[T]here is general agreement among eyewitnesses and commentators that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew into a crescendo when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in “Augurs of Spring”. Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage. In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into “a terrific uproar” which, along with the on-stage noises, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the step numbers to the dancers. The journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten recorded that the person behind him got carried away with excitement, and “began to beat rhythmically on top of my head”, though Van Vechten failed to notice this at first, his own emotion being so great.

{The premiere’s conductor, Pierre] Monteux believed that the trouble began when the two factions in the audience began attacking each other, but their mutual anger was soon diverted towards the orchestra: “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on”. Around forty of the worst offenders were ejected—possibly with the intervention of the police, although this is uncorroborated. Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. Things grew noticeably quieter during Part II, and by some accounts Maria Piltz’s rendering of the final “Sacrificial Dance” was watched in reasonable silence. At the end there were several curtain calls for the dancers, for Monteux and the orchestra, and for Stravinsky and Nijinsky before the evening’s programme continued.

Although the ballet went on to become accepted by audiences as both dance and as a concert work, Nijinsky’s unique choreography disappeared after the 1913 Ballets Russes season, until it was reconstructed for the Joffrey Ballet in the 1980s, by a team led by Millicent Hodson.  There have been several other choreographic interpretations of Stravinsky’s music and scenario, and the publisher estimates the ballet has undergone 150 productions worldwide since its composition.

Le Sacre‘s influence on composers during nine decades of the 20th century, and into this one, has been substantial.  What Stravinsky did in the music, was to combine new harmonic ideas, bordering on atonality, with a rhythmic freedom which was unprecedented, all portrayed symphonically by a very large orchestra of 110 players, with a huge rhythm section.  In terms of composers’ approach to rhythmic units, there is BLS and ALS (Before Le Sacre and After Le Sacre).  American composers as diverse Aaron Copland and Frank Zappa described encountering the work’s jagged sonic and metric vistas as having changed their lives.

In a brief period of time, less than a decade, when the shock of new music was represented by Richard Strauss’ sensually depraved Salome (1905) and Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal Pierrot Luniere (1912), Le Sacre stood out.  Because it led so many composers and other musicians in so many searches for freedom of expression, in so many different ways, I regard it as the most influential composition, not just of the 20th century, but of all modern history.

Happy 100th Birthday, Le Sacre du Printemps.

Here is the definitive performance of this masterpiece in the original (reconstructed) choreography.  The orchestra and dancers of the Kirov Ballet are directed by Valery Gergiev:

Image by dalbera under Creative Commons license

James Rosen

It seems my friend Dan at Pruning Shears and I are having a disagreement. I don’t think we’re actually as far apart on the government surveillance of the media as he does. I think I made rather clear in my earlier post on James Rosen and also on the AP records grab that I don’t condone secret government surveillance on the media — or anyone. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that the government conducted these investigations illegally. The laws that make it possible have been creeping into our judicial system long before the Obama administration arrived. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that Rosen isn’t being charged with a crime regardless of the dicey allegations made by the government to get its authorization for his records.

Booman and I differ on that point. I don’t consider Rosen a criminal. I think he’s an irresponsible journalist. Rosen’s email to his source made clear his main interest was in scooping his competitors, not in changing any policy. However, his piece was written in a way that revealed our intelligence operation. If he had simply done the usual anon source says N. Korea will blah, blah blah… without revealing we had an inside source in N. Korea and had lost track of their missiles, I wouldn’t have seen it as damaging.

While Dan Ellsberg would probably disagree, I don’t see any comparison between the Pentagon Papers and what Rosen did. The Pentagon Papers revealed serious government misconduct. Our government lied to the people and to Congress. Big lies that resulted in tens of thousands of lost lives. That was whistleblowing in the service of public interest. I’m wondering what government wrongdoing Dan sees as having been revealed by Rosen.

I don’t suggest we blindly accept every government claim of acting in the interest of national security while they abridge our civil rights. We need to look no further than the odious NSLs the Bush administration was so fond of to see the danger in that. But neither do I trust the motives of our present day media so much that I’m willing to unequivocally defend them. Surely Jon Karl and his anon source who provided altered emails to perpetrate a false GOP narrative would suggest our skepticism should go both ways. What good is a free media if they lie to us too, or jeopardize our intelligence assets, simply to drive traffic? As far I’m concerned neither secret surveillance nor irresponsible journalism should be defended. We deserve better from both sides.

It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.

I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions.

Many of us feel this way, but those words weren’t written recently by a progressive diarist, they were written by this diarist . . .

Like so many of us, Anne Frank had doubts and fears, she felt the weight of despair and disillusionment and depression, but she didn’t give up, she didn’t let the darkness overwhelm her, she knew where she wanted to be and let her words take her there, she let her words take all of us there, she kept writing . . .

I still express my ideals because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. When I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come out right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

Imprisoned in a slave labor camp, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote every day on scraps of paper and hid them away so they wouldn’t be confiscated by the guards and vanish forever. He didn’t know if he would ever be released, he didn’t know if anyone would ever read his words, but he was determined to bear witness to the inhuman cruelty tens of millions of people were being subjected to, he became their voice and the world heard them.

The words Aleksandr wrote on those scraps of paper became The GuLag Archipelago, they became One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, millions of people ultimately read his words.

Anne didn’t know if anyone would ever read her words, Aleksandr didn’t know if anyone would ever read his words, but they wrote them anyway, they resisted injustice because resisting injustice matters, it has always mattered, it always will matter.

Your resistance matters, FDL matters, MyFDL matters, what we’re doing here matters. The value of our words cannot be measured by Site Meter statistics, the Truth has timeless value. Affirm it, never let it be overwhelmed by the darkness of deceit, don’t ever stop telling it.

Keep the faith. Write what your heart tells you to write. Let your words take you where your heart wants to go.

We petition the Obama Administration to Invite Medea Benjamin to the White House for a beer.

On May 23, 2013, President Obama gave an important address at the National Defense University. Near the end, indefatigable peace activist, Medea Benjamin, pled with the President to consider important issues he had not addressed directly in his speech. The President stated, “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.”

We the undersigned believe the same. We encourage President Obama to invite Ms. Benjamin to the White House for a beer or two, so that he may redeem his pledge.

It needs 150 signatures before it goes up on their front page.

For anyone unfamiliar with the subject, here are two excerpts from the May 24th edition of Democracy Now:

The relevant parts of Obama’s speech:

Who Owns The Future?

It has been understood for several decades now that Jaron Lanier is a big thinker when it comes to the technologies that define our lives. The computer science pioneer who explained virtual reality to the rest of us inspires journalists to employ terms such as “digital visionary” (The Observer) and “Internet guru” (Publisher’s Weekly).

But he is another kind of thinker as well: a humanist speaking from an enlightenment perspective that recalls the Lunar Society days of two centuries ago, when there was broad recognition of the meeting group between technology and poetry. And where the great scientists of a new age wrestled with not just formulas and calculations but also with the question of how to build a just and humane society.

In his groundbreaking 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget (Vintage), Lanier challenged the digital utopianism that tells us that the solutions to all our problems can be found on the Web. It may have become “fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data,” he explained, but it not healthy for citizens or for society. Rather, Lanier argued, we should recognize the value, the necessity, of human initiative and reasoned argument.

You Are Not a Gadget was an invitation to think differently about everything. And the conclusions Lanier reached confirmed conclusions that Bob McChesney and I had come to as we prepared our book The Death and Life of American Journalism. We shared – and share – Lanier’s conclusion with regard to the direction of a digital transformation that was emptying out traditional newsrooms but failing to replace them with a sufficient online journalism to employ all the laid off reporters – let alone to serve a democratic society.

“Here’s just one problem: It screws the middle class,” Lanier explained in a 2010 Amazon.com interview on the rise of ‘Web 2.0’ designs. “Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. This is why newspapers are dying. It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone. When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians? Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.”

Lanier’s exceptional new book, Who Owns The Future? (Simon & Schuster), builds on that argument with a scorching critique of a digital transformation that is empowering not the great mass of citizens but high-tech monopolies; that is creating not equality of opportunity but a wealth gap that leaves even our most creative people with fewer and fewer options.

“The old ideas about information being free in the information age ended up screwing over everybody except the owners of the very biggest computers. The biggest computers turned into spying and behavior modification operations, which concentrated wealth and power,” Lanier explains. “Sharing information freely, without traditional rewards like royalties or paychecks, was supposed to create opportunities for brave, creative individuals. Instead, I have watched each successive generation of young journalists, artists, musicians, photographers, and writers face harsher and harsher odds. The perverse effect of opening up information has been that the status of a young person’s parents matters more and more, since it’s so hard to make one’s way.”

Jaron Lanier is reopening one of the old debates that Henry David Thoreau was wrestling with when he suggested the prospect that: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” We’ll wrestle with these ideas today, here in the Firedoglake Book Salon.

A subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Thursday on a bill that would impose an unconstitutional nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks post-fertilization. Four witnesses sat at the table during that hearing, but there was really only one person who mattered for the Republican lawmakers—whose aim, ultimately, is to outlaw all abortions. That person was Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Pennsylvania physician now serving a life sentence for murder and manslaughter.

US Capitol Building

According to Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, under whose jurisdiction the hearing was called, Gosnell is “not an anomaly in this gruesome Fortune 500 enterprise of killing unborn children.” The rogue doctor, who was roundly denounced by pro-choice activists as soon as the horrific conditions of his clinic came to light, is, for Franks, “the true face of abortion on demand in America.”

Using Gosnell as justification, Franks has retooled his proposed “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act”—previously introduced as a measure specific to Washington, D.C.—to apply to all 50 states. A D.C. 20-week ban has also been introduced in the Senate, although it is highly unlikely to come up for a vote.

If all abortion providers were like Gosnell, of course, they could be prosecuted under existing criminal laws, as Gosnell was. But they’re not—and that’s why House Republicans want to create a way to prosecute them. The Pain-Capable Act would subject doctors who perform abortions after 20 weeks to criminal prosecution, jail time, and monetary penalties. It would provide a cause of action for a woman who has an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy—or her husband, boyfriend, or one-night stand, as well as her family—to sue the doctor, including for punitive damages.

By pegging the gestational time-limit to disproven claims about fetal pain (which medical experts agree is not possible before the third trimester), the bill would lay the basis for limiting abortions even earlier in pregnancy, based on even more questionable science, as demonstrated at Franks’ hearing.

Maureen Condic, a University of Utah scientist who also opposes embryonic stem-cell research, testified that it is “uncontested that a fetus experiences pain as early as eight weeks.” By continually arguing that fetal pain is experienced far earlier than the established medical evidence, Condic did provide proof of something else: that Republicans’ ultimate goal is to outlaw abortion far earlier than 20 weeks.

The bill proposed by Franks contains no exceptions for the health of a woman who needs an abortion after 20 weeks, raising the specter of a woman (or the parents of a minor) suing a doctor who, in an emergency, saved her from horrific health consequences. It also provides no exceptions for rape or incest. The woman, the man by whom she is pregnant, or the woman’s family members could even seek a court order barring the doctor from performing abortions in the future.

Another of the Republicans’ three witnesses, anti-choice activist Jill Stanek, claimed that the Gosnell case is “evidence that the lines between illegal infanticide and legal feticide, both via abortion, have become blurred.”

By equating Gosnell’s criminal activity with all abortion, Franks and his supporters attempt to elide the fact that their bill is patently unconstitutional, as Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), noted. Just this week the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a similar law out of Franks’ home state of Arizona. [cont'd.]

James Rosen

Earlier this week I had a brief and unproductive Twitter exchange with Libby Spencer over leaks, whistleblowers and journalists. It was prompted by this from BooMan:

We need to get our heads around the distinction between a whistleblower, who observes criminal or unethical behavior by government officials, and a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security. Sometimes these two things can overlap, as when we learned that the NSA was conducting warrantless wiretaps in violation of current law. Bradley Manning revealed official wrongdoing, too, but he also did so with no discrimination.

Libby supported this point of view, I disagreed, and it quickly became obvious we wouldn’t get anything productive done 140 characters at a time. So here is the post-length treatment. The summarized version of her position (correct me if I’m wrong Libby!) is to side with the government in cases where, as BooMan writes, a leaker provides information without discrimination, or when outlets engage in irresponsible journalism.

I think the distinction between a “whistleblower” and “a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security” is specious (though he allows that “these two things can overlap”). My whistleblower may be your criminal who leaks etc. It largely depends on whether you support the leak in question.

BooMan’s post starts out looking at the recently revealed Justice Department (JD) investigation of James Rosen. Coming on the heels of the AP phone records seizure, it immediately became linked to that scandal. (That’s very fortunate timing! I wonder how the WaPo managed to unearth that “newly obtained court affidavit” at such a critical moment.)

There seem to be two big differences between them, though. The first is that Rosen was more narrowly targeted than the AP was, the second is that Rosen appeared to want to force a change in US policy as part of his reporting. So at least some the details on this particular case seem to support the JD’s actions.

The problem is that BooMan is not content to stay with the details of that one particular case. He moves on to some pretty troubling generalizations instead – his condemnation of indiscriminate leaking, for example.

Whistleblowers typically approach journalists in part because they want an organization with experience and resources to comb through the documents and figure out what to publish. Daniel Ellsberg indiscriminately leaked 7,000 pages to The New York Times. Do Libby and BooMan consider him a criminal?

