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Look at These Great Portraits of Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley, Etta James, and Algia Mae Hinton

by HelaineTranter Posted on January 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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I didn’t come up in the rural mountains, but my mother did, and during our vacations we’d find ourselves in the forest-and-meadows paradise of Southern Vermont, where just about any social gathering is an excuse to break out the instruments and play some old-time country tunes.

It’s also a place where just about everyone, it seems, has some kind of side talent, or at least something to barter. Wendy makes winter wreaths. Jerry sells jugs of home-brewed hard cider, milk, butter, and fresh eggs from his chickens. And Pete will carve you a custom mantelpiece when he isn’t building post-and-beam barns. People raised in these mountains don’t have a lot of cash, but they tend to be self sufficient—and they’re that way with music, too. If you can’t play some damned instrument, well, you can at least do the spoons, can’t you? It’s the people’s music.

Roan Mountain Hilltoppers at Fiddler’s Grove, 2003, Iredell County, N.C.

All this is by way of background as to why Hands in Harmony, a collection of portraits of Appalachian craftspeople and musicians by photographer Tim Barnwell, hit a note. It’s a long way from the mountains of Southern Vermont to the mountains of North Carolina, but in the music and lifestyle the distance is not so vast.

There’s a simple honesty, a complete lack of pretension, in Barnwell’s subjects, who consist both of notable artists—such Doc Watson, various Seegers, Earl Scruggs (who cut his teeth playing for Bill Monroe), Etta Baker, Ralph Stanley, and Laura Boosinger—and the unsung artisans and craftspeople who are equally skilled in their way, producing not songs but furniture, baskets, stories, pottery, or musical instruments. (This selection focuses on the music.)

Doc Watson backstage, 1983, Buncombe County, N.C.

The accompanying soundtrack, put together by Barnwell and dulcimerist Don Pedi, is appropriately hillbilly. That’s no put-down. That’s actually Ralph Stanley’s word for the music, since a lot of it came along decades, in some cases centuries, before anyone started calling it bluegrass. (That coinage emerged from the popularity of Kentucky’s late Bill Monroe, also pictured in the book, who named his backing band the Bluegrass Boys.)

Ralph Stanley Sr. with grandson Ralph III, 2007, Wise County, VA.

The producers did well. The CD features a nice gritty selection of songs, kicking off with 87-year-old Clyde Davenport of Kentucky doing “Over the Hill to See Betty Baker”—a lonely fiddle tune to put your mind on location—followed by a raw a cappella version of “William Riley” by Mary Jane Queen of North Carolina, who passed on recently at the age of 93. I already knew a number of these songs, and have even performed a few, but most of the versions were new to me. Old-time musicians borrow and steal bits from one another the way hip-hop producers do.

Algia Mae Hinton, 2007, Nash County, N.C.

I especially liked Algia Mae Hinton’s “Out of Jail,” and Barnwell’s portrait of her just makes you want to give her a hug, doesn’t it? I also liked the old fiddle tunes, including Byard Ray’s version of “Billy in the Low Ground,” Marcus Martin’s “Wounded Hoosier,” Roger Howell’s “Lafayette,” and Charlie Acuff‘s rendition of the old dance tune, “Two O’Clock.” Etta Baker‘s guitar work on “Carolina Breakdown,” stylistically similar to Doc Watson, is a pleasure, as is Pedi’s “That Pretty Girl Won’t Marry Me.”

Charlie Acuff, 2003, Anderson County, TN.

Now I like some grit in my hillbilly music, but no less alluring are Laura Boosinger’s more polished “Letter from Down the Road” and Sheila Kay Adams’ pairing of the old murder tale “Young Hunting” with “Elzic’s Farewell,” a Civil War-era song out of West Virginia.

It’s a solid collection in all, and just the thing to set the mood as you study Barnwell’s portraits, peruse the accompanying histories, and ponder how it would be to live in the mountains his camera inhabits.

Etta Baker, 2005, Burke County, N.C.

Earl Scruggs and son Gary, 2007, Jackson County, N.C.

Grover Sutton, 1987, Haywood County, N.C.

