The Wit of the Staircase

Dessert Topping On The Apocalypse Or Paradise Now? Wit Talks Art, War and Religion With Activist Father Frank Morales

Frank Morales is an Episcopal priest and activist in New York City.

Morales was born in 1949 and grew up in the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father was Puerto Rican and his mother Peruvian.

He first became involved in politics after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King as a member of the Assassination Information Committee.

Morales became an assistant pastor in 1978. In the Bronx he worked with squatters. In one interview he recalled, "I used to walk out of services with a crowbar and we’d open up abandoned buildings...." He now works at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

Wit and her partner, the artist Jeremy Blake, are currently residing in the church’s historic Ernest Flagg Rectory, where this interview took place.

Wit: So we of Wit want to hear about your years of research into a few of these covert Pentagon programs that have and are being instituted against civilian populations in places like good ol' New York and Los Angeles, particularly against these cities’ expressive and creative communities, their artists and filmmakers…

Father Frank Morales: Yes, well there's Operation Garden Plot, which is the U.S. Department of Defense code name for "U.S. Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2." But it's Garden Plot for short in most of the documents I've seen.

Wit: But some people say Operation Garden Plot is a myth, a paranoid invention…

FF: It's secret, but there's a paper trail, a legal trail. The legal eagles of the military, they're called Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs. They're the legal sophists who rationalize the death machine. They've published a bunch of papers on assassination, on various things that are very interesting reading, and one of them is on the subject of domestic military operations, against civilian populations, and this is Operation Garden Plot.

Wit: So these Pentagon Programs against domestic dissent were ramped up after the popular movements of the sixties, correct? They didn't want young people rising up and ending any more of their wars.

FF: Yeah. The historical roots of Operation Garden Plot, namely the Pentagon civil disturbance plan, emerged from the Kerner Commission. This was a federal commission that was appointed in 1967 according to a President Johnson Executive Order, to examine the roots of the riots that took place. There were 109 urban uprisings that took place in 1967, and they're looking at particularly Detroit and Newark, Watts. This report mentions ways in which to prevent riots in the future, and it’s also the first document to outline how Operation Garden Plot is a preemptive concept in this regard.

Wit: So like Cointelpro, it was designed to identify people and groups before they came to be influential and sway their peers or, in the case of someone like John Lennon, their popular audiences?

FF: Yes, it's suppression of dissent, and you can find many other documents online, for those who care to, at The Center for Law and Military Operations, or CLAMO. On their publications page there's a long list of legal dossiers, legal opinions, on this and other subjects.

Wit: And these are Pentagon documents?

FF: Well, it's been a work in progress since the popular uprisings against the Vietnam War and other popular uprising in the sixties. The military guys are always tweaking it, working it and so on. Over the decades, there's been administrative shifts in terms of who's the executive agent in charge of these things. It used to be the Army; now it's Northcom, which Dick Cheney heads.

Wit: And you said since the sixties the Pentagon devotes more and more money and manpower to something called Operations Other Than War.

FF: Yes, there's an increasing focus on turning the psychological operations might, the money, the suppression of dissent toward civilian populations. You can read about Operations Other Than War in these military magazines--Parameters Magazine, Military Review, The Army War College. It’s OOTW for short--Operations Other than War.

Wit: So what sorts of measures do they suggest taking against dissenters, protestors, or just people who have unpopular opinions?

FF: The primary law of counterinsurgency is preemption, and Operation Garden Plot is the main preemptive counterinsurgency strategy. In other words, you need to move before the opposition has a chance to gather any strength whatsoever. So, what Garden Plot represents from a macro point of view is a counterinsurgency apparatus directed at the American people to preempt and prevent the rise of resistance.

Wit: And what's Operation Chaos then?

FF: Operation Chaos is an intelligence gathering apparatus that was compiling lists of people who were involved in dissent. You know, various forms of rebellion against the, quote, unquote, authority of the U.S. government. So, they kept files on people. A lot of this was exposed in the mid-70s during the Church Committee hearings. But the Pentagon's machinations in the suppression of dissent have to this day remained fairly submerged. Operation Garden Plot has not been the subject of an article in The Nation or any other liberal journals in any extensive way--and forget any kind of mainstream stuff....

An Empire Won

Acting in the Way of Nature
often means not acting -
Not doing anything.
Indeed an empire can often be won
By doing nothing at the right time.
Indeed a life can often be lost
By trying to do too much.

--Lao Tzu

Link: whiskey river.

Witchy Atavism v. Lines Of Flight

Vaguely condescending but mostly respectful review of Wit favorite Karen Kilimnik's survey show at the ICA in Philadelphia by New York Times critic Roberta Smith, below. For we of Wit all Kilimnik's artistic devices and guises are brilliant ways to get past the mystification of female sexuality and female intelligence in culture, something that high culture is still as guilty of as low culture. (High culture is in fact now perhaps more guilty of this than low, which permits more of certain liberties freed from the class restraints of the former.)

The vaguely anti-social (or undersocialized; or as Smith puts it "woman-child") Kilimnik has the nuts or stupidity to keep pointing out this mystification. Artists like Smith favorite Cindy Sherman are the adolescent ones to we of Wit, as they have childishly made a bargain with this system rather than creating a space outside it. We of Wit are not fans of Sherman's work because it participates in creating a nostalgic (or retrograde, if you wish) aura of witchy atavism around women. Kilimnik's adolescent tinge is uncomprising and bold--the stance of a Deleuzian madwoman describing new "lines of flight."

Smith herself also seems to deliberately rely on this kind of mystificiation and Hellfire-style social S & M in her career as a female art critic. That's not power to we of Wit, it's a pose. One that is designed to make other people (call them "child-men", if you please) comfortable.

"Karen Kilimnik has gotten the survey that her strange, still difficult achievement deserves. For one thing, her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art is appropriately strange itself, beginning with a barren, seemingly empty, party’s-over gallery. It goes deep into her woman-child imagination, touching an all-too-American sense of emptiness. It also makes her efforts in installation art, which encompass materials as various as glitter, fake snow and blood, stuffed animals, ballet shoes and piles of party drugs, feel of a piece with her painting, photography, video and drawing."

Link: Karen Kilimnik - Art - Review - Philadelphia - New York Times.

Sleight Of Hand On The Staircase: A Larger Action Covers A Smaller Action

"It is commonly believed that sleight of hand works because 'the hand is quicker than the eye' but this is usually not the case.

In addition to manual dexterity, sleight of hand depends on the use of psychology, misdirection and natural choreography in accomplishing a magical effect. Misdirection is perhaps the most important component of the art of sleight of hand. Using misdirection, the skillful magician choreographs every movement in a routine so even the most critical and observant spectators are compelled to look where the magician wants them to.

Two types of misdirection are time and movement. Time is simple; by allowing a small amount of time to pass after an action, events are skewed in the viewer's mind. Movement is a little more complicated. A phrase often used is 'A larger action covers a smaller action.' But care must be used to not make the larger action so big it is suspicious."

Link: Sleight of hand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Zombie Flash Mob In S.F.

Must view photo series! (They swarm the Apple Store and the Scientology "Stress Test" table in the BART station.)

Link: zombie market street photo -- Declan McCullagh photograph.

Via: un regard oblique.

More Interesting, More Hopeful

"Check Heidegger. I would agree with him that we do a lot better treating anxiety (some forms, at least) as a kind of beckoning of the self to a self rather than as a symptom of illness. This is why in writing novels I often find that it works to turn things upside-down and to set forth a character‹say, a woman with severe free-floating anxiety‹as more interesting, more hopeful, possessing greater possibilities than, say, another perfectly adjusted symptom-free woman. To say this is to say a good deal more than that illness is more interesting than health."

