REMEMBERING SHIRLEY CLARKE

 Shirley Clarke's film, The Connection is opening at IFC this week. Her great film set in Harlem, The Cool World, is still hoarded by vicious misogynist Frederick Wiseman.  This photo of a Video Space Troop meeting is by Peter Simon. That's me on the left with the sandal and Shirley with the hat.

The following is a piece I wrote about her the day I heard she had died-- it is included in my book Hand Held Visions.    

Shirley Clarke was my mentor.  I learned more from her than anyone else I ever knew--  mostly about how to be a mentor-- how to energize people, how to push them to do good work, how not to give up when the technology was failing, the people lethargic or the situation impossible.  Shirley pushed things and people to the edge.  She never gave up.  Altziheimer claimed her about ten years ago, but she held on, tenderly nursed by two of her beloved disciples, Piper and David Cort, who bathed her and tucked her in and smoothed her forehead.  Her daughter Wendy and many of her colleagues were with her during her last days in a Boston hospital.  She died last month in a sweet sleep surrounded by Felix the Cat and Betty Boop, the toys of her youth held tight for all these years.

Shirley was somewhere between Betty Boop and Felix the Cat herself, with a bit of Charlie Chaplin's tramp thrown in.  She often wore a bowler hat and tight smart little suits, like something out of a 1930's chorus line. All she needed were spats to complete the costume.  She had style.  A small woman with the body of a dancer, she had piercing black eyes, like a beady little mouse.  She was witty and bright, and endlessly energetic. 

Shirley started as a dancer.  Her first films were dance films, such as Dance in the Sun (1953) and In Paris Parks (1954), a lyrical look at gesture and movement in a public landscape.  I saw this early work and Bridges Go Round, a piece she did for the Brussels World Fair at the Hunter Art Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  It changed my life.  Seeing her name on the credits and the joy and energy of the images made me realize that women could and should make their own films.  I decided to try to study film in college. 

Her work in the early 60's, The Connection and The Cool World are landmarks of the American New Wave movement.  The Cool World is a New York version of Italian neo-realism, every bit as powerful and poignant.  It remains (with Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy) the best expression of marginal life in that era.  Her film, Portrait of Jason (1967) was one of the first with a gay protagonist in an open and sympathetic (and completely unromantic) manner.  Shirley and Viva Superstar shared the screen as talent in Agnes Varda's Lion's Love, which was always my favorite Varda film.  Somehow Shirley (and Viva) added a New York edge to Varda, who can wax sentimental and cloying. 

In the early seventies I somehow found my way up to her workshop space in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel.  Shirley lived and worked there making live and taped video performance, installation and documentation with a collaborating group of artists.  I was lucky to have been a part of that work.  We formed a troupe, those of us who worked with Shirley.  She called us the TeePee Video Space Troupe and the idea was to experiment with performance that integrated video and other technologies.  It was the days before video cassettes and each tape had to be hand threaded into the portapak decks.  Not that it was really about recording per se.  Most of what we did was never on tape: the tape was only one of the elements of the constructions, the happenings, the events.  It was electronic performance in an interactive mode.  The troupe included myself, Andy Gurian, Shirley's daughter Wendy, Bruce Ferguson, Vicki Polon, David Cort, Bob Harris, Parry Teasdale, Shalom Gorewitz, Susan Milano, Shridir Bapat and others.  There were regular drop-ins like Agnes Varda, Shigeko Kaboda, Beryl Korot, Nam June Paik, Skip Blumberg, Barbara Haspiel, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Jori Schwartzman, or neighbors at the Chelsea, Carl Lee, Viva (toting one of her kids), photographer Peter Simon, Doris Chase, Andre Vosnevshenski, George Kleinsinger, Virgil Thompson, Harry Smith, Arthur C. Clarke (no relation).  

At any given time there always seemed to be one or two Japanese dancers around.  Sometimes even Andy Warhol climbed that flight of stairs after the last elevator stop, looking for Viva.  Louis Malle came by, as did Susan Sontag, Joris Ivens, Peter Brooks, Jean Rouche and Shelly Winters.  The Chelsea had a certain cachet for visitors from Europe, Hollywood and Japan and Shirley was queen of the Chelsea. 

Around Shirley swirled miles of video cables, cameras, monitors and telephones.  She was wired. Shirley had a new project every night.  We were needed to help make it happen.  It was sometimes frustrating, often exhausting, but it was hard not to trot over there, because you never knew what you might miss if you stayed away.

One time Arthur Clarke somehow got hold of a laser beam.  He unwrapped a long rectangular box with a fat cable, borrowed from some Columbia lab by a fan of 2001 Space Odysey.    This was many years before those red needles of light sparkled on every cashier's counter.  The laser was exotic and thrilling and Shirley and Arthur giggled like kids phoning in bogus pizza orders as they plugged it in and carried it out to the edge of the Chelsea roof, aiming it down at the sidewalk. From that distance it was hard to keep steady, but Shrider quickly screwed it into a tripod tilted over the edge.  Passers-by on 23rd street stooped to pick up the resulting tiny red jewel.  Both Clarke's roared with laughter as they made it jump five feet out of reach.  When we tried using the laser in our performances, it etched intricate patterns on several of our cameras.

One night we all agreed to do dawn.  We broke into five groups and went out to video dawn.  We recconoitered on the roof with stacks of monitors and cued up the five tapes from the five groups.  Shirley rang up for bagels and champaigne and when they were delivered we toasted the pink sky and switched on the decks for a multi channel piece of morning in New York.  Shots of steam rising from the street vents, tracking shots of bottle collectors pushing their carts, shots of pigeons in flight mixed and matched across the screens.  The natural sounds of the live streets below us mixed with the taped steam hisses and pigeon coos to make a city symphony of sounds as well as sights. Behind the pyramid of monitors flickering the black and white visual poems were the pastel sky scrapers, their windows reflecting the rising red sun ball.  One special moment was when pigoens flew right to left across one of the monitors and appeared in the bottom left of the neighboring monitor, as if in one continuous flight. It was one of those synchronisities that we were all sure Shirley planned. We didn't giggle during that event.  Exhausted and emotional we sat in the rosy light with tears streaming down our cheeks, the kind of tears that can punctuate a late Beethoven quartet played well.  When the tapes spun empty at the end we came together and hugged.  Like some Omega circle, just more spontaneous and real. 

I remember one night we set up an elaborate elevator installation: a camera on each Chelsea floor aimed at the elevator door and a Pisa-like leaning stack of monitors on the roof recreating the Chelsea's 10 floors.  Wires ran up the center staircase picking up the feed on each floor.  Then someone would do a performance on the elevator and we would watch the roof TV stack.  We could see the performance only when the doors opened on floor after floor.  It was a great idea.  It never quite worked.  None of Shirley's projects ever "worked" in the conventional sense, but we knew that the ideas totally worked.  It was exhilerating.    It was being high every night.  We were urban guerillas of the Chelsea penthouse, plotting an electronic coup that would liberate the imaginations of the world.

The image of Felix the Cat was one of the very first images to glow from a cathode ray tube in television experiments in the 1930's.   At this moment, high above us on a flickering celestial screen, an implike Shirley in a spiffy bowler hat morphs in and out with Felix in a perpetual soft shoe routine.  Goodnight, Shirley.  May some of us, your students, transmit electric visions as sassy and brilliant as you and Felix, with an edge as sharp and a passion as deep.  


Workshop Photographs by Peter Simon     Shirley kissing Nam June photo by DeeDee Halleck


AND HERE IS SHIRLEY IN ACTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH NOEL BURCH AND OTHERS (INCLUDING RIVETTE!)

Michael Ratner on Bradley Manning's "Trial"

On 24 April, a hearing in one of the most important court martial cases in decades will take place in Fort Meade, Maryland. The accused faces life in prison for the 22 charges against him, which include "aiding the enemy" and "transmitting defense information". His status as an alleged high-profile whistleblower and the importance of the issues his case raises should all but guarantee the proceedings a prominent spot in major media, as well as in public debate.

Yet, in spite of the grave implications, not to mention the press and public's first amendment right of full and open access to criminal trials,no outside parties will have access to the evidence, the court documents, court orders or off-the-record arguments that will ultimately decide his fate. Under these circumstances, whatever the outcome of the case, the loser will be the transparency necessary for democratic government, accountable courts and faith in our justice system.

In the two years since his arrest for allegedly leaking the confidential files that exposed grand-scale military misconduct, potential war crimes and questionable diplomatic tactics, army private Bradley Manning has been subjected to an extremely secretive criminal procedure. It is a sad irony that the government's heavy-handed approach to this case only serves to underscore the motivations – some would say, the necessity – for whistleblowing like Manning's in the first place.

The most well-known of the leaked files, a 39-minute video entitled"Collateral Murder", depicts three brutal attacks on civilians by US soldiers during the course of just one day of the Iraq war. The footage, recorded from the cockpit of a US Apache helicopter involved in the attacks, shows the killing of several individuals, including two Reuters journalists, as well as the serious injury of two children. Beyond the chilling images of US soldiers eagerly pleading for chances to shoot, the release of this footage placed a spotlight on the military's blatant mischaracterization of the events, in which a spokesman claimed that there was "no question" that the incident involved engagement with "a hostile force", and underscores the vital role that public scrutiny plays in government accountability.

As an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and a legal adviser to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, I continue to attend Manning's hearings and can only describe them as a theater of the absurd: the trial involves numerous and lengthy off-the-record conferences, out of sight and hearing of the press and public, after which the judge provides an in-court summary that hardly satisfies standards of "open and public". Perhaps more remarkable is the refusal even to provide the defense with a pre-trial publicity order signed by the judge – an order that details what lawyers can and cannot reveal about the case. Yes, even the degree to which proceedings should be kept in secret is a secret, leaving the public and media chained in a Plato's Cave, able only to glimpse the shadows of reality.

The press and advocacy groups, however, have not been quiet about the trampling of their rights. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, on behalf of 46 news organizations, urged the Department of Defense to take measures that would allow the news media to view documents prior to court arguments. The committee pointed out that the trial for the "alleged leak of the largest amount of classified information in US history" is of "intense public interest, particularly where, as here, that person's liberty is at stake". The Center for Constitutional Rights, too, has requested access in the interest of an "open and public" trial, but neither appeal has been answered.

