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Today we begin a series of three programs on Guns in the USA we’re calling a A Targeted Divide. Our first show is “Gunning Down the Bill of Rights,” how the 2nd Amendment trumps the 1st. After a Supreme Court decision in 2008, the most ambiguous and poorly written of our constitutional amendments now means …

We open with music composed by Sol Kaplan for the film Salt of the Earth. Kaplan was blacklisted in the 1950s for being “uncooperative” to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The rest of our music will feature the work of other blacklisted artists and performers; Hazel Scott, Yip Harburg, Marc Blitzstein, and Lena Horne.

Salt of the Earth is based on an actual strike in 1951 against the Empire Zinc Mine in New Mexico. The film deals with the prejudice against the Mexican American workers, who struck to attain wage parity with Anglo workers in other mines and to be treated with dignity by the bosses.

This film was directed by Herbert J. Biberman, one of the original "Hollywood Ten," who was blacklisted due to alleged involvement in Communist politics and for refusing to answer Congressional inquiries on First Amendment grounds. The film’s writer and producer, Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico, had also been blacklisted.

This is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. In many ways it seems ahead of its time in these terms, until we remember that feminism in the US might be said to predate even the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls as its history is tied to Native American rights and abolitionism.

Because Salt of the Earth was produced in response to the course of US culture and politics both pre- and post-WWII, we’ll begin with a look at the US as its discourse and instructions to the public imaginary comes out of the so-called "Red Scare" and eventuates in the disgraceful period presided over by HUAC and the likes of opportunist politicians Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

GUEST

Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the IU Media School and a member of The Writers Guild at Bloomington and The Burroughs Century. She has written extensively on experimental and avant-garde cultures.

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MUSIC

“Free and Equal Blues” performed by Josh White, written by Yip Harburg.

Yip Harburg was an American popular song lyricist who wrote the lyrics to "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" as well as all of the songs in The Wizard of Oz. Though not a Communist, he was a member of the Socialist Party and was named as “un-American” in a pamphlet called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television; and subsequently blocked from working in Hollywood films, television, and radio for twelve years, from 1950 to 1962.

“Joe Worker” from the 1937 play in music The Cradle Will Rock, by Marc Blitzstein. It’s performed by Micki Grant. In 1958, Blitzstein, who was openly gay, appeared before HUAC under subpoena. In a closed session, Blitzstein admitted his membership in the Communist Party (ending in 1949) but refused to name names or cooperate any further.

“Git Up From There” by Hazel Scott. Hazel Scott was a Trinidadian-born jazz and classical pianist who, In 1950, became the first black person to have a TV show, The Hazel Scott Show. After testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee,

We open with music composed by Sol Kaplan for the film Salt of the Earth. Kaplan was blacklisted in the 1950s for being “uncooperative” to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. The rest of our music will feature the work of other blacklisted artists and performers; Hazel Scott, Yip Harburg, Marc Blitzstein, and Lena Horne. …

In the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh rejects the grain offering of the farmer, Cain, while accepting the flesh offering of his brother, the shepherd Abel. Cain, wounded by this rejection, murders his brother. The consequence is banishment to the Land of Nod, which appears to be more a state of being than an actual place--Nod being the Hebrew root of the verb to wander; Cain becomes a fugitive.

It seems fair to suggest that this story, in which Cain becomes humanity twice-removed from Eden, is a central metaphor of our sorrows, centered in the logic of our capability to sustain life. What we eat, how food is gathered or grown or husbanded, is said to be how we settle into communities, how we become families and tribes; and further, how cities bloom...without concentrations of grain, easy access to a food supply, there can be no metropolis.

We might say that organizing into cities is the fruit of rejection. We are the fruit of rootlessness.

It’s that incessant wandering, our current land of nod, that we confront today in examining sustenance unmoored from place by technology and capital markets; the supply chains and the logistics that make it possible for South Koreans to buy California rice more cheaply than they can provide it for themselves out of their own fields.

