untitled (green shrimp) 2008

This beautiful salty oxymoron is permanently mounted above a wholesale seafood business on Madison Street in Chinatown.

untitled (clover) 2008

Just west of the East River shore in Brooklyn Bridge Park a large lawn supporting several huge patches of clover was dotted with raindrops this past Sunday.

a clutch of some of the pink and yellow [g a y] balloons which accompany Sharon Hayes's "Revolutionary Love 1 & 2: I Am Your Worst Fear, I Am Your Best Fantasy", spotted hanging out at the bottom of a dark corner of the hall just outside the room where the sound and video piece is installed

I didn't have time to do a full post on the show tonight, so I decided that I'd put up just one image and make a very strong recommendation that everyone who can do so make her or his way to the Park Avenue Armory tomorrow (actually that's today, Saturday) for the last day of Creative Time's essential contribution to the moment we're all sharing right now, questioning the idea of "Democracy in America".

It's an awesome show, it's not going to be forgotten, and you know you're going to want to have been a part of it - especially after the news that an important and not unrelated show at the Chelsea Museum has been [summarily ?] pulled.

*
This headline is the title of the exhibition catalog, edited by its curator, Nato Thompson.

a view of John Wallbank's studio showing rich, evocative shapes fashioned from scraps

It was a tremendously rejuvenating afternoon, and it continued into early evening. Barry and I both feel refreshed and renewed from an interaction yesterday's with a number of charming, smart, creative people and their art, after a rather slow summer and continuing dramatic reminders of the hideous knavery and incompetence which describes the alternate universe of the business and political world. (Yes, we're all entitled to call it a depression, even if for now it only describes our psychic state.)

At the invitation of the organizers, Barry and I spent hours walking through the workshops of dozens of artists from all over the world who had been invited to participate in a two-week program sponsored by Triangle Arts Association. This coming Saturday their Front Street Brooklyn studios will be open to the public, from 1 to 6 pm, as part of DAC's Art Under the Bridge Festival. I highly recommend a visit. This is an extraordinary group of artists: We weren't able to make it to every studio space in the time we had, but there certainly were no disappointments yesterday.

The images which surround this text represent only a peek at what I saw in some of the studios. I've indicated the name of the artists, but of course what you see here does not necessarily represent finished works, and for that matter, it may not be what you might find set up for visitors on Saturday.

Sun You's shimmering wall assemblage, in the form of a triptych, moves with the viewer

two sketches by the painter/printmaker Bertrand Bracaval explore and expand his themes

Suhee Wooh's improvisatory paintings may begin with barely-discernible human shapes

Valerio Carruba's pencilled frontispiece to his series of anatomy drawings

Maya Attoun's assemblage relates the body to the domestic materials which define it

This is the complete list of artists in the workshop this year:

Maya Attoun (Israel)
Bertrand Bacaral (France)
Astrid Busch (Germany)
Jillian Conrad (USA)
Valerio Carrubba (Italy)
Sungjin Choi (Korea/NY)
Alessandro Dal Pont (Italy)
Ann Gollifer (Botswana)
Alice Guareschi (Italy)
Minji Kim (South Korea)
Ethan Kruszka (USA)
Francis Okoronkwo Ikechukwu (Nigeria) [unfortunately unable to secure US visa]
Dan Levenson (USA)
Ghassan Maasri (Lebanon)
Maggie Madden (Ireland)
Kabelo Kim Modise (Namibia)
Liz Murray (England)
Klaus Pamminger (Austria)
Keun Young Park (South Korea/USA)
Emma Puntis (England)
Paul Santoleri (USA)
Justin Storms (USA)
Nicholas Tourre (France)
John Wallbank (England)
Suhee Wooh (Korea/NY)
Sun You (Korea/NY)

untitled (B E CO) 2008

I'm not sure what's going on here, but the presentation is certainly wonderful. There's no information inside Honey Space, the alternative Chelsea room which displays this sculpture, and nothing on its site. Midori Harima has an installation at Honey Space on Eleventh Avenue right now. It's a trompe-l'œil carousel, its surfaces shaped from paper. It's vaguely three dimensional and vaguely life size, almost colorless and almost immaterial. It's totally surrounded by black velvet curtains and levitates inches above a shiny floor. The only light in the room comes from the projection which nearly brings this gloomy merry-go-round to life.

Thinking about it afterwards I mused that I would like to hear music of some kind while standing in front of this ghostly apparition; maybe the artist could have furnished some distant achingly-sad ambient sound. But now as I look at the image I'm uploading here I realize instead that the work inspires the viewer makes her or his own music. The fact that it might be only an unspecific, vague collection of distant tones would probably just about perfect.

A surfer colony in Bushwick? Who knew? Yesterday afternoon these surfer dudes were busy loading a number of boards into and onto this beach buggy on Bogart across from Grattan.

untitled (Blindness) 2008

I just found this a few minutes ago while looking at my gatherings for my day in Bushwick and Williamsburg. I probably shouldn't admit it, since I like the image so much, but it was just one of those captures I manage to dredge up while carrying my feather-triggered camera around dropped more or less at arms length. The wall is on Metropolitan Avenue just east of the BQE.

Earlier this evening I spotted this canvas leaning against a light pole on Metropolitan Avenue near the BQE overpass. It's a painting of a modernist steel and glass building, and it's been carefully pressed into the shape of the architectural image it outlines.

I like it as sculpture, especially with that broken lower stretcher rail which added a bend to the right of the center. Maybe it's still there.

park yourself down where iron monsters usually lie

I went down the block to our local Whole Foods market yesterday afternoon, and as I turned the corner onto the avenue from 24th Street I stopped in my tracks. I must not have been reading my emails with any care, because I was taken entirely by surprise to find one of the 50 sites of what was the second "Park(ing) Day NYC". The "Seventh Haven" chapter had unrolled some real turf and living potted plants onto what is normally a vehicle parking lane. From this refreshing green oasis they greeted passersby and invited them to share their outdoor furniture and reading materials, the greenery and the ease.

"Brigadoon" is the story of a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every hundred years. These little parks may appear with greater frequency, but they are no more permanent than a view of that enchanted Highland valley - in the New York case, even for the cheery inhabitants we might meet there.

It was almost exactly one year ago that these activists had first introduced us to the possibilities which would open up if we took a hard, humanistic look at our current transportation priorities. Sadly, the "park" I saw yesterday looked no more permanent than the one I had seen the year before. I'd like to believe we might expect more from our City planners than to simply continue countenancing these annual exercises.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung untitled 2007 oil on canvas 11" x 14"

This was my favorite of a small, diverse group of paintings in the Molly Zuckerman-Hartung installation, "An Erotics", in the Tunnel Room at John Connelly Presents. Since it was also the last one I saw, and since I liked it enough to take away this image, I'm thinking I should go back to check out the other canvases a second time. The evening I was there I felt I was being hurried on to the next venue, and I hadn't even read the short press release, where Zuckerman-Hartung's evident indifference to the convention of showing a distinctive style (or "brand") is more than affirmed by the artist herself.

It was a glitch.

Because of some technical difficulties today, some of my draft posts went out last night in my "jimlog" email and appeared on the site for a while. I apologize for any confusion, and for the aesthetic abomination.

Sometimes I start a post and complete it much later when I have time (or maybe never), and sometimes I use drafts to make notes for potential posts. So, while some of these "drafts" are like post-it note reminders for myself to complete an entry in the near future, some are set up only as raw material bins.

[image, once again, from Benjamin Fischer's "Portfolio Neuordnung"]

It looks like I'm obsessed with cartoons this afternoon, so one more may not be a surprise, and this one is really fresh.

[image from Tom Toles via Yahoo]

And so the last myth of Republican competence has been exploded: I'm referring to the ability to accumulate on paper vast amounts of private wealth. I would have thought the world paroxysm of the 1930s would have been impressive enough, but Americans have no history, just those myths.