This is a clear violation of the law, but it will likely take burdensome litigation to rectify this lack of transparency. The US supreme court has insisted that criminal trials must be public, and the fourth circuit, where this court martial is occurring, has ruled that the first amendment right of access to criminal trials includes the right to the documents in such trials.

The greater issue at hand is why this process should be necessary at all. As circuit judge Damon Keith famously wrote in Detroit Free Press v Ashcroft, "Democracies die behind closed doors." Yet it is evident from the many layers of secrecy around Manning's arrest, imprisonment and prosecution that the government shows no sign of relinquishing its claimed powers to obscure rightfully transparent judicial proceedings. The doors appear to be tightly shut.

Unless we challenge the growing culture of secrecy within our government, and counter the ever-increasing, reflexive claims of "national security" by claiming our own constitutional rights, we risk finding those doors shut indefinitely.

Paper Tiger Exhibition at NYU Library

AN INTERVIEW WITH DEE DEE HALLECK FROM PAPER TIGER TELEVISION

March 22, 2012, 6:14 pm
Filed under: Exhibition, New York City, television, Activism | Tags: Lucas Green, Dee Dee Halleck,Paper Tiger Television

Citywide aims for progressive programming. We bring many people onto the show who stand to make a change in the world in whatever way they strive to do. This can take place in a number of different ways. Some of our guests are out there trying to improve conditions for less privileged parts of our society as well as spreading a humanitarian message, see our post on Immortal Technique. Some of our guests are actively trying to expand on what the human being can physically be, like recent guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Some of our guests have represented a change itself in being an original artist, like Mykki Blanco who was on last month.
These are people our program has brought on for our audience to check out and have something different to think about. Paper Tiger Television, our feature this week, is another weekly program in the City which doesn’t just discuss the people who are doing progressive work this day, the people on the show itself have been pioneering and innovative since the show’s formation in 1981. PPTV recognizes that there must be an aggressive front to counter a mainstream media that is largely controlled by large corporations. Formed entirely by volunteers who share the concern of what control mass media has over today’s culture, PPTV has been one of the most consistent and driven organizations of people who insist that there be a source of criticism and information outside the commercial world.
I spoke with one of the founders of Paper Tiger Television, Dee Dee Halleck, who took me through some of the early years of the new form of media activism which PPTV represented at the beginning of the 1980s. It is important to note about PPTV that while that not only did they set a new precedent for activists trying to reach a mass audience, they also set an important precedent for the mediums of public cable television which was just emerging at the time. And while programs such as The Coca Crystal Show and Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party (“The TV party that could be a political party”) had already fought to claim the medium as one belonging to the people, PPTV ensured that the medium would balways be used to also speak for the people.
It’s an extraordinary organization that continues to do extraordinary work. Greatest of all is that they are always accepting volunteers. Check out their website and see what you think about the work they do; see if maybe you even want to help. You can also watch many of the programs tand documentaries they have produced. That’s righthere.
PPTV is currently celebrating it’s 30 year anniversary with an exhibition at Fales Library at New York University. This is the exhibition’s website. Here is a video about the 30 year history of Paper Tiger Television-

Dee Dee Halleck also told me about a great new effort of hers to unite activists with similar causes around the world. Check out Deep Dish Waves of Change for more information about that. This program derives from another project of Dee Dee’s calledDeep Dish TV, a similar organization to PPTV, doing with satellite what Paper Tiger did with cable television.
Dee Dee told me some wonderful stories herself. Check out the interview here-
Here is one of the first PPTV programs, Herb Schiller reads the New York Times-



Lucas Green

1968

thank you John Douglas

Paper Tiger Exhibition at Fales

Camcorder Commando

Bifo Manifesto

IAMCR in Istanbul

From a history of the organization by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Cees Hamelink:
The history of the IAMCR goes back to the first years of Unesco. Its Committee on Technical Needs in the Mass Media drafted in 1946 a constitution for an “International Institute of the Press and information, designed to promote the training of journalists and the study of press problems throughout the world............

IAMCR reception in Prague 1984.
From left to right: Robin Cheesman (Section Head, Denmark), Kaarle Nordenstreng (Vice President, Finland), Cees Hamelink (Vice President, The Netherlands) and Peggy Gray (President Halloran's executive assistant, UK).
Over the five decades the aims and scope of the Association remained focused on the creation of a global forum where researchers and others involved in media and communication can meet and exchange information about their work. The Association wants to stimulate interest in media and communication research, to disseminate information about research and to create a broad constituency of researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

Throughout its history the Association has adopted public statements on such issues as the protection of journalists, the right to communicate, the freedom of research, the support for international communication policies in the service of democratic development, and the need to contribute to the improvement of communication facilities in the Third World. The concern about public presence of communication research and its role in public life has been a leading motive throughout the years. This became very concrete in the contributions of the IAMCR made to the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 (Geneva) and in 2005 (Tunis).

*******************

BRIEF REPORT FROM THE OPENING OF THE IAMCR CONFERENCE IN ISTANBUL
Over the years, IAMCR was unusual in the fact that several of their meetings took place in Eastern Europe (Prague, Bled, Leipzig), during intense cold war years. In addition there was an implicit support for the principles of the MacBride Report, which was viciously fought by the US, to the extent that funding for UNESCO and the UN itself was dropped because of the commission's report. In what seems like a reversal of previous policy, this year's IAMCR meeting saw the organization's annual award presented to Eliu Katz, who made concerted efforts to undermine the NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) principles in discussions at the time. Katz promulgated a theory of "active audience" which undercut the position of cultural imperialism and the need for democratic access to information technology and equitable means of expression.

In addition, another award was presented to a local scholar and official Turkish UNESCO rep during the harsh 1950s whose stance on "free flow of information" paralleled that of the US State Department at that time.

Two of the usual annual awards (the Herb Schiller Award and the Dallas Smythe Award-- two researchers who were adamantly critical of the corporate and imperial stance against NWICO by US policy makers and dictatorial regimes such as Turkey at the time) seem to be conveniently forgotten in the current revisions of IAMCR's position. Those awards were not included in the ceremony.

What was included was a long cello and piano recital of Bach and Italian medleys -- finishing with several compositions by the pianist in what has to be called easy listening style.

-- DeeDee Halleck, Istanbul, July 13, 2011.

Shut It Down!!!

Some short random clips from Mary Frank's Opening May 5, 2011

Remembering Hazel (1935-2011)

Me listening to Jeremy on the fiddle at Margie's wedding. Photo by John Cohen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/hazel-dickens-bluegrass-pioneer-who-sang-of-miners-and-downtrodden-dies-at-75/2011/04/22/AFPGscRE_story.html

When I was a student at Antioch in 1958 I used to hang out at a ramshackle clapboard house that was practically on campus and the source of consternation for the college administration and the Yellow Springs "civic improvement association". A non-functioning Bendix washer made the yard closer to Appalachia than Central Ohio suburbia and the sounds of guitar picking were pretty much always heard through the pushed-out-screen door.  It was where Jeremy Foster and Alice Gerrard Foster lived with their red-haired toddler Coralee. I was the eldest of four girls and had recently left my Tennessee family and my own younger red haired sisters and being at the Fosters was the closest thing to home for me.

One afternoon the Fosters were especially excited-- "Stick around," Jeremy said--a friend was coming by-- her name was Hazel and she was from West Virginia. Jeremy and Alice weren't from the mountains-- Jeremy was from outside DC and Alice was a California Valley girl. But they loved country music. REAL authentic country music, not, as Jeremy used to put it, "Fuck music" of the sort that co-eds from Greenwich Village moaned in their Antioch dorm rooms.

As Alice and Jeremy bustled about changing sheets on the pull-out couch, it was clear that they thought Hazel was the real thing. I imagined a Dorothea Lange sort of hillbilly, earthy type, maybe dressed in a flour sack shift, perhaps driving a rattletrap Ford pick-up. I couldn't wait! After several hours of anxious expectation, a car did pull in to the Foster's drive way, not a hillbilly truck, but the biggest, fanciest limo I had ever seen. Out stepped a woman with a bee-hive hair-do, heavy make-up and a shiny red dress with a big slit up the thigh. Hazel wasn't coming directly from the mountains of West Virginia, but from Baltimore where she was working the bars.

Jeremy and Alice were overjoyed to see her and laughed at my surprise. Within a few minutes of driving up, she took out a guitar and she and Alice picked and sang a Carter Family song together. I think it was "Chawing, chewing gum..." Yes, Hazel was authentic. She was the best singer I had ever heard and I sat with Coralee on my lap for the rest of the afternoon listening to an amazing song swap.

Jeremy died a few years later in an accident on a DC beltway. Alice and Hazel ended up forming a team and recording several LPs with many original songs. Coralee is now a physician in Ithaca, I think, and Alice is living in the mountains of North Carolina. And Hazel died today.



Hazel Dickens, 1935 -2011 An Obituary 

by John Pietaro

http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/2011/04/obituary-of-hazel-dickens.html

The high lonesome sound that touched so many, so
deeply, could only have been born of both strife and
fight-back in equal proportions. Singer/guitarist Hazel
Dickens' sound was probably about as high and lonesome
as one got. The soundtrack of "Harlan County USA"
introduced her to the many outside of the country home
she remained a visceral part of, even long after she'd
physically moved on. Dickens didn't just sing the
anthems of labor, she lived them and her place on many
a picket line, staring down gunfire and goon squads,
embedded her into the cause.

She was born on June 1, 1935 in Montcalm, West
Virginia, one of the faceless towns dotting Appalachian
coal country. Her father was an amateur banjo player
who worked as a truck driver for the mines and ran a
Primitive Baptist church each Sunday. Here was where
Hazel first began singing, unaccompanied out of
necessity and the laws of tradition. But the devotional
songs melded with the mountain tunes and ballads,
creating a unique personal style. Bearing a rough, at
times coarse timber, her voice eagerly reflected the
broken topography about her as well as the pains of
poverty in her midst. In a family of thirteen residing
in a three-room shack, the music was far from distant
symbolism for her.

At age 16 Dickens relocated to Baltimore where she
encountered Mike Seeger on the still fledgling folk
scene. Seeger, working alongside his parents Charles
and Ruth Crawford Seeger in the Library of Congress
Archive of American Folksong, began performing with the
Dickens family trio, but it was Hazel's association
with Seeger's wife Alice Gerrard that offered notable
area for impact on the music. The duet of Hazel & Alice
recorded original compositions and deeply explored the
feminist archetypes in Appalachian song.  Dickens was
sure to not only raise issues such as the need for
equal pay for women workers, but to actively fight for
these on and off stage. Among the titles she penned
were "Working Girl Blues" and "Don't Put Her Down, You
Helped Put Her There". She also composed the noted
"Black Lung", which called on the miners' plight back
home. Like Aunt Mollie Jackson before her, Dickens was
able to capture the struggle of the moment in song, and
this was most evident in her on-screen performances in
celebrated films such as "Matewan" and "Song Catcher"
and her work on the above noted "Harlan County USA".
The union cause was her cause and it lived anew each
time she conjured a topical song set to a melody that
sounded as old as the ages.

A clear heir to the Appalachian stylings of Aunt Mollie
Jackson and Sarah Ogan, Dickens became a respected
figure and was a featured singer at folk festivals for
decades. Since the 1970s, Dickens had performed with a
wide array of musicians including Emmy Lou Harris,
Elvis Costello, Linda Ronstadt, Mary Chapin Carpenter
and Rosanne Cash. In 2007 she was inducted into the
West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. Dickens was active as
recent as last month when she was seen attending the
South By Southwest Festival in Austin. Hazel Dickens
died of complications of pneumonia in Washington DC on
April 22. In the blackened crawlspaces of West
Virginia's mines the lament was a deafening silence as
the mountain peaks seemed to bow in solemn reverence.

-John Pietaro is a musician, writer and labor organizer
from New York City--http:TheCulturalWorker.blogspot.com

Memorial for Janine Vega

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brmJxfYT70U
M ikhail Horowitz and Andy Clausen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=857zPs_lxII
Ed Sanders, Carol Zaloom reading Janice King, Tom Pacheco



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADcBpxOYPwo
DeeDee Halleck introduces Sara Flores and Norma Flores, translated by Fanny Prizant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_sLFAM4bA
Max Kenner and Derrick Mustafa Bell

David Thomas and Peter Lamborn Wilson

Bill Yitalo, Michael Esposito, Allen Murphy and Juma Sultan



Mikhail Horowitz Sings the Mean Old Badger Blues; Jesus Papoleto Melendez Reads a Poem and Fatima plays piano and sings while Juma plays conga.

"Looking Bad"

In 1983 Eddie Becker, Karen Ranucci, Joan Braderman, Skip Blumberg, Joel Kovel and I went to Nicaragua as the US threatened to attack. We thought it would be similar to the assault that was perpetrated against the island nation of Grenada that fall. Everyone expected that there would be a similar military invasion and we went down to try to show that what was happening in Nicaragua was supported by many of the Nicaraguan people and also many U.S. citizens who lived and worked there.

The resulting film is called Waiting for the Invasion: US Citizens in Nicaragua. Although many people all over the world expected an immediate invasion, we were wrong.  The invasion came, but not in the form of a full-out military assault.  Reagan unleashed a bloody U.S.-funded and trained counter insurgency that ruined the Sandinista economy and killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants.

Before we finished the film, we tried to get portions of it shown on the MacNeil Lehrer Report on PBS. We were quite desperate to get the information to a wider audience to try to stave off what we saw as an impending invasion. We knew that PBS would want full "journalistic neutrality" so we were careful to interview people from "both sides". But it was hard to find people who supported the notion of a U.S. invasion. Even a U.S. ex-military entrepreneur tire salesman wearing a California Chamber of Commerce tee shirt was against an invasion. We interviewed him as he was digging a trench outside of his business saying he would be "ready for Reagan".

We did finally found a pro-invasion spokesperson-- the U.S. Ambassador, Anthony Quintain, who railed against the peaceniks who had gathered in front of his embassy with their peace signs. We also interviewed the Texaco oil man in Managua, whose swarmy interview was full of hostility towards those protesters who "must live in a box", to be brought out for protests by the devious communists running the country.

It was 1983 and it was before the many brigades of U.S. "sandalistias" descended on the revolutionary experiment with their cameras and tape recorders. We had pretty much "an exclusive" with our look inside the Sandinista Revolution.  MacNeil Lehrer kept our film clips for several weeks and a friend who worked with them said they were seriously considering running some of our footage. But ultimately we were turned down.  The opinion from the PBS management (we heard that the issue had gone up the chain of command to Washington executives) was that it was "too one-sided".

"But wait!" we objected. "We did show both sides! We interviewed the ambassador and the oil company!" "Yes," said the producer, "but they look bad. Nothing they say makes any sense." So because it was so obviously "one-sided", our film never ran on PBS. It did, however, run in the Iowa State Fair. A solidarity group picked our film to loop continuously at a booth the next summer. One of the scenes takes place in a cornfield where a young U.S. agronomist speaks about the agrarian reform program and the need to get away from export-only farming and plant more food products.  The Iowa peace group said they looked at a lot of films about conflict in Nicaragua and Central America and they felt that our film was the only one that Iowa farmers could relate to.  Corn farmers unite.

Reminiscing about 112 Greene Street

Kartuli Concert In Kingston, NY, January 21, 2011

Ezra Halleck and Tamar Schumann are members of this group.

