INSIDE THE OLDE TOYMAKER'S SHOPPE

This time of year, you're probably buying toys. Toys for kids -- I don't mean collectible action figures, or cool art objects -- I mean actual toys for kids. The ones made by Santa and the elves at the North Pole. It turns out Santa doesn't make them anymore. In fact, he's been outsourcing them for years, but you probably know that. Still, I bet you picture some kindly, gray-haired old Geppetto hammering away in his toy shop, or looking over his spectacles and dabbing on the final details with a Winsor and Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable paintbrush.

Wrong! It turns out your typical toymaker doesn't have kindly spectacles and gray whiskers. Your typical toymaker isn't old enough to have whiskers. And she's a female. Instead of Geppetto, she's named Liu Siuling, and came from the Anhui province, and traveled from the Chinese hinterlands to the big city when she was barely fifteen. She had been making 100 yuan a month ($12.10) in a restaurant, but now she works in a massive toy factory in Biejing. Since 75% of the worlds toys are made in China, including many, many American brand names, chances are that toy on the shelf was made by someone like Siuling.

After twenty years of working in Beijing, Siuling still must pay an annual fee for her temporary residence permit (like all migrants within China) which effectively registers her as a second-class citizen in her own country. This designation denies her a right to vote in local elections, and to have her children go to school, and opens her to hassles from local cops who are strapped for cash. The story is typical. There are factories all around Beijing, filled with similar country girls and poor men, and children. In the larger factories, 20,000, 30,000, even 70,000 people work.

You're bumming me out, dude. First there's no Santa and now this. Okay. I won't even mention the prison toy factories, which might really harsh your mellow. But it's not all bad. Thanks to the efforts of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) after seven years of working in Guangzhou, the capital of the southeastern province of Guangdong, migrant workers can finally apply for permanent residence and the social entitlements that go with it. Migrant workers form the country's main industrial workforce, and there are an estimated 20 million of them presently in Guangdong alone. The effort to get some basic rights is going on nationwide.

Sorry for hectoring you, but next time you're out Christmas shopping and navigating those miles of aisles in a mega-mall, think of where all that merchandise comes from. Check the labels. Remember it's not just China, but any factory and workfarm worldwide where hungry people are a source of cheap labor. Instead of giving all that plastic crap try giving homemade things this year (I know, I know, the kids are screaming for brand name junk). Here's an idea. Try making something, like artwork or a toy, or give an "experience" like tickets to a play or the zoo or a ballgame. Why not give a plain old box of paints and some paper? With any luck, you could turn your own house into Geppetto's workshop.


For more information:
http://newint.org/features/2004/09/01/labour-politics/

http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/

http://frostfirecube.com/chinese-prison-is-a-toy-factory

TANKS ON WENCESLAS SQUARE

Forget Tom Brokaw. Yes, he just finished a book about 1968 -- just like he did with the so-called Greatest Generation, the World War II generation -- but I don't think he's the one for the job on the 1960s. I vote for the poet Ed Sanders. Brokaw may be likeable, but he's a stiff; hearing him "rap" about the 1960s is like hearing a nun talk about multiple orgasms. Unlike Brokaw, Ed Sanders was on the cultural and political frontlines that year; a co-founder of the avant-folk group, The Fugs, and the Youth International Party (the Yippees!), a scholar who wrote "The Family," about the Manson Gang, and a damn funny guy to boot. Ed has my vote.

"Ed Sanders was in Prague last week as an early teaser to next summer’s Prague Writers’ Festival, an event that will be wholly focused on that annus terribilis, 1968 — a year Sanders remembers very well. 'It was a strange, schizophrenic time,' Sanders told an audience that gathered for his slide lecture at the American Center. 'There was all this revolutionary fervor, and then there was all the rest.
"That “rest” was considerable: Vietnam, massacres in My Lai and Mexico City, Biafra, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, the bloody riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, not to mention epic riots in Paris and London. In New York City, writer Valerie Solonas gunned down Andy Warhol, while in Baghdad a coup d’état propelled a young, unknown man named Saddam Hussein into power."

-- from the Prague Post, December 12th, 2007.
For the rest of the story, click here
http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2007/12/12/60s-survivor.php


For more on The Fugs:
http://www.thefugs.com/

Ed's website, the Woodstock Journal
http://www.woodstockjournal.com/

ARE YOU HEP TO THE JIVE?

I don't know what these guys are smoking, but all I can say is I'm glad they don't test musicians for performance-enhancing drugs the way they test baseball players, or these guys would be in serious trouble. A fine performance by Cab Calloway and his amazing band.

FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK

The spirit of punk meets traditional Irish folk music in The Pogues, a band led by drunken poet Shane MacGowan, who wrote this bittersweet Christmas song and sings it with Kirsty MacColl. I think this is poetry, but what do I know? Hardcore like a rose in a whiskey glass. One of my all-time favorites.

FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK

It was Christmas Eve babe in the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song, The Rare Old Mountain Dew
And I turned my face away and dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one, came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling this year's for me and you
So happy Christmas, I love you baby
I can see a better time when all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars, they've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you, It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome. You were pretty, Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing they howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging, all the drunks they were singing
We kissed on the corner then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir were singing 'Galway Bay'
And the bells were ringing out for Christmas day

You're a bum, You're a punk, You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scum bag, You maggot, You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God It's our last

I could have been someone, well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me when I first found you
I kept them with me babe, I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone I've built my dreams around you

-Shane MacGowan

IKE TURNER DEAD

Ike Turner, rock pioneer and lousy husband, is dead. He played what many considered the very first rock and roll song, "Rocket 88," recorded back in March of 1951 at Sam Phillips' legendary recording studio in Memphis. The record is listed as "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats," but that wasn't an actual band. Ike's band, the "Kings of Rhythm," performed the song; Brenston was the sax player in the band who sang the vocal. The song was the biggest selling R & B single in 1951, reaching #1 for five weeks. The song was based on "Cadillac Boogie" (1947) by Jimmy Liggins, and Pete Johnson's "Rocket 88 Boogie" (1949). Ike was also married to the talented singer Anna Mae Bullock, later known as Tina Turner.

To hear the original single, "Rocket 88," click the button.

IT'S FRANK'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Long before Bing Crosby sang that hideous "Drummer Boy" with David Bowie, he had other duets. Here's Der Bingle and Old Blue Eyes singing a holiday classic.

LIBERAL ISLAND

Recently a cousin of mine (I have so many) was complaining about how "liberals" were to blame for the high cost of cigarettes -- not to mention all the other ills of modern society. "They should be rounded up and put on an island," she said, a costly Marlboro bobbing in her pinched lips. With all due respect, she was in over her head. She's not much of a reader. In fact, the only book she's read since high school was a right-wing diatribe against Hillary Clinton. Don't get me wrong, I'm not crazy about Hillary myself, but my cousin's views are to the right of Rush Limbaugh when he's out of Oxycontin and getting really cranky. Only her voice is more shrill.

"Liberal" is such a lousy world. To my cousin, it means everything she despises. I'm sure she pictures some latte drinking, flag-burning, tree-hugging cliche -- someone who disrespects the president and his glorious war, someone who is smarter than she is and makes her cigarettes so expensive. Her views are based on fear, and the flames are fanned by alarmist talk radio -- oh, and that book she read that time about Hillary. I disagree with almost everything she says. Except for the island. I agree with her about the "Liberal Island."

It would be nice to have a "Liberal Island." Liberals could enjoy the sea and sand and have some intelligent conversation for a while. No oversimplifications, no fear-based propaganda, no mindless militarism, no ethnocentrism, no freaking Walmarts and fast food joints, no angry talk radio, no cranky moms snapping at their kids in the grocery store. We could enjoy ourselves and question authority, listen to great music, drink coffee, maybe go snorkeling. When nighttime rolled around, we could build a campfire, roast some fish, and maybe play ukulele with Chomsky.

Thanks to my cousin, and people who keep voting for Republican idiots who give tax breaks to the richest one percent, all the beautiful islands have been reserved for corporate CEOs and celebrities. Not for people like my cousin, of course, who have to shop at Walmart for cheap tube socks. Evolution, abortion, gay marriage, Mexicans -- red flag issues that make her jump blindly into line and vote against her own interests. But the island thing is good, and why not? Mick Jagger and Britain's late Princess Margaret had estates on Mustique, why not me? Richard Branson owns Necker Island in the British West Indies, and Mel Gibson has a retreat in Fiji, and Marlon Brando lived on the French Polynesia atoll of Tetiaroa. Why not me?

In an article in Forbes, I found some good information. "There is nothing more exclusive or sought-after in the world that having your own private island," says Cheyenne Morrison, of Coldwell Banker Morrison’s Private Islands. "It becomes, effectively, your own little kingdom."

One place to start: Fiji's Vatu Vara Island, which, at $75 million, is now the world's most expensive.

Who's with me?

Play "Liberal Island War Chant" by clicking button: