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Roughly one hundred full color, illustrated pages of essays, commentary, poetry, art, comics and reviews. "Apartheid" in today's world does not describe only a particular legal circumstance in this or that corner of the globe. Art, literature, music and creativity, in a very basic sense, are a bending of time and space, a defiance of the ways racism, capitalism and imperialism have shaped our world. They dare us to imagine over the walls. Pieces include: * A roundtable discussion with author and activist Walidah Imarisha, radical scholar Robin DG Kelley, and Jonathan Horstmann of "futurepunk" group BLXPLTN on the Radical Black Imagination * A series of essays on art and cultural exchange under neoliberalism from Bill Crane, Stella Becerril and Alexander Billet * Poetry from D. Noble, Prerna Bakshi, and Anthony Squiers * Octavio Quintanilla reviews Remi Kanazi's Before the Next Bomb Drops * Our first ever printed version of "Red Wedge Comix," featuring the work of Michelle Sayles * Colin Revolting revisits Rock Against Racism through the work of Syd Shelton

Roughly one hundred full color, illustrated pages of essays, commentary, poetry, art, comics and reviews. "Apartheid" in today's world does not describe only a particular legal circumstance in this or that corner of the globe. Art, literature, music and creativity, in a very basic sense, are a bending of time and space, a defiance of the ways racism, capitalism and imperialism have shaped our world. They dare us to imagine over the walls.

Pieces include:

* A roundtable discussion with author and activist Walidah Imarisha, radical scholar Robin DG Kelley, and Jonathan Horstmann of "futurepunk" group BLXPLTN on the Radical Black Imagination

* A series of essays on art and cultural exchange under neoliberalism from Bill Crane, Stella Becerril and Alexander Billet

* Poetry from D. Noble, Prerna Bakshi, and Anthony Squiers

* Octavio Quintanilla reviews Remi Kanazi's Before the Next Bomb Drops

* Our first ever printed version of "Red Wedge Comix," featuring the work of Michelle Sayles

* Colin Revolting revisits Rock Against Racism through the work of Syd Shelton

#poetry #antiracism #Afrofuturism #music #art #Rock Against Racism #Red Wedge Magazine #Radical Black Imagination #apartheid #art against global apartheid #comix

Like books and Black lives, albums still matter.

Prince (RIP)

#Prince #Black Lives Matter #music

It’s been a year since the death of Michael Brown, a year since the rebellion in Ferguson, a year since the Black Lives Matter movement began to shift the conversation in just about every avenue of American life. That shift can be seen in politics (from #BowDownBernie to Donald Trump’s threats to beat up protesters) and economics (the Black Youth Project’s embrace of the Fight for 15). It can also be seen, perhaps most obviously, in our culture — and in music, in particular.

#michaelbrown #blacklivesmatter #bowdownbernie #hiphoppolitics #radicalart #politicalmusic #radicalmusic

For Baltimore-based rapper Son of Nun, the forming of Firebrand in June, a new rebel music record label headed by Tom Morello and Ryan Harvey, offered him an opportunity to redeem his rhymes. Born Kevin James, the 37-year-old emcee took a lengthy hiatus from hip-hop until Harvey, who he’d met through activists circles years back, approached him to become part of his experiment. “I wasn’t performing and hadn’t been writing,” says James. “I had gone through some shit and I didn’t know when I was going to pick the mic up again.” But he did, leading the way for Firebrand with the politically charged “It’s Like That,” the label’s first release.

#sonofnun #baltimorerappers #baltimorerap #rapmusic #radicalmusic #politicalrap

In September 2008, the Irish government gave a blanket guarantee to the six main banks in the country’s financial services sector. No strings attached, no overseeing, no transparency. In effect, a blank check was handed to organisations low on funds. This decision, which obviously fell way short of outright nationalization, was disastrous; it tied the state to the debts of the banks, and eventually resulted in a total collapse of Ireland’s economy which in turn necessitated the intervention of the "Troika" — the IMF, ECB and European Commission. The Guarantee attempts to tell the story of how this fiscal catastrophe came to pass, identifying the main players and their motives along with a crash course in the vagaries of international finance. Colin Murphy adapts his stage play of the same name, and Ian Power takes up the directorial reins for what is intended to be a tense display of political mismanagement and disregard for social consequence.