Janine Pommy Vega Died Yesterday

Janine was a regular at the Willow Pond Poets' Society Annual Readings.
Janine Pommy Vega (February 5, 1942 – December 23, 2010) was an American poet associated with the Beats. Vega grew up in Union City, New Jersey. At the age of fifteen, inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, she travelled to Manhattan to become involved in the Beat scene there. In 1962, Vega moved to Europe with her husband, painter Fernando Vega. After his sudden death in Spain in 1965, she returned to New York, and then moved to California. Her first book, Poems to Fernando, was published by City Lights in 1968 as part of their City Lights Pocket Poets Series. During the early-1970s, Vega lived as a hermit on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian-Peruvuian border. Out of this self-imposed exile came Journal of a Hermit (1974) and Morning Passage (1976). Following her return to the Americas, she has published more than a dozen books, including Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents (1997) which is a collection of travel writings. Her last book of poetry was The Green Piano.
In the 1970s, Vega began working as an educator in schools through various arts in education programs and in prisons through the Incisions/Arts organisation. She has served on the PEN Prison Writing Committee. Pommy Vega is a pioneer of the women's movement in the United States. She has worked to improve the lives, conditions, and opportunities for women in prison. Vega had traveled throughout the North American and South American continents, all throughout Europe, including Eastern Europe, countries in the Middle East, often alone. She made friends everywhere, approaching all on the same, basic, human level, with love and compassion.
By 2006, Vega was living in Willow, New York, a small hamlet near Woodstock. She spent the last 11 years with poet Andy Clausen, tending her garden when she wasn’t traveling the world performing her magnetic and politically engaged poetry. She continued writing, performing, and working for human rights up to her death.

From Kole Oluwatoyin Ade-Odutola
I was at this VERY reading
We are consoled by the truth, her soul found creative expressions while with us and her words that stole our attention will live on.
To those of us alive we must give new lives to thoughts that are dead
and renew contacts with forgotten friends
Be well my friends behind the screen.

And then there was the time when Janine wrote a poem for Molly and Shawheen's "nuptial blessing." Her presentation is about half way through the video. (July 2008)


FROM THE WOODSTOCK TIMES
Janine Pommy Vega, 68 — poet, political activist, Beat legend, world traveler, hiker and lover of the Catskills, teacher of aspiring writers in schools and prisons, and so much, much more — died on December 23 at her mountain home in Willow, in the arms of her lover and longtime companion, Andy Clausen. Over the past few years she had suffered greatly from rheumatoid arthritis (which she wryly termed the “Mean Ol’ Badger”), heart and liver trouble, and a medley of other illnesses, but she never let them stay her from teaching, writing, performing, or any of her other appointed rounds, answering their insults and humiliations with a courage that those who knew her deemed extraordinary.

“I didn’t know such bravery was possible, and it made me want to do right by her,” said Clausen, who had lived with Vega since 1999. “She was still planning gigs and counting on finishing her Bard College prison classes, even though she could only go an inch at a time by that point.”

Born in Jersey City to Joseph and Irene Telkowski Pommy on February 5, 1942, Janine Vega was effectively born a second time in 1960, when — after graduating as valedictorian of her class — she hopped a bus for New York City, telling her mother, “I’m going to live with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in Greenwich Village.” She hung out with Allen, Peter, Gregory Corso, and other luminaries of the Beat scene and began writing poetry. In December of 1962 she met the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega; they were married in Israel and lived there, in Paris, and finally in Ibiza, where Fernando died of an overdose of heroin. The love poems that Vega wrote to him during a year of mourning were eventually published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press as Poems to Fernando — the first poems by a woman to be featured in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. As R’lene Dahlberg noted in her 1983 profile of Vega for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Vol. 16: The Beats), “Poems to Fernando is an exquisite chronicling of the birth of a poet through pain. Despite a few poetic affectations, the poet’s genuine emotions come through, and one experiences the birth pangs of a poet who is both mother and child. Janine Pommy is now truly Janine Pommy Vega — the name she will continue to use.”

Overall, Janine Vega published more than 15 books and chapbooks of poetry, notably The Bard Owl (1980); Drunk on a Glacier, Talking to Flies (1988); Mad Dogs of Trieste: New and Selected Poems (2000); and The Green Piano (2005). Her tales of journeys in search of matriarchal power sites, an odyssey that spanned four continents, were collected as Tracking the Serpent by City Lights (1997). These pilgrimages to the Amazon jungle, Nepal, Glastonbury, and Chartres Cathedral echoed the “road trips” taken by her male Beat compatriots, but were far more extensive, both geographically and in the nature of their investigations. The memoir, fueled by what the Boston Phoenix called Vega’s “compassionate indignation” at the subjugation of women and the demonizing of their spirituality through the ages, passes through loss and grief to a disciplined embrace of the life of the spirit. “That’s the fundamental relevance, for any woman artist, of Vega’s exploration of the world’s oldest female images of creativity,” the Phoenix concluded.

Vega’s friends and lovers constitute a Who’s Who of late-20th-century and early Third Millennium underground cultural heroes. But her most rewarding relationships were likely with the hundreds of inmates in the New York State prison system, her students of poetry and writing for more than three decades. Since 1987, she had directed Incisions/Arts, a program that brings writers into the prisons; at the time of her death, she was teaching at two local correctional facilities, Eastern and Woodbourne, through the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a Bard College program that confers bachelor’s degrees to incarcerated students.

“Janine’s work with BPI only supplemented her long-standing efforts to make many of our region’s harshest places more hospitable to the arts and individual expression,” said Max Kenner, BPI’s executive director. “For nearly 15 years Janine offered poetry workshops within Eastern, on her own and with little or no funding…In many respects, it was her acquaintance and generosity that led to Bard’s collaboration with Eastern and the program we now have.”

The poet Hettie Jones, who taught a prose-writing class through Vega’s Sing Sing poetry workshop in the winter of 1989, credits Vega with launching her “subsequent career of more than a dozen years” teaching in women’s prisons. “She was such a light in everyone’s life,” said Jones, who eventually became the chair of PEN’s prison writing committee. “I admired her so much for her incredible energy. She and I often appeared as ‘Beat girls’ in readings at various venues, and we’d have such fun, because we weren’t impressed with ourselves. Janine didn’t have any airs about her, even though she had done so much that really was impressive; she just remained a hardworking person.”

Always a propulsive and passionate reader of her poetry, Vega became more musically sophisticated over the years, working with such musicians as Nina Sheldon, John Esposito, David Arner, Michael Esposito, and the late Betty MacDonald. Her CD Across the Table, featuring poems recorded at Mark Dann Studios in Woodstock and in concert at festivals in Bosnia and Italy, preserves the urgency and ardor of her voice.

“She didn’t really need a band,” said Sheldon, a jazz pianist and singer who had been working with Vega in recent years. “She drove her words by shaking her maracas, right on the beat, strong and unflagging, even when her hands were so crippled she could barely hold them.”

Until the attrition of her physical capabilities, Janine Vega had been an intrepid hiker, trekking the backbone of the Andes, the high plateaus of

the Himalayas, and the gentler summits of the Catskills, where she was a card-carrying member of the 3500 club (meaning, she had made it to the top of every peak in the Catskills more than 3,500 feet above sea level). In a 1999 interview for Ulster magazine, she said, “I’m married to some of these mountains — Kaaterskill High Peak, Plateau — and when I’m climbing, it’s just me and the mountain. Your face leaves you, you take on the contours of the place that you’re with . . . it’s like they say, there’s no you and there’s no mountain, and it’s true — that’s the state that one looks for.”

“I always thought of her as larger than life, but I recently realized that wasn’t quite accurate,” said poet Mikhail Horowitz, a friend of many years. “She was as large as life — meaning, she met life head on, kiss for kiss and blow for blow, never flinching from anything it dealt, and giving as good as she got. That only seems ‘larger than life’ because so many of us shrink from meeting life on its own terms. But Janine was that rarest of persons, one who was able to make life worthy of her.”

On Christmas Day, Bob Arnold, the executor of Vega’s estate, and his wife, Susan — old friends to whom Janine dedicated Tracking the Serpent — made the long drive down from Vermont to gather her books and papers so as to ensure their safekeeping. The next day, Andy Clausen sat in the house he shared with Janine Vega and remembered when he first fell in love with her. “We were on a bus in Jersey City, standing and holding onto the straps, and I realized that she came from the same kind of neighborhood that I came from — the old school, the library — and neither of us had gone to college, but we had both learned poetry…” His reminiscence then skipped ahead, to encompass all the years they spent together: “She was stubborn, feisty, smart, big-hearted, big-spirited, and a tremendous worker. She really saw the infinite in the flowers, the Mother of us all in the night sky, and she had great love for the common people.”

In addition to Clausen, her survivors include a brother, Bill Pommy, and his wife, Carol, and a nephew, a niece, and a grandniece. She was predeceased by her sister, Irene Setaro.

A celebration of Janine Vega’s life will take place in February in Woodstock, the date, time, and place to be announced. There will also be a memorial in New York City. Her ashes will be buried in the Woodstock Artists Cemetery in the summer.

Feet

I look down at the flat feet by the toilet

my feet, this life

First we’re hypnotized that this is it

then we’re saying good-bye

How many nights have I done this?

Shivering moth wings on the screen

Outside hypnosis

it really is good-bye.

August 12, 2001

from Vega’s The Green Piano

Mad Dogs of Trieste

for Andy Clausen

We have never been in a war like this

in all the years of watching

the street at 3 a.m.,

kids lobbing cherry bombs into garbage cans

the last hookers heading toward home

It used to be, stopping in Les Halles cafes

after a night we could find the strong

men from the market

and the beautiful prostitutes

resting in each other’s arms

Le Chat Qui Peche, Le Chien Qui Fume

alive with Parisian waltzes, his hands on her ass

We could pick up raw produce from discard bins

and have lentil stew for tomorrow

Things have never been like this.

Cops square off against teenagers in the village square

take the most pliant as lovers, and reroute the rest

into chutes of incarceration

The mad dogs of Trieste

we counted on to bring down the dead

and rotting status quo, give a shove here

and there, marauder the fattened and calcified order,

have faded like stories

We used to catch them with their hat brims

keeping most of the face in shadow

and sometimes those voices

one by one

turned into waves

like cicadas in the August trees, whistling

receding, and the words crept under

the curtains of power, made little changes,

tilted precarious balance, and brought relief

Those packs don’t crisscross the boulevards

now in the ancient cities, no political cabal

behind us watches the world with

eyes entirely

cognizant

the lyrical voices rainbow bodies

your friends my friends nobody left

but the mad dogs of Trieste as we

cover the streets.