We can debate whether WikiLeaks is a media outlet (I think it is, or at least it was at the time of its Afghan war diary coverage), but Manning’s smuggled documents were published simultaneously – and with the cooperation of – The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. Did those outlets engage in irresponsible journalism?

This debate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Those who have been on the receiving end of the surveillance state’s attention tend to look at a story like Rosen’s in the broader context of the government attacks on the First Amendment. If national security reporting is now fair game for government attack, there’s no reason to think it will remain confined to sketchy characters like Rosen. Scoops like those from Charlie Savage and the New York Times will also presumably receive more scrutiny as well.

The American government’s sordid history of deception with highly classified intelligence goes back a long way. It’s somewhat astonishing to read someone uncritically pass along government claims that something endangers what BooMan calls “our” precious bodily fluids national security given its track record. One of the most visible tools used to keep information from the public has been the state secrets privilege (SSP), which was literally founded on a lie: [cont'd.]

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

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Originally posted at In These Times.

A time-honored tactic of conservative lawmakers is to “starve the beast”by defunding government programs. In the case of food stamps—the quintessential whipping boy for budget hawks—they’re going a step further by trying to starve actual people.

The House of Representatives and Senate have proposed the United States “tighten our belts” by slashing billions of dollars from poor people’s food budgets. The main mechanism for shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding is the removal of “categorical eligibility.” Basically, most states have used this policy to streamline enrollment: Families are made eligible for food stamps based on their receipt of other benefits, such as housing or childcare subsidies. That often means broadening eligibility for working-poor families or those with overall household income or savings that exceeds regular, stricter thresholds for qualifying for food stamps.

Now the House and Senate farm bill proposals, particularly the House plan, seek to “save” billions more by cutting categorical eligibility. Under the House farm bill budget, which cuts $20.5 billion in SNAP over 10 years, benefits would be eliminated for “nearly 2 million low-income people, mostly working families with children and senior citizens,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). (The Senate bill also cuts SNAP but only by about $4 billion over 10 years). In addition, the cuts would devastate poor students, because SNAP eligibility has enabled 210,000 low-income children to qualify for free school meals. That means more hunger pangs for kids in the cafeteria, and an emptier refrigerator waiting for them at home. Meanwhile, their working-poor parents may find themselves buying cheaper, less nutritious food to stretch budgets, or turning to the local food pantry, or facing cruel trade-offs like delaying rent payments to pay for groceries or leaving a health problem untreated.

According to Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy with the CBPP, the House proposal would end up cutting food stamps for people who hold minimal assets–poor families who have held onto a car to get to work, for example, or with savings just above $2,000. So at a time when wealth has declined for 93 percent of households, poor families who have built up a modest nest egg may be rewarded with the indignity of hunger. The typical food stamp family doesn’t fit the stereotype of the shiftless poor or “welfare queens,” Dean explained via email:

A typical working family that qualifies for SNAP benefits due to categorical eligibility is a mother with two young children who has monthly earnings just above the program’s monthly gross income limit ($2,069 for a family of three in 2013). On average, the families above that limit who qualify for SNAP as a result of categorical eligibility have combined child care and rent costs that exceed half of their wages. The approximately $100 per month in SNAP benefits they receive covers about one-fourth to one-fifth of their monthly food budget.

In addition to bumping people out of categorical eligibility, the House proposal would hit the so called “heat and eat” policy — a mechanism used by some states to coordinate heating assistance payments with food stamps. As a result, according to the CBPP, “about 850,000 low-income households, which include about 1.7 million individuals, would lose an average of $90 a month in SNAP benefits.”

All these cuts are absurdly out of sync with economic realities of the working poor. (They’re also heaped on top of a current cut to food stamps due to the expiration of a temporary boost from the federal stimulus package.) Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) estimatesthat over one-sixth of the population faces hardship in securing an adequate food supply–with appalling ratesof food insecurity among black and Latino households. And among those who can afford to keep their pantries stocked, many are still too poor to afford healthy, fresh food. Food stamps just dent that gap in food security, with monthly payments averaging a luxurious $280 per household.

For all the eagerness in Congress to shrink food stamps, the program’s problem is not that it helps too many, but that it reaches too few, as Monica Potts has reported. About one in four people who qualify for some reason do not receive benefits, according to federal estimates, perhaps due to stigma or bureaucratic barriers in the application process. Many immigrant families are also excluded due to their legal status.