An authentic twenty-first century revolution … will have to radically transform the way food is produced and distributed, not only because the present food system is wasteful, toxic to humans, and environmentally destructive, and not only because climate change stands to radically alter what can be grown and how and where it can be grown, but also because, even more importantly, the capitalist organization of nature as agriculture will, if relied on, entirely incapacitate such revolutions, guaranteeing the restoration of class society. - Jasper Bernes

Port of Oakland

Logistics, the management of the flow of things between the point of origin and the point of consumption, has its origins in military campaigns. That fact is all too relevant when we seek to understand the process of globalization. This so-called “war” is always fought through and against workers--minimizing their value (as labor and as people) as a cost to eliminate. But logistics, especially since the introduction of shipping containers, has brought forth the Planetary Factory, now a totality restricting our ability to even imagine another way of life.

All of our music today is by jazz pianist and composer, Andrew Hill. Our opening song is "Land of Nod," from the 1963 debut album Black Fire.

We begin with the lessons of Occupy on disruption and blockade as tactics against the logistics of capitalism.

GUEST

Joining us today to consider the state of things detached from the land we stand upon is Jasper Bernes. Bernes is a poet and Marxist theorist who was integrally involved in Occupy Oakland. His essay “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect” is deeply informed by that experience. He is the author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization published by Stanford last year, and together with Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune Editions.

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In the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh rejects the grain offering of the farmer, Cain, while accepting the flesh offering of his brother, the shepherd Abel. Cain, wounded by this rejection, murders his brother. The consequence is banishment to the Land of Nod, which appears to be more a state of being …

Photo by AGCC Studio Artist Slobodan Dimitrov, as part of Artist Portraits project.  Some rights reserved.

In his most famous essay, "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: "Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim." The "gulf" is where we always are.

Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic whose work frequently focused on what he called "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world."

Sekula started and maintained a photographic and literary praxis for 40 years. What you see in his 2012 essay film made in collaboration with film theorist Noel Burch, The Forgotten Space, is predicated on the same principles laid out in his Aerospace Folktales, first exhibited at the University of California at San Diego in 1973. Perhaps the key difference being that Aerospace Folktales is described as a “disassembled movie” while The Forgotten Space is of course assembled. I’m sure you can already detect the analogies that connect the themes and subjects of Sekula’s work in the word “assemble” as we apply it to industry and labor and the material things that profit some small number of the humans on the planet.

Sekula’s vision and his voice is impressively global and yet always local; the sites he explores are always uniquely of their place, but they are always also contending with the same economic tyrannies.

But Sekula was more than a critic of capitalism; he was an influential theorist of documentary photography and photojournalism. And for today’s show we’ll discover the intersection of these interests. His 2003 book Titanic’s Wake is a great introduction to both of these modes. If you want to dive deeper, find his book Photography Against the Grain and brace yourself--through an investigation of the uses of photography by capitalist-state institutions like museums and the CIA, Sekula exposes fully the manipulations of class and economic ideology.

Today, though, we’ll need to tighten our focus with the help of Stephanie Schwartz, a Lecturer in American Documentary film and photography and American modernism at University College London. Schwartz focuses on Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas, his ‘anti-journalistic’ manifesto consisting of a looped slide sequence of eighty-one photographs shot among the crowds during the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington, in 1999. The work is a radical form of portraiture and of street photography, a critique of the journalistic photo-essay and a profound anti-capitalist statement.

The working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margins of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-photojournalism: no flash, no telephoto zoom lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence....

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets, against the abstraction of global capital. There was a strong feminist dimension to this testimony, and there was also a dimension grounded in the experience of work. It was the men and women who work on the docks, after all, who shut down the flow of metal boxes from Asia, relying on individual knowledge that there is always another body on the other side of the sea doing the same work, that all this global trade is more than a matter of a mouse-click.

In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” …

For this first Tuesday of LGBT Pride Month we bring you, “Straightening Gayness: Mainstream Representation Under the Male Gaze” about television’s role in winning same-sex marriage.

We open with Elvin Bishop’s "Fooled Around and Fell In Love." All of the music was chosen by our Guest, Cory Albertson, author of A Perfect Union? Published by Routledge.

Due to the nature of our format here, we had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor, but we think you’d like to hear it all so you'll find a link to the full conversation below for your edification and pleasure! (See below.)

In what follows we’ll hear clips from and discuss representations of Lesbian, Gay and Queer characters on the shows Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family (not so modern), and The Good Wife. And a real treat, we’ll hear how Miss Piggy queers The Muppet Show.

We begin with Cory Albertson on the genesis of his new book and his focus on television’s role in winning same-sex marriage; a seeming unquestionable good that Cory complicates for us.

