Portside

Reader Comments - Vietnam - What Really Happened?; Chapel Hill Murders - Honor Their Memory; Chocolate, Mayan civilization; Ukraine; How Radical Change Occurs; Adjunct Profs; Teacher Unions; West Virginia Coal and Blood; Public Pensions; Water Privatization; Save the Postal Service; Timbuktu; UMass Backs Down on Iranian Student Ban; Artistic Expression; Support the Greek People; Announcements; Today in History - FDR Signs Order for Internment of Japanese Americans

Mesches is an artist who has illuminated -- in the style of medieval manuscripts -- his own FBI file. “I loved the way they looked, those black strokes, like Franz Kline color sketches. I also thought, ‘This is history, and, hey, this is my history.’”

In this view, hand stencils and animal paintings in Europe and Asia, separated by some 13,000 kilometers, have a common, far deeper origin in Africa.

Reader Comments - Fast Food Workers; Ralph Fasanella; US-Africa Leaders Summit; School's Back and Growing Inequality; Twin Plagues of ISIS and Ebola; Diablo Canyon Nuke Plant; Brazil's Elections; Argentina; Victory for Market Basket Workers and Consumers; Fed-Ex Workers Can Organize; New Culture on the Left; Call for papers on Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital; Today in History - Paul Robeson Returns to Peekskill; Jewish Woman Among the Interned Japanese

Why Marxist playwright Berthold Brecht is theater’s hottest old name

Reader Comments - Gaza, Israel, Palestine and the Jewish Community; Water Privatization; Charlie Haden; McDonald's and Low-wage Workers; Portside Book Reviews; Koch Bros.; Universal Soldier; Argentina; HIV; NSA, spying and Saudi Arabia; Public Education; Market Basket Revolt; Immigration Reform Infographic; new poems by Tom Karlson and Alan Gilbert; Afro-American Artists to Present Works in Cuba; Sinéad O'Connor: 'I Won't Play in Israel'

Fasanella copied no one: not Van Gogh, nor Grandma Moses or Edward Hicks. He was sui generis, and when his paintings finally came to be appreciated, it was for their uniqueness, not their adherence to any school or formal style. Most of all, they are celebrated for forcefully conveying the ideals he lived and worked by, as summarized in his motto: “Remember who you are. Remember where you came from. Don’t forget the past. Change the world.

Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization. But reason does not lift us upward to the heavens. It does not bring us into contact with the sacred. It does not permit us to curb our self-destructive urges. Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson mocked the myth of human progress and the folly of hubris.

Thailand Police Raptured Away in Solidarity; Big Food Portrays Itself As Anti-Big Food; A Plan to Save the Detroit Institute of Art Might Also Save Detroit's Pensions; JP Chase Morgan Reads Reverend Billy the Riot Act; The Phony Philanthropy of eBay's Billionaire Pierre Omidyar; Subtext of Super Heroes is Fascism.

Jon Stewart -- Affordable Horror Story. Liquid Art. Canned Heat -- Woodstock Boogie. Burn: Detroit Firefighter Documentary. Professor Louie -- What Does it Mean to be Working Class?