Saturday, August 2, 2025

What sort of society drives its artists into poverty? 

One that has no need for virtually any of them—is, in fact, ashamed of them, and wishes them to be ashamed too. It wishes the artists had the same view of themselves that it does—as scoundrels capable of any degradation. After all, there is always the danger one of these “scoundrels” may hit a nerve with the public and expose the rottenness of the social order before tens of millions. Such things have happened, and will happen again. A billionaire-infested society “fears superstitiously every new word,” even more than it did when Trotsky made the comment in 1938, for, as he went on, “it is no longer a matter of corrections and reforms for capitalism but of life and death.” 

The system is “broken” and “a complete failure” for the artists certainly. The giant music companies are doing very well. Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, for example, which control over 85 percent of the US recording music industry, took in more than $30 billion in revenue between them in 2023. Universal CEO Lucian Grainge received $150.3 million in total compensation this year. Various commentaries have appeared inveighing against the present situation. 

A piece on Paste referred to “our capitalism-ravaged world,” and continued: For musicians, this is an especially dire situation, as they’re expected to put out works of art that have taken years to create, all so that we can listen to them for free-or-cheap on vampiric corporate streaming platforms. And then they’re supposed to go on tour, which is a prohibitively expensive endeavor, especially since the pandemic. 

Touring costs have skyrocketed by about 40% since lockdowns. Business Insider headlined a recent exposure, “Want to make money as a pop star? Dream on—Why it’s nearly impossible to make money as a musician in 2024 (unless you’re Taylor Swift).” It observed that, “Music has always been a business, but streaming, TikTok, inflation, and the ballooning costs of touring have dramatically altered a musician’s traditional routes to making money.” 

Royalty distribution—how artists and others who own copyrights get paid—is a many-headed beast, but reliable industry estimates have put Spotify’s payout rate at less than half a cent per stream, while Apple Music in 2021 was said to have told artists it paid about one penny per stream. 

Songwriters meanwhile, Billboard indicated in 2022, could expect to earn 9.4 cents for every dollar a streaming service paid in royalties. According to someone familiar with the industry interviewed for the Business Insider piece, the baseline cost to record a full-length album would be “about $300,000. ‘That eliminated 75 percent of the people who are aspiring.’” 

The article went on to assert that: In a market flooded with demand in the wake of the pandemic, costs for everything from bus rentals to hotel rooms to hiring a lighting technician or manning a merchandise table have ballooned. (Not to mention that venues take a cut of merchandise profits these days, too—sometimes as much as 40%). When prominent artists “are canceling tour dates or entire tours amid reports of weak ticket sales, what hope is there for everybody else?” 

In the Guardian last March Damon Krukowski pointed out that Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google dominate streaming, and streaming accounted for 84 percent of all recorded music revenue in the US. For content, the current streaming system pays an average, across these platforms, of approximately $0.00173 per stream. And that meager amount … doesn’t even go directly to the artist. 

It goes to the rights holder for the master recording, which is usually a record label—which then splits this income with artists according to individual contracts, with a typical artist share somewhere between 15% and 50%. 

William Deresiewicz, in his Death of the Artist (2020), written before the pandemic, the further cartelization of the industry and the introduction of the newest technologies, asserted that, The system is designed for scale. You can actually make a lot of money as a musician from streaming, but only if you generate, say, a hundred million streams. 

A paltry million streams will only get you between about $700 and $6,000. ... In the age of [Michael Jackson’s] Thriller, the great blockbusting album of the early 1980s, 80 percent of revenue in the music business went to the top 20 percent of content. Now it goes to the top 1 percent. Deresiewicz noted that, according to one economist, in 1982, the top 1 percent of artists garnered 26 percent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 percent [What is it now?]. At a mega-festival of two hundred acts … 80 percent of the money will go to the three or four headliners. More generally, Deresiewicz asserted that, in the arts, tech does not eliminate existing producers—creation can’t be automated—it exploits and immiserates them. 

Jonathan Taplin estimates that between 2004 and 2015, about $50 billion in annual revenue ‘moved from the creators of content to the owners of monopoly platforms.’ … The devastation of the arts economy, like the degradation of the college experience, is rooted in the great besetting sin of contemporary American society: extreme and growing inequality. Creating and performing music that has an impact on the listener and that endures is no easy matter. In music, according to Hegel’s fine phrase, “the whole gamut of the heart’s feelings and passions resound and die away.” This is not something that comes about overnight, or that a person stumbles on accidentally. 

 Popular songs take countless forms and convey countless moods—lyrical, unruly, sensual, regretful, angry, pensive, rebellious and more. Through the best songs, an individual communicates to others his or her own inner life, with all that’s objectively important, original and elemental in it, both as it has developed over a lifetime and as it seizes him or her and his or her entire being powerfully at a given moment. It is appalling to consider that this often delicate and complex process, even if the final product is raucous or coarse, is at the mercy of financiers and philistines and other swinish types. At present, of course, a great deal of what dominates the music and entertainment world is backward and degraded. But that is not the end of the story. Deresiewicz, a liberal critic of capitalism, is wrong about the “death of the artist.” 

The artists and musicians will live, and live significantly, precisely in so far as they take up opposition to what exists, artistically, politically, economically. Pierre Jean de Béranger (Ary Scheffer, 1830) Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) was a French poet and songwriter who enjoyed immense popularity after the downfall of Napoleon in 1814-15. He has been described as “the most popular French songwriter of all time.” He once wrote, “The good of humanity has been the dream of my life.” As one commentator explains, [Béranger] composed songs and poems highly critical of the government set up under the restored Bourbon monarchy. 

They brought him immediate fame through their expression of popular feeling, but they led to dismissal from his post (1821) and three months’ imprisonment (an experience he compared favourably to life in his garret). Béranger’s lyrical, tender songs glorifying the just-passed Napoleonic era and his satires ridiculing the monarchy and reactionary clergy were written in a clear, simple, attractive style. Both song and satire soon made him as well known among ordinary country people as in the liberal literary circles of Paris. In one famed and beloved song, “My Republic,” Béranger explains that he has “grown fond of the republic / Since I’ve seen so many kings.” As a result, he has set up his own republic where “One trades there only to drink, / One judges there only with gaiety; / My table is all its territory; / Its motto is liberty.” 

Where is our Béranger? In 1842, the youthful Karl Marx turned to lyrics by Béranger to help illustrate his own attitude toward art and commerce. In his article, “On Freedom of the Press,” Marx noted that the writer, for example, “must earn in order to be able to live and write, but he must by no means live and write to earn.” 

Marx then cited these lines by Béranger: Je ne vis que pour faire des chansons, Si vous m’ôtez ma place Monseigneur Je ferai des chansons pour vivre. [I live only to compose songs. If you dismiss me, Monseigneur, I shall compose songs in order to live.] Béranger’s “threat,” Marx went on, “contains the ironic admission that the poet deserts his proper sphere when for him poetry becomes a means.” This remarkable passage from Marx follows, one that ought to be memorized by every artist with an ounce of integrity: The writer does not at all look on his work as a means. 


It is an end in itself, it is so little a means for him himself and for others that, if need be, he sacrifices his existence to its existence. He is, in another way, like the preacher of religion who adopts the principle: “Obey God [i.e., art] rather than man” … The recording and entertainment industry giants, the tech conglomerates, all of these are useless parasitical entities, which do nothing but drain wealth and energy and artistry. They only exist to subtract from and damage the culture. The working class in power under socialism will expropriate these corporations and place the production of music under the democratic control of the writers, singers, musicians, producers and technicians who create it.


Saturday, February 26, 2022

Defeat US / NATO War Drive and Sanctions Against Russia! (Boson Workers) 23 Feb 2022

 Defeat US / NATO War Drive and Sanctions Against Russia! 



The following statement was issued by the Executive Committee, Boson Workers on 23 February 2022.


On February 21, 2022, after weeks of increasingly hysterical imperialist war propaganda and daily escalating attacks by Ukrainian government and fascist/nationalist forces against the breakaway Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin formally recognized the independence of these embattled self-styled people’s republics and sent in troops. The United States, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the European Union immediately condemned Russia for its defensive action and announced they would impose severe economic sanctions. Class-conscious workers and all opponents of imperialism should denounce the U.S./NATO imperialist war drive, which raises the spectre of world war. The imperialists seek to isolate, provoke and demonize Russia, which despite Putin’s supposed ambitions is an intermediate, regional capitalist power. Yet the imperialists’ ultimate aim is to spark counterrevolution in China, Cuba and North Korea.


The next day, U.S. president Joe Biden seized upon Russia’s action to declare it “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” in order to declare economic sanctions against Russia, as was foreseen. 

For years, Putin has complained of the increasing encirclement by NATO and its threatening military actions against Russia, to no avail. Two months ago, Moscow handed the U.S. proposed language for security guarantees, and for emphasis, it mobilized its armed forces for military maneuvers all around Ukraine’s borders. The imperialist media went into full Russia-bashing mode, calling up Cold War images of the Russian bear seizing Europe. Non-stop fear-mongering over a supposedly impending Russian invasion of Ukraine recalled the war propaganda over non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The Western powers responded to Putin with nothing but empty arms-control talks and flatly refused to rule out NATO expansion. With its almost 1,300-mile border with Russia, inclusion of Ukraine in the Western military alliance would be an act of war. By declaring any limitation on NATO’s eastward expansion a “non-starter,” Biden and his European allies are declaring that the imperialist alliance is gearing up for war on Russia, sooner or later.


Biden is beating the war drums against Russia in a desperate attempt to appear strong after the U.S. imperialism’s humiliating defeat and flight from Afghanistan, where two decades of U.S./NATO invasion and occupation could not keep the puppet government from collapsing. The current inhabitant of the White House is desperately trying to resuscitate a unipolar “New World Order” that was proclaimed by the U.S. with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union three decades ago. But Washington no longer has the military and economic strength to impose its global hegemony, and instead has to rely on its European and Asian allies. In large part, the U.S.’ insistence on isolating and attacking Russia with economic warfare measures is driven by a determination to keep its imperialist ally and rival Germany in line, particularly by insisting on cancellation of Nord Stream 2.


In his speech announcing recognition of the two breakaway republics, Putin noted that in negotiations over the reunification of Germany in 1990, the U.S. assured Soviet leaders that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east. The existence of this pledge, which the U.S. now pretends was never made, is confirmed in a February 1990 exchange in which U.S. Secretary of State James Baker vowed to Mikhail Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction,” and in a classified German government document recently leaked by Der Spiegel. Yet NATO’s Drang nach Osten (march to the east) goes on unabated. And while Putin hails Russia’s “contribution to overcoming the legacy of the Cold War,” a handful of socialist militants fought tooth and nail against the capitalist reunification of Germany and the counterrevolution that brought down the multinational Soviet workers state.


The current crisis over Ukraine has been building for years. In 2014, Ukrainian fascists and ultra-nationalists staged a coup d’état that ousted the elected, pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich. This was a second attempt, after the 2004 so-called Orange Revolution, one of the U.S.-sponsored “color revolutions” for “regime change” in post-Soviet states. In 2014, the State Department’s Europe chief financed and directly coordinated with the nationalist fascists and hobnobbed with them in Maidan square in Ukraine’s capital.3 Ukrainian nationalists marched with portraits of Stepan Bandera, the infamous collaborator with the Nazi invasion of the USSR during World War II, who has now been officially declared “hero of Ukraine.” Following the February 2014 coup, its organizers launched a war on Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine and staged a pogrom in the south, burning dozens of people alive in the trade-union headquarters in Odessa. The use of Russian in schools and government was banned.

When an uprising against this murderous Ukrainian national chauvinism broke out in the east, the Kiev junta considered the army unreliable and dispatched fascist squads to try to put down the revolt. Yet the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (regional divisions) voted overwhelmingly in a May 2014 referendum for independence from the central government, and after hard close-quarters fighting, the would-be ethnic cleansers failed. In Crimea (whose capital Sevastopol has for centuries been the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet), after Russian troops seized the peninsula in March 2014 without a shot being fired, the overwhelmingly ethnically Russian population voted in a referendum to exercise their self-determination by joining Russia. Many socialist militants called to support the eastern uprising and to defend the regional republics that have tenaciously resisted the Ukrainian nationalist/fascist attacks, as well as defending Crimea’s democratic choice to join Russia.


Russia’s move to recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk republics puts an end to the 2015 Minsk Accords between Russia and Ukraine for regional autonomy of the eastern oblasts. While the separatists sought independence, Putin preferred that the Donbass be an autonomous part of a neutral Ukraine that could be a buffer between Russia and NATO. But the Kiev government never undertook promised reforms providing security guarantees and a say in foreign policy to the breakaway regions. Recently, the prohibitions on use of the Russian language have been intensified, even though it is the predominant language in the cities of the east and south, and is widely used in the capital, in business and popular culture. Putin talks of “genocide” against Russians, which is an exaggeration, but Russian-speakers in the east are definitely threatened by the Ukrainian nationalist army and fascists that have besieged the region for eight years. As for the now-defunct Minsk Accords for autonomy in Ukraine, it was always hard to see how the central government could reassert control without a bloodbath.


The escalation of anti-Russian provocations by the Ukrainian government is a direct result of the election of Democrat Biden to the U.S. presidency. As Republican Trump sought to make nice with Putin and Russia, the Democrats whipped up the “Russiagate” frenzy, blaming the Kremlin for Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 election. The Democrats have been tight with Ukraine’s anti-Russian nationalists for years, engineering the 2004 and 2014 coups, sitting on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, etc. As soon as Biden got in, the Ukraine government began a string of provocations, announcing a new military strategy in March 2021 centered on joining NATO and getting it to support Ukraine against Russia. Russian-language television stations were shut down, and the main pro-Russian “oligarch” business mogul in Ukraine was placed under house arrest on charges of “treason.”


The Ukrainian government and nationalist paramilitaries simultaneously launched a military escalation in the east, to which Moscow responded by beefing up its forces on Russian territory on the other side of the border. In the fall, Russia again mobilized for a series of military exercises, stating over and over that it had no intention of invading Ukraine. The purpose of those exercises was to make clear to the Western imperialists that if Ukraine joins NATO, it would be considered an act of war, and to indicate what would be the consequence. If Russia wanted to, it could easily take much of Ukraine. Even the Ukrainian top military brass admitted they would not last more than a few days against the modernized Russian military. So Putin’s point was made very clearly. The U.S. response was frenzied propaganda portraying the Russian leader as the embodiment of evil.


For all the feverish denunciation of Moscow’s military buildup, NATO has been intensifying aggressive military operations near Russia. “Trident Juncture” in 2018 was billed as “the biggest exercise since the end of the Cold War,” focusing on the Baltics, including a D-Day style landing in Latvia. This was followed up in May-July 2021 with “Defender Europe 21,” a joint exercise involving 28,000 troops and a giant landing of more than 1,000 military vehicles in Albania. This was linked to the simultaneous “Sea Breeze” naval exercises in the Black Sea, with ships of 32 countries (including Japan), along with ground exercises in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. None of these are ever mentioned in the imperialist media, and all are aimed at Russia. Since 1999, NATO has expanded to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Romania, encircling Russia. And now the imperialists want to tighten the noose by refusing to rule out entry of Ukraine and Georgia, which were told in 2008 they could join NATO if they got their houses in order.


Militant socialists call to defend self-rule in the breakaway regions of southern and eastern Ukraine and to defeat the war drive against Russia and China. We militantly oppose imperialist sanctions and denounce the U.S./NATO hue and cry over Russian troops shoring up the besieged Donbass republics as the bleating of frustrated warmongers and their social-democratic acolytes. The conductor of this orchestrated uproar is U.S. imperialism, with its record of countless bloody invasions. If clashes lead to a full-blown war between Russia and Ukraine, socialist militants would be for a policy of revolutionary defeatism in both of these regional powers, calling for workers to actively oppose the war effort of “their” capitalists and to wage intransigent class struggle against the capitalist rulers in Moscow and Kiev. But if it turned into a war by Ukraine’s imperialist backers against Russia that would be a very different matter.


Socialists warned repeatedly before the 2020 election that the Democrats were campaigning as “the more consistent warmongers against China, Russia and – of course – North Korea.”5 In an interview during the election campaign, Biden declared that the “biggest threat to America right now … is Russia,” while “the biggest competitor is China” (60 Minutes, 25 October 2020). And upon being named Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield called China “a strategic adversary” (AP, 27 January 2021). Thus the February 4 joint statement of Putin and Chinese president and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping proclaiming friendship with “no limits” between China and Russia, which explicitly opposed the expansion of NATO, caused great consternation in Washington. Facing the escalating threats and dangers, we call on the world working class to defend China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states against imperialism and counterrevolution.


