The Naked Civil Servant

The Naked Civil Servant is a 1975 made-for-television biographical comedy-drama film directed by Jack Gold and produced by Verity Lambert. It was adapted for film by Philip Mackie, based on Quentin Crisp's 1968 book of the same name. The movie stars John Hurt, Patricia Hodge and John Rhys-Davies. It was originally broadcast on 17 December 1975 on the British channel ITV. In 1976, it was shown on the US channel WOR and later PBS when Thames Television and WOR-TV exchanged programming for one week. For his performance, Hurt won the BAFTA for Best Actor in 1976 and the production also won the 1976 Prix Italia. The title of the book and the film (naked civil servant), is derived from his time working as a nude model in a government-funded art school.

Chomsky Explaining Real Anarchism

"Power prefers darkness. If it is exposed to light, it erodes."

Here's a transcription of a key part of his replies to the questions around how an anarchist society work, and how to communicate anarchist ideas. There are several comment threads below that present interpretations that are quite different than what he actually said here. He doesn't describe a final, utopian, end-state, and admits that he doesn't know what that would look like, but recognizes the on-going human tendency to question, challenge and dismantle illegitimate 'structures of authority, domination and hierarchy.' Some may disagree that this describes their own understanding of anarchism, but it seems to represent Chomsky's sense of the term.

"It's not a specific set of doctrines but a tendency in human thought and action which tries to detect and discover structures of authority, domination and hierarchy and challenge them - ask them to demonstrate their legitimacy, recognizing that they are not self-justifying. They have a burden of justification. That’s true all across the spectrum of human life, from patriarchal families to imperial systems, and everything in between. Wherever you find a structure of domination, hierarchy, someone giving orders, someone taking them, you have to ask if that’s legitimate. You cannot assume and you shouldn’t assume that it’s legitimate because it’s been like that. That’s not a justification. You have to ask, “is it legitimate?“ When you do, you generally find that it can’t be justified. There are cases where you could make up a justification, but try it. It’s pretty hard. Most of the time the justification is around the way power is distributed, but that’s not a justification. Anarchism is the effort to discover such systems, and when they can’t justify themselves, to dismantle them and to move towards greater freedom, justice, opportunity, individual creativity, cooperative activity, and so on. It’s just a tendency in history and I don’t think it’s hard to communicate to people. I think they take it for granted if it’s brought to their attention. You see it.

Take for example: one of the major achievements of the last 50 years in many societies - in the United States and in many others - has been the expansion of women’s rights. It’s changed enormously. How did it happen? Well, as soon as the structures of oppression were identified, they kind of disappeared. Not instantly of course. There’s still plenty of resistance. It’s a general truth that power prefers darkness. If it’s exposed to the light it erodes. This happens all through history.

Where does this lead? What will the final goal be? I don’t think anyone is smart enough to say that, to see what that will be. This is a constant, ongoing effort to expand the realm of justice, freedom, independence, breakdown of authority and so on, and I don’t see that it should have any limits."

"Hopefully, it would be like your describe it, but I still have a little doubt. And...um...isn't it too demanding, you know? It's easier to be led by authority. I'm, myself, sort of an activist, and sometimes I regret it...uh...all the time. It's terribly time-consuming, uh, it costs me a lot of energy, the outcome is very uncertain, it's not very rewarding, not all the time. It's easier to be led by authorities. So, isn't the idea...too much demanding?"

"That's basically an argument for slavery." - Chomsky

King Street Newtown 1995 - full documentary

 

A 25 minute documentary focusing on the characters that inhabit King Street in Newtown, Sydney Australia - aired on ABC TV 9.2.95. Newtown at the time was a 19th century workers suburb that had been taken over by diverse counter culture, artistic, punk and outsiders in the 1980s. By 1995 it was in full bloom and was about to enter a 5 year decline of gentrification and real estate market ethics. I highly recommend this film to capture something of the energy and spirit that was the inner city of Sydney in the 1980s and 90s. The film was raised in a Senate committee hearing regarding its rating, as it features some queer content.

Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste - Epitomes of 1920s Wiemar Republic Excess

In this video, there are two different dance sequences performed by extreme Wiemar Republic cabaret dancer, actress, and extreme performance artist Anita Berber. Each sequence is from a silent German film - the first from ‘Unheimliche Geschichten' ['Eerie Tales'] (1919) and the second from 'Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler' (1922).

While the second dance sequence is known, I believe that the first has never been noticed before. And it is this first performance that takes us a little nearer to the extraordinarily extreme Berber of the decadent 'Die Weisse Maus' [‘White Mouse’] cabaret in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.

Sebastian Droste and Anita Berber in 1922

Finally, there is a single dance sequence by Sebastian Droste, Anita Berber’s husband and collaborator, extreme dancer, gay poet and actor. It is a performance that seems to capture something of one of the kinds of perfume exuded in Berlin cabaret clubs during the Wiemar Republic. The fragment comes Hans Werckmeister’s 1920 'Algol - Tragödie der Macht' ('Tragedy of Power'), a film thought lost until a print was discovered in 2010.

Anita Berber, more than almost anyone, epitomises for me the excesses and decadences of the German Roaring Twenties, with its fascination with addiction, morbidity, narcissism, ecstasy and horror.

Addicted to cocaine and morphine, the bisexual Berber's drug of choice was equal parts of chloroform and ether. She would dip a white rose into the potentially lethal concoction and slowly chew off each of the petals. She later segued into a cocktail of cocaine, opium and cognac.

As a stage performer, Berber gave extreme erotic fantasy pieces with dancer, poet and husband Sebastian Droste - 'Suicide', 'Morphium' and 'Mad House'.

She famously appeared, often naked, at 'Die Weisse Maus' ('The White Mouse') cabaret in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. This was a small exclusive cabaret club of ninety-nine seats, where the audience wore masks for anonymity.

Of her performances there, it has been written:

"After midnight, the guests were ready for the apocalyptic moment when the blouse-less girls pranced up the stage ramp. Anita's girls were powdered in deadly pallid shades and appeared like figures of death incarnate. 

But Anita performed with bitter sincerity. Each intrusion annoyed her. She responded to the audience's heckling with show-stopping obscenities and indecent provocations. 

Berber had been known to spit brandy on them or stand naked on their tables, dousing herself in wine whilst simultaneously urinating. It was not long before the entire cabaret one night sank into a groundswell of shouting, screams and laughter. Anita jumped off the stage in fuming rage, grabbed the nearest champagne bottle and smashed it over a businessman's head.' 

It was Anita's last evening, she was sacked without notice.'

Berber's relationships were as unconventional and complicated as her stage endeavours.

Berber in the 1920s

She married wealthy young screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusiu in 1919, but soon after began a series of lesbian affairs, including one with the young Marlene Dietrich. At the same time, she explored the world of free-lancing S and M sex. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1921.

In the following year, Berber met dancer and poet Sebastian Droste and understood that together they could create something theatrically bold, new and shocking, such as their production 'The Dances of Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy'. They married in 1923. However, the pair drifted into greater cocaine use and the relationship failed.

Then in 1924, she married American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman, whom she'd met at Berlin's Blüthne-Saal. They began performing through Europe and the Middle East with their new production 'Dances of Sex and Ecstasy'. But in Zagreb, Berber publicly insulted the King of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned for six weeks. Returning to Berlin, the pair returned to the cabaret circuit.

Almost appropriately Anita Berber died in 1928, surrounded by statues of the Virgin Mary and empty morphine syringes. Or so the myth went -- in fact she collapsed while performing at a Beirut nightclub. She was diagnosed with a state of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and died four months later in Bethanien Hospital in Kreuzberg.

There is not a large visual record of this extraordinary Wiemar Republic icon.

While in Düsseldorf in 1925, Otto Dix painted her portrait 'The Dancer Anita Berber', unofficially known as 'The Scarlet Whore of Babylon'.