From my vantage point, I could see everything Horace was doing. I could see the glisten of his forehead and still feel the heat from his grin. He was a man who supported a movement with his voice. I saw Horace in front of me become a martyr in his own doing. He did not die from some heinous crime, but he gave his life to show that what he protested wasn’t as much about him and the many patients that he befriended and defended when the mayor of Chicago closed half of the mental hospitals. Horace stood there for something beyond tangible attainment, which was often tested and tried in the April Spring. The movement had intensified by then. Occupy Chicago and a handful of non-violent grassroots action committees had joined together with the vision of bringing back Chicago. On a rainy afternoon, the sound of the heavy raindrops knocking down on every white and off-white surface of the city made the condition more hectic than usual. I could recall it being some of the heaviest rain Chicago had gotten in that April. I met up with a few other activists at Daley plaza, in the South Loop. Across the street, the three of us waited for our time to join the rest of our fellow activists for a planned sit in.

#Prose #ShortStory #Occupy Chicago #Mental Health #Occupy Stories #Protest

Editors' note: Naomi Weisstein passed a way in March. She was a pioneering voice for feminism in psychology and was a formidable socialist-feminist activist in the 1960's and 70's. She was also a founding member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and of its musical group: the Chicago Women's Liberation Union Rock Band. The band was formed as an effort to push back against the chauvinism prevalent in popular music at the time and as a way to provide space for feminist art and culture to thrive. We publish this essay, which also appears at the CWLU Herstory Project, in her memory. * * * In Chicago, one cold and sunny day in March of 1970, I decided to organize a feminist rock band. I was lying on the sofa listening to the radio -- a rare bit of free time in those early days of the women's movement. Perhaps a meeting had been canceled. The trendy station that had just switched to all-rock was playing a medley of hits. First, Mick Jagger crowed that his once feisty girlfriend was now "under his thumb." Then Janis Joplin moaned with thrilled resignation that love was like "a ball and chain." Then The Band, a self-consciously left-wing group, sang:

#feminism #Herstory #ChicagoWomen #Women in Rock #Political Rock #Womens Liberation

Activists and organizers for social change undoubtedly experience periods of burnout. Working long hours — typically without pay and little appreciation — on campaigns, issues and causes where victories are few and far between can be demoralizing. Some activists get so frustrated with the perceived lack of results from their hard work, the divisions within the Left, and the rampant apathy among the general public that they give up entirely and retreat from activism. Cartoonist, writer and organizer Stephanie McMillan saw the depression, feelings of hopelessness and other difficulties faced by her fellow activists. And she wanted to do something to help people overcome these. So she started writing uplifting messages to empower individuals to continue working for a better world. She calls her inspirational messages “Daily Affirmations for the Revolutionary Proletarian Militant.” Similar to the memorable characters in her popular comic strips Minimum Security and Code Green, McMillan’s affirmations are accompanied by cute and colorful animals, plants and insects.

#Comics #PoliticalCartoon #RadicalArt #PoliticalArt #ResistanceArt #RevolutionaryArt #ProletarianArt

Bastille Day Prison Abolition Drink & Draw!

Brick by brick, wall by wall...

If we can't physically tear down any jails this Bastille Day then we can at least lend a hand to the groups that are aiming to build an alternative to our racist prison industrial complex. Red Wedge magazine is proud to present this event, and we want you there!

There will be opportunities to create your own art. Drinks will be available for purchase. So grab a libation, sit down with a blank piece of paper and get to know some other radical artists.

There will be magazines, books, and posters for sale. Proceeds will be split between Red Wedge and Project NIA, a group working to end youth incarceration through the framework of transformative justice (http://www.project-nia.org/home.php).

Come celebrate Bastille Day the right way: with revolutionary art and the promise of liberation.

2400 S. Oakley, Chicago IL (entrance in rear of building)

“I had to drink this beer to get the taste of the cell out of my mouth,” Brian said, raising his bottle to the audience. A survivor of 12 straight years of solitary confinement at Tamms Supermax, he can still sometimes taste the concrete dust, and being in a room with a life-size model of a solitary cell wasn’t helping. Brian went on to say that though his nametag said he was a “survivor” of solitary, he doesn’t feel like he has survived. More than four years after leaving his cell, he said, “not a day goes by that it’s not in my head.” The crowded room was quiet, and Brian’s eyes were wet as he talked. He has serious PTSD from what he went through, plus a lot of survivor guilt because of the guys he left behind, still locked in gray boxes of their own.

#solitary #incarceration #solitary confinement #politicalart

mrsronweasleygingerlover

litbugi

I love this <3 http://remezcla.com/culture/this-frida-kahlo-inspired-cartoon-will-get-you-through-hump-day/

Introduction Hollywood and moviegoers seem infatuated with dystopian futures. To be sure this is not entirely new, dystopian fiction has been a staple of human imagination since we started telling stories. But the recent popularity of stories like The Hunger Games and Divergent and a plethora of other dark futuristic tales deserves notice. A look at any newspaper can tell you why: Environmental disasters and extreme weather events seem almost routine; an ongoing global economic crises has upended millions of lives and neoliberal economic policies offer only more austerity and hardship. In the U.S. and many other countries broken and utterly corrupt political systems only reinforce growing inequality, and serve to guard elites’ control of wealth and resources. Endless militarism and war have become the new normal as various elites fight for position and control of resources, bolstered by religious fanaticism and hollow but motivating patriotic fervor. Director George Miller and company are veterans of the post apocalyptic genre. The fourth installment of the Mad Max franchise isn’t so much a reboot, as we’ve come to expect from an increasingly risk averse Hollywood establishment in search of sure fire hits based upon name recognition and audience familiarity. Instead it is an utterly refreshing reimagining of the universe inhabited by the previous Mad Max films, reiterating familiar themes but also transcending them. Therefore, though the left has already written a great deal on this movie (from high praise to critical panning), it is worth stepping back and looking at how its aesthetic accomplishments set it apart.

#MadMax #MovieReview #GeorgeMiller

How do our dreams fit in a world that scatters us to the wind? This is the question, asked in various ways, by working people today. We live in a world of perpetual war, ecological catastrophe and economic degradation. Our lives are work (either too much or too little) and work amplifies the brut...

Get a special addition t-shirt designed by Red Wedge Editors Adam Turl and Craig Ross when you donate $30 towards the 2015 Fund Drive!

tamtams

damnitrj

Whoop, there it is.

For leftists, Le musee du Carnavalet, a free museum tucked away in the Parisian Marais, is a treasure trove. The museum presents the history of the city of Paris, depositing artifacts, paintings, and relics of the tortured history of this tortured city. Paris has long captivated the leftist imagination, not simply for its prominence in literature nor only for its demonstrated and longstanding left resistance, but precisely because of its history. Paris, the city of 100,000 novels as Balzac once called it, is singular in its revolutionary history — the site of the decapitation of the king, the streets barricaded during the commune, the vibrancy of the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation, the bravery of Algerian resistance fighters during the struggle for decolonization. Those interested in the Carnavalet's Revolution collection usually come to marvel at Couthon's chair, displayed in the middle of the room, or to look at Saint Just's pistol, to have their hearts palpitate at Robespierre's membership card to the Cordelier club. These artifacts of history, these possessions of great men, they are no doubt inspiring. And standing in front of it, my partner and I even joked that one day, we could use the lock of Robespierre's hair to do a Jurassic Park style resurrection. There is a kind of awe and grandeur imbued in these objects that the revolutionary heart of mine aches for in longing. One feels inaugurated into the gravity and the force of Revolutionary history, with all its contentions, struggles, vanities, sacrifices, and torrid demises by standing before it.

For leftists, Le musee du Carnavalet, a free museum tucked away in the Parisian Marais, is a treasure trove. The museum presents the history of the city of Paris, depositing artifacts, paintings, and relics of the tortured history of this tortured city. Paris has long captivated the leftist imagination, not simply for its prominence in literature nor only for its demonstrated and longstanding left resistance, but precisely because of its history. Paris, the city of 100,000 novels as Balzac once called it, is singular in its revolutionary history — the site of the decapitation of the king, the streets barricaded during the commune, the vibrancy of the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation, the bravery of Algerian resistance fighters during the struggle for decolonization.