Today, the overriding class issue is to fight against the aggressive U.S./NATO imperialist warmongers and their flunkeys in Kiev, as well as against the fascist and ultra-nationalist pogromists threatening the population in eastern Ukraine. In no case do Marxists give political support to the Ukrainian leaders or to the Russian nationalist and anti-communist Vladimir Putin, whose February 21 speech began with a diatribe against Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating Ukraine in the first place. Putin was a lawyer for the Soviet security services and a memeber of the Communist Party.  Putin has said that when the Soviet Union imploded many agents publicly burned their Communist Party membership cards.  They were Stalinists who never believed in socialism or communism.  Putin said he did not burn his Communist Party membership card and still has it at home in a draw.  

A Soviet Ukraine in a multinational USSR could have overcome regional and ethnic tensions, although Stalin’s brutal centralization negated that. But ever since Ukraine’s 1991 independence as a bourgeois state, it has been a deeply divided country, ruled by an inveterately corrupt, self-dealing oligarchy using ultra-nationalist and fascist shock troops as a battering ram to enforce “Ukrainization” on the Russian-speaking east and south.


Socialist millitants should defend the democratic, national and linguistic rights of all sectors of the population, seeking to unite Russian and Ukrainian workers in common struggle together with the workers of East and West Europe. As the imperialists continue to whip up war fever and impose escalating sanctions that ultimately point to world war, those who follow the internationalist program of world socialist revolution against all the capitalist ruling classes. ■

Friday, October 8, 2021

Me and Jesus and the Grass Cutter


 I heard male voices outside my kitchen window.  I surmised that someone had come to cut the wild grass that had been growing all summer in the backyard next door.  My cat got lost in the tall grass.  

I put in earplugs, and then my earmuff industrial noise protection over the head unit.  I could still hear the loud gas powered lawn mowers the two men used.  Then came the leaf blowers.  I had something outside in my sun oven but thought I'd just wait until the landscape workers left and I didn't face any noise.  

I looked out the front window and saw the two men getting back in a black truck I had seen them get their equipment from.  So, I went out the back door.  

As I walk up the side walk to the sun oven a young man came back around the front and opened the neighbor's gate.

I said, "Hi." 

"Hi," he said as he moved to the back.

He turned with a concerned look and I wondered what his concern was.  He was in his twenties and bald with a big beard.  He had on a white tank top.  

"I just want to tell you how the Lord Jesus has changed my life," he said looking at me.

What?  

Please allow me to introduce myself....

I thought of passing politely on the subject and congratulating the young man, but, I didn't.

I took the bait.

"Jesus never existed," I said.  "The whole thing is a story." 


https://odysee.com/@zenagogue64:2/Me%2C-Jesus%2C-and-the-Grasscutter:4?r=D1PvVF4ZBAZm6zMRt1VPJMJv6ErgSKX5

Thursday, September 23, 2021

Wuhan Scientists Planned To Release 'Chimeric Covid Spike Proteins' Into Bat Populations Using 'Skin-Penetrating Nanoparticles' - by Tyler Durden (Zero Hedge)

 18 months before the pandemic, scientists in Wuhan, China submitted a proposal to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.

The bid was submitted by zoologist Peter Daszak of US-based EcoHealth Alliance, who was hoping to use genetic engineering to cobble "human-specific cleavage sites" onto bat Covid 'which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells' - a method which would coincidentally answer a longstanding question among the scientific community as to how SARS-CoV-2 evolved to become so infectious to humans.

Daszak's proposal also included plans to commingle high-risk natural coronaviruses strains with more infectious, yet less deadly versions. His 'bat team' of researchers included Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as US researchers from the University of North Carolina and the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center.

Darpa refused the contract - saying "It is clear that the proposed project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk," while warning that Daszak hadn't fully considered the dangers involved in enhancing the virus via gain-of-function research, or by releasing a vaccine into the air.

Grant documents show that the team also had some concerns about the vaccine programme and said they would “conduct educational outreach … so that there is a public understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it, particularly because of the practice of bat-consumption in the region”.

Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St Georges, University of London, who struggled to get work published showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out “gain of function” work for years before the pandemic, said the research may have gone ahead even without the funding.

This is clearly a gain of function, engineering the cleavage site and polishing the new viruses to enhance human cell infectibility in more than one cell line,” he said. -Telegraph

As the Telegraph aptly notes (and you'll never hear from Maddow, Lemon or Hayes), Daszak is the same guy behind a letter published in The Lancet last year which ruled out the lab leak hypothesis, and temporarily stifled debate on the origins of Covid-19.

"For more than a year I tried repeatedly to ask questions of Peter Daszak with no response," said Viscount Ridley, who has co-authored an upcoming book on the origin of Covid-19, and has repeatedly implored the House of Lords to dig deeper into the origins of the pandemic. "Now it turns out he had authored this vital piece of information about virus work in Wuhan but refused to share it with the world. I am furious. So should the world be," he added.

"Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) proposed injecting deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanised and ‘batified’ mice, and much, much more."

The documents, released by an international consortium of scientists known as 'Drastic Research,' were authenticated by a former Trump administration official. According to the group, "The actual DEFUSE Proposal Documents will be published in due course."

"Given that we find in this proposal a discussion of the planned introduction of human-specific cleavage sites, a review by the wider scientific community of the plausibility of artificial insertion is warranted," Drastic said in a statement.

Enhanced MERS?

One anonymous World Health Organization (WHO) scientist told The Telegraph that Daszak's grant proposal shockingly proposed plans to enhance the more deadly MERS (Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome).

"The scary part is they were making infectious chimeric Mers viruses," said the source, adding "These viruses have a fatality rate over 30 per cent, which is at least an order of magnitude more deadly than Sars-CoV-2."

"If one of their receptor replacements made Mers spread similarly, while maintaining its lethality, this pandemic would be nearly apocalyptic."

Just remember, the initial cover story started with 'bat soup.'

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Hellas: Sophie, The Moon, and Me - We all fall down


 I was thinking of Venus rising with the sun as I had observed in days last week.  I could see the sun was lighting the horizon to the southeast as I look out my kitchen window.  I went online to see what the sky charts showed.  I saw the eastern sky and southern skies had no Venus.  I moved the view around to the west.  The Moon was bright to the west northwest.  I thought of going out to the front porch, but I'd have to unlock the front door and step out into the cold.  


 

I decided to go up the front stairs.  I was thinking of the stairs the narrator in "A Voyage to Arturus" went up went he was getting ready for his journey into the sky.  He looked out a window at each level.  I looked out the window on the second floor after pulling back the yellow curtain.  But, the Moon was through a screen and textured.  I went up the next flight of stairs holding on to the railing.  I was in the dark.  I pulled back the curtain and looked through the wiggly old glass to the bright, cold moon.  

"Pale Hecarte who rules the night," I remembered from some pagan character, or, Shakespeare.  

I turned around and went down the stairs in the dark backwards, and holding on to the rail.  I remembered a nurse online warning, "you are one fall away from a nursing home."

I had climbed up to observe the Moon, not to sacrifice myself in worship.  

Later that morning I read that a 34 year old woman who created dance music was living in Greece and had also gone up to look at the same full moon.  Sophie tripped and fell and died.  Requiescat in pace et amore. 

We were not looking at the moon at the same time.  The reports say she fell at about 4 am Greek time which must be about four hours ahead of my US Eastern Standard Time.  


 

SOPHIE, the influential British producer who molded electronic music into bracingly original avant-garde pop, died in an accidental fall Saturday morning (January 30), a representative confirms. SOPHIE, who was 34, died at roughly 4 a.m. in Athens, Greece, where the artist had been living. In a statement, the labels Transgressive and Future Classic wrote: “True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell. She will always be here with us.”

SOPHIE emerged on the European club circuit in the early 2010s, breaking out with a string of inventive, house-adjacent singles including 2013’s “Nothing More to Say.” Next single “Bipp,” a stark and disembodied anthem, signalled a new direction and brought international acclaim, both from dance DJs and in the year-end lists of music publications across genres. Subsequent tracks “Lemonade” and “Hard” mixed distinctive vocals and abrasive sound design into SOPHIE’s music, forging a tactile twist on pop. SOPHIE’s 2014 collaboration with PC Music founder A.G. Cook and Quinn Thomas, QT’s “Hey QT,” embodied the new form, a hyperactive sugar rush of unashamedly euphoric hooks.

The 2015 compilation PRODUCT collected these singles and added new music such as “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” which pointed to yet another phase of innovation. In 2018, SOPHIE—who prefers not to use gendered or nonbinary pronouns, according to one representative—released a debut album proper, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, prominently featuring SOPHIE’s own vocals. Until then, the producer’s identity was kept mysterious, but in press around the debut, SOPHIE stepped into the frame of videos and photo shoots, coming out as trans. The record was widely hailed as a landmark in forward pop music, earning a Best Dance/Electronic Album nomination at the 2019 Grammys and recognition in album of the decade lists the following year.

SOPHIE’s outsize influence on pop and electronic music stems from not only this solo discography but also an expansive collaborative catalog. This repertoire includes productions for Vince Staples, Madonna, and, prominently, Charli XCX, who said in 2019: “There are very few artists who make me feel something up my core and make me wanna cry. Justice and Uffie made me feel something when I was 14, and I didn’t really have that feeling again until I met Sophie. I felt this rush of: Fuck, this is the coolest shit I have ever heard.” Advertisement

In a statement, SOPHIE’s representative wrote: “At this time respect and privacy for the family is our priority. We would also ask for respect for SOPHIE’s fanbase, and to treat the private nature of this news with sensitivity.”

This article was originally published on Saturday, January 30 at 6:52 a.m. Eastern. It was last updated the same day at 7:40 a.m. Eastern.

https://pitchfork.com/news/sophie-has-died/

Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ? (Notes From Underground) 26 January 2021


 

Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ?

January 26, 2021 at 4:46 pm (Uncategorized

Years ago when I was a member of the Toronto branch of the Bolshevik Tendency, the assignment I hated most was having to go to [Spartacist League]  Trotskyist League forums. We were banned from meetings of the Internationalist Socialists and whatever the Mandelites were calling themselves, but we were allowed into TL meetings. Unfortunately…

We were required to sit at the back of the meeting in designated seats. After the presentation, we got to make one intervention (3 minutes although the time limit only seemed to apply to us), following that numerous TL members and supporters would shriek abuse at us (we were supposedly racists, anglo-chauvinists, cop-lovers, dubious elements, quitters, etc. etc.). Then at the end, we were herded out to prevent us from talking to anyone who was actually crazy enough to have come to this meeting in the first place (I suppose that included us too).

And they were always on a Saturday night.

Sustained by coffee and cigarettes, very energetic were the TL…and the rest of their international tendency. Among the first to arrive at an event, the last to leave. Always the most annoying: New issues of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist Canada, Spartacist, Women and Revolution, Black History and the Class Struggle, a pamphlet or two, and always always on sub-drives or so it seemed.

Workers Vanguard came out every two weeks for as long as I remember, until last year. In April, the ICL posted on its web site that the frequency of WV would be …irregular. That has turned out to be a bit of an understatement; it has been over seven months since an issue of WV has appeared.

On October 30, a new SL item appeared on the site: A perfunctory “Don’t Vote for the Democrats” leaflet which could easily have been written by a new member of the Spartacus Youth League (does that still exist?), but nothing since then to indicate to regular readers that Biden won the election and has since been sworn in as president, or that a motley crew of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6th. Odder too is that the SL does not appear to have written a single word on the uprising that took place after the police murder of George Floyd (or even the murder itself – if I’m wrong, please let me know)

A quick scan through the International Communist League web site and the pattern is the same. Some sections have not had a new item on their pages for almost a year. The Canadian section’s most recent post dates to October, but is a reprint of a leaflet from August about a ten-day strike. It too is of a generic variety of Spart cliches. You can’t help but think, something is going on.

In 2017, the ICL-FI published a long document, “The Chauvinist Hydra” which seemed to consist mostly of a lot of trashing of various sections on the national question. Spartacist leader James Robertson died in 2019. His passing was marking by a brief notice and then months went by before a more substantial obit was published. It’s temping to believe that there’s a power struggle taking place in the group which has paralysed the organization, but that it would have prevented them from publishing across their international tendency to this degree is difficult to accept. The Internationalist Group, led by former WV editor Jan Norden speculates the group is on the verge of collapse, but they wrote that in MAy of 2020. I suppose it’ll all come out in the wash.

But seriously, whatever happened to the Spartacist League?

https://fischerzed.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/whatever-happened-to-the-spartacist-league/