Berber also appeared in nine silent films in the teens and twenties.

She played Else (with Conrad Veidt) in the 1919 Richard Oswald film 'Anders als die Anderen' ('Different From The Others'), a film based on the work of famed pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirshfeldt.

She also appeared briefly and uncredited as the tuxedo-ed dancer in Fritz Lang's 1922 four hour silent epic 'Doktor Mabuse Der Spieler' ('The Gambler').

In 1925 in New York City, dancer Sebastian Droste met Francis Bruguière (1879 – 1945) a photographer from San Francisco, and together they composed over 60 photographs for a project they titled The Way, part of the promotional material for a proposed Expressionist film starring Droste.

The film never got made, but Droste sent a handful of the stills to Die Dame magazine with an article titled Photography As Art: Remarks on Recent Photographs by Francis Bruguière. Bruguière made his living photographing for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar and as the official photographer of the New York Theatre Guild.

Droste is rarely remembered anymore except in the context of his brief collaboration with Weimar, Berlin’s most notorious cabaret performer.

He was born Willy Knobloch in Hamburg in 1898. His father owned a silk-stocking factory in Chemnitz, and Droste lived a privileged life growing-up. As a teenager he attended an art school where he excelled in languages and dance. He was drafted into the army in 1915 and fought on the Western Front. When he turned 27-years-old in 1919, he moved to Berlin and changed his name to Sebastian Droste.

He was hired by Celly De Rheidt as a lead dancer in her cabaret show Dance Of Beauty. He became a moderately successful ”naked” dancer, choreographer and poet. His first poem appeared in Der Sturm magazine in 1919, which published 15 more of his pieces in the following years.

He took the name of the near-naked, arrow-pierced saint whose martyrdom he burlesqued in his stage act. In costume or as a civilian, he embodied a dark, calculated glamour inspired the nightmarish contemporary expressionistic German cinema. His drug taking was the greatest factor in the success or failure of a any given night’s performance of his stage act.

In the summer of 1922, he met the decadent, androgynous Anita Berber; both were fame hungry cocaine addicts. Berber’s hair was fashionably cut into a short bob and was frequently bright red, seen in the 1925 portrait of her by the German painter Otto Dix. Droste was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls that looked like sideburns. In their act neither of them wore much more than G-strings, or even that, and Berber occasionally wore a corsage, placed below her boobs. She wore heavy make-up with jet black lipstick painted across the heart-shaped part of her skinny lips, and charcoaled eyes.

Their dances, with titles such as Cocaine and Morphium, broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was their public appearances that really challenged the social taboos of the era. Their bisexuality was much gossiped about. In addition to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of the pair’s favorite forms of inebriation was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl, stirred with a white rose, the petals of which they would then eat.

Droste was the perfect partner for Berber. He became her manager and together they produced The Dances Of Depravity, Horror And Ecstasy which was staged in a theatre in Vienna and then toured in 1922 and 1923.

Droste and Berber were combustible in combination. He was as much a hustler as an artist, finding a way to repackage Expressionism and other avant-garde trends in a way that could be absorbed by the club-hopping bourgeoisie. The 1920s were a decade whose excesses were reflected, exaggerated, and grotesqued in the clubs and cabarets of Germany.

Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, Berber was also an alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery, she had been diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928, although rumour had it that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes. Berber was buried in a pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln.

Sebastian Droste and Anita Berber, The Way, 1926

Britain's Outlaws: Highwaymen, Pirates and Rogues

This documentary begins with the arrival of a new breed of gentleman criminal out of the ashes of the English Civil War - the highwayman. Heavily romanticised in literature, these glamorous gangsters became a social menace on the roads and a political thorn in the side of the creaking British state - threatening to steal our wallets and our hearts. But underneath the dashing image of stylish robbers on horseback lay a far darker reality.