Although I once worked in that world, I wasn't really of it, and I knew enough to know what I didn't know. I used to think I'd never be able to say anything smart about the financial world, but the events of the past months, and especially the past few days, have strangely emboldened me, as I hope they have the entire country.

[image of Scott Adams strip via Don Monk]

Alexander Cockburn knows how to turn a phrase - or two. In a piece in the current The Nation titled "Fatal Distraction" he outlines what the "miraculous conception" [my phase] of Sarah Palin as VP candidate has done to the ordinary high level of American political campaign discourse [just kidding, folks]. He dismisses the circumspect MSM accounts of what happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and offers his own. I have to remind myself that he's writing this before the financial crash news of the last few days.

He begins by saying that the MSP has been far too circumspect in describing "the misleading procedures identified by Treasury accountants scrutinizing Fannie and Freddie's ledgers".

In cruder language the operators of these two giants had been engaged in the pleasant activity of cooking the books by borrowing at low-interest government rates, selling the repackaged mortgages at a higher-interest markup and then lying about their actual exposures. "Fannie and Freddie were almost single-handedly supporting the junk mortgage market that was making Wall Street rich," economist Michael Hudson told CounterPunch the Monday after the takeover, protecting themselves from regulatory harassment by shoveling campaign contributions at the relevant lawmakers sitting on the financial committees in Washington.

Now the Treasury is refloating these two huge casinos and sending them down the river again, so that Wall Street can stay happy and China and the other overseas lenders can be assured that the money they're lending the United States to finance activities like strafing Afghan children from the air is at least partly secured.

He's tough on the money handlers and their Republican enablers, but neither Barack Obama nor his party are spared Cockburn's scorn. Several paragraphs earlier he argued that idealistic younger voters, whose turnout is needed on November 4, are being distracted by the more ludicrous aspects of Palin's weird story:

. . . from unpleasant reflections on the candidate of hope and change, whose prime foreign policy commitment is to increase the US military presence in Afghanistan and hence the certainty that Afghan children will be shot from the air or blown up by US gunships in steadily increasing numbers.

The peace candidate has disappeared.

But the ball is being dropped at home as well. Cockburn suggests the Democrats are dead on arrival in the area of domestic change as well, particularly in the financial area:

The problem is that co-conspiring in Gramm's [Phil Gramm, McCain's "unoffical" financial advisor] deregulatory rampages in the late '90s was the Clinton Administration, spurred on by the Democratic Leadership Council. On the ticket with Obama is that lifelong serf of the banks, Joe Biden. Obama himself has been heavily staked by Wall Street.

It happens every time. Progressives are eternally hopeful, but as soon as it looks like we might prevail, we run into the same closed door. I think this time it might have been our last chance. I feel like Charlie Brown, and the system I'm working with is Lucy and that football.

Cockburn's article ends on a note a measure less lugubrious than my own - but not by much:

When they look back on it, people will surely see this election as one of the larger missed opportunities in the nation's history for scrutiny and shake-up of our economic and imperial arrangements: an unpopular war abroad, brazen thievery by the rich and powerful at home, widespread discontent of huge slabs of the electorate, beleaguered by debt, low wages and joblessness. How easy it should have been for a politician as eloquent and intelligent as Obama to create an irresistible popular constituency challenging business as usual. But what's positively eerie is the cautious sensitivity of his political antennas, alerting him time and again to the risks of actually saying or pledging anything substantive by way of challenge to present arrangements. Small wonder it's hard to remember much that he says, because so little that he does say is ever substantively memorable or surprising or exciting; no wonder that Sarah Palin is proving so successful a distraction.

[image from bodie25]

in the end, invisible even to Republicans

So now we have to nationalize those stars of the capitalist firmament, the monopolistic conglomerates we've been encouraging for decades, because with the tender care of the Government they've finally gotten too big for us to let them fail. What happened to that legendary "Invisible Hand"?

[image from bizid.co]

untitled (towers) 2008

Both towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are reflected in the waters of the East [er, . . . tidal strait] at the top of this photograph. The picture was taken yesterday from the deck outside the Spiegeltent on Pier 17. Later in the evening those outdoor spaces were the site of the presentation of The Bessies.

And, yes, the water you see here was moving north at a good clip.

untitled (self-portrait with Praktiflex) 1961

Occasionally someone will ask about the brevity of my "about" page, but for years I have put off enlarging it. I suppose it was because I couldn't decide what to put in or leave out, or how formal or personal it should be. I think I've come up with an answer, at least for now. I've kept the original statement on my home page, but I've written an extended and probably sort-of-irritating narrative bio, "more about" on a separate page, where you have to dig for it a little, and where I expect it to languish in obscurity.

Oh, the picture which appears there was taken by Barry while we were crossing to Seattle in a ferry. It may not have been taken yesterday, but it has the virtue of documenting the last time I remember having anything resembling a tan. The picture of me (also showing a tan - hmmm . . . .) included on this page was taken in the entrance foyer of the home in which I grew up.

lovely shirt, Noah, but don't try to eat it

I found Noah Lyon in the middle of the largest of the pieces in Jennifer Steinkamp's show, "Daisy Bell", last Sunday when Barry and I visited Lehmann Maupin's beautiful Lower East Side space. Noah was covered with sections of Steinkamps' gently-waving projection of flowers as they paraded down the far wall of the darkened gallery on a black ground.

My thoughts about the show itself while I was in the gallery were something on the order of, "yes, it's beautiful, but (especially because of the extravagant high-tech element) so what?" I didn't actually read the press release until much later (in fact only after looking on my computer screen at the picture above) and then it came together. I have to remind myself that sometimes you shouldn't leave a show without looking at the "instructions". Here's an excerpt from the gallery website, edited for some typos:

The title, Daisy Bell, refers to a particular moment in the history of science and culture: when in 1962, Bell Labs used the IBM 704 to synthesize the popular 19th- Century English song of the same name. The song was also used in the climactic scene of the epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the supercomputer HAL 9000 begins to sing Daisy, Daisy as his consciousness is degraded.

Steinkamp's Daisy Bell series is comprised of a variety of poisonous flowers that appear to cascade down the gallery walls.

Much as Bell Lab's Daisy Bell consisted of a human application reinterpreting nature, Steinkamp reprises the idea, and defines this new series of artwork by its relationship to human innovations.

The gallery's site for this exhibition has more images, including a video of another piece being shown on Chrystie Street.

untitled (yellow slickers) 2008

Early last Saturday we met up with a visiting friend who had never been to New York before, so of course we didn't let the rain keep us inside. We ended up walking all over Manhattan. In the midst of the worst of it I found this handsome family of ghosts sheltering, like the three of us, under a marquee on Broadway in Times Square.

just put in a parking lot

Remember that glorious central transit hub we were promised? The one they've been dangling in front of all of our eyes for years? Gone. It's been cancelled. It looks like one more case of bait-and-switch. Some people are making a lot of money playing with us, while they play with this wretched site.

On September 10th, the day before this, our latest jingoist holiday, "Patriot Day"*, Mayor Bloomberg decided to drop his own bomb on New York. In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, "There Should Be No More Excuses At Ground Zero", he wrote:

. . . the PATH station's design, including the underground hall, is too complicated to build and threatens to delay the memorial and the entire project. It must be scaled back.

The scale of the grand, highly-praised and long-anticipated transit superstation designed by Santiago Calatrava for the World Trade Center site had already been cut back several times, and our Mayor wants it reduced even further - actually, totally eliminated at least as we've known it until now.

One would think that our much-vaunted "subway mayor," who worked so hard (with mixed results) to make several totally inappropriate new corporate-sports stadiums and arenas his personal civic career memorial, might be able to persuade himself that a great transit hub would be the perfect grand projet to leave to a great city on the run. But no, he just wants to fill in that damn hole.

*
originally called "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims Of the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001" and never to be confused with that much more venerable and more upbeat celebration called "Patriots' Day"

[image from answers.com]

Fermilab scientists in Illinois hold pajama party celebrating activation of collider near Geneva

I love this story. I had tears in my eyes before I had barely begun reading it, and they're still there as I'm typing this. Very good journalism, and the photos are absolutely wonderful.

