The movie focuses on Stan and Olllie's personal appearances in Britain and will be released in the UK and Ireland by Entertainment One on January 11th 2019.
John C Reilly plays Ollie, trapped in a fat suit, but nevertheless conveying the confusion and sadness of a man clinging on to his last chance of fame, and the comedy partner who gives him the gags he needs to win over each night's audience. It's a fine, even heartrending performance, but this is Coogan's movie. The poignancy of Stan Laurel, a man with his best days behind him, but driven at all hours by a obsession with gag-making, is the culmination of many of his best characters, from the fame-hungry Alan Partridge to his own namesake in The Trip. His mania for for jokes will get him and his partner through these dark days, but what happens when the double-act eventually has to split. On tour, Ollie's health fails, inevitably, prompting another crisis, just when it looks like they were on the up-and-up.
For me, a little Laurel and Hardy goes a long way, and I approached this film with trepidation. But it's a thing of subdued beauty, a mediation on growing old and the power of friendship. And this is a real friendship, almost a lifeline, even if it was born of a professional partnership, an inspired wheeze courtesyof producer Hal Roach.
Baird trades endearingly on the nostalgia generated by his famous duo – shooting them in a simple two-shot, in silhouette or zeroing in on those two famous titfers, to remind us of the inspiration for his tale.
What did I like most about this film? Coogan's jug-eared impersonation for sure. The secondary double-act of Shirley Henderson and Nina Ariana as the duo's wives is a close call too. But most of all perhaps the magic of that all-pervasive melancholy tone. It means when the two boys skid into a familiar routine or gag in the middle of the straight business of everyday life it takes you unawares, and reminds you of the importance of laughter, or the value of friendship, and just how funny these two mismatched clowns could be.
2018 MIDDLEBURG FILM FESTIVAL: The phrase "movie magic" has been tossed around for decades but I can't think of a more perfect recent example than what is witnessed in Jon S. Baird's deeply felt and incredibly moving "Stan & Ollie." Boasting two gargantuan performances from Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly, the film is a refreshing look at aging Hollywood, while examing the friendship of two figures that meant so much to each other. Immaculately constructed, "Stan & Ollie" assembles a multitude of laughs, while not holding back to bring out a few tears.
"Stan & Ollie," tells the story of Stan Laurel (Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (Reilly), the world's most famous comedy duo. When the two attempt to reignite their film careers, they embark on what becomes their swan song, all along a grueling theatre tour of post-war Britain.
The film lives and ignites with the two ingenious achievements by Coogan and Reilly. Coogan's search and discovery into Stan's deep-rooted insecurity is enlightening. He invites the viewer on the journey, showing his most fragile elements, before walloping the audience with his charismatic wit.
Reilly falls into Ollie with impeccable precision and genuine sensitivity. More than just a makeup trick, Reilly delivers a searing, realistic depiction of an emotional and delicately damaged soul. Shattering each scene he takes part in, not since "Chicago" has he proved his worth in the industry and gave a gift that will be felt for years to come.
One of the more surprising and enjoyable elements are the one-two punch turns from Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as Laurel and Hardy's wives Lucielle and Ida. Henderson's mousy words are believed in her pleading for her husband's well-being, while Arianda's comedic timing is just as brilliant as her dramatic calls. All these components measure up to one of the year's best ensembles along with Danny Huston's biting producer and Rufus Jones' hilarious and skeevy tour manager.
Laurie Rose's camera work is perfectly executed, as the film's brown hue adds to its classic feel. A near ten-minute opening, almost entirely one shot, is a rapture. John Paul Kelly's production design along with Guy Speranza's costume work are two ingredients that make this sweet film all the sweeter. Rolfe Kent's music is his best composition since "Sideways," as he walks the viewer to near tears, focusing on the moments with strings and piano tunes that are brilliantly accomplished.
Baird's direction may feel standard, but he doesn't paint a picture other than one of friendship, understanding, and love. The respect and adoration for Laurel and Hardy are apparent in every frame, showcasing his more inventive sensibilities. Jeff Pope's script packs a jolt, showing the struggles of old Hollywood splendidly. Letting Laurel and Hardy perform their renditions and bits on more than one occasion drives home what their legacy has meant to cinema.
"Stan & Ollie" is the kind of film you want to love, and are acutely attuned to its spirit. Its lavish sets and harmonious performances are just the surface of what it delivers. It cuts to the core of the men, following their uncertainty in a world that's forgotten them without sacrificing their humanity. Intelligent and beautiful, the chamber in which Baird and team pack the story is a beautiful slice of cinematic history that is wholly satisfying.
"Genial" is the word for Stan & Ollie. Even though they remained household names for years after their heyday due to TV reruns of their many comedy hits, Laurel & Hardy are no doubt little-known to millennials. But the lovely performances by Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly should lure a decent number of fans to this warm account of the team's final live performance tours through the British Isles in the early 1950s, thereby likely sparking a degree of renewed interest in one of Hollywood's most successful comedy teams.
"We're getting older, but we're not done yet," Hardy, the fat one, proclaims early on, although, due to his weight and related health issues, he's closer to the end than he'd like to think. A popular screen team since 1926, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy specialized in slow-burn comedy routines that typically saw the derby-hatted duo sink ever-deeper into exasperating predicaments, with the slight, bewildered, borderline infantile Laurel usually leading the duo into trouble from which the smugly superior Hardy haughtily thinks he can extricate them. Built with a deliberation that at its best was both agonizing and hilarious, the humor almost invariably stemmed from the gradual compounding of multiple dilemmas one on top of another.
Working for producer Hal Roach from 1926-1940, the pair made dozens of shorts and 27 features. But when they left Roach, their status declined, as plainly delineated at the beginning of Jeff Pope's creditable but overly expository script. By the early 1950s, having been supplanted as the big screen's kings of comedy by Abbott and Costello, the duo was nearly broke. So they headed for the U.K. on a tour of live music-hall performances with the hope of launching a new movie with promoter/producer Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), whose abiding interest at the time was promoting the home-bred comedian Norman Wisdom.
Even for those well acquainted with the looks and behavior of the two performers, it takes no time at all to accept Coogan and Reilly as Laurel and Hardy. Born, like Laurel, in Lancashire, England, Coogan is more conventionally good-looking than the man he's playing, but he slips neatly into the role of the duo's brains and writer. He seems an eminently decent and normal man whose expertise is playing a slow-witted simpleton.
For his part, Reilly is having a career-high year, with his outstanding dominant performance in Jacques Audiard's Western The Sisters Brothers and now this wonderful turn, in which he all but disappears into the Hardy persona. Outfitted with some extra padding and prosthetically enhanced with an ample double chin, Reilly excels at conveying the extreme politesse, exaggerated gestures, self-satisfied condescension and inevitable exasperation that were always part of the Hardy shtick. Much of the time, you feel like you're beholding the real duo, so thoroughly conceived are the actors' physicality and performances.
Arriving in England in 1953, the comics find themselves booked into less-than-deluxe accommodations at Newcastle, and their initial shows are sparsely attended. Delfont (born Boris Winogradsky in Russia, brother of future tycoon Lew Grade and later to become Lord Delfont) proves slippery and evasive when it comes to money and support for the script Laurel is writing, Robin Hood.
But eventually the houses improve, and so does the film with the arrival of the comics' wives as the boys prepare for their long-awaited two-week engagement in London. Laurel's wife is a force of Russian nature named Ida (Nina Arianda), a dyed-blonde whirlwind with less than zero tolerance for fools who seldom has a good word to say about anyone but always tends to the team's welfare. With her brash assertiveness and bold effrontery, Arianda steals everything in sight.
But equally effective in her own way is Shirley Henderson as Hardy's wife Lucille, a bird-like creature with a squeaky little voice whose tiny stature next to her hulking husband creates a constantly amusing disparity. Lucille and Ida soon emerge as a contrasting comedy team of their own, creating a neat parallel act to that of the men.
Even as the team's fortune improves — their foursome is put up at the deluxe Savoy Hotel and the London fortnight is SRO — the feeling gathers that this is likely the boys' last hurrah. The imagined film is not to be, and it's not surprising when Hardy's health takes a dramatic turn for the worse. Like all old troopers, they'd like to go out with their boots on, but sanity prevails, not that, in the end, it will prolong Hardy's life for long.
By the time of the touching conclusion, one has come to like and care about these sweet old guys a good deal. Everything the film has to offer is obvious and on the surface, its pleasures simple and sincere under the attentive guidance of director Jon S. Baird; these good men have their differences but well understand that whatever they might have accomplished individually would never have remotely equaled what they were able to do together. This is clear from the fact that, after Hardy's death, Laurel never acted again despite many offers, even if he did continue to write.
Coogan and Reilly not only excel at creating convincing impressions of one of the most famous comic teams of the last century, but they do an uncanny job of recreating a handful of their famous routines, which today mostly play as mild yet expertly timed delights.
There was little that was bold or adventurous about Laurel and Hardy's comedy, which is doubtless why their films have not been rediscovered by younger generations over the past half-century; unusually for top comics, their work was benign, not subversive. But even if it only occasionally provokes big laughs, this sweet, small film makes you smile most of the way through, which may be a more uncommon feat.
The release date for the DVD of this movie has been announced as June 3rd in the United Kingdom (it's a BBC production). Amazon UK is taking pre-orders at £9.99.


text:
Archive for the 'Chiapas' Category
Struggles Across Borders: Resisting Climate Breakdown and State Violence
Please find below a video recording of my presentation at Highline College in Seattle, Washington, on April 23, 2019, about global warming and resistance.
Posted in 'development', Abya Yala, anarchism, biology, Chiapas, climate catastrophe, COP, displacement, ecology, Europe, fascism/antifa, Frankfurt School, health, imperialism, Imperiled Life, literature, requiems, Revolution, Syria, U.S., war | Leave a Comment »
"Lessons from exits foreclosed: An exilic interpretation of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, 1910-1924" – published in Capital and Class
I am pleased to announce the publication in Capital and Class of a collaborative work co-written by Andrew Smolski, Alexander Reid Ross, and myself, entitled "Lessons from exits foreclosed: An exilic interpretation of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, 1910–1924." Please find the abstract here:
We apply a typology of exile to factions involved in the Mexican and Russian Revolutions of the early 20th century. Our typology is based on Grubačić and O'Hearn's theory of exile, which seeks to explain how alternative social institutions based on mutual aid, substantive reproduction, and egalitarian, direct democracy come into being and sustain themselves. We argue for exile as a determinant of revolutionary outcomes and the state (de)formation process and that we must understand exile-in-rupture as a moment when structures are at maximal flux due to the existence of exilic factions. By doing so, we offer a novel approach to understanding revolutions and state (de)formation based upon the alliances between exilic and incorporative factions. Through descriptions of loyalty bargains made, maintained, and broken during the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, we demonstrate how factions representing autonomy and exit are excluded from the resulting political-economic order post-Revolution, while their energy and power are leveraged during revolution itself. Based on this, we argue that exile is a key component of radical strategy, but that it is often precariously based on loyalty bargains that underpin it. Due to exile's precarity, revolutions are foreclosed by reincorporation into the capitalist world-system as states are (re)formed by incorporative factions. Therefore, exile is both a necessary and contingent component of revolution and state (de)formation.
Tags:"Land and Freedom", Andrej Grubačić, autonomy, "Tierra y Libertad", Batallones rojos, Bolsheviks, Capital and Class, COM, Constitutionalists, Dennis O'Hearn, exile, exit, Francisco I. Madero, Greens, incorporation, indigenous struggle, Kronstadt, Kronstadt Commune, Lenin, Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, Maderismo, México, Mexican Revolution, Nestor Makhno, peasantry, PLM, Práxedis Guerrero, proletariat, Red Batalliones, Ricardo Flores Magón, Russia, Russian Revolution, Samara, State, Third Revolution, Trotsky, Ukraine, Veracruz, Victoriano Huerta, Voline, world-system, Zapata
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Eros and Revolution Now Available in Paperback
Exciting news! Eros & Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse is now available in paperback from Haymarket Books, having first been published in hard cover by Brill in 2016. The text is currently 1/3 off the list price. Eros and Revolution is the eighty-sixth entry in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (SCSS) series, a joint collaboration between Brill and Haymarket. Please note that the cover design appears as seen above, not as seen on the website.
For any inquiries, please leave comments here or write @intlibecosoc on Twitter.
Tags:anarchism, antifa, Brill, critical theory, Eros, Eros and Revolution, Haymarket, Herbert Marcuse, Marcuse, Marxism, Orpheus, Orphic Marxism, revolution, SCSS, socialism, Studies in Critical Social Sciences
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Eros and Revolution Now Available
Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse is now available in hardcover from Brill Academic Publishers. Being the eighty-sixth title in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (SCSS), this 400-page political and intellectual biography examines Marcuse's life, focusing on the German critical theorist's contributions to the realms of philosophy, radical politics, and social revolution, while also reflecting on critiques made of Marcuse and the continued relevance of critical theory, libertarian communism, Marxist-Hegelianism, utopian socialism, radical ecology, and anti-authoritarianism today.
The volume will be republished in paperback in a year's time with Haymarket Books.
For review copies, please contact Anne Tilanus: reviews@brill.com
For author inquiries, contact jscastro@riseup.net
Tags:anti-authoritarianism, antifa, Brill, critical theory, ecology, Frankfurt School, Haymarket, Hegelianism, Herbert Marcuse, libertarian communism, Marxism, radical ecology, revolution, Romanticism, SCSS, utopian socialism
Posted in 'development', Abya Yala, anarchism, Chiapas, China, climate catastrophe, Cuba, displacement, Europe, Frankfurt School, health, imperialism, Imperiled Life, Kurdistan, literature, México, nuclear, Palestine, reformism, requiems, Revolution, Russia/Former Soviet Union, Shoah, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Syria, U.S., war | Leave a Comment »
Feria Libertaria del Libro y la Publicación (FLLP 2016) Monterrey
El fin de semana que viene, estaré presente en Monterrey para dar dos ponencias en la Feria Libertaria del Libro y la Publicación (FLLP 2016). El primer será presentar un ensayo conjunto que he escrito con Andrew Smolski y Alexander Reid Ross, "Tierra y Libertad: El Anarquismo y las Alianzas Campesinas-Proletarias en México y Rusia, 1848-1924" (el sábado 5 marzo a las 16:30). Por otra parte, presentaré la traducción de mi libro Clima, Ecocidio y Revolución, publicada por Revuelta Epistémica hace un año, el domingo a las 16h. Muchas gracias a l@s organizadores de la feria por darme esta oportunidad. Además estoy contento que voy a estar compartiendo espacio de nuevo con mi compa scott crow.
Next weekend, I will be in Monterrey to give two talks at the Anarchist Bookfair (FLLP 2016). The first will be to present an essay I have written jointly with Andrew Smolski and Alexander Reid Ross, "Land and Liberty: Anarchism and Campesino-Proletarian Alliances in Mexico and Russia, 1848-1924" (Saturday 5 March at 4:30pm). Next, I will present the translation of my book, Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe, published by Revuelta Epistémica a year ago, this on Sunday at 4pm. Many thanks to the organizers of the bookfair to allow me this opportunity. I am pleased as well that I will be sharing space again with my comrade scott crow.
Tags:Alexander Reid Ross, anarchism, Andrew Smolski, FLLP 2016, Imperiled Life, Land and Liberty, México, Mexican Revolution, Monterrey, Russia, Russian Revolution, scott crow
Posted in 'development', Abya Yala, anarchism, Chiapas, China, climate catastrophe, COP, displacement, en Castellano, Europe, Frankfurt School, health, imperialism, Imperiled Life, literature, México, nuclear, requiems, Revolution, Russia/Former Soviet Union, U.S., war | Leave a Comment »
Announcing Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse
Thomas Cole, "The Course of Empire: Desolation" (1836)
The online entry for my forthcoming volume Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse (Brill Publishers/Haymarket Books) has now been created. The eightieth-sixth title in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (SCSS) series, the work will be available this summer through Brill in hardcover, and approximately a year later in paperback edition with Haymarket. The summary follows:
In Eros and Revolution, Javier Sethness Castro presents a comprehensive intellectual and political biography of the world-renowned critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Investigating the origins and development of Marcuse's dialectical approach vis-à-vis Hegel, Marx, Fourier, Heidegger, and Freud as well as the central figures of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Fromm, and Benjamin—Sethness Castro chronicles the radical philosopher's lifelong activism in favor of anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-authoritarianism together with Marcuse's defiant revindication of global libertarian-socialist revolution as the precondition for the realization of reason, freedom, and human happiness. Beyond examining Marcuse's revolutionary life and contributions, moreover, the author contemplates the philosopher's relevance to contemporary struggle, especially with regard to ecology, feminism, anarchism, and the general cause of worldwide social transformation.
1. Introduction: Marcuse, the Utopian
Idealism, Materialism, Romanticism, and Judaism
Marcuse's Importance for Radical Politics Today
PART I: MARCUSE'S LIFE, 1898-1979
2. Early Years: Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution, Romanticism, Utopian Socialism, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger
Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution
Post-War Investigations: Aesthetics, German Romanticism, and Hegel
Friedrich Schiller and Charles Fourier: Utopian Socialism
Marcuse's Torturous Relationship with Heidegger
Heideggerian Marxism
Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932)
Hitler's Accession and Flight of the Marcuse Family and the Frankfurt School
3. Militant Theorizing in Resistance to Fascism, 1933-1945
Negations (1934-1938)
Studies on Authority and Family
Marcuse's Direct Investigations of Nazism
Early Theories of Social Change
The Progression of Marcuse's Thought on Art's Functions Under Fascism
Reason and Revolution (1941)
4. State, Freud, and Orphic Marxism: 1945-1960
Post-War Studies: "33 Theses," Francis Bacon, Lukács, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderin, and Erasmus
Continued Investigations of Historical Progress, Russian Studies, and the Trajectory of Communism and Reason during the Early Cold War
On Sartre's Existentialism
Orphic Marxism and the Struggle of Eros against Thanatos
Lectures on Freedom and Progress in Freud's Theory of the Instincts
Marcuse's Debate with Fromm on Freud, Therapy, and Adjustment
Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)
The Ideology of Death
5. Radical Struggle in the 1960s
Marcuse on Cuba
Continued Engagement with Critical Theorists and Lecture on Weber
Humanism, Feminism, and Revolution
Critical Reflections on Science and Technology
One-Dimensional Humanity: Diagnosis, Reflections, and Recommendations
Marcuse on Marx, Louis Napoleon, and Benjamin
Justification of Revolutionary Praxis: "Repressive Tolerance," "Ethics and Revolution," Guerrilla Warfare, "The Question of Revolution," and "Thoughts on the Defense of Gracchus Babeuf"
Psychoanalytical Interventions
Activism against the Vietnam War
Summer 1967 Lectures before the German SDS and Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation: On Utopia, Radical Opposition, and Violence
1968: A New Dawn for Humanity?
An Essay on Liberation (1969)
Other Interventions from 1969: On Student Protest, "The Relevance of Reality," Qualitative Change, and Self-Determination
The 1969 Debate with Adorno on Theory and Praxis
Revisiting "Repressive Tolerance" and Civil Rights with the ACLU and Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade
"Marxism and the New Humanity: An Unfinished Revolution"
"Freedom and the Historical Imperative"
6. Marcuse's Final Decade: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Intensification (1970-1979)
Marcuse's Assessment of the State of the Radical Opposition in the Early 1970s: "Cultural Revolution," "The Movement in a New Age of Repression," and "A Revolution in Values"
Revolution or Reform? Marcuse's Debate with Popper
Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972)
Marcuse's Late Championing of Feminism
International Relations: Vietnam and Israel/Palestine
Continued Engagement with Aesthetics
"It is Right to Revolt" and "Theory and Politics": Late Discussions with Sartre and Habermas
Marcuse's Final Interventions in Life: On Political Violence, the New Left, the U.S. Bicentennial, "The Reification of the Proletariat," Rudolf Bahro, Technology, and Ecology
The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)
PART II: REFLECTIONS ON MARCUSE
7. Nature and Revolution
Nature, Evolution, and Morality
"Repressive Tolerance" and Radical Struggle for Animal and Earth Liberation Today
8. Critique of Marcuse
The Limits to Integration
The Problem of Sources: Political Philosophy and Empirics
Marcuse the Edelkommunist
Marcuse the Zionist?
Feminism, Gender, Eros
Conflicts with Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
Marcuse on Authority and the Transition: Between Jacobinism and Anarchism
PART III: CONCLUSION
9. Marcusean Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Radical Ecological Politics
Feminist Socialism and Anarcha-Feminism
The "World Mind" in International Relations: Global Anti-Authoritarianism
Means and Ends: The Question of Counter-Violence
Close: Eros and Revolution
Tags:1968, Aesthetic Dimensions, aesthetics, anarcha-feminism, anarchism, animal liberation, anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, antifa, Brill, Charles Fourier, Cold War, counter-violence, Counterrevolution and Revolt, critical theory, Cuba, Earth liberation, ecology, Edelkommunism, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Erich Fromm, Eros and Civilization, Eros and Revolution, existentialism, fascism, feminism, feminist socialism, Francis Bacon, Franz Neumann, Friedrich Hölderin, Friedrich Schiller, G.W.F. Hegel, Geist, George Jackson, German Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf, György Lukács, Haymarket, Herbert Marcuse, Hitler, Humanism, international relations, Israel, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Judaism, Karl Marx, Karl Popper, libertarian socialism, Louis Napoleon, Martin Heidegger, Marxism, Max Horkheimer, Max Weber, nature, Nazism, Negations, One-Dimensional Man, Orphic Marxism, Palestine, postmodernism, poststructuralism, radical ecology, Reason and Revolution, Repressive Tolerance, revolution, Romanticism, Rudolf Bahro, Russia, SCSS, Sigmund Freud, social psychology, Soviet Union, Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Theodor W. Adorno, utopian socialism, utopianism, Vietnam War, violence, Walter Benjamin, World Mind, World War I, Zionism
Posted in 'development', Abya Yala, anarchism, biology, Chiapas, climate catastrophe, Cuba, displacement, Europe, Frankfurt School, imperialism, Imperiled Life, Kurdistan, literature, México, nuclear, Palestine, reformism, requiems, Revolution, Russia/Former Soviet Union, Shoah, U.S., war | Leave a Comment »
Publicación de Clima, Ecocidio y Revolución con Bloque Libertario/Revuelta Epistémica en México
Durante la Sexta Feria Anarquista del Libro en México Distrito Federal que tuvo lugar el 25 y 26 de abril, salió a la luz pública la traducción al castellano de mi primer libro, Clima, Ecocidio y Revolución, que originalmente llevaba el título de Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe (Institute for Anarchist Studies/AK Press, 2012). Gracias a la colaboración de mi madre, quien tradujo el texto, y la voluntad de los compañer@s integrantes de Bloque Libertario y la casa editorial Revuelta Epistémica de publicar la obra, ya está disponible para l@s lectores hispanoparlantes. La obra se puede pedir a través del sitio web de Bloque Libertario/Revuelta Epistémica. Cuesta $60 pesos mexicanos el ejemplar.
El texto es casi lo mismo que el original, aunque incluye un prólogo nuevo que actualiza la situación ambiental y climatológica en el mundo, cubriendo los tres años que han transcurrido desde la fecha original de publicación. A continuación, el resumen:
Clima, Ecocidio y Revolución sintetiza los avisos alarmantes procedentes tanto a partir de los análisis de l@s climatolog@s como acerca del estado actual de nuestro planeta Tierra que indican las consecuencias potencialmente terminales del cambio climático que el capitalismo ha impulsado hasta ahora. A pesar de ello, esta obra reivindica la posibilidad de una salida de emergencia. En su contemplación de este fenómeno catastrófico en sus vertientes climatológicas, políticas y sociales, Javier Sethness Castro promueve el cambio de nuestra trayectoria historica por medio del pensamiento crítico, y ofrece una visión regeneradora que se inspira en las tradiciones intelectuales ácratas.
"Clima, Ecocidio y Revolución es una disección rabiosa y urgente del sistema económico omnívoro actual, que despiadadamente está conviertiendo el planeta Tierra en un campo de aniquilación."
— Jeffrey St. Clair, redactor de Counterpunch y de Caso Perdido: Barack Obama y la Política de Ilusión
Tags:AK Press, anarquismo, Barack Obama, Bloque Libertario, cambio climático, clima, climate change, COP, disidencia, Distrito Federal, ecocidio, filosofía, Imperiled Life, Institute for Anarchist Studies, Jeffrey St. Clair, justicia climática, México, revolución, Revuelta Epistémica, Sexta Feria Anarquista del Libro
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At the 2015 NYC Anarchist Bookfair: Marcuse and Bakunin, Magón and Benjamin
I will be speaking at this year's New York City Anarchist Bookfair (NYC ABF), this Saturday, 18 April, at 3:30pm in the New School. The topic of my comments will be "Marcuse and Bakunin, Magón and Benjamin: Investigating Mutual Affinities." I hope to see you there! A description follows:
"This talk will examine the close affinities among four important historical radicals, half of them renowned anarchists from Russia and Mexico—Mikhail Bakunin and Ricardo Flores Magón, respectively—and the other half German critical theorists: Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin. The similarities between Marcuse and Bakunin on the one hand and Magón and Benjamin on the other are striking, in terms of philosophy, revolutionary commitment, and biographies. Marcuse and Bakunin share a common passion for Hegelian dialectics, the radical negation of the status quo, and the critique of Karl Marx, while Magón and Benjamin share an enthusiasm for journalism and the written word in subverting bourgeois society and converge in their views on revolutionary armed struggle, in addition to having both experienced a sordidly tragic fate in U.S. federal prison and at the hands of European Fascists, respectively, due to their revolutionary militancy. Indeed, all four thinkers have numerous affinities among themselves that transcend this convenient dyadic coupling I have suggested. With this presentation, I seek to review the mutual affinities among these radicals and then to present some reflections on the meaning of their thoughts and lives for anarchist and anti-systemic struggle today, particularly in terms of ecology, feminism, and global anti-authoritarianism."
Tags:2015 NYC ABF, anarchism, anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-state communism, collectivist anarchism, counter-violence, critical theory, dialectics, fascism, Frankfurt School, Germany, Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, insurrectionism, Karl Marx, libertarian communism, Marxism, Mexico, Mikhail Bakunin, Nazis, negation, NYC ABF, NYC ABF 2015, PLM, revolution, RFM, Ricardo Flores Magón, Russia, violence, Walter Benjamin
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On the Life and Death of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón
"Against Capital, Authority, and the Church"
This is part II of an interview with Claudio Lomnitz regarding his book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014). Part I can be found here.
Continuing in the vein of the last question from the first part of our conversation, which had to do with the profoundly romantic love-relations, both platonic and sexual, that developed among the central figures of the Junta Organizadora of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and those closest to them, what role would you say art and beauty played in this movement? In the chapter on Magón's bohemian period, "La Bohème," you observe that an aesthetic sensibility was intimately related to the humanistic and revolutionary sensitivities felt by the militants affiliated with this group. Indeed, such a philosophical connection between art and social revolution has been identified at different times by Herbert Marcuse and Albert Camus, among others. G. W. F. Hegel is known for his view that aesthetic heroism is seen in one's commitment to the cause of changing the world.