Laura Boosinger, 2006, Buncombe County, N.C.

Roger Howell, 2002, Madison County, N.C.

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Look at These Great Portraits of Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley, Etta James, and Algia Mae Hinton

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Take a Tour of Battlefields, Protests, and Prisons With These Photography Legends

by MarieJefferson Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Photographers working with Magnum Photos—the premier photo collective founded after World War II by Henri Carter-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, and David “Chim” Seymour—have been exceptionally busy this year releasing a trove of photo books. Among them, a few showcase longtime Magnum Photos members like Eli Reed, Hiroji Kubota, and Danny Lyon. The books—a reprint of Lyon’s classic Conversations with the Dead and massive retrospectives from Kubota and Reed, are joined by the book version of Postcards From America’s Rochester project and a graphic novel treatment of Robert Capa’s famous D-Day landing photo. Here’s a quick look.

Long Walk Home
Reed’s retrospective shows how and why he has earned his status as one of the best photojournalists of the late 20th century. This is the work that put him in Magnum and won him a Leica Medal of Excellence (1988) and a W. Eugene Smith Grant (1992), among many other awards. It’s great to catch up with his work in this hefty, beautiful retrospective, a collection of refreshingly frank, top-notch black-and-white photojournalism. I love a good complex, layered, emotional image as much as the next photo editor, but seeing Reed’s work—direct, strong, and matter of fact—offers a bit of visual fresh air.

This spans Reed’s career, from 1980s images of Central American wars, Haiti, and Lebenon—bread and butter for photojournalists at the time—to work focused closer to home. He also captured arresting images of homeless people and had a unique perspective on the Million Man March. There are far too few African American photojournalists. Reed’s perspective on the world—not just the quality of his images, but how he approaches stories and the subjects on whom he focuses—stands apart. (University of Texas Press)

A selection of Reed’s work from Long Walk Home is on display at the Leica Gallery in San Francisco until December 31, 2015.

Hiroji Kubota Photographer
Kubota’s book is a beastly retrospective, with more than 500 pages spanning 50 years of work. A versatile photojournalist in his own right, Kubota routinely served as a fixer for Western photographers visiting Japan in the early ’60s. That list included a few Magnum photographers, such as Elliot Erwitt, who wrote the preface to this book. Kubota himself joined Magnum Photos in 1965 and, judging from the work in this book, quickly became a prolific, world-traveling photojournalist.

The work here is fairly classic ’70s and ’80s style magazine photography from all over the world. Flipping through the book is almost like browsing through old issues of LIFE without any text. It’s great photography of daily life, protests, wars, and landscapes—both in color and black and white. Kubota gives us a truly unique look at the transition of the world from the tumultuous ’60s to the 2000s. It’s the work of a photographer for whom making an excellent picture seems second nature. Kubota makes it look easy.

One of the best parts is the interview with Kubota that is peppered throughout the book. It gives readers insight into how he got into photography, plus how, where, and why he traveled. It’s a wonderful look at a photojournalist’s adventures, hopscotching around the world to cover stories—a way of life that fires up young photographers’ imaginations but is far more rare these days. (Aperture)

USA. Chicago, Illinois. 1969. The Black Panthers. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

USA. NYC, New York. 1989. An aerial view of Manhattan. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

USA. Washington, DC. 1963. Demonstrators sing in protest in front of the Washington Monument. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

Japan. Asakusa. 1967. Sanja Matsuri Festival. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

Photos from Hiroji Kubota Photographer are on view at the Aperture Gallery in New York from November 19, 2015, through January 14, 2016.

Conversations with the Dead: Photographs of Prison Life With the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune #122054
Phaidon’s reprinting of Danny Lyon’s classic 1971 book Conversations with the Dead is a body of work that couldn’t be made today. At 26 years old, Lyon spent 14 months in 1967 and 1968 taking photographs in Texas prisons. The access he had is as fascinating as the photos. He was in the cells, in the yard, out in the fields on work details and in the visiting rooms. And of course, with this kind of access come some truly memorable images. Prisons have changed considerably since the late ’60s.