From the publisher:

On June 26, 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy declared same-sex marriage "is so ordered" across the United States. The day will no doubt be remembered as a landmark shift in how U.S. society views and validates marriage and romantic relationships. But the shift would not have happened without an arguably more important, but already forgotten, shift four years earlier that saw unprecedented movement in public attitudes alongside record amounts of television representation of LGBQ relationships. Situated at this intersection of legislative, attitudinal and representational change, A Perfect Union? presents analyses of popular programs such as Modern Family, Grey's Anatomy, The Good Wife, Glee, Desperate Housewives and House in order to tackle crucial ethical questions regarding the impact of heterosexual knowledges on the rendering of same-sex relationships as relatable and "respectable" - portraits of heteronormativity that reproduce the masculine/feminine binary, monogamous coupledom and the raising of children.

EXTENDED CONVERSATION (79m)

This is the full conversation with Cory Albertson about his book A Perfect Union?: Television and the Winning of Same-Sex Marriage, published by Routledge. If I were to choose a title for it I think it would be “Carriers of Heteronormativity.” Our talk is lightly edited, but only to sweep out the dust, all of the content of the conversation is here. We hope you enjoy it--we felt it was too good not to share in full. We’ll deepen our discussion of entertainment culture by applying Alain Badiou’s concept of "The Event" and Michel Foucault’s assertion that visibility is always a trap.

GUEST

Cory Albertson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research spans media cultures, gender and sexuality studies and social justice movements. he’s currently a lecturer in sociology at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

MUSIC

"Fooled Around and Fell In Love" by Elvin Bishop

"Raining Glitter" by Kylie Minogue

"The Chapel of Love" by the Dixie Cups

"White Wedding" by Billie Idol

"Marriage is for Old Folks" by Nina Simone

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Edited by Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

For this first Tuesday of LGBT Pride Month we bring you, “Straightening Gayness: Mainstream Representation Under the Male Gaze” about television’s role in winning same-sex marriage. We open with Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love.” All of the music was chosen by our Guest, Cory Albertson, author of A Perfect Union? Published by …

Today we pledge allegiance to what Ralph Ellison called a sorrowful laughter for all, and we open with “Waitin’ for Benny” a jam session from 1941 featuring jazz and swing guitarist Charlie Christian, an artist who, like Ellison, discovered the New World of Jazz in Oklahoma City.

In Ellison’s 1958 Saturday Review essay “The Charlie Christian Story," he writes, "The wooden tenement in which he grew up was full of poverty, crime and sickness. It was alive and exciting, and I enjoyed visiting there, for the people both lived and sang the blues.” Charlie Christian’s genius was a brief triumph that would have a deep influence on jazz greats to come.

M. Cooper Harriss

Guest Host Jason Fickel serves as our guide today as he returns to Interchange with M. Cooper Harriss. Fickel is a guitarist and songwriter, and Harriss is an assistant professor in the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University. They joined us previously to discuss how the blues inflected the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston in a show punctuated by the music of Lizzie Douglas, better known as Memphis Minnie.

The occasion of the Fickel-Harris reunion is Harriss’s new book Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology published by NYU Press. Harriss finds in Ellison’s masterpiece, his only completed novel, an underlying “civil religious orientation” or as J. Kameron Carter of the Duke University Divinity School puts it, "an 'invisible theology' of an unseen blackness that works through and against the grain of America’s 'original sin': racism."

Jason Fickel

Ellison’s "The Charlie Christian Story" opens with a revelation of America and its one original art form: "Jazz, like the country which gave it birth, is fecund in its inventiveness, swift and traumatic in its developments and terribly wasteful of its resources. It is an orgiastic art which demands great physical stamina of its practitioners, and many of its most talented creators die young." True of Charlie Christian, dead of tuberculosis in 1942. He was 25 years old.

Ellison wrote of the blues, and perhaps his work as a novelist, that it's "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."

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MUSIC

"Waitin' for Benny" by the Charlie Christian Jammers

"Gone to Main Street" by Muddy Waters

"Jaybird Blues" by Peetie Wheatstraw

"John the Revelator" by Son House

"Royal Garden Blues" by the Benny Goodman Sextet (Charlie Christian)

"(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue" by Louis Armstrong

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Guest Host: Jason Fickel

Editing: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin