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19.10.09
17.10.09
Art And
The Beautiful
The Beautiful is that which makes us go “hmm” or “aah.” Actually it is what makes some people do those things and others explode from inside. People think Beauty is a Thing but it’s a process of hmm-ing and aah-ing and exploding.
The Artist
The Artist is the Hierophant. Their work is a rite and it uses magick that will make us go “hmm” or “aah” or explode. Some rites call for BLOOD.
The Art World
The trouble with the Art World is that there are so many. Actually it is that they bother to exist at all. Some are Alive, and some are pretend, but no matter the case they will and do tell you what Art is and means. They don’t know if Art needs to breathe. To me it is very simple: Art is a sixty-legged Arachnid in an empty park that barks like a louse dans l’hiver.
Telling
Telling is snaring.
Listening
Listening is what you should never do. Set me on fire and hold me in your bowels; I am the Ever Expendable and I will shriek to the Nothing of All.
-Omar Zahzah Full post...
The Beautiful is that which makes us go “hmm” or “aah.” Actually it is what makes some people do those things and others explode from inside. People think Beauty is a Thing but it’s a process of hmm-ing and aah-ing and exploding.
The Artist
The Artist is the Hierophant. Their work is a rite and it uses magick that will make us go “hmm” or “aah” or explode. Some rites call for BLOOD.
The Art World
The trouble with the Art World is that there are so many. Actually it is that they bother to exist at all. Some are Alive, and some are pretend, but no matter the case they will and do tell you what Art is and means. They don’t know if Art needs to breathe. To me it is very simple: Art is a sixty-legged Arachnid in an empty park that barks like a louse dans l’hiver.
Telling
Telling is snaring.
Listening
Listening is what you should never do. Set me on fire and hold me in your bowels; I am the Ever Expendable and I will shriek to the Nothing of All.
-Omar Zahzah Full post...
15.10.09
The Somali Sea
Teach a man to fish
He'll fight for a lifetime.
Taken to the high-seas, swathed in cotton—the rags of the sweatiest shops across the savannah—they wait with nervous hands, dirty with gun grease, gripping guns black with night and finally cry Soomaaliga into the nocturnal sea. Neither of the Caribbean order—Anglo and Netherlander privateers—nor akin to ancient Barbary slaver-corsairs, a new generation of Pirate blooms in the Aden. They executive kidnappers, global internalizers of cost, reflecting the lawlessness of capitalism, mutated by desperation, sailing the post-atomic deserts of revolution.
Ancient Romans sent naval patrols to quell the seas around the Horn, to clear the way for trade, but in vain: their remote scouts glimpsed only merchant ships, smoking with capture, whose crew would await ransom forever. The intimate knowledge of the sea and frequent disenfranchisement from international trade brought pirates out throughout the history of the land, interrupting Arab exploitation of Afrika and terrorizing the British merchant during the height of empire. Ya, all ships lost in the Aden are sacrificial offerings on the buccaneer alter of the Somali seafaring tradition.
But, untold by tradition, unfathomable desperation, utterly unemolliated, flows the deep saline veins of the pirate. Before the tributary rivers lead us to the ocean, let’s paint a picture of a land in chaos:
There is genocidal civil war in the Sudan between the Muslim North and the marginalized Animist/Christian South, Ethiopia’s indomitable poverty that they try to ignore through constant border crises and invading Somalia more than once, the marginalization of Eritreans ain their own land and cast abroad for subsistence while Yemen—the link to Asia—is so packed with treacherous rebels that even the likes of al-Qaeda can hunt American tourists in the desert for sport and Oman’s feudal sell-out oil Sultan Qaboos “rules by decree” of the United States, who has a military base in Djibouti, with its endless victims of rendition to Kenya, who has graduated from the rim of civil war to more civilized crimes, such as embezzlement.
And, in the center of the world, fractured Somalia, at the tip of Afrika, the tip of itself. Locked in perpetual struggle for freedom from Ethiopia (the only Afrikan nation to colonize another Afrikan nation), Somalia has also clashed with colonial forces from France, Italy, England, and even the US who were eventually successful in destabilizing Somali central authority, and arming extremist militias.
The UN and even the African Union have traditionally supported Ethiopian incursions into Somali sovereignty, deploying weapons and troops to further infantilize and alienate the culturally cohesive land. In the early 90’s, from the sea and air, US and European powers converged on Somalia and, under the guise of “protecting the delivery of food and other humanitarian aid,” initiated a long-lasting military presence. This culminated in the event known in popular culture at Black Hawk Down where American Special Forces killed hundreds of militiamen.
International political, economic, and outright military incursion since the Cold War have transformed this pastoral land into a mire of politico-social unrest, mass starvation and displacement, and extreme Islamist militancy. Since the break down of the Somali government, competing foreign interests have ushered in an age of neo-colonial exploitation, reflecting upon the choppy Aden the anarchy of capitalism. From the Karkaar mountains down to the Nugaal valley—Confederated Puntland has been opened up to Canadian and Australian oil exploration and the fatal petroleum trade. These mineral companies fuel regional unrest in order abuse laborers, importing weapons and militias to guard oil towers—chaos, chaos.
The ghettoes of Bosaso seethe while the quiet of the country starves, and in Eyl the sound of tires peels down hard earth roads, but the true injustices are felt at sea. Undaunted by the vesselless Somali Navy, foreign fishing trawlers from Europe and Asia have invaded the waters of the Somali Sea. They slowly began to push out local fishermen with their traditional, low impact nets, replacing them with miles of mesh and sonar tracking. Within a few years, illegal fishing practices like intensive bottom trawling had not only removed most of the culinary fish and various by-catch species, but destroyed their habitats and breeding waters. These fishing companies—who had already out fished their own fisheries—didn’t share their profits with the fishermen.
The greatest atrocity committed against the Somalis to date, though, remains the illegal disposal of nuclear waste off of their coast. Slow poisoning has claimed the fish that survived the trawls and the people brave enough to eat them, wreaking untold havoc on remote parts of the Horn. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami dredged up the rusty barrels of nuclear jetsam, to a magnitude of 9.3, flinging them onto inhabited lands so that the people can die or radiation sickness, dreaming of a blue ocean and pure soil.
Western and Soviet colonial backed Somalia saw the rapid forced settlement of numerous nomadic tribes from Somalilaand, Puntlaand, Ogaden, and the south. Groups that used to be able to move with the rain and avoid draught now wait to die, each prizing only his gun, lost to their traditions and their freedom of movement. They were forced from the seas, where the fish that are left are poisoned by the atomic refuse of more “civilized” nations.
Millions of Somalis are now dependent on foreign food programs, which come and go with the political tides. When their rations are hijacked by US armed militiamen, skeletal parents are forced to make the incomprehensible decision, which child to stop feeding so that the other children can continue to have nourishment, waiting for the day when they are felled, too weak to work on stick legs, watching the next child foam at the mouth and fade in their arms, on the hard earth.
Ransom, gentlemen—have you heard of Robin Hood? Islamic warlords taught the displaced fishermen to sharpen their alienation, to take back their waters from the horrors of this world. They took up AK-47s, sweet Kalashnikov, spark of revolution, drum of the fiery rhythm time, rocket launchers that are blessed to hit Black Hawks and grey frigates dead on. Armed albatross, environmental freedom fighters run the black-market, rich for the time being from selling Chinese goods that were meant for Europe and guns that were meant for Sudan.
The dust-barren streets of Eyl crawl with the headlights of SUVs at night—the veins begin to pump when the ships come in. Speeder boats run up the beach amid growing shouts as the seized tankers are anchored in the shoals. Hostages and contraband are hauled ashore through crowds of clamoring businessmen and pirate-marines. Western and Chinese ships pace impotently across the distant horizon. Armed with the most advanced military technology in the history of the world, Western and Chinese warships supplemented by the most powerful private security specialists pace impotently aside the Puntish maritime border between capitalism and peace.
As the tides of 7.62mm shells wash ashore and money filled parachutes fall from the sky, Somalis are claiming their voice. In a world structured around large-scale exploitation, they ask for only tithes for their suffering and each hostage freed can tell you that the pirates are justice.
Somali society is shifting once more towards a state of independence and maritime satiety. Aimé Césaire said that real tradition is dialectical—the Somalis are mobile, no longer in the doldrums of the drought plains, waiting for UN food shipments. We see it on the front page and sailors see it down the barrel of the rifle pointed in their face, a narrowing labyrinth: Pirates, Islamists, and civilians forced to the gun to protect their starving kin know no bounds.
-Michaël Veremans Full post...
He'll fight for a lifetime.
Taken to the high-seas, swathed in cotton—the rags of the sweatiest shops across the savannah—they wait with nervous hands, dirty with gun grease, gripping guns black with night and finally cry Soomaaliga into the nocturnal sea. Neither of the Caribbean order—Anglo and Netherlander privateers—nor akin to ancient Barbary slaver-corsairs, a new generation of Pirate blooms in the Aden. They executive kidnappers, global internalizers of cost, reflecting the lawlessness of capitalism, mutated by desperation, sailing the post-atomic deserts of revolution.
Ancient Romans sent naval patrols to quell the seas around the Horn, to clear the way for trade, but in vain: their remote scouts glimpsed only merchant ships, smoking with capture, whose crew would await ransom forever. The intimate knowledge of the sea and frequent disenfranchisement from international trade brought pirates out throughout the history of the land, interrupting Arab exploitation of Afrika and terrorizing the British merchant during the height of empire. Ya, all ships lost in the Aden are sacrificial offerings on the buccaneer alter of the Somali seafaring tradition.
But, untold by tradition, unfathomable desperation, utterly unemolliated, flows the deep saline veins of the pirate. Before the tributary rivers lead us to the ocean, let’s paint a picture of a land in chaos:
There is genocidal civil war in the Sudan between the Muslim North and the marginalized Animist/Christian South, Ethiopia’s indomitable poverty that they try to ignore through constant border crises and invading Somalia more than once, the marginalization of Eritreans ain their own land and cast abroad for subsistence while Yemen—the link to Asia—is so packed with treacherous rebels that even the likes of al-Qaeda can hunt American tourists in the desert for sport and Oman’s feudal sell-out oil Sultan Qaboos “rules by decree” of the United States, who has a military base in Djibouti, with its endless victims of rendition to Kenya, who has graduated from the rim of civil war to more civilized crimes, such as embezzlement.
And, in the center of the world, fractured Somalia, at the tip of Afrika, the tip of itself. Locked in perpetual struggle for freedom from Ethiopia (the only Afrikan nation to colonize another Afrikan nation), Somalia has also clashed with colonial forces from France, Italy, England, and even the US who were eventually successful in destabilizing Somali central authority, and arming extremist militias.
The UN and even the African Union have traditionally supported Ethiopian incursions into Somali sovereignty, deploying weapons and troops to further infantilize and alienate the culturally cohesive land. In the early 90’s, from the sea and air, US and European powers converged on Somalia and, under the guise of “protecting the delivery of food and other humanitarian aid,” initiated a long-lasting military presence. This culminated in the event known in popular culture at Black Hawk Down where American Special Forces killed hundreds of militiamen.
International political, economic, and outright military incursion since the Cold War have transformed this pastoral land into a mire of politico-social unrest, mass starvation and displacement, and extreme Islamist militancy. Since the break down of the Somali government, competing foreign interests have ushered in an age of neo-colonial exploitation, reflecting upon the choppy Aden the anarchy of capitalism. From the Karkaar mountains down to the Nugaal valley—Confederated Puntland has been opened up to Canadian and Australian oil exploration and the fatal petroleum trade. These mineral companies fuel regional unrest in order abuse laborers, importing weapons and militias to guard oil towers—chaos, chaos.
The ghettoes of Bosaso seethe while the quiet of the country starves, and in Eyl the sound of tires peels down hard earth roads, but the true injustices are felt at sea. Undaunted by the vesselless Somali Navy, foreign fishing trawlers from Europe and Asia have invaded the waters of the Somali Sea. They slowly began to push out local fishermen with their traditional, low impact nets, replacing them with miles of mesh and sonar tracking. Within a few years, illegal fishing practices like intensive bottom trawling had not only removed most of the culinary fish and various by-catch species, but destroyed their habitats and breeding waters. These fishing companies—who had already out fished their own fisheries—didn’t share their profits with the fishermen.
The greatest atrocity committed against the Somalis to date, though, remains the illegal disposal of nuclear waste off of their coast. Slow poisoning has claimed the fish that survived the trawls and the people brave enough to eat them, wreaking untold havoc on remote parts of the Horn. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami dredged up the rusty barrels of nuclear jetsam, to a magnitude of 9.3, flinging them onto inhabited lands so that the people can die or radiation sickness, dreaming of a blue ocean and pure soil.
Western and Soviet colonial backed Somalia saw the rapid forced settlement of numerous nomadic tribes from Somalilaand, Puntlaand, Ogaden, and the south. Groups that used to be able to move with the rain and avoid draught now wait to die, each prizing only his gun, lost to their traditions and their freedom of movement. They were forced from the seas, where the fish that are left are poisoned by the atomic refuse of more “civilized” nations.
Millions of Somalis are now dependent on foreign food programs, which come and go with the political tides. When their rations are hijacked by US armed militiamen, skeletal parents are forced to make the incomprehensible decision, which child to stop feeding so that the other children can continue to have nourishment, waiting for the day when they are felled, too weak to work on stick legs, watching the next child foam at the mouth and fade in their arms, on the hard earth.