Then, we take to the high seas in search of the swashbuckling pirates of the golden age of piracy during the early 18th century. Following in the wake of the infamous Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Calico Jack and others, we see the devastating impact these pirates had during an era of colonial expansion and how, by plundering the vast network of seaborne trade, they became the most wanted outlaws in the world.

Finally, we get a look at urban crime, fraud and corruption in the 18th century, uncovering a fascinating rogues gallery of charmers, fraudsters and villains. Charmers like thief and serial escapee Jack Sheppard, so notorious that almost a quarter of a million people turned up to witness his hanging.

Aquarius Rising : Hippie life in California, 1967

This is six parts of a 7 part film made in 1967 documenting the Height Ashbury scene and cultures.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 1: Hippie life in California, 1967 by filmmaker Pierre Sogol. Chapter 1 starts with a lot of statements, then documents a Be-In in Orange County, Various festivals in LA, the Sunset Riots (in 1966?) and the resulting hearings (?). This is Sogol's 1992 edit of the original footage. Note: Pierre Sogol may not be the filmmaker's real name. We are trying to find the filmmaker.  Pierre Sogol 

Filmmaker: Pierre Sogol 

Video Producer: Al Lundell 

Source: Rob Menzies 

Curator: Bruce Damer

A soundtrack playlist for the six parts can be found here

Aquarius Rising Chapter 3: Hippie life in California, 1967 by filmmaker Pierre Sogol. In this episode, the gang goes to the "New Mecca" (San Francisco). Scenes from the Haight, hippie wedding, Summer of Love, Natasha's tale, Oregon LSD trip, Nancy (who reappears frequently in other chapters), July 4th in Golden Gate Park. This is Sogol's 1992 edit of the original 1967 footage.

 
Aquarius Rising Chapter 4: Hippie life in California, 1967 by filmmaker Pierre Sogol. Here we hear from Nancy, and witness open drug dealing on the streets of Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. This is Sogol's 1992 edit of the original 1967 footage.

 
Aquarius Rising Chapter 5: Hippie life in California, 1967 by filmmaker Pierre Sogol. In this episode we have more scenes from OM Commune (Ben Lomond). Next we go to Love Street to Betty's house for a group discussion. Then jump to a public hearing about hippies, end with Stephen on guitar.
 
Aquarius Rising Chapter 7: Hippie life in California, 1967 by filmmaker Pierre Sogol. This last chapter or "appendix" shows various scenes and rolls credits and opinions.

Ira Cohen compilation 'Optredens Ruigoord' 1999

Ira Cohen, the poet, publisher and mystic, at the squatted village of Ruigoord outside Amsterdam in 1999.

Ira Cohen (February 3, 1935 – April 25, 2011) was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker. Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Cohen died of kidney failure on April 25, 2011. Ira Cohen's literary archive now resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

In early 1964, Cohen visited Amsterdam (during the same trip up from Tangier when he arranged for the printing of Gnaoua in Antwerp, Belgium). He befriended writer Simon Vinkenoog, who would later translate many of Cohen's writings into Dutch. Ira was also in Amsterdam in 1974, having visited Paris and the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky with an intention to involve his partner, Petra Vogt, in Jodorowsky's forthcoming film Dune. Unfavorably received, he traveled to Amsterdam, again in the company of Simon Vinkenoog, Louise Landes Levi - poet, musician & translator with whom he would later collaborate on many projects – and Gerard Bellaart (Cold Turkey Press - Rotterdam, publisher of Burroughs, Bailes, Pound et al.), who became Ira's first publisher in the West & a lifelong friend, as was Levi. However his most continuous Amsterdam period began in the spring of 1978. It was then that he met Caroline Gosselin, a French girl who was making and selling life masks at the Melkweg (Milky Way) multimedia center. She and Cohen expanded this into Bandaged Poets - a series of papier-mâché masks of dozens of well-known poets that he subsequently photographed. He also reconnected with Eddie Woods, whom he had first met in Kathmandu in 1976. Woods, who co-founded Ins & Outs Press with Jane Harvey, was preparing to launch Ins & Outs magazine. Cohen's work appeared in every issue and he regularly served as a contributing editor. He performed at the first of Benn Posset's long-running One World Poetry festivals, P78. Cohen (and Gosselin) lived in Amsterdam for the next three years; and even after leaving he made several return visits to the city, often staying for long spells. Ins & Outs Press, which had already published postcards of the Bandaged Poets series, produced three limited-edition Kirke Wilson silkscreen prints of the photographs, including those of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. His film Kings with Straw Mats was also edited, in collaboration with Ira Landgarten, at Ins & Outs. In September 1993 Cohen returned to Amsterdam from New York to participate in a Benn Posset-organized tribute to Burroughs, along with Woods, the American writer William Levy, the German translator & publisher Udo Breger, and others.

Cohen further developed a close association with the artists colony village of Ruigoord (eight miles west of Amsterdam) and is one their very few non-Dutch trophy holders

The Redfern Story (2014)

The National Black Theatre was a theatre company run by a small group of Aboriginal people based in the Sydney suburb of Redfern and which operated from 1972 to 1977. The original concept for the theatre grew out of political struggles, especially the land rights demonstrations, which at the time were being organised by the Black Moratorium Committee. The centre held workshops in modern dancing, tribal dancing, writing for theatre, karate and photography, and provided a venue for new Aboriginal drama. It also ran drama classes under Brian Syron, whose students included Jack Davis, Freddie Reynolds, Maureen Watson, Lillian Crombie, and Hyllus Maris. The company ran the Black Theatre Arts and Culture Centre from 1974 to 1977.

Paul Bowles Biography

“If I am here now, it is only because I was still here when I realized to what an extent the world had worsened, and that I no longer wanted to travel. In defense of the city I can say that so far it has been touched by fewer of the negative aspects of contemporary civilization than most cities of its size. More important than that, I relish the idea that in the night, all around me in my sleep, sorcery is burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Spells are being cast, poison is running its course; souls are being dispossessed of parasitic pseudo consciousness that lurk in the unguarded recesses of the mind.

There is drumming out there most nights. It never awakens me; I hear the drums and incorporate them into my dream, like the nightly cries of the muezzins. Even if in the dream I am in New York, the first Allah akbar! effaces the backdrop and carries whatever comes next to North Africa, and the dream goes on.” . Paul Bowles

Full Moon Party - documentary about travellers to Thailand & Ko Phangan parties

"Bangkok 1996 alone at two in the morning bought back that same feeling I had on the first day at school. My mother released my hand and she walked back toward the gate from where we had arrived together at the huge strange building. The night seems to be oily about me with humidity, the airport is a reasonably calm environment with a yellow electric hum reflecting off huge windows all around you. There are uniforms framing many faces, some questions, a stamp, and nobody bothers to check baggage on the way in. Then the final set of doors open and you are standing on the other side, in the black spicy hot box of Asian night and a thousand taxi drivers are yelling at you, someone wants to carry your bag, and you know there is a bus station around here somewhere. But then you learn that the busses stop at midnight, and with safety being in numbers and with my American friend emerging from the crowd, we begin negotiations with a cheerful beetle stained mouth. The taxi takes us to Thanon Koa San, or Khao San Road, the tourist ghetto of Bangkok where all budget backpackers and twisted travellers gather. Fresh off the plane and with suburban stories of kidnap, theft and corruption running in my mind, I insisted upon taking my rucksack inside the taxi, making the journey a cramped one. My face pressed against the dirty glass I watched the scenes of black smoking buses, families on scooters, pedestrians in single file and single light bulb-lit eating places flash by. Pitch black canals crossed by crazy drivers and the gilded flat portraits of the asthmatic looking king everywhere, flashing bursts of radio fly by as our driver takes every opportunity to keep moving in the solid traffic, occasionally mounting the median strip or sidewalk." - from an almost finished novel about the global rave freak scene in the 90s. Another short section published here.