Although it is tough to respond to a question like this for the entire movement, because there was a fair amount of variation amongst its participants, one can say for the movement as a whole relied crucially on reading and writing—and that beauty was a key reason to gain access to literacy. Ricardo was very explicit in his correspondence on the significance of words, of discussion and thought, and insistent on the fact that it was consciousness, not violence, that really did the work of Revolution. Yet there was quite a lot more beyond the question of revolution itself. First, the contents of Regeneración and The Border included a fair amount of art and beauty—emphasis on poetry, for instance, interest in graphic art, and the recognition of literary authors and works. This emphasis was also critical in the development of interpersonal affinities—a factor that was indispensable for the social life of the militant, as we saw in the discussion of love.
There was also a philosophical principle at stake, which was that the movement felt that humanity was being degraded by contemporary forms of exploitation and oppression, and that beauty was in fact key to the human vocation. So, for instance, in one letter written from Leavenworth to Ellen White, Ricardo wrote: "I could not help laughing a little—only a little—at your lovely naiveté. You say that it is superfluous to speak to me of Beauty, and you say this when it is Beauty what I love most." More philosophically, again from Leavenworth, Ricardo wrote to the socialist activist Winnie Branstetter that "Man has wronged the Beautiful. Being the most intelligent animal, the one most favored by Nature, Man has lived in moral and material filth."
I would say that beauty and art were key to the formation of the militants, in the socialization of the movement, in the definition of the movement's goals, in the formation of spiritual affinities between strangers who could then reach out and support one another spontaneously, and in the philosophical attitude that led individuals to revolt against what might otherwise have been naturalized as "their lot."
This is also, I think, one of the reasons why we see important militants of the group tending to artistic production at different moments of their lives. In some cases—Práxedis Guerrero, Juan Sarabia, or Santiago de la Hoz come to mind—poetic writing was happening at the height of their role as political organizers. In others—with this to some extent being the case of Ricardo's plays, for instance—the turn to artistic production is an alternative space for communitarian organization and militancy, at a point in time when political effectiveness in the armed revolutionary struggle had declined significantly. But it is generally true that a great number of militants wrote poetry or found forms of artistic expression, even if it was simply to court a potential lover.
For those who are more familiar with a reductive account of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) that prioritizes the reformist landowner Francisco I. Madero's Anti-Reelectionist campaign against the Porfiriato—or at least, early on, the Maderista opposition to Díaz's choice for vice-president in the planned 1910 election—it may come as a surprise to consider that the PLM organized a number of armed revolt in the border region during the lead-up to the Revolution in the hopes of catalyzing a generalized popular insurrection across Mexico. The first came in 1906, the second in 1908, and the third when the Revolution was very young, in December 1910, and then in Baja California during the first half of 1911. The most ambitious of these planned revolts was the first, slated to commemorate Independence Day in September 1906: with the central figures of the Junta Organizadora fully participating, the idea was to attack and take three major Mexican border towns—Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, and Jiménez. However, the machinations of the transnational spy network foiled the uprising, with part of the Junta being arrested and another part managing to escape capture. Díaz thereafter opted to have the U.S. State prosecute the revoltosos for their violation of neutrality laws which had been established during the Spanish-American War in exchange for his non-intervention in that conflict—with this being the very charge on which Magón and his comrades were imprisoned once again for three years in 1907, as retribution for their attempted insurrection. The 1908 revolt, an attack led by Práxedis Guerrero and Francisco Manrique on Las Palomas, Chihuahua, while the rest of the Junta was behind bars, seems to have been ill-advised, and a similar analysis could perhaps be applied to the December 1910 uprising in which Práxedis himself was killed.
In addition, in no small part due to this new jail sentence for many of the key figures of the Junta Organizadora, the PLM seems to have been relatively eclipsed in the years leading up to the Revolution itself by Maderismo, which provided a more incrementalist, familiar, and accommodating alternative to the one advanced by the PLM: for Francisco I. Madero ("Don Panchito") stood for "law and order," constitutionality, and bourgeois-democratic reform, in contrast to Magón's stress on direct action, radical land redistribution, expropriation, and proletarian emancipation. You discuss the fascinating history whereby Madero approached Magón early on to offer him the position of vice-presidential candidate at his side—an offer which Magón readily rejected out of hand. Then, you show how Madero appropriated Díaz's federal army to reign in and defeat the Liberal troops who had taken Mexicali and Tijuana in the months leading up to Díaz's fall in 1911, and subsequently activated diplomatic channels with the U.S. to have the Junta and a number of PLM commanders imprisoned once again after Ricardo's rejection—even if Madero had requested and received military support from the Liberals in good faith up to that point in the Revolution! Madero's opportunistic traición (betrayal) clearly demonstrates his commitment to practicing authoritarian-Weberian statecraft, and it can explain the reason for which Regeneración came to refer to him variously as a "dictator," a "second Porfirio Díaz," and "a slave owner." Can you expand upon the various dilemmas faced by the PLM in the early phase of the Revolution? You argue that, following its split with Madero, the PLM became a more marginal current in the revolutionary process, even as it became free to openly express its anarchist philosophy. Could it have been different?
Counterfactuals are always difficult. People will always debate whether Ricardo made a mistake in rebelling against Madero or not. At the very least, from a political point of view, his timing seemed ill-advised. Ricardo pronounced that Madero was a traitor while the revolt against Porfirio Díaz was still raging. This opened the group that was loyal to his position to being represented as traitors, paid for by the científicos, and doing Díaz's dirty work for him. Many honest revolutionaries felt this way—including old PLM sympathizers like Esteban Baca Calderón and Manuel Diéguez, of Cananea vintage. Perhaps Ricardo felt that he would lose credibility if he supported Madero and then rebelled once Madero was in power. It's hard to say. It is clear though that the Junta under Ricardo's leadership had no effective military strategist, and its position with regard to Madero first, and then with regard to Huerta, Carranza, Villa and the rest of them, left the military leadership that it had in Mexico very vulnerable, since they always needed alliances, and these alliances opened them up to being labeled as traitors by the Junta in Los Angeles. So Ricardo's decision on Madero in effect paved the way to a quick military defeat, but perhaps also to more lasting ideological influence.
The Junta Organizadora of the PLM in 1910. From left: Anselmo Figueroa, Práxedis Guerrero, Ricardo Flores Magón (seated), Enrique Flores Magón, and Librado Rivera. Práxedis' face has been superimposed onto that of another central figure in the PLM, most likely Antonio Villarreal, who broke from the group early on within the development of the Mexican Revolution. Besides the question of Villarreal's defection to Francisco Madero, Ricardo held his rumored homosexuality in contempt. (Courtesy El Hijo del Ahuizote)
For Magón, armed struggle certainly was an important tactic, but given his view that the counterrevolution was concentrated in the three-headed hydra of capital, State, and clergy, social revolution to him was more expansive than mere insurrection—hence his belief in the need for agitational intellectual work to continue to inspire militant direct action, as through the issues of Regeneración. Magón's decision after the failure of 1906 and the subsequent imprisonment of the Junta to prevent his brother Enrique from participating in the 1908 uprising and thereafter to emphasize the protection of the physical integrity of the PLM's intellectuals led to conflict with Práxedis, who—perhaps in a more consistently anarchist way—felt he could not ask others to risk their lives in insurrection without doing the same. The twenty-eight year old militant died in the December 1910 revolt for having observed this belief, thus expiating his guilt for surviving Manrique, who was killed in the 1908 revolt—in a parallel to the fate of the EZLN's Subcomandante Pedro, who similarly lost his life during the neo-Zapatista uprising on 1 January 1994.
Intriguingly, given this difference of opinion on theory and practice, you discuss how Práxedis was more wary of the employment of hatred than Magón in the revolutionary struggle, with the former declaring in some of his final articles for Regeneración that "[d]espotism can be annihilated without hatred," and that "[w]e are going off to a violent struggle without making violence our ideal and without dreaming of the execution of our tyrants as if that was the supreme victory of justice. Our violence is not justice; it is simply a necessity." What was Magón's take on hatred, in contrast? Beyond this, I will say that your assessment of Práxedis' supposed youthful lack of comprehension of the "value of survival" potentially runs the risk of betraying ageism. Do you disagree?
Your charge of "ageism" against me is probably right. I hadn't thought of it that way, but there is a kind of paternal identification in my sympathy with Ricardo's attempt to try to keep Práxedis away from battle.
Having said that, though, it is also true that I sympathize more with Práxedis than with Ricardo on the question of hatred. I think that Ricardo at a certain point was filled with a lot of bile. Many of his attacks on enemies, and on comrades who he came to see as enemies, are simply horrifying. One can understand why Ricardo hated when one considers the hardship and sacrifices that he endured, but that does not make his attitude attractive. Ricardo had many great virtues; his promotion of hatred was not one of them. Práxedis, by contrast, was more conscious of this problem, and one of the beauties of Práxedis is that he wrote his thoughts on this question down and published them.
Ricardo's fanning of hatred was also predicated on his view of history, and not only on rancor. He was convinced that he was living at the cusp of world revolution, and he was by no means alone in that belief—particularly after the start of World War I. In some ways this sense might justify to a degree Ricardo's continuous call for violence and even for murder, but I must say that this aspect of Ricardo is to me one of the most problematic. And one sees its negative effects in some of the people who were closest to him, as well as in loss of support for revolution by a people who were exhausted by continual and unending violence. This was an aspect of the Mexican situation that Ricardo did not live directly, but that is very relevant for understanding what Enrique and other Liberals experienced when they returned to Mexico after the revolution.
As the early phase of the Revolution developed and increasingly more former members of the PLM decided to join Madero, the transnational network supporting the "Mexican Cause" began to break down, as you detail—in part as a response to the virulent aggressivity Ricardo expressed to a number of his former comrades who would defect to Madero. One critical component of this uncomradely behavior has to do with Ricardo's evident prejudice against non-heterosexuals: he reserved special ire for the lesbian Juana B. Gutiérrez de Mendoza, outing her publicly as a "degenerate" engaged in a "quarrel with Nature" following her break with the PLM, and Antonio I. Villarreal, who left the Junta for Madero and thereafter was accused of having had relations with a certain barber. Despite Gutiérrez de Mendoza's "betrayal," she would go on to help Zapata compose the Plan de Ayala (1911/1914) following her disillusionment with Maderista reformism, while Villareal the socialist served under Madero and received a promotion to lieutenant colonel for having done so, before founding a Mexico City version of Regeneración (which Magón considered "Degeneración" or "Regeneración burguesa") and later charging Ricardo with having sold out.
Of course, the "charge" of homosexuality raised by Magón played into popular knowledge of the "Scandal of the 41," which refers to a police raid of an upper-class ball in Mexico City in 1901 that involved the arrest of 41 young males who were found dancing with each other, half of them in drag. The implication is that the Porfiriato's ruling class was effeminate, emasculated, and "degenerate," whereas what was needed was masculine, masculinizing—and to a certain degree, patriarchal—regeneration! Unfortunately, with regard to the present, a similar dynamic seems to operate to an extent now in Mexico in terms of President Enrique Peña Nieto and Manuel Velasco Coello, State Governor of Chiapas. Certainly, these PRI potentates are horrid reactionaries, but it is known that one current of the opposition against them is expressed in terms of their being supposed putos, or gays ("fags"), in Magonist style. Several questions come to mind. First, to what degree does Ricardo's homophobia mirror the prevailing prejudices of Mexican society at that time? It rather self-evidently contradicts the militant anti-authoritarian philosophy governing the PLM, which, being profoundly transgressive, "confronted the status quo and sought to create an alternative to it," as you write. Furthermore, how much do you think Mexican society has progressed on questions of sexual and gender diversity in the century since the Mexican Revolution—no thanks to Magón, unfortunately?
It is probably impossible to gauge the depth or extent of "homophobia" during Magón's day. The term itself did not exist and, as Carlos Monsivais once pointed out, the affair of the 41 was Mexico's first homosexual scandal, and it happened in 1901. So my response to the first part of your question is tentative—but here it is: I have the impression that Ricardo was more intensively "homophobic" than many of his contemporaries, and I think that he was that for a couple of different reasons. The first was to do with the idea of regeneration itself—a notion that constantly relied on the view that Mexico was prostrated, humiliated, enslaved, and so on. These ideas all involved undermining virility. And indeed "virility" was a key value for the movement. This does not automatically lead to homosexual panic, but it can play in as a factor, and I think that for Ricardo, it did.
A second factor in my view is Ricardo's extensive prison experience. Homosexual relations were extremely common in prison, and this was well-known in Mexico. Mexico's chief positivist criminologist, Carlos Roumagnac, had published a study of criminal types based on extensive interviews in Belem Prison—one of the places where Ricardo had been held—and claimed that almost all of the prison inmates had sex with one another. Antonio Villarreal's description of the Junta's experience in federal prison in Arizona also dwelled on this point. It is possible that Ricardo developed an aversion to sexual advances that he'd been subjected to in prison, or that he developed a view concerning homosexuality and weakness, or that he himself was a homosexual and was terrified to be "outed." We cannot say from the historical documents, but I think that we can say that experiences in prison were relevant.
Finally, the third factor is the political utility of the accusation. In the press, Ricardo was constantly on the attack, and he tended to use whatever he could to defile his enemies. The accusation of homosexuality was useful, and he used it—I would say not only that he used it, but that he indulged.
As for changes with present-day Mexico, Mexico has had tremendous transformations in gender and sexual relations—tremendous. Even in my life-time, let alone with regard to what was happening in the Porfiriato. Now, ideas of homosexual conspiracy, and of homosexual conspiracy in the elite, like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, are still common and commonly indulged. In this regard, Ricardo was much less pernicious than contemporary conspiracy theorists, because he did not believe that Mexico was in the hands of a homosexual ring. I think that the fact that Ricardo was for the most part anti-nationalistic spared him from some of the worst aspects of conspiracy theories like the kind to which you refer, that tend to imagine the nation as pure, and then to posit its exploiters as a cabal of ill-born perverts. Ricardo's homophobia was also directed to people who he saw as traitors, but to traitors of a Cause rather than traitors of a "pure" nation.
Given, as you say, that the anarchist revolution "was the most radical revolution that the Enlightenment spawned," I was curious if you have any comments to share about the influence postmodernism and poststructuralism have had on the anarchist tradition in recent decades, as in the concept of "post-structuralist anarchism." As you know, both these schools of thought reject the Enlightenment wholesale.
I don't know enough about these tendencies to comment, but I think that there is good reason why postmodernism and post-structuralism would have a serious interest in anarchism. On the one hand, Michel Foucault's criticism of the State and of sovereignty can easily lead to the exploration of anarchism as an alternative space; on the other, postmodernism's rejection of the grand récit of progress provides ample space for the valorization of the peasantry, of artisans, and of modes of life that are distinct from the old Marxist romance with the industrial proletariat. Those connections were always extremely important to the anarchists, who were not at all committed to uprooting the peasantry and transforming it into industrial labor.
When I say that anarchism was the most radical current of the Enlightenment, I mean this especially with regard to the slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." They took this further than anyone else.
Importantly, you observe that vegetarianism was an innovative social practice taken up by some members of the PLM and U.S.-based supporters of the Mexican Cause: namely, Práxedis Guerrero and Elizabeth Trowbridge, a young Boston heiress sympathetic to socialism who made a substantial proportion of her inheritance available to the struggle. Presumably, as you write, she and Práxedis adopted vegetarianism as an affirmation of their love for animals and a repudiation of the cruelty and suffering unnecessarily visited on them—such that their keen rejection of social injustice among humans was extended also to the animal and natural worlds. Perhaps they were also influenced in this decision by the examples of the anarcho-pacifist Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus, the "Vegetarian Communard," which were in turn echoed by the vegetarian clubs that arose in the Spanish anarchist cultural revolution as well as among the Sarvodaya vegetarian-anarchists.1 In a parallel to the question of LGBTQ emancipation, to what extent do you see progress or regression in terms of the struggle for animal rights and liberation at present?
Yes to your comment on Tolstoy and Reclus. I think that the question of animals and animal rights is a sign of deep progress, and extends much further today than it did at the time of Elizabeth or Práxedis, because the question of the environment and of our responsibility as subjects no longer of human history, but of the history of life on the planet, is today of a different order than it was then. Remember that the Mexican Revolution occurred before the existence of the atomic bomb or of atomic energy. The sense that humans could actually destroy the planet was not yet there, even though there were ideas of conservation and concerns with destruction of environments. Frances Noel, one of the American radicals that I write about, was an environmentalist and supporter of conservation in California. More generally, the question of health, fresh air, and environment was part of the discourse not only of hygienists and eugenicists, but also of labor organizers and urban reformers at that time. So I don't mean to say that environmental issues were absent then, but simply that they were of a different order. Today the environmental struggle is of the very highest priority. It was not then. This makes the vegetarianism of a Práxedis or an Elizabeth all the more interesting, relevant, and attractive today.
With reference to the Baja California campaign of 1911—the PLM's most famous military struggle, which resembled a fiasco more than any successful revolution—you note a number of problematics: for one, that only an estimated 10 percent of the insurrectos who captured Tijuana were Mexicans, with the remainder being Wobblies from the U.S. and foreign soldiers of fortune. Secondly, this material dynamic led to the awkward situation whereby more experienced Anglo volunteers were elected as officers—in accordance with anarchist-democratic principles—to wage war against Mexicans, as in the case of the British aristocrat Carl Ap Rhys Pryce, who promptly announced the independence of Baja California following Díaz's resignation in Ciudad Juárez in May 1911. Juxtaposed with the clownish venture capitalist Dick Ferris' proposal for outright colonization of the peninsula in the interest of U.S. capital, Pryce's move—which was not supported by the Junta in Los Angeles or by Liberals and Wobblies in the field—inexorably led many Mexican observers to conclude that the Liberal campaign in reality sought to facilitate the annexation of Baja to the U.S., as in the concept of filibusterismo, in a parallel to the previous loss of Texas and the entire Southwest after the war waged by James K. Polk against Mexico some sixty-five years prior.
This framing of the Baja campaign immediately served to delegitimize the Liberal efforts there, and furthermore aided in the ease with which Madero employed the federal troops whose command he had inherited against the PLM—with Mexicali and Tijuana falling within a month of Díaz's abdication. While the Junta felt Baja was but one among several fronts, or puntos rojos, for libertarian upheaval in the country, this association made between the PLM and secessionism may well have marred its relationship with Mexican public opinion. Do you consider Ricardo's decision to remain physically aloof from the Baja operation to have been a mistake, or believe that he was insufficiently forceful in distancing the Liberal campaign from the charges of filibusterism raised against it, his stress on direct action and revolutionary expropriation notwithstanding? In part, as you observe, this problem is inherent to the Junta's anarchism, which was not concerned with "national integrity," as patriots and statists are.
This is a difficult question to respond to, because we don't actually know what Ricardo and the Junta was thinking, so my response is very tentative. It is clear that in 1911 Ricardo did not think or believe that the United States was close to a revolution (a notion that he might have thought in 1917), but if he felt that the Wobblies and Socialists in the Southwest were in fact strongly increasing in force and might be building to a position where they might aspire to take power, he might have been indifferent as to whether Baja stayed in Mexico, became independent, or was annexed to the United States.
My impression is that he may not have cared all that much if Baja had become an independent republic, but that he would have been adamantly opposed to annexation by the United States at that time. This is all speculation, you understand. According to Ricardo, he rejected both alternatives and wanted the peninsula in Mexico where it belonged—but this was after he was accused of filibusterism. I certainly don't think that he cared what proportion of troops were Mexicans and which were foreign. The struggle was for liberation from economic and political exploitation, not for national independence. Ricardo was for extending Mexican nationality to foreigners who participated in the Revolution.
Should Ricardo have gone to Baja California to lead the fight? From the viewpoint of the fighters who sympathized with the Liberals, yes. At the very least, they should have been in more direct contact. The Junta tended to use John Kenneth Turner and Antonio de Pío Araujo as intermediaries, and the troops in Mexicali and Tijuana were never visited by Ricardo, or by Anselmo Figueroa, or Enrique, who were the senior members of the Junta then.
But on the other hand, Ricardo and the Junta always viewed Baja as one front, and not as their principal goal. In this respect, it made sense for Ricardo not to go there to lead the fight, because Baja was extremely isolated then, and he could not have led a propaganda effort comparable to what he could do from Los Angeles. And yet, the Junta was all imprisoned and sent to McNeil Island in Washington State after the fall of Tijuana. So it is possible that they would have been able to do more from Baja California after all.
Faced with the progression of the Revolution and particularly the coup d'etat of February 1913 led by General Victoriano Huerta that killed Madero and his vice president Pino Suárez—a coup which the U.S. Embassy helped to coordinate, in fact, as you show—Regeneración reacted by claiming all politicians to be the same, whether they be dictators, bourgeois reformists, or generals. Yet you suggest that this ultra-left type of analysis was not shared by the Mexican people at large. Could you speak, then, to the tensions between the "vanguardist" anti-authoritarianism of the PLM and the reality of the popular sentiments regarding the course of the Revolution, particularly in terms of the fate of Madero?
Maligning Madero was a bad political mistake that showed lack of regard for popular sentiment. Or maybe, as you say, it simply reflected the degree to which this was a vanguardist movement that saw its role as educating the people and weaning them from deception. Although by the time of the coup Madero's popularity was very much in question, at least in some areas of Mexico—certainly in Mexico City—his assassination was deeply unpopular. Jibes in Regeneración against Madero and his wife and family at the time of their assassination were deeply insensitive, and might have guaranteed that the movement would remain marginal as a political force, if it hadn't been for the fact that the movement was so deeply marginalized in Mexico by then in any case. Recall that at the time of the coup, the Junta was in prison in Washington, and many of the old militants of the PLM had left its ranks and joined other movements—often as those movements' radical fringe.
Beyond the tactical blunder, there seems to me to have also been insufficient appreciation for liberal-democratic reform by the Junta, which is why they viewed Huerta and Madero as being the same. It is true that they were pretty similar from the point of view of economic policies. In fact, Huerta even made some concessions to the union movement in order to buttress some of his popular support. But the fact of parliamentary democracy was more of a value than the PLM recognized, in my opinion, including for the future of the labor movement.
What can you say about the relationship between the PLM and other insurgent movements opposed to Madero and his successors Huerta and Venustiano Carranza: that is to say, Emiliano Zapata and the Ejército Libertador del Sur, as well as Pancho Villa and his División del Norte? You observe that Zapata sympathized with the PLM's September 1911 manifesto, and he would seem to have consciously taken the concept of "Tierra y Libertad" ("Land and Freedom") directly from the Liberals, with the practical manifestations of Zapatista strategy arguably advancing in consonance with Magón's call for generalized and decentralized armed revolt designed to expropriate the means of production. However, the situation would seem to have been rather different in the case of Villa.
I think that it is fair to say that Zapatismo got its main ideas from the Liberals, and that Zapatismo ended up being the best example of the sort of politics that Ricardo was advocating for. Obviously, ideology was not everything—and much of what Zapatismo did responded directly to conditions on the ground, rather than to ideology, so I don't think that the PLM can take all of the credit, or all of the flak, for what the Zapatistas did and did not do. But their ideological influence was very real, and their points of confluence were many. The problem of the caudillo and of personalismo was a concern for the PLM—probably not shared by Zapatistas overall—but because Zapatismo did not really aspire to take power nationally, this concern was in the end secondary.
The PLM had a terrible opinion of Villa. This was in large part due to Villa's role fighting the PLM during the Madero revolution, and to the fact that he was directly responsible for butchering many of their comrades. But differences with Villa also went beyond that sphere—to Ricardo, Villa was a typical politiquillo: corrupt, blood-thirsty, self-aggrandizing, in the pay of the Americans at first, and of the highest bidder after that…
The fact that PLM opinion on Villa was so negative, though, does not mean that there were no points of coincidence with this movement, or with Carrancismo, for that matter. The PLM's 1906 platform had pretty broad influence in the Mexican revolutionary process. Because of Villa's personal animosity to the PLM, there weren't a lot of former PLM militants in his movement, but there were many prominent people in Carranza's camp for a while, including people like Antonio Villarreal and Juan Sarabia, who were relevant players for the agrarian ideas of that movement.
A century now after the Revolution, do you see any movements taking from the example of Magón and the PLM? In an April 1994 interview, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the EZLN explicitly tied Zapatismo to the thought of Ricardo, among others, while in Rojava a number of parallel developments taken up by the Kurds have seen the flowering of "democratic confederalism" and anarchistic self-management during the past few years. Self-evidently, as well, Magón remains a key reference for the movimiento social in Mexico to this day.
Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the few ideologues of stature in the Mexican Revolution. Other important figures, like Luis Cabrera or José Vasconcelos, for instance, were probably much better political analysts than Ricardo, but they were not visionaries, in the sense of imagining a truly alternative society. Hence, despite all of their shortcomings, Ricardo's thought and experience return constantly. What is more, the transnational, feminist, anti-racist and anti-nationalist component is unique for the Mexican Revolution, as well as being a source of inspiration to any contemporary Mexican-American social movement worth its salt, starting with the Chicano movement in the 1970s. So PLM influence returns in social movements, just as you say, and it also often happens with individuals as well—I know that I was impacted by Ricardo's writings when I first read some of them, when I was 17 (years ago!) and yet I knew very little about the Mexican Revolution then, and did not have any special interest in the subject.
As with many other complicated figures, there are people who claim inspiration from Ricardo but who have a politics that is not very compatible with his. This deserves to be noted, certainly, but the deeper point is that there are movements today looking to formulate various alternative forms of self-management, democracy and equality that have found—and will continue to find—much to learn from Ricardo's thought, and from the collective experience of the PLM and of their friends and allies.
Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and Librado Rivera were imprisoned during the First Red Scare for violating neutrality laws and the Espionage Act. This would be Ricardo's place of death during the early morning of 21 November 1922, whether due to conscious medical neglect or outright murder. (Courtesy John Murray Papers)
The ascendancy of Huerta in 1913 provoked a crisis in Texas and the rest of the border region which would ultimately prove fatal to Magón. In response to Huerta's coup, Jesús María Rangel, a respected Liberal commander, organized an expeditionary force to cross into Chihuahua, do battle with the Carrancistas, and progress south to deal with Huerta himself, but they were forcibly prevented from doing so by Texas Rangers who met them at the border, fired on them, and arrested the revolutionaries who survived the shoot-out. The PLM immediately took up the cause of the "Texas Martyrs" and the surviving political prisoners. Then, in 1915, a Mexican uprising in Texas following the Plan de San Diego was met with a fierce, all-out reprisal against Mexicans located in the state: thousands were shot, lynched, or otherwise summarily executed by white-supremacist gangs. Such atrocities led Magón to declare in Regeneración that it was not the San Diego rebels but their executioners who should be shot. It was this declaration, together with Ricardo's apt designation of Carranza as "another Díaz" and another "lackey of the White House" who would work to "subject the Mexican proletarian and turn him [sic] over to the foreign and domestic capitalist class, hand and foot," as well as the accompanying call he made for Mexicans fighting in Carranza's army to turn their guns on the officer class which landed him and Enrique once again in jail in 1916, until Emma Goldman's efforts to raise bail gave them a temporary reprieve.