August 1998

from Vega’s The Mad Dogs of Trieste
Elegy for Janine: Singing in Eternity

No, it cannot be that you are gone.

I weep for thee, sister spirit!

Do not say I should not cry.

Death has stolen your smile from me,

And stilled the voice of passion

Through which the Great Mother spoke.

You walked the world opening doors

In prisons and in our hearts.

You talked to flies on glaciers!

You held on to life with your fingertips,

And just kept on coming.

I weep for thee sister spirit!

Do not say I should not cry.

How can the beautiful die?

Michael Perkins

23 December, 2010
Janine Pommy Vega

She was born on February 5, 1942

in Jersey City, New Jersey

Soon after it was published, she read

Kerouac’s On the Road — that was 1958

It made a big impression on her

She was a wild young woman

and at age 16 she met Beat Poet Gregory Corso

at the Cedar Bar

on University Place in Manhattan

The Cedar was where the painters and poets commingled

Through Corso, the 16 year old Janine met Kerouac,

Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky

She returned to N.J. to finish high school

and then fled to Greenwich Village

where in the summer of ’59 she became a waitress

at the Beat coffee house on West Third Street

called the Bizarre.

She met the Beat writer Herbert Huncke

& for a while lived with him.

She also was a lover of Peter Orlovsky

And she began to write poetry

She lived in Paris, in Israel, in San Francisco, in Ireland

and other places

till with $5,000 she inherited from her mother

she purchased a six room house in Willow

in 1979.

Throughout her career, since 1968 she published

a sequence of excellent books

Miriam and I toured Italy and Sardinia

with Janine a couple of years in the early 2000s

and were always amazed by her cross-cultural

vivacity.

Her final years were wracked with declining health,

but she kept up her touring, her work helping

writers in prison, and appearing in festival upon

festival. Never surrendering. Never giving up,

always with a gleam in her eye.

And now she is gone. Just two months shy of

her 69th birthday.

Rest in peaceful glory, Janine Vega

Ed Sanders
Her voice was invincible

Janine Pommy Vega — poet, lover, witness, warrior, clarion voice for those forgotten and discarded by governments, gardener of vegetables and verbs, speaker of truth to power, singer of the fearless, unconstrained heart — has left us, way too soon, and we have no instruments with which to gauge our loss, which is incalculable. She recorded it all with an eye that never flinched, heard it with an ear that never stopped paying attention, voiced it with a tongue that never apologized, and embraced it with a generosity of spirit that never quit. Time and again, she reached deeply into the darkness and retrieved something that is so essential, it can’t be named—and yet she named it, each time, with great eloquence. Her life and work were illuminated by the wisdom that a true struggle for justice has to be waged with laughter and joy as well as anger and tears. Her voice will not be dispersed with her ashes, and the great and beautiful gift she gave us will never stop giving.

Mikhail Horowitz

Saugerties

R

Janine asked me to write a recommendation for her application to the Guggenheim Foundation. Unfortunately she did not qualify for a grant.

Janine Pommy Vega is a “beat poet” who “slammed” before that became an MTV category. Her strong words and the dynamic performances she musters are the highlight of readings and poet gatherings in the U.S. and around the world. She is acknowledged as a master poetry performer by other poets, one of a very few women to be so recognized. 
The world of "beat" poetry has been for the most part a male domain: but she has been a strong and lyrical presence for decades, respected and honored as a poet’s poet.
I think Janine deserves this fellowship at this time especially for her recent work, which in the past two or three years has truly taken flight. Her recent poems are the best she has ever written. She is on fire and needs the time to concentrate to let the magic out! This increased fire in her work is partly a reaction of the current world situation, partly a reaction to her own pain and physical sufferings, but mostly just the distillation of the long years of passion and dedication that has been her life. I think she has also been inspired by her work with musicians—her CD of poems set to music (a jazz combo) is the very best of that genre. There is no better. It is up there with Ginsberg and his harmonium.
Her strength is her determination to experience first hand those elements of her poetry. She knows nature directly from her experiences as a climber of every peak in the Catskills, and her many years as an ardent gardener at her mountain home. Her travels to the Andes have been part of her prose and poetry. Her eloquent descriptions of the state apparati of repression and confinement come from thirty years of prison work, a service that is unique in terms of both length of time and depth of participation.
Janine is known and loved behind bars in every prison in this state—she is a legend in those clanking corridors, a breath of life that lingers in the minds and hearts of those incarcerated—an inspiration for her months and years of dedicated work. The poems produced in her workshops are exquisite – by far the best “prison writing” that I have come across. This is deep stuff—the sort of excavation of the soul that only true poets can do. That Janine can inspire these prisoners to open their minds to such depth is a rare talent. She has been doing this, often thanklessly, for decades. She, more than any other person, would be able to do justice to the sort of anthology she outlines in her proposal (Part B).
Janine Pommy Vega is a great poet. For the most part she is unrecognized (except by other poets! ) in this country. She is fierce, lyrical and passionate and she brings the many worlds of her life together into her recent work—her experiences in Latin America and Italy, her appreciation and involvement with the mountains of the Catskills and her close affiliation with those beings whom society has rejected: the men (and women) who live under complete state control. Janine has been there and brings us as close as we will ever get to the reality of those places. -- DeeDee Halleck

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Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

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