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Category Archives: Atlantic Records

Marianne Faithfull: The “As Tears Go By” 50th anniversary

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in Adrienne Posta, Ahmet Ertegun, Alfred P. Sloan, Andrew Loog Oldham, Anita Pallenberg, As Tears Go By, Atlantic Records, Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, Beatles, Before the Poison, Bianca Jagger, Bob Dylan, Brian Jones, Broken English (1979), Catholicism, Charlotte Rampling, Cole Porter, Easy Come, Easy Go, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Freud, Give My Love To London (2014), Horses and High Heels, Indica Gallery, John Dunbar, John Lennon, Keith Richards, Laurence Harvey, Like A Rolling Stone, Lionel Bart, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, Mike Leander, Miss X, Ned Kelly, Redlands drug bust, Rich Cohen, Rolling Stones, Strange Weather, suicide, Sweet Smell Of Success, Tony Richardson, Venus In Furs, Wall Street Journal Magazine, Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel, Wild Horses, Yoko Ono, Zelda Fitzgerald

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL MAGAZINE:  September 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/marianne-faithfulls-gloriously-reckless-rock-n-roll-life-1409842633?tesla=y&mod=WSJMagazineCulture_LEFTStories&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204587804580106133969707928.html?mod=WSJMagazineCulture_LEFTStories

Feature

Marianne Faithfull’s Gloriously Reckless Rock ‘n’ Roll Life

The onetime pop ingénue, style icon and muse to the Rolling Stones releases a new album on the 50th anniversary of ‘As Tears Go By’

By

Rich Cohen
Updated Sept. 4, 2014 10:59 a.m. ET

LIVE THROUGH THIS | ‘This is a very personal record about things I’ve been going through with my loved ones,’ Faithfull says of ‘Give My Love to London,’ out this month.  ‘It’s about how to get through.’  Illustration by Mats Gustafson

CERTAIN LIVES STAND for an entire era.  Cole Porter is the Jazz Age and the crash.  Alfred P. Sloan, whose reign at General Motors began when city streets were still rank with manure and ended with them awash in tail fins, is the auto age.  Marianne Faithfull, who had her first hit record in 1964, a song written by a 20-year-old Mick Jagger and his friend Keith Richards, is rock ‘n’ roll.  She was 17, a primly blond Brit who elicited aristocratic fantasies.  Approaching her at a party where members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were in attendance, Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham said, “I’m gonna make you a star, and that’s just for starters, baby!”

In the ensuing decades, Faithfull lived a multiplicity of lives, riding and, at times, nearly being destroyed by an ecstatic energy she helped unleash.  She was the “It Girl.”  A pop ingénue in ’64, a headliner in ’65, a torrid one-night stand of Richards’s in ’66, the muse and partner of Jagger for several years, the singer who rejected Bob Dylan, Miss X at the notorious Redlands drug bust in ’67, best friends with model Anita Pallenberg; dabbler in black magic and hallucinogens.  She tasted and touched everything that fascinated her baby-boomer demographic.  “She was always perceived as someone very brave, very cool and very much self-created,” said British actress Charlotte Rampling.  “She’s always been her own woman, in no one’s mold, and it’s very impressive when a person can live that way.”

Photos: Marianne Faithfull’s Life in Pictures

View Slideshow

Faithfull’s life echoed the course of rock ‘n’ roll itself, which started with the playful excitement of sock hops and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and dead-ended, for a time, in atonal melodies and concept albums—which is just another way of saying “experience.”  By the ’70s, she had lost it all and was on the street, a junky cadging a dose.  She turned whispery, desperate.