Far from supplementing welfare “dependency,” SNAP actually supports work. According to the CBPP, “Among SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, more than half work while receiving SNAP—and more than 80 percent work in the year prior to or the year after receiving SNAP.” FRAC reports that overall, “SNAP typically boosts low-wage workers’ income by 10 percent or more,” which in turn helps stimulate the economy overall.

Between 2000 and 2011,the number of income-earning households on food stamps has more than tripled, topping six million. On the one hand this is a disturbing sign that working-class families are unable to find living wage jobs. But this reality highlights the critical role of SNAP in protecting people from sinking further into poverty.

So that’s the theme of this year’s budget debate: that millions of people can’t afford to eat is not a cause for alarm for politicians so much as a burdensome line item. And erasing public benefits make it easier to make the poor invisible in the public mind. After all, food stamps symbolize not only the failure of “free markets” but the power of social policy to reduce endemic human suffering. For millions of Americans, that monthly food allowance is an unsavory reminder of the consequences of social disinvestment: no matter how hard you work, at the end of the day, you’ll still be hungry.

Good morning everyone! How are you all today? Here’s hoping that some of the rain we’ve been getting in our necks of the woods goes to visit places in West Texas and New Mexico that could really use it.

My topic for today was given to me by Susan Vento, the wife of Bruce Vento, who was the longtime congressman for the Fourth Congressional District of Minnesota, an area comprising Saint Paul and the rest of Ramsey County. Congressman Vento passed away in October of 2000 from pleural mesothelioma, a deadly disease caused by exposure to asbestos during the many blue-collar jobs the congressman had held in his pre-Congress years.

At the time Vento was diagnosed in February of 2000, many asbestos companies pushed Henry Hyde, then the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to back a bill that would curb the rights of asbestos victims, such as Rep. Vento, to pursue damages in civil court. The industry-backed “Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act”, or “FACT”, would have forced the federal government to pre-screen all asbestos claims before the claimants were allowed to file any civil claims against the asbestos manufacturers. The asbestos industry claimed that this was intended to reduce “docket clog”, though what it really was meant to reduce were the payments made to the victims or their next of kin.

“FACT” was never enacted into law, but its main components are still being promoted by the asbestos industry. Just last week, asbestos companies teamed up with their good friends at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to lobby for a new bill with the same initials — the “Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency (FACT) Act.” (Original thinkers, they’re not.)

This zombified new “FACT” is even nastier than the first one. As Susan Vento told me in her email:

On top of mass privacy concerns, this bill would delay and, in some cases, deny justice to people suffering from asbestos-related diseases. The FACT Act marks the beginning of a state-by-state strategy to dismantle the rights of victims.

In the name of so-called “transparency,” the bill places burdensome reporting requirements on victims applying to the bankruptcy trusts. Yet, the companies who knowingly caused the asbestos exposure have no comparable requirements. The legislation is a one-sided and unfair effort designed to harm those who have already been injured. You can find more information on the bill here. This legislation is not an effort to make the legal system more responsive. Instead, it is merely the latest attempt by big companies and individuals like the Koch brothers to avoid responsibility for their heinous wrongdoings.

To find out more about the new Zombie FACT, go here: http://cancervictimsrights.org/legislation/fact-act/

To sign a petition to Congress to stop this new version of FACT, go here: http://cancervictimsrights.org/legislation/fact-act/

You know what to do.

Don't forget the lemonade

So what’s on the menu this weekend? Maybe some BBQ King Crab? A fancy salad? I would eat these, perfect to bring to a potluck party. End it all with some homemade ice cream and these festive M&M white chocolate brownies, they have to be made using only the red, white and blue ones, tho.

As some of you may know, I traditionally wander the neighborhood borrowing cheeseburgers, so my menu is established – and traditional. Anyone NOT making the same thing as always? I had friends who never do the same thing twice, it’s a big bash with lotsa potluck dishes to taste your way through. The one picnic that sticks in my mind was the roast pig. Now THAT’s a project, and obviously not for everyone. But it was fun – a looong wait tho, and I think it was delicious (I was young and there was a lot of beer and stuff).

I’ve always wanted to go to a giant clambake– I mean a giant party on the beach with a clams on the menu, not a party where they ‘bake’ giant clams. (Do people even eat those monsters or do they eat you!?) Nothing like a seaside get together to start off the summer.

Does anyone incorporate any formal remembrances for Memorial Day? Visit a cemetery, place flags on graves? We never did that when I was growing up, it was more an opening-the-pool picnic. Of course no disrespect intended, my parents were both veterans of WW II.

If only we’d stop killing each other…

Image by mitsy mcgoo under Creative Commons license