News and Reviews

Wooden Shoe Books, 112 S. 20^th St., Philadelphia PA 19103, is putting together an Anarchist Songbook and needs your favorite anarchist, protest, anti-nuke, feminist, gay, lesbian, animal liberation, Bob Avakian, etc. songs for the first edition to be available in Spring 1988.

And, they remind us, “Don’t forget to plagiarize.”

Lev Chernyi, already busy with the Columbia Anarchist League and the publication of Anarchy: a journal of desire armed, has announced yet another project: a proposed North American Anarchist Review. It would have as its purpose the increase of anarchist publications and consist of reviews of anti-authoritarian books, pamphlets and periodicals and information on anarchist publishers, book stores and distributors.

This is all in the planning stages with Lev waiting for a response to his proposal from those who would be willing to contribute reviews, help on production and assist with financing. Contact him through CAL, Box 380, Columbia MO 65205.

The Anarchist Archives Project, P.O. Box 1323, Cambridge MA 02238, has been collecting anti-authoritarian literature since 1978. It is an independent project not connected with any institution and is seeking the donation of new and old publications to add to its collection. The AA Project preparing a catalog from its 25 page list of periodicals and books and is available. We suggest a donation for printing and mailing costs.

I’m occasionally approached by people who insist politics and music don’t mix. This rather dated claim once really bothered me until I noticed those complaining most about “political” music were almost always those least politically active.

Of course, there’s always much debate over what and how politics fits. For those who prefer the loud pounding without the hard preaching, Angry Red Planet offers one of the strongest examples. As they tour about the country, their LP, “Little Pigs, Little Pigs,” should make Detroit known as the “protest rock” capital as much as the murder capital.

Though the LP sounds almost too live —ever go to a loud rock show and miss most of the words?—the lyric sheet will fill in those few holes, like exactly how Rocky/Rambo/Stallone autoasphyxiates himself in “Rockycide.”

This group stretches their solid hard-core roots with a creative driving urgency able to make even the more skeptical snarl and laugh with them. The world according to ARP on “Little Pigs” (or on stage) is a world which includes us all, whether we’re arguing or laughing about it. LP is available for $7 from Angry Red Records, PO Box 9, E. Detroit, MI 48021. —Bobby Ochs

The pamphlets, On Organization and On Homosexuality, are now out-of-print and can no longer be ordered from our book service. The latter was a verbatim reprint of a scandalously anti-gay text put out by the Revolutionary (sic) Union (sic), which later became the RCP. It was accompanied by a delightful rapiering of it through a use of creative graphics and quotes showing that these heirs of Stalin are as liberated sexually as the Catholic Church. The former pamphlet, by theorist/obscurantist Jacque Camatte, is a real loss. It is one of Camatte’s easier (though not easy) to understand essays and exposes all organizations as gangs within capital whose only potential is to impede revolutionary development. Anyone interested in reprinting this piece, please contact us.

We have received Bizarro Processed World, a handsomely done self-published pamphlet by Stephanie Klein, a former member of the Processed World magazine collective. Klein tells the sordid story of the racketization of an anti-authoritarian collective, its purges of its members and eventual gang war with its most vociferous critic, “the rogue elephant” of the libertarian milieu, Bob Black. While the pamphlet does not entirely clear up the events, it sheds light on them, and more importantly, raises questions about the mystique behind that closed world of theory-turned-style that characterizes much of the anti-authoritarian current and gives it its bad name. The process of questioning and reflection makes it well worth reading. Available for free from Stephanie Klein, P.O. Box 7353, Menlo Park CA 44025.