She came back in 1979 with the titanic breakthrough record Broken English, turning her brush with the dark side into music.  She had followed the classic trajectory of the hero:  the rise to stardom, the split with society, the journey through a shadow land, the return.  Through it all, she’s remained an object of fascination, allegedly a subject for iconic songs, among them “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones.  When I asked if she was the inspiration behind the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” she said, “I was told so, but that doesn’t mean anything.  Musicians do that all the time.  ‘This song’s for you, darlin’.’ ”

It’s been 50 years since the release of her first single, “As Tears Go By,” the hit that began it all.  A new record—Give My Love to London—will mark the anniversary.  If you want to experience the passage of decades, play the new album beside her first numbers.  In the early ’60s, her voice was not faux-naïf but the real thing—simple, childlike—which was part of its appeal, the fantasy of innocence corrupted.  No one has ever been younger than Faithfull was in 1964.  And no one’s ever been older than she is on the new record.  She’s a dance-hall singer, moaning in a dive on the edge of town, her voice rough from years of smoking, shouting, staying out all night in the rain—a wisdom-filled rasp.  It’s the quality that made those late Frank Sinatra records, after his voice was shot, electrifying.  It’s not just the songs you hear; it’s the life—though the song titles alone tell a story:  “The Price of Love,” “Give My Love to London,” “Love More or Less,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”  Here’s a singer with her eyes on the horizon.  “This is a very personal record about things I’ve been going through with my loved ones,” she said. “It’s about how to get through.”

Faithfull is 67, splits her time between Dublin and Paris, smokes (e-cigarettes), walks, sings, writes, thinks.  Though no longer the sex symbol she once was, she’s still beautiful.  I caught up with her by phone in Paris.  She’d broken a hip this summer, which, along with another injury, gave her time to reflect.  “Six months on your back will do that,” she told me.  “You become introverted.  You start thinking about things, too many things.”

We talked about her childhood growing up in a small town just north of Liverpool.  Her mother was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose great uncle, Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, wrote Venus in Furs, the book that gave rise to the term masochist; her father was a British intelligence officer in World War II, later a professor of Italian literature.  Despite this pedigree, her childhood was tough.  Her parents split when she was six years old; there was never much money.  Faithfull was educated at a convent, where she learned the basics of this world and the next.

“Were you Catholic?”

“Not originally, no, but I had to become a Catholic.  I couldn’t have survived otherwise.  I had been a very bright pupil in the sixth form at the convent.  I was preparing to go to university or art school or maybe music school.  And then—well, I was discovered, for God’s sake!  I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t wanted to get out of home.”

The first big moment came in 1964, at a launch party for a teen singer named Adrienne Posta, a famous soiree of that swinging London moment; Faithfull’s social circle and her connections to the city’s exploding music scene had brought her to a party where several young rock stars were in attendance.  And here comes the Stones’ exotic boy manager, approaching the convent girl through a haze of cigarette smoke.  “Andrew f—ing Oldham, excuse my French,” Faithfull recalls, laughing.  “He was fascinating.  I had never met a man who wore makeup, never met anybody who talked that way:  ‘I’m gonna make you a star, baby.’  I had watched Sweet Smell of Success and all those Laurence Harvey films, so I did understand where he got his persona.”

“ “Marianne has always been her own woman, in no one’s mold. It’s very impressive when a person can live that way.” ”

—–Charlotte Rampling

A week later, Faithfull was at a recording session with Oldham and engineer Mike Leander.  According to legend, Oldham had locked Jagger and Richards in a kitchen in Chelsea a few months before, saying, “Don’t come out till you’ve written a song.”  It took them ages to figure out how to compose for the Stones.  Their early numbers were ballads, melancholy tunes.  Oldham farmed them out to other clients.  “I first heard [“As Tears Go By”] in the studio,” Faithfull said.  “It wasn’t meant to be the single; it was meant to be the B side.  It was some scam of Andrew’s whereby I was meant to sing an awful song by Lionel Bart.  It was obviously wrong.  Mike Leander said, ‘Why don’t we try the B side?’  There must’ve been an acetate of Mick and Keith.  I heard that once or twice, then went in and sang.  It was magic.”

Faithfull has rerecorded that song since, finding new resonance.  She’s grown into the song’s sadness as she’s aged.

It is the evening of the day.
I sit and watch the children play.

Does the 50th anniversary strike her as significant, or is it just a number?  “It’s very significant,” she said, “because it’s not just that ‘As Tears Go By’ was released; it was also the beginning of a completely different life.  It’s when I became a recording artiste, as they say, with an e on the end.”

Faithfull has known Jagger and Richards since she was a girl and they were boys.  Brian Jones, a founding member of the Stones, was dead before his 28th birthday, but she knew him in his last days.  She was already in a serious relationship with a gallery owner named John Dunbar (his Indica Gallery is where John Lennon and Yoko Ono would first meet).  She married Dunbar when she was 18, and the couple had a young son, which did not stop her from hooking up first with Richards, and then, later, in a more meaningful way, with Jagger.  For a time, she drifted between Dunbar and Jagger, sometimes bringing her son along, sometimes leaving him behind.  By 1967, she was connected in the public mind with Jagger.  They were a reigning couple of the era, the F. Scott and Zelda of swinging London.  For a time, tired of motels and theaters, she gave up touring for a life inside the Stones’ inner circle—the band had achieved a remarkable fusion of mainstream and avant-garde.  They threw parties, took drugs and had so much fun.  It was a golden moment that unfurled like a day that seems to never end, until it does.

For Faithfull, the turning point, her Waterloo, came in ’67 with the drug bust at Redlands, Richards’s country home in Sussex, on the southern coast of England.  It was a tabloid scandal that stands as a high watermark of the acid age:  Jagger and Richards and various hangers-on getting bombed on LSD in the company of a woman who, because she was not named, became the mystery—the Miss X—at the core of it all.

“Redlands was my moment of truth, when I realized I was in a situation I couldn’t stand,” she told me.  “It had been fun for a long time, and I guess we all made the mistake:  We believed nothing could touch us, completely forgetting about working-class and middle-class envy, how people would feel.  It didn’t even occur to me in my arrogance.”

Faithfull was not arrested, but Jagger and Richards and two other friends were.  There was a tremendous trial—almost a show trial—that cemented the Stones’ reputation as rock ‘n’ roll outlaws.  Jagger and Richards spent a night in prison before public sentiment helped secure their freedom.  Crucial was the publication of an editorial in the conservative London Times under the headline, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?”  Though she was supposed to be ashamed, Faithfull showed up in court to support Mick and Keith but also to demonstrate her defiance.

Of course, there’s the pose, and then there’s the way you feel.  “I got terrible hate letters,” Faithfull told me.  “I’ll never forget.  The most awful articles in the newspapers.  I was only 20.  I believed everything, took it all to heart.  I got very depressed.  Mick and Keith, God bless ’em, went on to be bigger, better, stronger, brighter, more wicked, more naughty, more powerful.  But as a woman—it was completely against the rules.  We scuttered on for quite a time after that, trying to pretend it was OK and we could still have fun, but I was beginning to feel bad about myself.  And then, you know, I got the usual sort of problems every woman gets with Mick Jagger. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer, all the different women and all that stuff.”

The psychic break came in the summer of ’69, when Brian Jones, who’d been kicked out of the band weeks before and was suffering from paranoia, drowned in a swimming pool.  This began a run of dead rock stars:  Brian, Jimi, Janis, Jim.  They were all 27 when they died.  After Jones’s death, Faithfull and Jagger flew to Australia to appear in Tony Richardson’s movie Ned Kelly, about an outlaw bank robber.  Faithfull took sleeping pills before the flight, took more when she got to the hotel.  At some point, she woke up, jet-lagged, walked dead-eyed to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.  It was Brian’s face looking back.  He beckoned her to join him inside the glass.  The windows were sealed, so, instead of jumping, she took a fistful of pills and lay down beside the sleeping rock star.

“It was an awful thing to do to Mick, to Tony Richardson, to my mother, to my little tiny son who was in England, to myself,” she said.  “I do remember having these feelings of ‘I’ll show them!  They’ll realize when I’m dead they shouldn’t have done that!’  Completely forgetting you’ll be dead!  I understood it years later when I had a good shrink in Boston and she gave me an essay Freud wrote on melancholy.  In it he describes insanity of the suicide, where the id, the ego and the superego split.  That’s when you actually see yourself dying, jumping out the window, whatever it is you choose.  And then you’re at your own funeral listening to what people say about you.”