Ransom, gentlemen—have you heard of Robin Hood? Islamic warlords taught the displaced fishermen to sharpen their alienation, to take back their waters from the horrors of this world. They took up AK-47s, sweet Kalashnikov, spark of revolution, drum of the fiery rhythm time, rocket launchers that are blessed to hit Black Hawks and grey frigates dead on. Armed albatross, environmental freedom fighters run the black-market, rich for the time being from selling Chinese goods that were meant for Europe and guns that were meant for Sudan.
The dust-barren streets of Eyl crawl with the headlights of SUVs at night—the veins begin to pump when the ships come in. Speeder boats run up the beach amid growing shouts as the seized tankers are anchored in the shoals. Hostages and contraband are hauled ashore through crowds of clamoring businessmen and pirate-marines. Western and Chinese ships pace impotently across the distant horizon. Armed with the most advanced military technology in the history of the world, Western and Chinese warships supplemented by the most powerful private security specialists pace impotently aside the Puntish maritime border between capitalism and peace.
As the tides of 7.62mm shells wash ashore and money filled parachutes fall from the sky, Somalis are claiming their voice. In a world structured around large-scale exploitation, they ask for only tithes for their suffering and each hostage freed can tell you that the pirates are justice.
Somali society is shifting once more towards a state of independence and maritime satiety. Aimé Césaire said that real tradition is dialectical—the Somalis are mobile, no longer in the doldrums of the drought plains, waiting for UN food shipments. We see it on the front page and sailors see it down the barrel of the rifle pointed in their face, a narrowing labyrinth: Pirates, Islamists, and civilians forced to the gun to protect their starving kin know no bounds.
-Michaël Veremans Full post...
11.10.09
Jaguar Press Manifesto
Come, come, bring up the sun, bring colors—blue—and everything else to the world once dark and subdued. Revolutionists! We are calling you out.
The Jaguar Press is the throbbing avant-garde that has been alive since histories unwritten, stalking the psycadelic jungles that form the borderland between objective reality and our perception of it. It is a hub for the development and presentation of underground creative projects, a manifestation of the “subterranean currents of unrest.”1
Our mere observation and understanding of reality is insufficient to the project of human life and so we seek to produce. The Jaguar Press is a community portfolio dedicated to art and connectivity. The internet is our ferry, a seized media, wired to connect the people and our ideas—a frontier of human development. We’ll be in the streets too.
No one is free unless everyone is free. The Jaguar Press is a group dedicated to the synthesis of revolutionary art, bringing something back from the countless trips into the jungle, actualized for the present and the near future, interpreting the past and blazing paths. We are the media of social consciousness—“It is [art] of combat because it assumes responsibility."2
We are dialectical materialist expressionism, socialist realism—artists, the dead. We are human animals, we are lynx, no, Jaguar Press.
-Editorial Staff
Full post...
The Jaguar Press is the throbbing avant-garde that has been alive since histories unwritten, stalking the psycadelic jungles that form the borderland between objective reality and our perception of it. It is a hub for the development and presentation of underground creative projects, a manifestation of the “subterranean currents of unrest.”1
Our mere observation and understanding of reality is insufficient to the project of human life and so we seek to produce. The Jaguar Press is a community portfolio dedicated to art and connectivity. The internet is our ferry, a seized media, wired to connect the people and our ideas—a frontier of human development. We’ll be in the streets too.
No one is free unless everyone is free. The Jaguar Press is a group dedicated to the synthesis of revolutionary art, bringing something back from the countless trips into the jungle, actualized for the present and the near future, interpreting the past and blazing paths. We are the media of social consciousness—“It is [art] of combat because it assumes responsibility."2
We are dialectical materialist expressionism, socialist realism—artists, the dead. We are human animals, we are lynx, no, Jaguar Press.
-Editorial Staff
Golden Canary of LB Conflagration
This is the first publishing of an article on the recent violence in the streets of Long Beach. It was rejected by its editor but the truth must out.
-Editorial Staff
Golden Canary of LB Conflagration
Eva Schöffer – Long Beach
Friday, July 24, 2009
-Editorial Staff
Golden Canary of LB Conflagration
Eva Schöffer – Long Beach
Friday, July 24, 2009
It was two and going on into evening, the streets were hot and the dust whipped wildly at my legs. The wind was silent though, and the witnesses present were whispering in indecipherable quiet. Like crows they stood around gawking in the trees, in the gutters, out car windows, and off church steps—a thronging nebula, more like a constellation all focused on the brightest star—a murder victim, cold in the summer. Rust-red blood bloomed over the pavement around where he was laying, gunshot to the head.
Markus Morales was preparing to enter the twelfth grade at Cabrillo High and deeply involved in a local set of the Pirus—more of a machismo boys club than a criminal organization, except for petty drug dealing, usually to friends and locals. A benign business that once only boomed during family BBQs and nighttime parties began to dip into the dismal depression of debt. With most firms consolidating jobs, familiar distributors—those who exclusively sell to friends, relatives, and acquaintances—are more willing than ever to deal to a closed network. Profits are made in the form of surplus product or petty cash.
Morales was dead before I ever met him, and I learned these few facts by asking an anonymous friend of his who was so scared that he forgot the ageless code of the street—silence. Witness testimony at the scene suggests that two unidentified, well-dressed gunmen shot Markus and then fled calmly in an unmarked vehicle. Quick to shield their traditional apathy to most street murder cases, the police have declined to comment, leaving potential victims ignorant and vulnerable.
Like the other organized-crime murders this summer, the bodies were left in public view—on MLK and 6th St., near Santa Rosa church—but the epidemic of killings are thought to be completely unrelated. Clyde “Sly” Johnson, 17, Benny “Killer” Guzman, 18, DeVon “Day-day” Allah, 15, Charles “Sui” Khamsyha, 16, were also kids dead on loans to drug mafias, found in the debtors prison of the gutters, chronicled in previous volumes of the Jaguar Press after it was too late. This article must find the youth alive.
The broad Latin American drug network, through careful political maneuvering and an eagerness for violent resolution, has transformed itself into a multi-billion dollar industry, dealing in cocaine produced in Columbia and heroin from Afghanistan, among other contraband. Law enforcement and policy efforts to curb the trade have simply strengthened this international conglomerate that now encompasses the entire Western hemisphere and even Europe, where members of Mexican street gangs were arrested last year. Despite the scope of the business, most low-level distributors such as Markus deal in cocaine and cannabis, which is now domestically grown.
The crowd of bystanders watched the scene, eyes affixed to the memento mori—if you can call a dead man that—like a exploitation film they’d seen over and over, always with the same plot and ending. Slamming fire in the streets where crime and poverty are sister sicknesses, fear is king, the alligator of the sewers, and they all lead to the ocean. The youth here is desperately pushed and pulled down the fatal career path of debt and death without respite.
Full post...
Markus Morales was preparing to enter the twelfth grade at Cabrillo High and deeply involved in a local set of the Pirus—more of a machismo boys club than a criminal organization, except for petty drug dealing, usually to friends and locals. A benign business that once only boomed during family BBQs and nighttime parties began to dip into the dismal depression of debt. With most firms consolidating jobs, familiar distributors—those who exclusively sell to friends, relatives, and acquaintances—are more willing than ever to deal to a closed network. Profits are made in the form of surplus product or petty cash.
Morales was dead before I ever met him, and I learned these few facts by asking an anonymous friend of his who was so scared that he forgot the ageless code of the street—silence. Witness testimony at the scene suggests that two unidentified, well-dressed gunmen shot Markus and then fled calmly in an unmarked vehicle. Quick to shield their traditional apathy to most street murder cases, the police have declined to comment, leaving potential victims ignorant and vulnerable.
Like the other organized-crime murders this summer, the bodies were left in public view—on MLK and 6th St., near Santa Rosa church—but the epidemic of killings are thought to be completely unrelated. Clyde “Sly” Johnson, 17, Benny “Killer” Guzman, 18, DeVon “Day-day” Allah, 15, Charles “Sui” Khamsyha, 16, were also kids dead on loans to drug mafias, found in the debtors prison of the gutters, chronicled in previous volumes of the Jaguar Press after it was too late. This article must find the youth alive.
The broad Latin American drug network, through careful political maneuvering and an eagerness for violent resolution, has transformed itself into a multi-billion dollar industry, dealing in cocaine produced in Columbia and heroin from Afghanistan, among other contraband. Law enforcement and policy efforts to curb the trade have simply strengthened this international conglomerate that now encompasses the entire Western hemisphere and even Europe, where members of Mexican street gangs were arrested last year. Despite the scope of the business, most low-level distributors such as Markus deal in cocaine and cannabis, which is now domestically grown.
The crowd of bystanders watched the scene, eyes affixed to the memento mori—if you can call a dead man that—like a exploitation film they’d seen over and over, always with the same plot and ending. Slamming fire in the streets where crime and poverty are sister sicknesses, fear is king, the alligator of the sewers, and they all lead to the ocean. The youth here is desperately pushed and pulled down the fatal career path of debt and death without respite.
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