Hadley Suter : The Maternal Instinct Vs. the Realities of Unwaged Labor

Graphic from The Motherhood Manifesto.
The maternal instinct versus
the realities of unwaged labor

I’ve been worried sick over the past nine months that I’m about to turn into a mommy-slave -- and like it.

By Hadley Suter / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2012

[As we go to press, Hadley Suter reports that she has given birth. "He was very polite and waited till I'd finished and sent out the essay," she tells us. "Then, boom! Labor." We all wish her -- and hers -- our very best.]

The scariest part of being pregnant with my first kid has been the overwhelming fear that an impending maternal instinct will, upon the little creature’s arrival, wipe out all traces of my former self and transform me into the kind of psycho-mom who not only rejoices at negating her own identity in the name of her child but vaunts this state of sacrificial maternal nothingness as the epitome of female existential plenitude.

In other words, I’ve been worried sick over the past nine months that I’m about to turn into a mommy-slave -- and like it.

Lucky for me, I’ve been able to grapple with this fear in tandem with the well-timed onslaught of books and articles about the so-called “Mommy Wars.” Some main contenders: In February, Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé, which claims that parenting à la française not only raises superior children but prevents one’s identity as a Woman from being usurped by one’s role as Mother.

Then there was the April arrival of the English translation of Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, which lambasts the new ecologically-obsessed naturalism and essentialized notions of gender at the heart of modern motherhood.

In May came the ridiculous “Are You Mom Enough?” Time cover story featuring toddlers with full sets of teeth chomping away at their mothers’ nipples, a “controversy” the magazine was no doubt thrilled to declare itself relevant for having triggered -- you could just hear the echoes of editorial backslapping for weeks afterwards.

Finally, in July, came Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article on “Why Women Can’t Have It All,” a sentiment repeated recently by British Conservative Louise Mensch’s retirement from Parliament to spend more time with her three children.

While some of these writings were thought-provoking and others nauseous-making, it’s been nice having the growth of my uterus paralleled by the crescendo of debate about what, exactly, motherhood is. Much of the recent U.S. media discussion about mommy-ing boils down to this question: how much sacrifice is natural to the maternal role and how much is socially imposed?

Here we find ourselves in vintage Badinter territory. Though The Conflict continues her exposition of the pernicious underbelly of naturalism, it’s a question the French intellectual first broached with her 1981 L’Amour en plus : histoire de l’amour maternel (XVIIe – XXe siècle), where she claims that the maternal instinct is not primal, innate, but a social construct, propagated by the naturalist-misogynist par excellence, 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Critics of Badinter are right to point out the cartoonishly corrupt conflict of interest at the heart of her condemnation of eco-naturalist maternalism -- she argues against breastfeeding yet she chairs the supervisory board of a PR firm representing Nestlé, maker of infant formula Similac. But her assault on naturalism as the most poisonous legacy of Rousseau is completely justified; his interpretation of the “natural” differences between the sexes is insidious enough to be more widely reviled.

When certain strands of feminism buy into these supposedly natural differences, they become the fodder for all sorts of moralistic, irrational proclamations, often beginning with “If women ruled the world...” and ending with the disappearance of war, violence, and evil in general. This sort of thinking -- call it Goddess Feminism -- worships the physiological as some magical source of nurturing love and female power, while tacitly embracing the disproportionate responsibility these “innate” qualities translate into for women.

Naturalism, in the realm of gender, is bad for feminism because it justifies the division of the sexes and their societal roles in the name of a return to some long-lost, prelapsarian state of humanity. But more importantly, naturalism is bad for feminism because its very premise -- that the division of labor between the sexes is less fixed now than it used to be -- is a blatant lie, a rewriting of human nature that warps pre-industrial history in order to ignore the economic changes that paved the way for these divisions.

In their 1972 pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James recount the shift from the gender-neutral oppression of the feudal system to the division of the sexes that came about with the rise of capitalism and that was sealed as fate with industrialization.

Pre-capitalist patriarchal society, they argue, was organized around the family, which represented the central unit of agricultural and artisan production. Men and women, children and the elderly, all the serfs lived in a communal state of “unfreedom” under their feudal lord.

When the family was replaced by the factory as the productive center of society, men were expelled from the home, as were children as they began to be educated in schools rather than by their family, leaving domestic life -- and, more importantly, domestic labor -- to women alone. “The passage from serfdom to free labor power separated the male from the female proletarian and both of them from their children.”

Whether we accept them as “natural” or not, our conception of “traditional” gender roles as being since the dawn of humanity divided down domestic lines is bogus; in fact, this separation of the sexes is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, powered by industrial innovations that we universally characterize as Progress, or a step towards the enlightened freedom we believe ourselves to enjoy today as individuals.

With perspectives like this one from Dalla Costa and James, the maternal instinct, which today is understood in practical terms as the sort of passionate and exaggerated self-sacrifice -- in the name of Motherly Love -- to all the demands of child-rearing and domestic labor, is much easier to reject as a social construct, one just waiting to be exploited in the late 18th century by Rousseau and his mommy-complex.

But if it’s simple to snub the concept in theory, it becomes much harder to do in practice. Or, at least, I imagine it will be once I give birth. My fear is not that the baby will be some sort of parasite, sucking away at my time and soul till I’m left with little of my former self.

Rather, I’m scared the loss of self will come entirely from within: What if I start taking so much pleasure in caring for another that it becomes a convenient excuse to drop out of life? Let go of ambitions, interests, and the social obligations through which these are enacted? Willfully disappear behind diapers and nursing to avoid that other niggling duty of modern existence known as self-realization?

Though the potential for a biological component of the maternal instinct is derided by Badinter in The Conflict as downright offensive to the human race, pregnancy alone has been proof enough that there’s reason to fear the physiological.

Instead of becoming the moody nightmare I always imagined I’d be as a pregnant person, I’ve been almost creepily blissed out for most of the past nine months -- much jollier, less impatient, more gregarious than I am in real life. Part of this is obviously social -- people smile at pregnant ladies just for being pregnant -- but mainly it’s hormonal. What if through some sick biological coup the sort of Goddess Feminism I’ve always sneered at will be my new ideological fate?

Over the past few months I’ve spent far too much time staring in wonder at the basketball that is my stomach. I’m terrified that the next step, once I have my kid, will be to adopt some sort of worldview centered on the holiness of reproduction: through no effort other than having given birth, I’ll start to profess to loving all creatures -- or worse, all humans -- great and small, good and vile. I’ll start thinking of everyone as the child of some mother, somewhere.

In Badinter’s eyes, the sanctification of the maternal role, and the self-sacrifice it stealthily demands, is externally imposed, but what if it also comes from within?

When I call this kind of mother a happy mommy-slave I mean it literally -- as an unwaged laborer. If we consider sacrifice in its least spiritual, most empirical form, it is, quite simply, work. So how much work -- how much labor -- is natural to the maternal role and how much is socially imposed?

The media surrounding the Mommy Wars have only danced around the economic issues that are involved, and usually just to point out that the ideological choices of motherhood -- home versus workplace, breast versus bottle, cloth versus disposable -- are the privilege of the elite. Which is to say that ideology itself is only for rich people, with everyone else just worried about getting by.

The exclusion of the question of labor from the debate surrounding motherhood has helped turn feminism in America into a matter of freedom of consumption, as frivolous as any other luxury market where individuality and personhood are expressed through purchasing power. We might as well be talking about what kind of handbag to buy.

This hasn’t always been the case. The economics of women’s work -- reproductive and domestic, two kinds of labor existing outside of the modern workplace -- once occupied a much greater place in feminist discourse.

Central to James and Dalla Costa’s work, for example, is their rejection of the capitalist distinction between productive and unproductive labor as falling easily down gender lines. They successfully debunk the notion that man’s work in the factory is productive in that it contributes to capital, while woman’s work is merely re-productive, both in that it is procreative and that it re-creates, every day, through domestic labor, the series of tasks necessary to win the fight against atrophy and decline -- cooking, cleaning, the works -- without actually contributing to the production of capital.

Not so, Dalla Costa and James prove, as both housework and child-rearing reproduce not just life but “labor power.” The mother is not just feeding and nurturing her children but preparing them for productive lives as wage-earners or future reproducers. The happy slave-mother creates the conditions that ready the happy slave-child to contribute to the production of capital.

The difference between factory work and domestic work cannot then be described as productive versus unproductive, but rather as waged labor versus non-waged. This argument provided the basis for the international Wages for Housework Campaign, founded by James in 1972.

Interestingly, the false distinction between productive/workplace and unproductive/domestic labor is one upheld more rigorously today in the U.S. by left-leaning women than by right-wing men. Case in point: Democratic Party Commentator Hilary Rosen’s denouncement of Ann Romney as having “never worked a day in her life.”

Meanwhile, it’s usually conservative men (like those who rushed to Romney’s defense) who shout the loudest about how stay-at-home moms are in fact doing “real” work (though I wonder if they’d so readily classify it as such if it meant that this work had by law to be remunerated through government wages).

Today, we talk about the distinction between productive and unproductive labor as if it were a thing of the past, not only because we believe ourselves to have escaped its division along gender lines but also because the nature of work has changed thanks to industrial outsourcing, the explosion of the service sector, and technological advancement.

This is the movement towards what Autonomists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call “immaterial labor,” a shift they demonstrate to be linked with the increase of precarious labor, in the form of part-time employment, self-employment, work done from home, and unpaid internships.

At first glance, precarious labor would seem like something that only the most rabid free-market freaks would celebrate. But as Silvia Federici points out in Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint, even Autonomists like Negri see the precariazation of work as “a trend towards the reduction of work and therefore the reduction of exploitation.”

She goes on to show how wrong this premise is: not only does exploitation actually increase with precarious labor, but it does so disproportionately for women, who have “always had a precarious relation to waged labor” due to domestic duties, which for women in the workforce translates to more part time jobs, less security, fewer benefits, and lower salaries.

But lately, precarious labor, especially in its work-from-anywhere incarnation, has been increasingly extolled by women as a liberating force, or a way to succeed both at work and at home. This is Anne-Marie Slaughter’s premise when she vaunts the possibility of remote work as a means of proving one’s efficiency as a worker even in the midst of domestic duty: “Being able to work from home -- in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends -- can be key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments.”

This basis of capitalist efficiency pervades the logic of Slaughter’s article, from her a priori acceptance that any sort of time not devoted to labor, what we used to call free time, be sacrificed, right down to her suggestion that women freeze their eggs for later use if their careers have not flourished fast enough for them to have children during their fertile years.

That precarious labor weighs heavier on women than it does on men should be obvious; what’s less apparent is how the very distinctions it seems at first to do away with -- divisions between men and women, productive and unproductive labor, the office and the home -- are actually reinstated.

Federici’s main critique of Negri and Hardt’s theory of precarious labor is their characterization of “affective labor” as immaterial. Affective labor is defined by Negri and Hardt as service jobs, held by those such as flight attendants and waitresses, that require certain affective behaviors -- friendly smiles and the like -- with the goal of producing “states of being.”

For Federici, the fact that work meant to produce “feelings” and “emotions” is by default categorized as immaterial is tantamount to the reduction of reproductive work to being a “labor of love”: in both cases, the work is stripped of its economic value, its contribution to the accumulation of capital, simply because its demands are affective or rooted in emotional work, and thus understood as natural to the (unproductive) female worker.

So belief in a natural maternal instinct is not just an acceptance of self-sacrifice, it’s the acceptance of affective labor as being inherently unproductive. It denies the material contributions of reproductive and domestic labor, by painting them as purely emotional products, and implicitly restores the supposedly defunct gender-lines of the distinction between productive and unproductive work -- even when both labors are performed by women.

Such is the case with Slaughter’s suggestion that mothers continue their work from home after completing their domestic duties: it privileges her career-related “male” tasks as productive while relegating her work as a mother as purely reproductive -- because it is affective.

But what’s more, to allow for the workplace’s colonization of the domestic sphere is to repaint even the most explicitly “productive” work as affective -- those midnight email sessions Slaughter suggests as being the key to women’s career success should be recognized for what they are: unwaged work parading, like motherhood, as a labor of (if not motherly, then at the very least womanly) love.

The happy mommy-slave is as ripe for exploitation by her office as she is by her home.

[Hadley Suter is a Ph.D Candidate in UCLA’s Department of French and Francophone Studies.]

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Harry Targ : Culture and the Cuban Experience

The Cuban band Sierra Maestra was formed at the University of Havana in 1976.
Economics, politics, and culture:
The Cuban experience

Culture can be revolutionary when it expresses pain, implies a better life, and extends the experiences of some to others...

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 9, 2012

[These remarks were prepared for a presentation before a musical performance at Purdue University by Sierra Maestra, the stirring band formed at the University of Havana in 1976. The band was named after the mountain range in Eastern Cuba that was the site of the formation of the Cuban revolutionary force that overthrew the U.S.-supported dictator in the 1950s. The nine-person band promotes and celebrates the classic Cuba Son music that has its roots in the diversity of class, race, ethnicity, and gender in Cuban history.]

People’s lives begin with the struggle for existence and are supplemented by the pursuit of joy and liberation. Culture, often reflecting the pain of daily existence and the vision of a better life, is intimately embedded in history, economics, and politics.

Cuba’s revolutionary poet Jose Marti describes his place in history, economics, and politics.

I am a truthful man,
From the land of the palm,
Before dying, I want to
Share these poems of my soul.

My poems are light green,
But they are also flaming red
My verses are like a wounded fawn.
Seeking refuge in the mountain.

(Pete Seeger reports learning these two additional Marti verses from a Cuban of African descent in 1983.)

Red, as in the desert,
Rose the sun on the horizon.
It shone on a dead slave
Hanging from a tree of the mountain.

A child saw it, trembled,
With passion for those that wept,
And swore that with his blood
He would wash away that crime.

Latin American social theorists and activists of the era of the Cuban revolutionary process (since the 1950s) defined the economic and political context of countries like Cuba -- less passionately but rigorously -- as a result of dependency. For example, Brazilian social scientist Theotonio Dos Santos wrote about what he called “the structure of dependence.”

Dependence is a situation in which a certain group of countries have their economy conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to which the former is subject.

Andre Gunter Frank, looking at the broad sweep of history beginning with the rise of capitalism out of feudalism referred to “the development of underdevelopment.” During the fifteenth century the sectors of the globe now referred to as the “Global North” and “Global South” were roughly equal in economic and military power. But as a result of the globalization of capitalism and militarism, some countries, primarily in Europe and North America, developed at the expense of most of the other countries of the world.

Dependency theorists began to include domestic class structures in their analysis of relations between dominant and dependent nations. In addition to dominant and weak countries bound by exploitation and violence, within both powerful and weak countries class structures existed.

In fact, rulers in poor countries usually were tied by interests and ideology to the interests and ideology of the ruling classes in powerful countries. And, most important, the poor, the exploited, the repressed in both rich and poor countries shared common experiences, often a common outlook, and potentially a common culture.

I have written a book chapter about “Themes in Cuban History” from the point of view of dominance and dependence (from Harry R. Targ, Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992). The chapter addresses:

• Spanish conquest between 1511 and 1515
• Cuba as sugar producer
• Cuba as slave society. By 1827 over 50 percent of Cuban residents were of African descent.
• Britain’s economic and military penetration of the island beginning in the 18th century
• Revolutionary ferment, particularly slave revolts, permeating 19th century Cuban society
• The visions of U.S. leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, that some day Cuba would join the new nation to the North.
• U.S. investor penetration of the island, challenging the Spanish and British. By the 1880s over 80 percent of sugar exports went to the United States and large plantations on the island were owned by Americans.
• The Spanish/Cuban/American war of 1898 which lead to a full transfer of colonial and neo-colonial hegemony from the Spanish and British to the United States
• The United States establishment of economic, political, and cultural domination of the island from 1898 to 1959. Subordinate wealthy and powerful Cubans controlled the political system, benefitting from U.S. hegemony, while “the poor people of this earth” on the island made up the vast majority.
• 1953 to 1959 armed struggle which overthrew the Batista dictatorship and the elimination of U.S. interests on the island.
• 1959 to the present Cuba haltingly, with international and domestic opposition, pursuing a new society to “wash away that crime” of long years of empire and dependency.

How is this history relevant to indigenous Cuban music and its connections with U.S. culture?

Culture, it seems to me, grows out of the experience of peoples. That experience is shaped by history, economics, and politics. Music is a common way of communicating and sharing experience, particularly of pain and joy.

The seeds of a common Cuban culture were planted in various fields -- Africa, the sugar plantations of the island, and growing relations between Cubans and people of African descent in the region, including the United States.

Finally, culture can be revolutionary when it expresses pain, implies a better life, and extends the experiences of some to others -- of similar class, racial, ethnic, and gender histories.

So as we listen to Sierra Maestra and reflect on the roots of its music, its contribution to jazz in the U.S., and the commonalities of Cuban Son and U.S jazz and blues, we might remember Marti’s expression from the poet’s point of view:

With the poor people of this earth,
I want to share my lot.
The little streams of the mountains
Please me more than the sea.

(All verses quoted here are from Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone?: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, A Sing Out Publication,1993).

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Marc Estrin : Mob 'n Maul

Buddy Christ statue from the movie Dogma.
MOB 'N MAUL

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / December 30, 2010

We seem to be bombarded lately by “random acts of culture” both in the real world (if such a place exists) and on YouTube. Handel's Hallelujah Chorus seems to be popping up all over -- almost expected at shopping malls and food courts.

I love Messiah. I've made it a point to sing, play, or conduct it almost every year since I've been 20. The Hallelujah Chorus is an astoundingly effective work of its time -- and ours -- and one can well imagine King George rising in ecstasy when hearing it. I've written about Messiah in several of my books, and it is a major altar in my church of worship.

But does it belong in a shopping mall? In the midst of ongoing orgies of consumerism, here we have enthusiastic artists, most often volunteers, singing “for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.”

In the context of the shopping mall, who is the Lord God omnipotent that reigneth? Surely more Mammon than Jehovah. The Lord God of Capitalism here reigns, “and he shall reign for ever and ever!”

While this may in fact be true, at least for the moment, is it worth putting so much energy into celebrating it? The Hallelujah Chorus is not Muzak, especially in live performance. People hear it, understand it, and receive it positively. What is it they are joyfully hearing in the context of the mall? The delight of Christmas shopping. The triumphant assertion of their own culture. The craving for that culture to reign forever and ever.

But is this the function of art? Should great music be an accomplice to great crimes? Should it enable and abet destructive capitalist madness?

In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse speaks of the Great Refusal -- the protest against that which is. That is great art's function in society -- to refute, break and recreate "the modes in which man and things are made to appear.”

I have been invited several times to participate in a Hallelujah flash mob. I know the bass part well, and could easily do it. But the idea of singing such praise in a shopping mall -- to a shopping mall -- to the activities of a shopping mall -- makes my gorge rise.

When I got my most recent invite, I suggested, as an alternative, a flash mob which would sing a neighboring chorus from Messiah -- “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs And Carried Our Sorrows.” The music is truly harrowing, filled with dotted rhythms of the lash and dissonances of pain. The words go on to say, “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruisèd for our iniquities.” And was he not? What would Jesus buy at the mall? The text of “Surely” concludes, "The chastisement of our peace was upon him.”

Singing "Surely" at the mall? Now that would be a surprise event, an invasion of culture by Culture.

Of course whenever I hear the word Culture, I think of Goering and his remarkable assertion, “Whenever I hear the word Culture I reach for my gun.” I understand what he was talking about. Because real Culture is always and immensely subversive of great schemes human and inhuman.

Brecht nailed the oppositional function of art in the closing speech of his teaching play, The Exception and the Rule. Concerning the actions of the characters in the one-act, the narrator instructs the audience:

Observe the conduct of these people closely:
Find it estranging even if not very strange
Hard to explain even if it is the custom
Hard to understand even if it is the rule
Observe the smallest action, seeming simple
With mistrust
Inquire if a thing be necessary
Especially if it is common
We particularly ask you -
When a thing continually occurs -
Not on that account to find it natural
Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion
Ordered disorder, planned caprice
And dehumanized humanity
Lest all things
Be held unalterable!

That, I think, is what random acts of Culture should be doing.

My next week's essay will discuss the healing potential of infiltrative art.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Houston Alternative Media : Telling It Like It Was

Underground in H-Town. Art by Shelby Hohl / Museum of Printing History.
Underground [history] in H-Town:
Veteran journalists compare notes
On counterculture and alt media

By Raj Mankad / May 24, 2010

[Raj Mankad is the editor of Cite magazine, the "architecture and design review of Houston" that has been published quarterly by the Rice Design Alliance since 1982. OffCite, where this article first appeared, is Cite's online incarnation.]

“The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is watching you.”

An arrow bearing that note was shot into the Space City! office. The incident was one among many threats and acts of violence against progressive and radical institutions in Houston. The KPFT station transmitter was bombed off the air twice. Bullets were shot at and yellow paint thrown on the walls of Margaret Webb Dreyer’s gallery, which she ran out of her home from 1961 to 1975. The gallery had served as a counterculture hub according to Thorne Dreyer, her son and an editor of Space City!.

Thorne Dreyer shared these stories at an event on alternative media also featuring veteran writers Tom Curtis, Gabrielle Cosgriff, and Michael Berryhill. The Museum of Printing History hosted the panel discussion in conjunction with “Underground in H-Town,” an exhibition that highlights the importance of minority and alternative publications in local history.

Space City! was published from 1969 to 1972, a part of an international explosion of underground papers set off by the introduction of low-cost offset printing.

Houston in the 60s and 70s is never represented as a hotbed of dissent on par with San Francisco or New York. “The main thing about Houston was that it was all spread out,” Dreyer said in a similar talk at the Houston Zine Fest. “There was no Houston there, [only] community in bits and pieces everywhere. Houston is much more of a city now than it was then. What Space City! did was to help to identify all these pockets of progressive politics and kindred spirits, and pull them together into a cohesive spirit...a network of countercultural stuff.”

Gabrielle Cosgriff picked up the discussion where Dreyer left off. She partnered with Janice Blue to publish Breakthrough from 1976 to 1981. They named it after La Brecha, a book written by Mercedes Valdivieso, a Chilean feminist who taught literature at the University of Houston and Rice University. Cosgriff talked about Breakthrough’s support of Kathy Whitmire in her election to Houston city controller and mayor. The recent election of a lesbian mayor and a city council with an equal gender balance, she argued, can be traced back to efforts three decades earlier.

In its last year of publication, Breakthrough became a general-interest publication --“women’s issues are everybody’s issues” said Cosgriff -- and named David Crossley as a co-editor. Crossley has gone on to lead Houston Tomorrow. Cosgriff serves on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle.

The audience in the small auditorium included activist Gloria Rubac, writer David Theis, and many other notable people. Alternative media scholar and Rice Media Center staffer Tish Stringer recorded the discussion on video. There were some young people absorbing the history including Culturemap writer Steven Thomson and Emily Hall of PH Design.

Organized in partnership with the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, “Underground in H-Town” presents original documents and images from community papers and the alternative press from the second half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Papers presented in the exhibition include historic issues of Forward Times, Voice of Hope, Space City!, The Jewish Herald Voice, El Papel Chicano, El Sol De Houston, Houston Breakthrough, among others. It is worth a visit.

For more information, visit The Rag Blog post on the exhibit by Shane Patrick Boyle. The Rag Blog is edited by Thorne Dreyer.

From left: Michael Berryhill, Gabrielle Cosgriff, Tom Curtis, Thorne Dreyer. Photo by F. Carter Smith / The Rag Blog.

Special issue of Cite
Will focus on counterculture

In 1970, Charles Tapley’s architecture firm won a national award for convincing their client, Camille Waters, not to build anything on her site in the Texas Hill Country. The architects’ renderings portray a life camping out of a volkswagon. The upcoming issue of Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston recovers this and other 1960s and 70s sites of counterculture.

This issue of Cite, like many in its 28-year archive at citemag.org , mixes high design with down and dirty civic engagement.

Scheduled for a June release, the special issue covers experimental geodesic domes, the Moody Park riot, underground papers, the Love Street Light Circus, the 1977 march on an Anita Bryant performance that gave birth to Houston's vibrant GLBT organizations, and other topics. The photography draws from the Space City! archives. Gary Panter, East Texas-born illustrator and set designer of the Pee Wee’s Playhouse, is contributing the cover art.

-- Raj Mankad / The Rag Blog

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Liam Clancy : Putting the Irish in Folk

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Above, Liam Clancey. Below, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem:
Irish music and the American folk scene

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / December 17, 2009

In the beginning it was William Clancy, Liam being still too Celtic and “Irish” for Ireland in the early 1950s.

His older brothers, big burly lads, had already gone to America and eventually to New York City to find jobs as Irishmen in various stage productions. William longed to go as well but the chance didn’t come until he met New York City based ethno-musicologist Dianne Hamilton Guggenheim, a protégé of Alan Lomax.

In his autobiography, Liam Clancy tries to deal with his relationship with Ms. Hamilton, an older woman. Whatever personal struggles he might have had with his patroness, the fact remained that she got him to New York City and even tried to set him up as a folksinger. Although Clancy landed a few acting jobs as a stock Irishman, he didn’t really see the future until he met Josh White.

Josh White in the early 1950s was a towering figure in the miniscule folk music scene. Unique among his black blues contemporaries, Josh had found a way to present field hand music in a posh night club setting, more akin to Billie Holiday than to, say, Leadbelly. As Liam marveled in his autobiography, The Mountain of the Women, Josh White was the consummate professional. He would pick up his guitar, throw it into tune and be on stage in minutes with the audience eating out of his hand. Liam wondered how he could ever achieve that level of taste, talent and sophistication.

Singing with his big bruiser brothers he knew the act still lacked something. What would it take to transform them from your average Irish singing family to say, something like Josh White? His mind turned to someone who had also been “discovered” by Dianne Hamilton on her Irish trip. Young Tommy Makem, the son of Ireland’s well known folksinger Sarah Makem.

Sure enough, Tommy had already come to America, was living in New Hampshire, and was ready to sing with the Clancy's. The model for the modern Irish folksinging unit was now set. With Tommy Makem in the lead singing role, the "Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem" were now an entertainment reality. Although Tommy forever chaffed against being most of the group’s talent, but restricted to a set of virtual parentheses, Tommy Makem's and Liam Clancy’s fates were now sealed.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem did indeed remake the entire image of an Irish folksinging group. Although they did do Irish sentimental favorites, they were no “cry in your beer sad memories of the past” comiseraters. They also did some Irish Republican anthems from the days of the struggles, but were not overly consumed by that passion. What they presented was a broad spectrum of Irish songs, new and old, with something for all types and ages. Not unlike Josh White.

When they did have a politically oriented hit, it was, interestingly, with the bitter "Patriot Game," which equivocated in its support for armed struggle while still championing the cause. A very sophisticated song which Bob Dylan, who hung around the Clancy's all he could in his salad days, transformed into "With God On Our Side."

Liam Clancey at the 2005 Milwaukee Irish Fest. Photo by Stacina / Flickr.
That was the wonderful thing about this ancient Irish music. Like the tunes, the themes have been around forever. Irish music made the big time on the Ed Sullivan Show and other top American venues thanks to the Clancy's and Tommy Makem. But mostly they hung around the White Horse Tavern, a well known watering hole on the West Side of New York’s Greenwich Village. In this setting they would bend their elbows with anyone.

Their solid proletarian comradeship was not necessarily political, it was just Irish and it was infectious. Much of the good energy (and a lot of the good tunes) that later enchanted the USA Folk scene in the 1960s came out of the family atmosphere created by the Clancys and Tommy Makem. If this was folk music, these guys from Ireland were surely the folk. Lift your glass to friendship, mates, the music from the distant blessed archaic past is once again being played by young men of charm and influence. All is not lost.

So Liam Clancy wasn’t necessarily the big talent in the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Although, unlike his brothers who just sang in the ensemble, he did sing lead on some songs, his soft voice could never carry the group the way Tommy Makem could. Tommy also wrote songs and played the tin whistle. But it was Liam Clancy who set the whole thing up, who’d had the vision and got to see his creation become a big success.

Many decades and albums later it was easy to look back on how Irish music came back to life in the 1950s. Once considered, like black music in the days of the minstrels, a kind of ethnic joke, no one would ever think to disparage this rich heritage again. You can thank the Clancy's and Tommy Makem for that, especially Liam. One of the reasons young people were able to be so successful as a force for cultural transformation in the 1960s was that they had the historical precedents rightly in place. Black blues, jazz, ragtime, and also Irish music, were finally being understood for what they really were, not just stupid stereotypes.

If we had to pick one song to represent the Clancy Brothers and with Tommy Makem, it would probably be impossible. But one that comes to mind is actually a tune off an album Liam Clancy made with Tommy Makem after the Clancy's had disbanded. Recorded in 1976, the song by Alan Bell, celebrates the history of wind power in Europe. It seems particularly appropriate to present this song as a sample, especially after having spent some time bemoaning the lack of spiritual energy in the USA regarding alternative energy. Here is that supposedly missing sacred prayer:

Windmills

In days gone by, when the world was much younger
Men harnessed the wind to work for mankind
Seamen built tall ships to sail on the ocean
While landsmen built wheels the corn for to grind

And around and around and around went the big sail
Turning the shaft and the great wooden wheel
Creaking and groaning, the millstones kept turning
Grinding to flour the good corn from the field

In Flanders and Spain and the lowlands of Holland
And the kingdoms of England and Scotland and Wales
Windmills sprang up all along the wild coastline
Ships of the land with their high canvas sails

In Lancashire, lads work hard at the good earth
Ploughing and sowing as the seasons declare
Waiting to reap all the rich, golden harvest
While the miller is idle, his mill to repair

Windmills of wood all blackened by weather
Windmills of stone, glaring white in the sun
Windmills like giants all ready for tilting
Windmills that died in the gales and the sun

Liam Clancy passed away Friday, December 4. Thanks for bringing us The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, a group that changed the course of modern folk music. And thanks also for staying such a simple honest man. That’s actually not an easy act to pull off.

[Carl R. Hultberg's grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York's Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

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Claude Lévi-Strauss : 'La Pensée Sauvage'

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: dead at 100.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Making sense of la pensée sauvage

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2009

In French sauvage means wild, not necessarily savage. In our language savage means aggressive, a value judgment left over from centuries of exterminations.

Heathens, savages, primitive people, natives. All these words describe a certain section of humanity, but they all mean something different. If confusion about our ancestral past is the price we pay to be modern, then so called “primitive man” will always be a source of much uneasiness. After the period when natives must be displaced and killed off, what do we derive from our relationship with them? Do we try in sad little ways to imitate their rituals at Boy Scout camp or on a football team?

For years the details of primitive people’s lives were catalogued by observers, anthropologists. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that one of these anthropologists, a Frenchman working for the Rockefeller Foundation, began to draw parallels from all the studies that had been made worldwide.

Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Brazilian Amazon, 1936. Photo by Apic / Getty Images.
To Claude Lévi-Strauss, the mind of the “primitive” was not a disorganized collection of confused myths and superstitions, but was in its own way searching for objective reality like all the rest of us. And the vast collection of mythology collected around the world from these types of populations could be catalogued and searched over for commonalities.

Lévi-Strauss himself did some of this pattern work, creating a new school of Western thought known as structuralism. Of course what structuralism points back to is what certain philosophers, psychologists, and poets have claimed all along: the existence of a universal human element, an originating unified matriarchy, one source and one basic pattern for all disparate human myths.

What Claude Lévi-Strauss succeeded in doing was bringing anthropology as a science to the brink of being able to understand human origins. The fact that he himself backed off before embracing the full Rousseau (Noble Savage), the absolute Carl Jung (Universal Unconscious) or the mother of all mythbreakers, Robert Graves (White Goddess), tells you right away he went too far. Two steps further and Levi-Strauss would have been back in alchemy land.

So it was that structuralism was attacked as simplistic, finally superseded by, you guessed it, “post-structuralism.” All male dominant science is ultimately one big ego-driven pissing contest. Truth can never flourish for long if we are to have neverending “progress” and new succeeding generations of intellectual leaders.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of the structuralist school of anthropology died this week. He was a hundred years old.

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