Days went by as she slept.  In a dream, she met Brian, who told her how lonely he’d been.  She walked him to the edge of nowhere, let him go.  She woke up in a hospital with Mick and her mother at her side.  “I had taken 150 Tuinals and was unconscious for six days,” she said.

FOR FAITHFULL, the period after the near suicide meant a switch from mind-expanding drugs to opiates, from a quest for experience to a search for numbness, escape.  A personal disaster for Faithfull, the hangover that followed the ’60s was also part of a general malaise:  Vietnam, the slide into dissolution, Watergate, OPEC, bell-bottoms.  At some point, Faithfull became too self-destructive.  In her memoir, she recounts a conversation she overheard between Jagger and Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records.  “There’s only one thing to do,” Ertegun told Jagger.  “I’ve seen a lot of heartbreak with junkies.  Believe me, old friend, it wrecks the lives of everybody around them, as well.  It’s a bottomless pit, and she’ll drag you into it unless you let her go.”

“ “Marianne has lived so many lives already, and has many more to live.” ”

—–Yoko Ono

Jagger and Faithfull broke up.  A short time later, while in a London taxi, she learned of Jagger’s engagement to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias.  Faithfull got out, got drunk, got arrested, and then spent the night in jail.  From there, it was down the rabbit hole that led to the street.  She lost touch with friends, family.  Most painfully, she lost custody of her son.  At times, she seemed like the ragged princess of the Dylan song “Like A Rolling Stone,” strung out on streets she once commanded like a queen.  Yet, through it all, she remained true to her quest to sample every kind of experience.  “For me, being a junkie was an admirable life,” she wrote later.  “It was total anonymity, something I hadn’t known since I was 17.  As a street addict in London, I finally found it.  I had no telephone, no address.  Nobody knew me from Adam.”  Somehow, she survived.

When she found her way back in 1979 with Broken English, it was with a new sound, a new voice—gritty, wizened, experienced.  “It was another person you heard on that record,” Rampling said.  “And it spoke so clearly about what she had been through and how she had lived.”  A string of great records followed: Strange Weather; Before the Poison; Easy Come, Easy Go; Horses and High Heels.  Her late albums are her best—powerful because they suggest a life beyond music—and stand as a distillation.  The pure ingénue at the beginning of the ’60s, the hippie chick by the end; the heroin girl at the beginning of ’70s, the proto-grunge girl at the end—Faithfull has always been a personification of her time.

These days, she stands for the rock ‘n’ roll generation grown old and dignified.  “Marianne has lived so many lives already, and has many more to live,” Yoko Ono wrote in response to emailed questions.  “She always keeps her chin up.  As time goes by, she just gets better and better.”  That’s her new record:  chaos recollected in the calm after the storm.

“Everyone has to go through it themselves,” Faithfull told me, laughing.  “But, just to be kind, I will give you my motto:  ‘Never let the buggers grind you down.'”

~

*Please also see:  https://whenisapartynotaparty.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/spring-2012-lucifer-rising-and-other-sound-tracks/

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Three Essays Advocating The Abolishing Of Money: I. “The Lower Depths of Capitalism”

01 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by essaybee2012 in Atlantic Records, Berlin Wall (1961-1989), Berlin, Germany, Brautigan Library - Washington State (1990- ), capitalism, CBS News, Charles Kuralt (1934-1997), communism, compassion, cradle-to-grave, Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969- ), Czechoslovakia, Dan Rather (1931- ), Denver Post (DP), Eastern Europe, Financial News Network (FNN), Frank Zappa (1940-1993), hand-to-mouth, Hyman Products Inc. - Missouri, Jane Fonda (1937- ), Krenzman (Batman), Lawrence Ingrassia (WSJ), Li Peng (1928- ), Liz Smith (DP), money, Mother Teresa (1910-1997), NBC News, Nicoli Ceaucescu (1918-1989), Olga Havel (1933-1996), oppression, Peter Tautfest (RMN), products, Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), Rocky Mountain News (RMN), Socialism, The Lower Depths (Kurosawa 1957), The Lower Depths (Renoir 1936), Tom Brokaw (1940- ), Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Weimar, East Germany

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Foreward

Capitalism is to civilization what AIDS is to the human body.  The injustice of injustices is that our fundamental human needs must be earned through labor and purchased with income.  Human existence does not have to be subservient to the flow of money.  When the needs of humanity are met unconditionally (without first having to earn the right for survival) then we, as a people, as a community, will be free to turn the creativity within our minds and hearts to higher concerns.

04 APRIL 1990, DENVER, COLORADO:  “If we did not keep to socialism, but instead, as some people advocate, turned back to take the capitalist road, . . . degeneration . . . inherent in a society of exploiting classes, would spread unchecked.”  Chinese Premier Li Peng spoke these words on March 20, 1990, to the Chinese legislature.  Although blind to the greater oppression of socialism, Premier Peng, when observing capitalism, sees with notable clarity.

Capitalism invites a degeneration of human compassion and desire; it calls for an inhalation of profit, gain, goods, and services; and it demands a plunge to the lower depths of human potential.  Within the system of capitalism, people make choices in life while contemplating the pitch-black abyss of unemployment, hunger and homelessness.

For a view of these lower depths, one has only to look to the cast of characters in the recent events in Eastern Europe:  the American capitalists who are rushing in for opportunity; the Eastern Europeans who are embracing the West with wild intoxication (as documented by American journalists); and finally, the Eastern Europeans who are worrying with a sober fear of an uncertain future that approaches like an avalanche.

On November 9, 1989, East Germany conceded to the rupture of its population that had begun September 12, with the opening of the East German – Hungarian border.  The Berlin Wall had opened for travel into the west.

As if a dam had burst open from the pressure, refugees, like tons of water, flooded through.  With the Christmas season rapidly approaching, Hyman Products, Inc. of St. Louis, Missouri, responded to the event with salivating urgency.  Fifty tons of the Berlin Wall were quickly dismantled and quietly shipped to Missouri, where the concrete slabs were reduced to chunks the size of golf balls.  The mementos, symbolizing the western democratic freedom to be found beyond the wall (and moderately priced at $10.00 each), reached the shelves of stores such as Bloomingdales and May D&F in the nick of time for Christmas shoppers who had mistakenly thought they had everything.

Arriving in West Berlin nine days after the wall was opened, the aging acoustic-rock trio Crosby, Stills & Nash performed a twenty-minute set of music to an enthusiastic audience with the Brandenburg Gate portion of the Berlin Wall as a backdrop.  A CBS Evening News film clip captured the trio singing “Chippin’ Away,” a fortuitously appropriate song from one of their recent albums.  Their record company, Atlantic Records, no doubt, insured that music stores throughout West Berlin had an adequate supply of the Crosby, Stills & Nash vinyl.

*******************************************************************

SHORT TAKES : Crosby, Stills and Nash Sound a Positive Note at Berlin Wall

November 21, 1989|From [LA] Times Staff and wire service reports

WEST BERLIN — Crosby, Stills and Nash, whose rock music roots reach back to the early years of the Berlin Wall, sang to several hundred chilly fans today in front of the Brandenburg Gate, telling them to keep chipping away at the wall.

*******************************************************************

Stephen Stills said the 20-minute performance with sidekicks David Crosby and Graham Nash was arranged on short notice, with help from the West Berlin police.

There might have been no hint of an intent to market except for the telltale evening news clip.  How could the performance have truly been spontaneous and heartfelt when it was a mere twenty minutes in length, but long enough for CBS to grab a film clip of the song, “Chippin’ Away?”  Compassion and marketing walk hand-in-hand along the capitalist road.

On December 29, Vaclav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia after its population had also ruptured the borders of its communist regime.  Frank Zappa, American rock guitarist and self-avowed capitalist, wasted no time announcing that he was planning to interview Havel in a film documentary for FNN (Financial News Network on cable television).  The documentary would cover Havel’s rise from the oppression of socialism to his role in Czechoslovakia’s current alignment with the economy of the West.

Jane Fonda, the movie actress, had a similar light bulb flash in her mind, according to a March 21, 1990, Denver Post column by Liz Smith:

“People are talking about Jane Fonda’s recent trip to Europe.  She’s been moving fast since the tumultuous events over there and plans a big movie which would co-star – the fall of the iron curtain!  Fonda recently spent time with Czechoslovakia’s new president, playwright Vaclav Havel, and sees his life story – especially the five years he spent in jail for dissident activities against communism – as a heady brew for film.  Fonda herself would portray Havel’s wife, Olga.”

It’s debatable that Fonda’s desire would go any further than the boundaries of her heart without the profit motive of the film company that dictates her vocation.  Honest compassion, present though it may be, is hard to find in the news stories emanating from these recent events.  Honest compassion is associated with the poor and the lower class – those who are the polar opposites of capitalists.  An example would be Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who does not accept money for the continuation of her work.  She accepts only unconditional offerings of food, medical supplies, and service.  Compassion that turns a profit, however, makes the news and adds definition to life at the lower depths.

Captured by American journalists, the eyes and voices of the refugees flooding through the borders express a consuming desire for the goods and services of the West.  A CBS reporter for the Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt program on November 12, 1989 commented that refugees pouring into West Berlin would mostly stop in front of toy stores with “crazy-big smiles” while looking at stuff for their children.

One television image focused on a large sign held by children in a crowd near the Brandenburg Gate, at the entrance to West Berlin, which proclaimed Krenzman, “Batman.”  One journalist wrote in a November 12 front-page Denver Post article that a large Woolworth’s outlet in the heart of West Berlin was literally under siege by thousands of East German consumers “buying food, cassettes, clothes, anything affordable and in short supply in the east.”

According to an article from the same paper, East Germans “waded past dazzling showcases of oysters, caviar, lobsters, champagne, and oranges on their first visit to the West.  So it went in thousands of West Berlin department stores and bars, bookstores and movie theatres, hamburger joints and even pornography shops.”

The article continues, “outside the Wertheimer department store, a crowd gathered around a glass case to ogle an elaborate toy train display that seemed as marvelous to them as the Mercedes sedans clogging the nearby side street.”  According to a March 18, 1990 Denver Post article, there are now open-air markets in Weimar, East Germany with signs over much-coveted blue jeans and bananas that read “deutsche marks only.”

This intoxication with Western goods and services affected the results of the March 19 free elections in East Germany, after which one East German man (interviewed on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather) concluded “East Germany is finished.  Fifty percent of the people voted for money, not for their own country.”  A professor from Humboldt University in East Berlin concluded “My fellow countrymen have betrayed me and my nation for the promise of riches.  They voted for bananas, chocolate, and a better life.”  In nearby Czechoslovakia, when the borders were opened to the west, one Prague teenager (interviewed on the CBS Evening News) said “I think for young people it makes no sense, because we won’t have the money to go [to the West] anyway.”  This degenerative focusing of human desire upon the acquisition of products characterizes life at the lower depths of capitalism.

The elderly and the soon-to-be unemployed of East Germany are fearful of the insecurity that capitalism will bring.  Under socialism, the East Germans have “cradle-to-grave” social benefits that provide secure employment, as well as subsidized food and housing.

On December 31, 1989, a journalist for CBS Sunday Morning reported “Most East Germans want the benefits of a free economy, but are afraid of losing the benefits of socialism.”  An East German lady (being interviewed) agreed, “Not only a free economy, but on the other side the social things should not be lost:  the right for work; everyone has a house; nobody is so poor they have to be hungry.”  A March 13, 1990 Denver Post article reported:

“Economic reforms will leave 100,000 auto workers without jobs, an industry official said yesterday in the most concrete sign that East Germany’s radical changes could mean widespread unemployment.  Dieter Voigt, the general manager of East Germany’s IFA Automobile works, said layoffs of between sixty percent to seventy percent were expected in the automobile industry and related production facilities.”

On the March 19, NBC Evening News with Tom Brokaw, Gerhard Petri (interviewed in East Germany) said “I am scared that my apartment will cost four or five times more, and my pension will not be raised.  I am 78 years old and I don’t see a rosy future.”

According to a December 14 Rocky Mountain News article by Peter Tautfest (an American writer and editor who has lived in West Germany for the last twenty years), West Berlin residents, prior to the building of the Berlin Wall, would exchange their strong mark on the free market for the weak East German mark and cross over to East Berlin to buy such heavily subsidized food items as bread, milk, potatoes and meat at a fraction of the price they had to pay in Western supermarkets.  “Today,” he writes, “many fear the same prospect could draw West Berlin’s growing population of homeless, unemployed and social dropouts to buy cheap basics in East Berlin.”  He adds:

“An even greater worry is that a poor and weak East Germany could wind up as an economic colony of its rich and powerful Western cousin.  Some wealthy West Germans are already speculating in real estate in East Germany, . . . As go basic food items and real estate, so would go industrial assets. . . . In no time flat, large parts of East Germany could be bought up by West German investors.”

Fear and insecurity, already being felt by East Germans, are at the heart of the lower depths of capitalism.

Soon, capitalism will be the only economic system of significant strength.  Then, all other systems will be slight in comparison.  Eyes will turn away from the tangible oppression of the socialist regimes that created symbols of division such as the Berlin Wall and rulers such as Nicolai Ceaucescu.  As the refugees flood to the capitalist west and socialist regimes crumble into obscurity, eyes will turn to the oppression of capitalism that degenerates the compassion and desire of humanity into a narrowed focus upon earnings, acquisitions, and basic hand-to-mouth survival.  It is an oppression that cannot be shattered into pieces with a sledgehammer, like the Berlin Wall, or assassinated with a firing squad, like Ceaucescu, yet it seeks to divide, control, and submerge life with the same authority.

~

by S.A. Bort / 1 August 2013 (4 April 1990)

Three Essays Advocating the Abolishing of Money:  III.  “Imagining Earth (Without Money)”

Three Essays Advocating The Abolishing Of Money:  II.  “The Travail of Wage Labor“

Photo Credits:

1).  Associated Press.  The Denver Post.  18 March 1990.  2), 3).  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall  4).  eBay.  5).  http://www.bridgemanart.com/asset/328143/Children-holding-a-banner-reading-‘Krenzman’-duri  6).  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/10/berlin-model-railroad-birds-eye-view-in-miniature_n_1505832.html#slide=960847  7). eBay. 8).  http://media.photobucket.com/user/julierhodes7/media/playgroundcemetary.jpg.html?filters[term]=cradle%20to%20grave&filters[primary]=images&filters[secondary]=videos&sort=1&o=19#/user/julierhodes7/media/playgroundcemetary.jpg.html?filters%5Bterm%5D=cradle%20to%20grave&filters%5Bprimary%5D=images&filters%5Bsecondary%5D=videos&sort=1&o=19&_suid=1375402521143003213963459371233  9).  Amazon.com.

NOTE:

I originally wrote this April 4, 1990, five months after the Berlin Wall fell.  After twenty-three years, I thought I would tune it up a bit and publish it here on the blog, along with the two accompanying essays.

I sent these three essays to Burlington, Vermont’s Brautigan Library, named for Richard Brautigan and initiated by his daughter, Ianthe.  The essays were among the first (in 1990) accepted, bound and placed on the shelves under the “Mayonnaise System Catalog Number” of:  “Social/Political/Cultural:  SOC 1990.007.”  My accompanying certificate states:  “LET NO MAN block the light of wisdom and inspiration found therein.”

See: http://dtc-wsuv.org/brautiganlibrary/?s=Stephen+Bort , http://www.cchmuseum.org/research/the-brautigan-library/ , http://www.thebrautiganlibrary.org/Blank.html , http://www.brautigan.net/responses-library.html , http://brautigan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.php?page=The+Brautigan+Library and https://www.facebook.com/BrautiganLibrary for current information on the library.

Shortly after I was added to the shelves, I was contacted by Lawrence Ingrassia of the Wall Street Journal, who was writing an article on the opening of the library.  He had seen the above foreward to this essay and was curious about the concept of “abolishing money.”  He asked if I was a socialist.  I answered no.  He asked other questions, but in the end, his article of May 28, 1991 did not mention me.  His article can be found here: http://brautigan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.php?page=Ingrassia+1991+Fictional+Library+Becomes+a+Real+Place

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