-Interview - Walker Percy

Via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Suffragette, Revolutionary, Bohemian, Cabinet Minister: Ireland's Wildest Woman

"SHE stares rather disconsolately into the middle distance like a little too much absinthe has been taken and a cigarette droops languidly from her full lips.

Her companion stares directly and defiantly at the camera, beautiful, Bohemian and with sexual frankness that would have scandalised her contemporaries in well born Ango-Irish society.

Even today it is a provocative image but this remarkable photograph also sheds new light on two of the wildest women in Irish history.

The gaunt and hauntingly fragile figure on the left is none other than Countess Constance Markiewicz - revolutionary, suffragette and Ireland's first woman cabinet minister...."

Link: Revealing photo album of Ireland's wildest women - Independent.ie.

Via: Professor Hex.

One Need Not Be A Chamber To Be Haunted: Ghost Photos For Sale

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted; / One need not be a house; /The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.”

--Emily Dickinson

"In the mid 19th century, two powerful forces--the march of technology and the gaining momentum of the Spiritualist movement--led to a strange alliance of photography and the supernatural and the birth of 'spirit photography'.

From the 1860s carte-de-visites of William Mumler to the present day, photography has been used to both prove and debunk the existence of ghosts and spirits. Jack and Beverly Wilgus, a collecting team for 30 years and the creative force behind the Bright Byte Studio, have a remarkable collection of spirit photography. In the following interview, they discuss their collection and this mysterious aspect of ephemera...."

Link: ephemera: Spirit Photography Collectors Ain't Afriad of No Ghosts.

Via: Professor Hex.

Memorial Day Message In A Bottle

I said I'm Hurt
She said honey let me heal it

--Bruce Springsteen

Among the medals I earned at fifteen for the dark Michigan arts I have here now are Rock Mnemonics, Trickery In The Treehouse, BB Gun Guerrilla, Candle Spells, Apple Bong and Colonial Home Carpetburns.

"Impressive." You say as I rattle them ribbonless in their red wooden chest.

"Yes." We of Wit are forced to admit--then humbly: "And that was just for the early part of the evening."

"Here, smell the animalic darkness,"--I hold the small cedar box up for you--"that's my rich best friend's horse farm where the next day I took my books to the end of her family's wooden pier, there to sort through all last night's sensations alone because the rest of them didn't read."

"Heeley Cuir Pleine Fleur (Fine Leather) conjures up just that kind of teenage animal," I tell you, "summer skins steeped in a violet essence created with all the lies told to cover last night's liberties. A kind of purple Kirilian aura that can only be read by 19 year old grocery clerks."

And then, "Note how that honeyed leather of mimosa complements the thought of '85 camaro."

No reply, really.

"The smoky birch tar and suede notes stand for whatever you come into very close contact with on such strange nights," I instruct anyway.

"Some stains happily never wear off, you see," I continue, "no matter how many pages have been turned, summers passed."

And then from the house down the long lawn, "TD! Phone! It's that guy."

Link: Aedes De Venustas| Indulge Your Senses....

Are You There God? It's Me, Scorpio

Atheists are the new whey-faced fundamentalists, a writer friend wrote us a while back. We are still waiting for this brilliant pal to expound on this in print somewhere suitably high profile.... And now this below, from an ignorant and superstitious weekly horoscope.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23–Nov. 21): Militant atheists make the claim that religion has always been a primary cause of war. If humans weren't under the sway of 'the God delusion,' they fume, armed conflicts would be infrequent. But military historian Eric Bergerud says that's absurd. He notes that while there have been a few religious wars, 'most wars in history have been driven by the lust for power and loot.' In other words, the materialist delusion is far more lethal than the God delusion. People who believe there's nothing of value beyond what the five senses can perceive are often the most dangerous of all. Make this the seed for your meditations, Scorpio. Think about how much less fear and loathing you'd suffer if you knew for a fact that your soul lives forever. Imagine the peace and wonder you'd feel if you knew there are realities and spiritual beings that aren't visible to the naked eye or to the technology that science has dreamed up thus far.

Of course I'm a Scorpio, mes amis....