Then, with the coming of the Red Scare, the Magón brothers were tried and convicted yet again in 1918. Ricardo was sentenced to twenty-one years' imprisonment, thanks to a new charge of violation of the Espionage Act, which had just been passed the year before. Such a sentence amounted to capital punishment for Ricardo, whose health was already declining. In point of fact, two years after coming to Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas, where he had requested medical assistance no fewer than 22 times, Magón died of a heart attack. Ricardo's death came just days after he was transferred to a different cell farther away from Librado Rivera, who was also interned in Leavenworth on the same charge as Magón. While there is no question that Venustiano Carranza ordered Zapata's assassination in Chinameca, Morelos in 1919, it is less clear that Magón's end was due to outright execution rather than conscious medical neglect. Do you think Ricardo was murdered?
I myself don't think that Ricardo was murdered, but probably we will never know for sure. I do believe that there was deliberate medical negligence with regard to Ricardo's serious condition, and that his death might have been postponed or averted had he been given proper medical attention, but I don't believe that he was strangled, as the theory goes.
We know for sure that one of the theories of his "murder" is false—as I show in the book—and we know for sure about the medical negligence. Whether Ricardo might have been murdered by a guard in any case is possible, and I am sure that there will be many who subscribe to that theory.
The reasons why I don't think that he was murdered are, first, that Librado Rivera did not say that Ricardo was murdered in a letter that he wrote to a comrade from prison telling the tale of Ricardo's death, at a time when Librado did not know what was being said outside the prison. After Librado's release from Leavenworth, he did subscribe to the theory of Ricardo's murder, but by that point the productivity of that tale was clear, and going against it would have been costly and unnecessary since, in a deeper sense, Ricardo was of course killed by his oppressors.
I also don't believe that Ricardo was murdered because I don't think that the Americans saw him as such a threat at that point. The Obregón government was willing to repatriate him to Mexico. If Obregón did not see Ricardo as a threat, why would the US government? Remember that Ricardo was practically blind by the time that he died, and in very poor health. Finally, Ricardo's death was an embarrassment to the warden of the prison, who had repeatedly claimed that the prisoner's health was good. It earned him a direct inquiry from the Attorney General. So I don't see much motivation there either.
My sense is that the story of Ricardo's assassination was a way of figuring and expressing the potency of his subversive ideas, and a way of pointing to the repression to which he was subjected by the American government. Ricardo's ideas were indeed powerful. And he was indeed condemned to life in prison because of his resistance to the draft and to World War I, and because of his adscription to anarchism. All of that is true. I just don't think that he was murdered by the guard, that's all.
While the twilight of Magón's life was full of pathos, given the decline of Regeneración, the poverty and marginalization experienced by the Junta members prior to imprisonment in Leavenworth, and the estrangement with Enrique, you make clear that Ricardo was encouraged in the end by an optimistic, almost Hegelian sense that the Mexican and Russian Revolutions illuminated the way forward for humanity, hearkening the beginning of a universal social transformation that would overthrow capital and all authority. In a letter written in Leavenworth less than a year before his death, indeed, Ricardo expressed his certainty regarding the "bright future which is [now] opened to the human race," and he even identifies this as his "consolation." A little less than a century on, we see that the multidimensional crisis of the capitalist world-order persists precisely because the revolutions of the twentieth century failed to displace the reactionary enemies identified by Magón from the stage of world history. In light of the intimate and profound knowledge of social revolution you have collected and presented to us in The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, do you have any concrete suggestions to make to anarchists and other radicals today?
Thank you for this question—it is not one that I had dared to ask myself. As long as I'm not taken as some sort of Delphian oracle, here's my response. I think that the most powerful aspect of this story and experience is the idea of the centrality of mutual aid. Also, I believe that the movement's feminism, its punctilious resistance to nationalism, its commitment to love and to art and beauty, and its criticism of the State and of organized religion are all exemplary. I do not have as high an opinion of the movement's embrace of violence or of its revolutionary theory, which was simply wrong.
Concerning the latter, Ricardo believed that each town and village in Mexico replicated a fundamental struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed, and that a revolutionary spark had the power to explode the whole tinder-box. In this sense, he can be seen as a precursor to foquismo and Che Guevara—with some of the same limitations as that theory, too. What Ricardo did not visualize though is that revolutionary processes are civil wars, and that in civil wars all of the fractures of society become politically productive and material for political exploitation. The dynamic of war was not, as Ricardo imagined, a kind of purgatorial fire that would end up cleansing society of its ills and giving birth to pure communism. Instead, civil war proved to be a process wherein coalitions were formed, leaderships emerged, and the life and freedom of the best people were bargained with. There were major gains in the process, to be sure, but the costs were huge, and the results were not what the PLM hoped for, so much so that many of its militants continued to struggle, and continue to rise up in arms until they were finally shot. I give the example of Lázaro Alanís at the very start of the book, who rose up in arms first against Porfirio Díaz, then against Madero, then against Huerta, then against Carranza, and was finally executed after participating in the De la Huerta rebellion against Obregón.
I don't think much of Bakuninist theories of violence. But to my mind there's deep philosophical truth in much of the doctrines of Kropotkin and others who believe in the primacy of mutual aid, and I also feel that there are communications media and organizational possibilities in the present that make at least some anarchist ideals more viable today than they were in the early twentieth century. Of course, new theorists will be necessary to put these resources into play in a way that is different from those that were tried in that earlier generation.
Thank you again, Javier, for offering me this conversation, which has given me much to reflect on.
1 John P. Clark, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 145-6, 180, 229.
Tags:Anselmo Figueroa, Antonio Villarreal, art, Authority, "post-structuralist anarchism", "Tierra y Libertad", Bakunin, beauty, Belem Prison, Camus, Capital, chauvinism, Che Guevara, Chinameca, Church, Ciudad Juárez, clergy, decline, democratic confederalism, División del Norte, Don Panchito, Ejército Libertador del Sur, Elisée Reclus, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Emiliano Zapata, Emma Goldman, Enlightenment, Enrique Flores Magón, Espionage Act, EZLN, filibusterism, foquismo, Francisco I. Madero, Francisco Manrique, Hegel, heteronormativity, homophobia, homosexuality, insurrection, Jesús María Rangel, Jiménez, Juan Sarabia, Juana B. Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Junta Organizadora, Lázaro Alanís, Leavenworth, Lev Tolstoy, Librado Rivera, Maderismo, Mexican Revolution, Michel Foucault, mutual aid, nationalism, Nogales, Obregón, Pancho Villa, pathos, PLM, Porfiriato, postmodernism, poststructuralism, Práxedis Guerrero, Red Scare, Regeneración, religion, revolution, Ricardo Flores Magón, Rojava, Russian Revolution, Sarvodaya, social revolution, State, Subcomandante Marcos, Subcomandante Pedro, The Border, twilight, Venustiano Carranza, world revolution, WWI, Zapata
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


"Stay" is a doo-wop song written by Maurice Williams and first recorded in 1960 by Williams with his group the Zodiacs. Commercially successful versions were later also issued by The Hollies, The Four Seasons and Jackson Browne.
(1978) "You Love the Thunder"
The song was written by Williams in 1953 when he was 15 years old. He had been trying to convince his date not to go home at 10 o'clock as she was supposed to. He lost the argument, but as he was to relate years later, "Like a flood, the words just came to me."
In 1960, the song was put on a demo by Williams and his band, the Zodiacs, but it attracted no interest until a ten-year-old heard it and impressed the band members with her positive reaction to the tune. The band's producers took it along with some other demos to New York City and played them for all the major record producers that they could access. Finally, Al Silver of Herald Records became interested, but insisted that the song be re-recorded as the demo's recording levels were too low. They also said that one line, "Let's have another smoke" would have to be removed in order for the song to be played on commercial radio. After the group recorded the tune again, it was released by Herald Records and was picked up by CKLW. It entered the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 on October 9, 1960 and reached the number one spot on November 21, 1960. It was dislodged a week later by Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?". On the Herald recording, Williams sang lead and Henry Gaston sang the falsetto counter-verse.
The original recording of "Stay" remains the shortest single ever to reach the top of the American record charts, at 1 minute 36 seconds in length. By 1990, it had sold more than 8 million copies. It received a new lease of popularity after being featured on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.
In August 1963, the song was released by the Hollies, who took it to number eight in the UK Singles Chart.
The Four Seasons version was first released on their June 1963 album The 4 Seasons Sing Ain't That a Shame and 11 Others; it was later released as a single in December 1963. Vee Jay originally released it as the B-side of "Peanuts" in December, but when disc jockeys started to "turn the single over" to play "Stay" on the air, the record company superseded the single with a new one with "Stay" as the A-side and "Goodnight My Love" as the new B-side. It peaked at number 16 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in April.
In 1964, the song was recorded by The Dave Clark Five on their studio album Glad All Over.
The song was recorded in 1968 by Jan & Dean for release on their album Carnival of Sound but the album was not released until 2010.
Singer-songwriter Andrew Gold recorded a version of "Stay" for his 1976 album What's Wrong with This Picture?.
A version of the song with revised lyrics is the last track on Jackson Browne's 1977 album Running on Empty. The song, which follows on the heels of Browne's "The Load-Out" begs the audience to stay for an encore and includes an extensive playout. It includes backing contributions from David Lindley and Rosemary Butler. Browne, Butler and Lindley each contribute a similar verse in turn in ascending vocal ranges. It was released as a single and reached number 20 in the U.S. as well as number 12 in the UK.
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band recorded a version for the No Nukes album in September 1979.
In 1980, Austrian singer Georg Danzer wrote a German text to the Jackson Browne medley "The Load Out"/"Stay". It was performed live on the album Direkt as "Roadie Song".
Italo disco duo Marx & Spencer released their version in 1983.
Lyrics from the song were interpolated on reggae artist Buju Banton's song "Hush Baby Hush" on his 1995 album 'Til Shiloh.
The recording of the song by British pop group Dreamhouse was first released as a single in 1995, then again in 1998.
"Stay" was the third and final single from Cyndi Lauper's 2003 album At Last. It was a promo-only single, released only in the U.S. and Australia. The video that accompanied it is rarely seen but is commercially available as a special feature on the DVD, Live at Last.
Australian group Human Nature included the song on their 2014 album Jukebox.
^ "Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs - Stay / Do You Believe at Discogs". Discogs.com. Retrieved 2016-09-26.
^ "Official Charts Company". Officialcharts.com. 1961-01-11. Retrieved 2019-03-26.
^ "Billboard Hot 100 - April 4, 1964". Retrieved September 12, 2017.


Posted by Robert McIntyre on Thursday, January 25th, 2018 at 11:36am.
Upon entering the home you will find the welcoming living room with a full wall of windows overlooking the magnificent view of the Rocky Mountains. A two sided fireplace divides the living room from the library and is delightful on chilly Alberta nights. The kitchen is a chefs dream with cherry wood cabinets, dual built-in wall ovens, gas cooktop, integrated refrigerator & granite countertops.
The master suite is located on the main floor and has a spectacular view of the property & ambiance with the gas fireplace, new carpets, chandelier & 5-piece spa like ensuite, featuring a deep soaker tub!
Up a set of stairs you will find the bonus room (currently used as a bedroom) with stylish sitting area, 4-piece bath & walk-in closet. There is also a plethora of hidden storage space on the outer corners of the bonus room.
Two stairwells grant access to the walkout level. Here you will find a wet bar, wine room, media room, gym, huge rec room, living room with gas fireplace and two additional well sized bedrooms. The basement also features a sunroom with in floor heat.
The custom built 1876 sqft barn is a man cave dream! Built with entertaining in mind, there is a full kitchen complete with high end appliances that are made to look like antiques, floor to ceiling ledgestone wood burning fireplace, western themed bathroom, a sitting area & plenty of space to park all kinds of toy!
The barn also features two full sized stables in the back with lofts for feed and make up air so that no animal smells enter into the rest of the barn. The property is cross fenced and fully set up with a horse shelter and auto waterers in the paddock.
You do not want to miss out on this exceptional acreage! Join us this Saturday and Sunday between 1-3PM, and come fall in love with your new dream home!
Directions: Head south on Hwy 2 or Macleod Trail to the Okotoks exit, keep right towards Okotoks. Turn right just before the Big Sky BBQ Pit on 306 Ave E, Drive 1/2 Mile to Rusty Spurs Drive and Turn Left. Third driveway on the right with #6 on the box at the gate.


text:
Q: Privilege banner buggy? Or am I just confused? On the main Stack Overflow site, I arrived and had a banner:
"Congrats, you've gained the privilege – create wiki posts and 3 other privileges"
This confuses me, because I only see two privileges listed at 100%. Is the banner just buggy?
Or is there a better place to see my privileges that the page linked to by that banner?

A: The banner was inserted in your message box when you had over 10 rep, then somebody changed their mind and took back the vote, putting you back at 6.
When we insert stuff into the message stream we mark that privilege as notified meaning you will never be notified about it again.
The only way to fix this is to walk all the messages in the message table and roll back the invalid ones and "un-notify"
A change that corrects the priv message for this edge case would be very complex, I am inclined not to fix it for now.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: How to alter decimal scale and precision in psycopg2 using python? I am using the script that contains the code below
    query = """ALTER TABLE table_name ALTER COLUMN column_name NUMERIC (22,6);"""

    self.cursor.execute(query)
    self.connection.commit()

but i get error below
psycopg2.errors.SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "NUMERIC"

Have you encountered error like this? I have searched nothing is out on the internet.
PS: I have used DECIMAL instead of Numeric, same error appears

A: If you look at the PostgreSQL documentation for ALTER TABLE, you'll see you need to use the TYPE keyword (mandatory):
ALTER [ COLUMN ] column_name [ SET DATA ] TYPE data_type [ COLLATE collation ]
      [ USING expression ]

ALTER TABLE table_name ALTER COLUMN column_name TYPE NUMERIC (22,6)

Also, this error shows that this is a syntax error coming from PostgreSQL. Practically, your question has nothing to do with Python or Psycopg2:
psycopg2.errors.SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "NUMERIC"


"Fifi MLW got a 79.737% in her first ever Prix St. Georges today! We got eleven 8′s, two 8.5′s, and six 9′s! Very proud of her and she totally has a fan club going already =D <3.
Micanopy RH won the Prix St Georges yesterday and her first ever Intermediare I today with a 68.9% and a 68.7%!
Anne's Bandito RH made his fourth level debut and won both of his classes too!
Fran's fabulous Grapjas (Zizi Top/Kennedy) was a superstar at his first real dressage show – scoring an impressive 78.4% in the FEI 6 YO Test including "8″s for his gorgeous canter and uphill general impression. Gabs is a true talent with a very bright future!
Anne's sweetheart 9 yo Bandito RH (Bretone/Fabriano) made his Prix St. Georges debut with nearly a 66% and a second place finish – earning an "8″ on his three tempis along the way. Bandito has learned so much in a short amount of time, I am very proud of him!
Fifi MLW was a star at the USDF Trainers' Conference!
Nora and Fifi MLW were selected to be demo riders at the January 2017 USDF FEI Trainers' Conference with Lilo Fore and Hans Christian Matthiesen. Fifi MLW was such a star that she garnered lots of good press!
Fifi MLW also did a super job as the Third Level Demo horse and Bahai was a great Grand Prix Demo horse in the Janet Foy Symposium at BREC Dressage in February!
I have been very bad about posting show results on the website lately, so I am going to copy my Facebook post here to get caught up!
Micanopy also took eighth in the Open Fourth Level National Championship. It was her first defeat all year in that class, Mickey really had a great year!
Bahai did a great job at the Tryon Fall CDI in North Carolina. Taking third place in the CDI Grand Prix and second place in the CDI Grand Prix Freestyle.
Farleight and Bahai are officially Grand Prix horses! Bahai, Farleight, & Wilber have successul starts to 2014!
Farleight and Bahai both successfully made their Grand Prix debuts at the American Dressage Concours in Venice, FL at the beginning of February. They are now officially Grand Prix horses! That makes five horses trained to Grand Prix by Nora (Farleight, Bahai, Bretone, Rue Facile, and Weide)!
They returned to Venice at the end of February for the Florida Dressage Concours 1 & 2 and performed very well. Nora decided to try Farleight in the new Intermediare B test, which proved to be a very forward and inviting test for him – he took home two blue ribbons with scores of 72.262% and 70.595%! In the two tests, he earned EIGHTEEN 8′s and one 9!!! Way to go Flumpy!
Bahai was also a superstar! She also took home two blue ribbons for her efforts in the Developing Horse Grand Prix. She earned a 68.625%, including FIVE 8′s and an 8.5, the first day and a 70.500% overall the second day (a 70.125% and a 70.875%, including FIFTEEN 8′s, from the two judges)! Bahai received multiple 8′s on her piaffe, which is very exciting! She should be all qualified for the Markel National Developing Horse Grand Prix Championships in August in Illinois. So, for now it's just more training for the next few months with her.
Farleight and Nora went to the Ocala Spring Dressage I competition on March 8th and 9th. He had another stellar weekend in his new favorite test, the Intermediare B. He earned two more blue ribbons and lots more 8′s – scoring a 68.690% and a 70.714% on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Good boy, Flumpy!!! Wilber also attended the Ocala Spring Dressage I show with Jeanie in the saddle. It was their first big show together for quite some time and they put in two successful Intermediare I tests, scoring in the mid-sixties. The pirouettes were a real highlight. Next up for Wilber and Farleight may be the Ocala Spring Dressage II competition in April.
Below are pictures of Farleight at Venice and Bahai at the Developing Horse PSG Championships last year (Carolynn Bunch Photos).
I-B Trot Extension for an 8!
I-B Piaffe for an 8!