Those interested in the Carnavalet's Revolution collection usually come to marvel at Couthon's chair, displayed in the middle of the room, or to look at Saint Just's pistol, to have their hearts palpitate at Robespierre's membership card to the Cordelier club. These artifacts of history, these possessions of great men, they are no doubt inspiring. And standing in front of it, my partner and I even joked that one day, we could use the lock of Robespierre's hair to do a Jurassic Park style resurrection. There is a kind of awe and grandeur imbued in these objects that the revolutionary heart of mine aches for in longing. One feels inaugurated into the gravity and the force of Revolutionary history, with all its contentions, struggles, vanities, sacrifices, and torrid demises by standing before it. Continue Reading at Redwedge.com

#french revolution #musee du carnavalet #Revolutionary #RevolutionaryAesthetics #robespierre #RadicalArt #Aesthetics #walter benjamin #franz fanon #aesthetic theory #revolutionary art

Ornette Coleman died in June of a cardiac arrest on the same day as an infamous bad guy actor, Christopher Lee and legendary professional wrestler Dusty Rhodes. One can’t help but chuckle at the Colemanesque improvisation of the Grim Reaper. Coleman was perhaps the jazz musician with the most theoretical depth, even if his own cultural production never hit the highs of his early performances for Atlantic Records. Like Godard, Brecht or David Byrne, Coleman was as illuminating — if not sometimes moreso — when theorizing his own project, as he was in the project itself. Indeed, the man was so on point, that no less than Jacques Derrida comes off as humble — even insecure — in an interview that he conducted with Coleman in 1997. After an awkward mouthful attempting to make Derridean sense of improvisation’s dialectic of repetition and rupture, the comrade with the saxophone said to the French philosopher “Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.” Derrida clearly seemed interested in Coleman’s dictum of “harmolodics” which decenters the specificity of tone. Decentering tone, however, was grounded in what Coleman referred to as “punching the C”. Every musician has their own “movable C”, understood as a tone, a note, a timbre, a sound that was related to another tone, note, timbre – that is to say, a sort of determinate negation. That repetition, that ideational presence of structure in a seemingly formless void is always-already present when sound is produced, or when social time is measured in a sense that sound become what we know as “music”. This is perhaps why one of the most satisfying moments for listeners of improvised music — jazz, rock, bluegrass or post-rock – is the segue or the re-entry of improvisation back into the chord pattern and metre of the composition being explored — the reappearance of the syncopation. The syncopation that confused Adorno exists, after all, even in seemingly un-syncopated temporal parcels of social time.

Ornette Coleman died in June of a cardiac arrest on the same day as an infamous bad guy actor, Christopher Lee and legendary professional wrestler Dusty Rhodes. One can’t help but chuckle at the Colemanesque improvisation of the Grim Reaper. Coleman was perhaps the jazz musician with the most theoretical depth, even if his own cultural production never hit the highs of his early performances for Atlantic Records. Like Godard, Brecht or David Byrne, Coleman was as illuminating — if not sometimes moreso — when theorizing his own project, as he was in the project itself. Indeed, the man was so on point, that no less than Jacques Derrida comes off as humble — even insecure — in an interview that he conducted with Coleman in 1997.

After an awkward mouthful attempting to make Derridean sense of improvisation’s dialectic of repetition and rupture, the comrade with the saxophone said to the French philosopher “Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.” Derrida clearly seemed interested in Coleman’s dictum of “harmolodics” which decenters the specificity of tone. Decentering tone, however, was grounded in what Coleman referred to as “punching the C”. Every musician has their own “movable C”, understood as a tone, a note, a timbre, a sound that was related to another tone, note, timbre – that is to say, a sort of determinate negation.

That repetition, that ideational presence of structure in a seemingly formless void is always-already present when sound is produced, or when social time is measured in a sense that sound become what we know as “music”. This is perhaps why one of the most satisfying moments for listeners of improvised music — jazz, rock, bluegrass or post-rock – is the segue or the re-entry of improvisation back into the chord pattern and metre of the composition being explored — the reappearance of the syncopation. The syncopation that confused Adorno exists, after all, even in seemingly un-syncopated temporal parcels of social time. Continue Reading at RedWedge.com

#ornette coleman #jazz #jazztheory #freejazz #TommorowistheQuestion

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