coen!

handwritten poem by phil ochs from the liner notes of his tape from california (1968)

“Hi, I thought I'd drop you a line

from the beautifulpeoply Coast

where i'm filming the family slime

(the most)

stopping behind the Pendleton barracks to get high

(tonight American pigs you die!)

I left my mind in San Francisco

I left my life in LA

thought I'd drop you a line

a Chevrolet from Che

to say

the NLF is nibbling

they're not afraid they're not alone

(you are afraid you are alone)

Can it be the War of Liberation

has finally come home?

Farewells & Fantasies, Folks

andy wickham was a conservative and i am sure he had a warped idea of what a "leftist" was. he was probably expecting phil to be a long-haired lsd-taking sexually liberated hippie, which phil certainly was not, and because of this he was "not a real leftist" to andy, even though phil was absolutely dead serious about anti-imperialism, anti-racism, & socialism.

that being said, i can understand where andy was coming from otherwise. phil was something of a chauvinist, especially when drinking heavily. there was always a duality within him — basically "phil ochs the sensitive compassionate poetic leftwing folksinger" vs. "phil ochs the misogynistic violent drunk wannabe cowboy."

eventually the latter became so disparate from the former that it had to break off and form its own identity (john train). i do feel that the former was closer to who he really was, considering he could only act like the latter for any extended period of time when drinking gallons of hard liquor, but in many of his greatest fantasies he was a communist john wayne character.

Phil Ochs at San Francisco State College Folk Music Festival in San Francisco, California. May 1965.

you saw an app that was used for organizing and spreading information be banned to suppress free speech.

you saw that app be brought back but as a fascist propaganda machine.

you saw the richest man in the world do a nazi salute and be cheered by thousands of people.

you saw ICE agents deport hundreds (for now) of undocumented immigrants.

you saw it. you saw it all. dont let a single person tell you that you haven't.

unite. resist. fight.

Oda: awwwtysm

[ Link to survey ]

The ninth annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2022.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 44,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]