Stew compares it to an aspiring young rapper put on the map by Kanye West suddenly turning on his mentor.

Baldwin admired many artists who werent African American, which did not endear him to the Black Panthers. He penned an insightful profile of Bergman (The Northern Protestant) for Esquire in the early 60s, and later wrote about his friendship with Norman Mailer. When Gates, as a young man, visited Baldwin in the South of France in the early 70s, he was amazed to see a whole shelf of books by or about Henry James. His prose was Jamesian, the scholar says. Henry James and the King James Bible. Id just write down his sentences because I liked the sound of them.

Often, though, he was buried by respectful neglect. It would have been easy to earn a robust literary or historical education in the 1980s or 90s and not read a single work of Baldwins. Partly, it was because his greatest achievements were with essays rather than novels, and because his irony and nuance could be difficult to hear over the straightforward rage of Wrights Black Boy and Native Son, or the sheer brilliance of Ellisons Invisible Man. Baldwin was, for a long time, out of fashion.

Moonlight director Jenkins studied black literature at Florida State University without reading Baldwin at all, and found The Fire Next Time only because a friend mentioned his work. Giovannis Room, he says, was the first queer novel I ever read, and one of the first black novels as well. It was like two doors being kicked down at once.

But between Coates and an anthology from August called The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, which includes pieces by Claudia Rankine and Isabel Wilkerson, its been hard to miss his reemergence.

Any time someone uses the term Baldwinesque I think of shockingly articulate and flamboyant, says Stew, whose band the Negro Problem once a highlight of L.A.s indie rock scene took its name from a phrase Baldwin used ironically in Notes of a Native Son.

We speak his language today, Stew says. We use his ideas to navigate the contemporary terrain. A guy can't get any more relevant than that.

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30 years after his death, James Baldwin is having a new pop culture moment - Los Angeles Times

Less than three months ago, after a pair of articles about the rise in Anti-Semitism appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the nation learned that during Twitters internal investigation the organization found that 2.6 million anti-Semitic messages were posted from August 2015 to July 2016, 19,253 of which were directed at journalists. Readers also learned that anti Jewish rhetoric, and incidents of anti-Semitism had risen markedly, and that Jewish journalists, many of whom seemed not to be voting for a particular candidate, were receiving hate mail at a rate not seen in recent history. When one such writer announced the birth of his second child on Twitter, he received this reply: Into the gas chamber with all four of you. More recently, there have been reports of bomb threats, nearly seventy in all, called into Jewish Community Centers across the nation. And this week, at least 170 headstones were knocked over at an historical Jewish cemetery in suburban Saint Louis, Missouri.

One has to be careful to choose ones words carefully, and to be circumspect about whom to blame. After all it would be easy to paint the 45th president with the broad brush of anti-Semitism, (may I just call it Jew-Hatred from here on?) That would be wrong, I dont believe he hates Jews. I do believe that in taking his support from any quarter, no matter how insidious, as hed done during his presidential campaign, his refusal to disavow strident voices of Jew hatred (along with hatred of other minority groups) seems to have stirred up a long simmering cauldron of malevolence. Having been brought up in Minnesota, a former home to the National Socialist American Workers Freedom Movement, I believe I know at least three things that motivate Jew-Haters.

1. Sloth. The slothful Jew-Hater has a perpetual sense of being ripped off. Youll hear things like: Hey, why are they getting ahead so fast? and Look at those cheaters, howd they do that? I was born in a place called Saint Louis Park. Because there were approximately six percent Jews there, and because those Jews in my home town were astoundingly creative and productivewell beyond their numbers, as is often the case with Jews in generalbe they Nobel prize winners, artists, writers or even the founders of the State of Israel, there is always an attendant animus that crops up among those that are less so. The slothful JewHaters of my youth called my city by the wildly un-clever pejorative: Saint Jewish Park, as if that six percent were far too many Jews to bear. The advice Id share with this type of Jew-Hater is: spend less time grousing about the accomplishments of others, get up off your ass and accomplish something yourself, something other than self-pity and rage.

2. Jealousy. Sloth and jealousy go hand in hand dont they? One can either be impressed or depressed with the success of others, there arent a lot of options, and to choose jealousy is to always choose the latter. Unfortunately, as we all know, depression is not a much admired way to move through the world, and often a depressed person will use anger to compensate for his or her deficiencies. Anger, after all, has long been a more socially acceptable substitute for sadness. And who better to take ones anger out on than the Jews?

History has shown us that path. And it seems easy enough. Without fear of reprisal, (at least not a physical reprisal), the jealous Jew-Haters feel safe meting out their anger on minorities, particularly those who like the Jews are not known for a propensity towards violence. The Jews therefore, make an excellent target for the jealous Jew-Hater.

3. Fanaticism. Fanaticism has within it, the qualities of both sloth and jealousy, but it also brings with it another, more troubling one: myopia. By seeing complex issues in only their most narrow framework, its easy to draw hasty conclusions. And while those conclusions will often be simple, they are almost never accurate. Although with fanaticism of any sort, accuracy and truth are thought to be superfluous at any rate, and therefore safely dispensable as weve seen of late.

The fanatical Jew-Hater believes in all the discredited cabals; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (that great old Russian canard), and in the Blood Libel, (the falsehood promulgated in Europe and elsewhere, that the Jews murdered Christian babies to use their blood in Passover matzos), along with Anti-Zionist conspiracy theories about things as wide ranging as 911 and the AIDS epidemic. As absurd as these stories are, they nonetheless, slide down the gullets of fanatics like gruel, warming their bellies and nourishing hatred for generations.

As Ive said, I dont believe our 45th president is a Jew-Hater in any real sense, but he often seems so dead set on self aggrandizement that for example, during his campaign at least, he had no compunctions whatsoever about turning over stones to garner votes and attention, stones, which hid all sorts of horrible ideas. By not immediately repudiating those ideas (as a leader must) he allowed them to fester, to take root, and to ripen. Once seeds of hatred are permitted to grow into poisonous weeds they possess a life of their own, a dark power, which in turn invites other such fanatical ideas to flourish.

One may prefer one party, over another, one set of values perhaps one is more liberal or more conservative, more religious or less so but what has been released into the American zeitgeist is something altogether different. America is confronting a Pandoras box of pure madness that hasnt been seen in this measure for decades, at least.

Dont be fooled, power doesnt exist only in intelligence, creativity, and compromise. It exists as well, in intolerance, hatred and fanaticism. We humans have an animal instinct, a powerful visceral nature that left unchecked, gravitates to power for powers sake. When unleashed it hungers for it power to fight, power to consume, power to terrorize. To prevail over these dark forces we must see this tendency, first, in our selves, and only then can we discourage it in others.

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Turning Over Stones (What The Election Set Free) - Huffington Post

Break out your flower crowns and your crochet crop tops: The Summer of Love returns to San Francisco this year for a 50th anniversary celebration.

As part of a series of celebrations leading up to this summer, the San Francisco Arts Commission asked three local artists to examine the historic season of revolution through a contemporary lens for its popular Art on Market Street Poster Series. The first in the series, The Zeitgeist by Deborah Aschheim, highlights some of the people and events that defined 1967 through highly detailed pen and ink drawings.

From now through May 12, 2017, pedestrians along Market Street will see scenes that recall the 1967 Spring Mobilization, the Vietnam War, and the Human Be-In, alongside portraits of individuals including City Lights Books founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Each image is contextualized by a caption: A drawing of a Black Panther woman is accompanied by a quote from famous Panther member Kathleen Cleaver.

"Deborah Aschheim's beautifully rendered posters capture the spirit of the ideas and radical expression that made the San Francisco Bay Area the epicenter of the counterculture movement," said Director of Cultural Affairs Tom DeCaigny. "The 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love is an opportunity to reconnect with its important legacy of political activism, inclusiveness and, above all, love."

To prepare for the series, Aschheim rigorously researched the archives at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, unearthing the stories of people who participated in the Diggers, an anarchist art troupe that was a fixture of the Haight-Ashbury; the Vanguard, an early LGBT rights group based in the Tenderloin; and a number of other significant political activists from the late 1960s.

"My project explores the intersection of political and social utopian ideas that drew people to San Francisco, from the Free Speech movement at Berkeley to the art, music, and lifestyle scene," says Aschheim. "I hope that entrepreneurs and billionaires have not replaced revolutionaries and poets as our heroes. I want to re-animate an authentic vision of 1967 that still has the power to inspire us to disrupt society in creative ways."

// The Zeitgeist can be seen in Muni bus kiosks on Market Street between Embarcadero and Eighth Street through May 12. Subsequent series will feature new work by Sarah Hotchkiss and Kate Haug.

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Summer of Love 50th Anniversary Posters Wake up Market Street - 7x7