An ocean away from Geneva, the new [Hadron] collider's activation was watched with rueful excitement here at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which has had the reigning particle collider.

Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers, and three local mayors gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new high-energy physics. They applauded each milestone as the scientists methodically steered the protons on their course at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Many of them, including the lab's director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even nightcaps bearing Fermilab "pajama party" patches on them.

Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky, a reminder that the universe was beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.

I've only read the hard copy story so far, and since I'm listening to a dramatic, late (wartime) symphony by Nikolai Myaskovsky right now, I'll wait to watch the video on the NYTimes site.

entrance to the underground Cern Laboratory near Geneva

The wooden 2002 Palais de l'Equilibre [architect Hervé Dessimoz, construction engineer Thomas Büchi], the icon of the 2002 Swiss National Exhibition, performs as the public face of the laboratory. It's now been dubbed, "Globe de l'Innovation", but I prefer the sound and the idea of the original name. Its shape and its current placement are surely a tribute to Étienne-Louis Boullée's theoretical, monumental designs, in particular his "Cénotaphe a Newton" (1784). For a discussion of the architecture of the underground lab itself, see this Charles Jencks essay, "Ultimate architecture: Cern's partical detector".

[first image by Peter Wynn Thompson from the NYTimes, the second by Anja Niedringhaus from Associated Press via NYTimes]

Marcius Galan Isolante (quadrada)/Isulated (square) 2006 painted metal 55" x 52" x 36.75" [installation view]

Edgard de Souza Tigelinha (grupo I) 2004 cow skin 23.75" x 35.5" x 4" [installation view]

The first show of the fall season at Eleven Rivington is curated by Fernanda Arruda. "Active Forms" includes work by three young South American artists currently working in São Paolo. The sculptures and works on paper by Edgard de Souza, Marcius Galan and Camila Sposati are displayed here, literally, in the shadow of several small hanging drawings by the Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919-1988), a pioneer in conceptual abstraction most familiar for work which combined language and paper.

Brock Enright Untitled 2008 [detail of installation, with small wooden objects "Computer 1" on the left, "Computer 2" on the right]

[large detail]

Robert Longo [his new ArtCat site is coming soon!] has a curatorial project he calls "Monsters" at Rental. It opened last night. There's one 1999 study by Longo in the show, but each of the some dozen other artists has assisted Longo in his studio during the last ten years. An acrylic and silkscreen on canvas piece by Zander Vaubel has been placed above the gallery desk. Vaubel died in a tragic accident in Brooklyn in 2006 He was 22.

I was already familiar with Brock Enright's art, and that of Paolo Arao, but I think the others were new to me. A number of works stood out even in what was a very crowded reception. Of course I was intrigued by Enright's installation, one of a number of works he expects to complete which will incorporate elements from his dramatic projects. I liked Arao's drawings, as well as works by Michael Owen, Jason Bartell, Garrick Imatani and Eric Schnell. The names of Qing Liu, Julio Gonzalez, Colin Hunt, Owen McAuley, Nathan Spondike and William Latta complete the list.

This is what the sky looked like above a mid-nineteenth-century warehouse on a breezy West 27th Street around 7 o'clock last night. The rains arrived hours later.

For years we've been horrified by what's been coming out of the Republican camp, but now we can take a laugh break.

I found the first of these four videos through the New York magazine blog site while searching Google for results on Levi Johnston/"sex on skates" after reading Maureen Dowd's "Too Much Life?" [print edition title], in the NYTimes this morning. I usually skip her rants, but today I found it somewhat compelling, not least because jumping out of the page was the phrase:

wild soap opera storylines erupting from the Palin family and the Alaskan wilderness [my italics]

The videos are by Sara Benincasa. The one I saw was incredibly cute (and I mean that in the best way), but most important it was a truly hysterical parody, and not the least bit mean. Yes, I know the real story isn't this family, but rather McCain's misjudgment and his cynicism.

Now excuse me while I go off to look at the other three videos.

[image from youtube]

I know it's almost two months away, but if your calendar fills up like my calendar does, and if you already know how worthy this operation is, you'll appreciate knowing now that the 2008 NURTUREart benefit is scheduled for October 27th. It's also an terrific opportunity to bring home some terrific art, so put it in your calendars: As Barry says on Bloggy, "You know any group that honored James and me at the last one has excellent taste".

Oh, and the bash will be in Manhattan, at James Cohan Gallery on West 26th Street. More details as we get closer to the date.

an early image of the "Me Worry?" kid, possibly from the 1920s according to Wikipedia

Going back at least as far as The Yellow Kid, we've always had our Alfred E. Neumans, but we never used to make them emperors.

The upshot of telling a citizenry over and over again for two hundred years that anyone can become president is today's reality that anyone can become president - unless of course they're smart or work hard to deserve the honor and responsibility.

Mournful thoughts about the current occupant of the White House and the two cyphers whom the corporations are about to nominate to succeed him are the occasion for my reflection on this baleful subject.

We now know that Bush clearly wasn't an accident, and McCain and Palin scare me perhaps more - if that's even possible.

[image from wikipedia]

The Minnesota September 1st "March on the RNC and Stop the War" began in St. Paul at 11am local time today (CDT is one hour earlier than New York). Marchers planned to start with a rally at the state capitol, go to the Xcel Center in a "permitted" march and return to the capital, but things are already getting interesting as I write this. For more information see marchonrnc.org.

For continuous updates, go to this page on the Twin Cities Indymedia site or check out the MnIndyLIVE twitter feed.

Should you need more context for this, see my earlier posts from August 28 and August 30, and this Salon.com piece by Glenn Greenwald published just 24 hours ago. It's excerpted here:

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

It seems we're now leaving it up to the kids to defend liberties we all used to pretend were ours. I hope that somehow both they and the genuine patriotism which inspires them survives. At the moment they aren't being given much support, or even the recognition which a real media would owe them, the rest of us, and the entire world.

[image from marchonrnc]

National Guardsmen firing into demonstrators during the 1894 Chicago Pullman strike* [contemporary Harpers Weekly drawing]

[six years ago today I did an entry titled "the real meaning of Labor Day". I posted it again last year, and I think it's time to do it again. My brief text was augmented with quotes from the site of Jim Lehrer's PBS show, NewsHour, on a page which had appeared the week before September 11, 2001. Last year I added the image which appears above]

It's not the barbeque, and it's certainly not the traffic. It was born as an attempt to appease the working people of America. [Remember the Pullman strike in history class?] Unfortunately it seems to have worked too well.

The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America's labor unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant election-year compromise.

Soon after, when the entire nation became thoroughly frightened by the bugbear of socialism and communism, the movement was de-radicalized. The real Left was gradually marginalized and almost totally eliminated from American culture and society. The workers' movement itself became middle class, before it acquired the material benefits and political power which that adjustment should have delivered. And there it languishes.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed...that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it."

Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words, though, Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer rather than a day for political organizing. In 1995, less than 15 percent of American workers belonged to unions, down from a high in the 1950's of nearly 50 percent, though nearly all have benefited from the victories of the Labor movement.

Happy Labor Day, but don't forget.

*
I haven't been able to find a really good compact summary of the strike anywhere on line, although there is this setting of the broader context in a discussion from Howard Zinn. I would definitely welcome any other suggestions. I can however offer information on some of the numbers involved in the physical conflict itself, quoted here from the Kansas Heritage Group:

The total forces of the strikebreakers both government and private were [against 100,000 strikers]: 1,936 federal troops, 4,000 national guardsmen, about 5,000 extra deputy marshals, 250 extra deputy sheriffs, and the 3,000 policemen in Chicago for a total of 14,186 strikebreakers. In addition to these figures there were also twelve people shot and killed, and 71 people who were arrested and sentenced on the federal indictment.

No picnic.

[image from Wikimedia Commons]