The work in this book was made after Lyon spent years covering the civil rights movement and notably, the lives of the Outlaws bike gang, which resulted in the equally classic book The Bikeriders (reprinted by Aperture in 2014). Lyon applied new journalism reporting techniques to photography, which back then was still a relatively novel idea: spending months at a time with your subject(s), fully immersing yourself in their lives, camera always at the ready.

In Conversations, Lyons focuses on a few prisoners he met while doing this project, most prominently, Billy McCune, whose writings and drawings are featured at the end of the book and on the cover. From today’s perspective, it’s tempting to see these images as a snapshot of a simpler era, an age when serving prison time was seemingly less harrowing than it is for some inmates today. That is, until you get to images of inmates on work details being carried off a field or thrown in the back of pickup trucks because of heat exhaustion. And McCune’s writing brings home the utter unpleasantness of spending time in these prisons. (Phaidon)

Seven years flat on a 20-year sentence Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Visiting room Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Billy McCune rap sheet From Conversations With the Dead

Shakedown Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Rochester 585/716: A Postcards From America Project
Postcards From America is an ongoing project, started in 2011, in which a group of Magnum photographers packed themselves into a motorhome and hit the road to document a part of the United States, whether a leg of a long road trip or, as was the case of this project, a specific city. As the title suggests, 10 photographers (Jim Goldberg, Bruce Gilden, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Larry Towell, Alex Webb, and Donovan Wylie, plus Chien-Chi Chang, who documented the documentarians) went to Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, in 2012. That was the year the once-mighty American corporation declared bankruptcy. Each photographer was given an assignment: shoot and assemble 100 photos from Rochester to create the basis of an archive of images documenting the city at this precipitous moment. The 1,000 images created for the Rochester project make up this book. Each copy of this book contains a loose print from the 1,000 images created.

As a documentation of a place at a very specific time, it’s a marvelous project. The range of styles provides an interesting contrast, seeing how some of the world’s best photojournalists each take on the city of Rochester. The layout and presentation of the work, however, leaves something to be desired. The final book, rather than providing what could have been a beautifully contoured picture of a city, feels clinical—more of a catalog of images than a portrait of a place.

(Aperture, published in collaboration with Pier 24, San Francisco)

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Downtown Rochester. Alex Webb/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Hickey Freeman factory. Make and trim pant corners. Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Bottle collection show at the fair and expo arena. Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Man praying. Last frame on a roll of handrolled Tri-X film. Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. A man is arrested by the Rochester police after having assaulted his father with a samurai sword. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

Omaha Beach on D-Day: June 6, 1944
The publisher that brought you the The Photographer, a graphic novel of Didier Lefevre’s time as a photojournalist in Afghanistan during the ’80s, First Second Books delivers another photojournalism-related graphic novel. Omaha Beach on D-Day: June 6, 1944 tells the story of Robert Capa’s time photographing the D-Day landing in World War II, with writing by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël and illustrations by Dominique Bertail.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of it as a preview of the upcoming television series Magnum, about the early days of the Magnum Photos collective. Like the TV dramatization, Omaha Beach is an interesting exercise in storytelling. It offers a graphic novel interpretation of Capa’s assignment that day, and gives readers a look from behind the viewfinder on Omaha Beach. However, the book then moves into providing the backstory, showing Capa’s original photos from that day—the 10 images that survived a darkroom accident that ruined most of what he shot. And finally, closing the circle, Omaha Beach on D-Day gives a quick biography of Capa, put in context with a handful of historical essays. The book is packaged as a graphic novel, but it really gives unique (and easily digested) context to one of the most famous war photos, and the photographer who took it.

First Second Books

First Second Books

First Second Books

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Take a Tour of Battlefields, Protests, and Prisons With These Photography Legends

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One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality

by BlairBlyth Posted on October 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Unfashionable” is a word that Marilynne Robinson has used to describe herself, but the world appears to disagree.

The “self-declared Calvinist from northern Idaho” has been held up as one of the most iconic writers of our time, with an uncommon gift for finding the sacred in the everyday. Her fans include President Obama, who recently sat down with the author in Des Moines for an expansive interview in the New York Review of Books.

Robinson published Housekeeping, her first novel, in 1980, and for most of the years since she has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She describes the process of writing a novel as though it were a forming star—a nebulous voice that comes to her on its own accord and gradually gains shape, accumulating narrative heft. Recently, those voices have called out from a fictional, mid-century town in Iowa called Gilead, resulting in an award-winning trilogy of novels. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Home was honored with the Orange Prize in 2009, and Lila was named to the long-list (among the finalists) for the Man Booker Prize this year.

But Robinson is also the author of penetrating nonfiction that has tackled topics from the roots of her Calvinist faith to nuclear contamination. In her latest collection, The Givenness of Things, out this Tuesday, Robinson casts John Calvin, the 16th century theologian whose doctrine is often today simplified as predestining some for heaven and others for hell. In Givenness, Calvin is portrayed as a misunderstood scholar who saw human curiosity and inventiveness as “unmistakeable proofs of the existence of the soul.”

The new essays, like their author, evade easy categories, pairing theological arguments with sweeping critiques of brain research, Shakespearean conspiracy theories, and a broad cross section of American politics (“Those who hate Fox News are as persuaded by its representation of the country as are its truest devotees”). But those quarrels drive at a more hopeful conclusion: that grace and wonder live on in modern times.

courtesy of FSG

Mother Jones: You describe discovering a story by slowly finding and nurturing a voice. Does your nonfiction form that way?

Marilynne Robinson: It happens fairly often that something I hear or read strikes me as false or somehow in error. This can happen because I have information I trust that is at odds with it. Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.

MJ: What led you to undertake this deep investigation of the history and literature related to your faith?

MR: Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well. So I have studied it for the pleasure of the work, and for its good effect on my mind. The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.

MJ: While working on the essays, did you come across any surprises in Calvin’s life or work?

MR: I had been reading about Calvin for years and had been studying the English Renaissance for many more years, and it had never occurred to me to think of them together. I learned that Calvin was the most widely read writer in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime. He was translated and published in many editions. His theology emphasizes the sanctity of conscience, the sanctity of companionate marriage, and the obligation of those in power to attend to the well-being of the people in general, especially the poor. Interestingly, for the interpretation of Hamlet, for example, he forbids even the thought of revenge. This is not the Calvin of myth, but when the Elizabethans read him there was no such myth, nor would there be now, if he were read.

MJ: What are you reading now?

MR: Lately I’ve been reading in the period leading to and including the English Civil War—Edward Coke, the political writing of John Milton, Calvin’s letters to the Earl of Somerset. I just got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.

MJ: In the essays, you describe the civil rights era as a third great awakening that stirred both religious and civic change. Was that part of what drew you to set your novels in the 1950s?

MR: It is true that America in the moments just before that era began interests me a great deal. It seems we are always about to realize again how much the complacencies of the majority culture have hidden from them. Now the issues of policing and incarceration have arisen, very grave issues that somehow are only recently acknowledged. Thank God these awakenings come, though it is grievous thing that they are always necessary. There is a mystery in this pattern of self-deception, then shock. It has everything to do with the moral competence of society, which we are generally much too ready to assume and rely on.

MJ: As I read about Calvin in The Givenness of Things, the children of your fiction often came to mind—their curiosity unencumbered by preconceived expectations. Lila is someone who doesn’t seem to lose this quality in adulthood. What do those perspectives bring to your work?

MR: Calvin treats experience as essentially visionary and revelatory from moment to moment, addressed to the individual perceiver, the individual soul. Where this is assumed preconceptions can only distract and obscure, though, of course, as human beings we can never wholly free ourselves of them. John Ames is acculturated by his faith to try to see given experience as visionary. Lila is very slightly acculturated and sees the world quite directly. Their worlds meet. I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

MJ: In that vein, you’ve lived in Iowa City for 25 years and your recent novels have offered an intimate portrait of a single community. You don’t appear to be in a rush to pack up and move on from places, in life or in literature.

MR: I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention. In the nature of things, limitation is a strategy of thought, not a property of anything real. It seems there may be vast complexity within, so to speak, subatomic particles. Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all.

MJ: Given that perspective, and because you’ve been critical of media coverage and oversaturation of information in the past, it’s surprising that you seem warm to the potential of the internet in your essays. Where does your optimism come from?

MR: I don’t think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine. The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that’s just how things are.

MJ: In your essay on realism from The Givenness of Things you write, “I wish that I had experienced my earthly life more deeply.” That’s a surprising, humbling admission. What do you mean by it?

MR: I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn’t matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time. I’m amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don’t know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.

MJ: You’ve said we can expect a return to Gilead in the future. Can you say what you have in the works?

MR: Is it haunting my mind? Yes. Have I written a few pages? Yes. Does this mean that it is in the works? We’ll see.

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One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

by RainaGlasfurd Posted on October 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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“What follows,” David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil’s Chessboard, “is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar.” Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn’t deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.

Mother Jones chatted with Talbot about the reporting that went into his 704-page doorstop, the controversy he invited with his discussion of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories, and the parallels he sees in today’s government intelligence overreach.

Mother Jones: You seem to have a thing for brothers—particularly for younger brothers in the shadow of their more prominent older brothers. As it happens, you yourself have a successful older brother—former child actor and Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist Stephen Talbot. Do you see yourself in Allen Dulles or in Bobby Kennedy?

David Talbot: No one has pointed that particular analogy out before. But definitely it’s there. I had a very close relationship and still do with my older brother. We both went into progressive media work, and live in the same city still, San Francisco, and have worked together off and on over the years. So I guess I have a feel for what that chemistry is like between brothers.

MJ: Given that Allen Dulles isn’t exactly a household name these days, did you feel the need to inject your book with extra drama?

DT: No, because I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself. Dulles is not a household name anymore. He was at the time, though, particularly as part of this two-brother team. He was on the cover of all the magazines. For a spy, he was kind of a glory hog.

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.

MJ: Is that why you chose not to include much about Dulles’ childhood or his internal strife or the other types of things that tend to dominate biographies?

DT: I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles’s biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn’t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.

They’ve done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him “the Shark.” His favorite word was whether you were “useful” to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.

There’s a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles’s knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.

MJ: I’m interested to hear you mention Rumsfeld. Do you think the Bush years compared in ruthlessness or secrecy to what was going on under Dulles?

DT: Definitely. That same kind of dynamic was revived or in some ways expanded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Those guys very much were in keeping with the sort of Dulles ethic, that of complete ruthlessness. It’s this feeling of unaccountability, that democratic sanctions and regulations don’t make sense in today’s ruthless world.

MJ: And do you see echoes of the apparatus that Dulles created in some of the debates today over spying on allies and collection of cellphone records?

DT: Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

MJ: Let’s talk about that. For 500 pages of the book you lay out Dulles’s acquisition and use and abuse of power in and out of the CIA. And then at the end you take a deep dive back into some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy ideas that you explored in Brothers. It’s not an uncontroversial subject. Did you worry that including that might color the reaction to the rest of the book?

DT: Yeah, you always worry, because unfortunately this climate has been created over the years that discourages and intimidates scholars and journalists and investigators from looking into these dark corners in American life that should be examined. Poll after poll for the last 50 years has shown that most American people don’t accept the official version. The only people who do are the media establishment and the political establishment, at least in public.

To me it’s one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. “Why didn’t you, with your investigative resources, try to get to the bottom of it?” You should read what he says in Brothers, but basically it came down to, “Well, I thought it would ruin my career.”

I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there’s a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement. Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn’t have acted on its own.

During the Kennedy period, there was a sense that he’d broken from the Cold War hegemony and that he was putting the country at risk, and that he was a young, untested president. He was maybe cowardly. He was physically not fit. So they just felt, for the good of the nation, that as painful as it probably was to do, he had to be removed. That’s what I think the consensus finally was about him. And Dulles would have been the person, as the executor of this kind of security wing of the American establishment, who would have been given this job.

MJ: Given that exploring these theories has been perceived as a career-killer, did you not have those same fears yourself?

DT: If you have fears at 63 after a career in journalism like I have, taking the risks I have, then you don’t belong in journalism. That’s what journalism should be all about: taking risks and asking the questions that no one else is.

MJ: Alright, last question for you. Connection cuts out. MJ calls DT back.

DT: Aaron? There you are. They’re fucking with us again! The NSA!

MJ: The NSA, of course. Okay, so: When the Devil’s Chessboard movie comes out, who should play Allen Dulles?

DT: Laughs. That’s a very good question. In fact, the book is being read widely in Hollywood now, and I have no idea. But there have been some interesting suggestions. One is William Hurt, who kind of looks like him now in his older age. You know, to tell you the truth, we’ll see if Hollywood will be willing to take this on. Brothers had a long and winding road in Hollywood. And it was about to go many different times and then the plug was pulled on it. I still think this is kind of a verboten subject in Hollywood, particularly the Kennedy stuff. But, you know, we’ll see. We’ll see if they’re braver with this one.

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You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

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These Photos Will Make You Want to Quit Your Job and Ride a Mustang From Mexico to Canada

by AllenWaring Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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On a midsummer afternoon in 2013, in the wilds of southern Utah, Ben Masters jumped off his horse, tied it to a tree, and watched his three friends ride off into the mountains in the wrong direction. It had been a tough day. They’d already been forced to turn back after trying to scale the Wasatch Plateau, snow-choked at 10,500 feet above sea level; the horses struggled and postholed through thick snowdrifts, and the group could go no farther.

Two of the 16 mustangs Ben Masters and his pals adopted from BLM. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

The setback had wasted precious hours. The four men needed to find, before nightfall, a camp with grass for their 16 horses—including pack animals—to graze. That already looked uncertain. Then, as they made their down from the snowy pass, the mustangs were startled by the thrum of engines from some off-road vehicles in the area. They began to spook and bolt, one after another. Left with just five horses, the friends threw together a hasty plan: Masters would stay put while the others attempted to chase down the runaways.

At that point, the men were two months into a journey that would take them through 3,000 miles of America’s backcountry, primarily public lands, from Mexico to Canada. They still had a long way to go. “What the hell?” Masters remembers thinking after 48 hours of waiting. “This whole thing is going to unravel.”

Masters consults his GPS in the Montana backcountry. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

“That was the lowest point of the journey for me,” he told me, “just waiting, twiddling my thumbs. It’s funny now, but when you’ve put that much time and energy into something and you think the whole trip is being undone—the horses have run off and you’re never going to find them again—it was scary.”

Their epic undertaking, the subject of a photo book and a new documentary film opening this week, was born out of a desire for adventure and freedom, at least for a little while, from societal obligations. Masters had been on one long-distance horse trip before. In 2010, he and two friends decided over tequila to take a semester off college and ride through the state of Colorado. That trip ended with sore legs, wet clothes, cold fingers, empty bellies, and a decision to never endure that kind of suffering again. But just three weeks later, Masters started planning for his next adventure.

Day 5: Southern Arizona. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

This time, one state wasn’t enough. Masters wanted to ride through the longest stretch of contiguous backcountry remaining in America, and he wanted to film it. He found a crew headed by adventure filmmaker Phillip Baribeau and recruited three other friends who knew their way around a horse. These included Jonny Fitzsimons, who grew up on a cattle ranch Thomas Glover, who had once worked at a dude ranch, and Masters’ childhood pal Ben Thamer.

As he’d done the first time around, Masters arranged to adopt a team of unwanted wild mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages more than 50,000 wild horses and burros on public lands in the West. With a mustang population that can double every four years, the BLM offers thousands of horses for sale or adoption, but the demand rarely meets the supply. “I wanted to show that mustangs aren’t the worthless beasts that are currently wasting away in holding pens but are excellent, usable stock,” Masters writes in the book Unbranded: Four Men and Sixteen Mustangs. Three Thousand Miles Across the American West. (The BLM disputes the “holding pen” characterization.) “I hoped to inspire adoptions and educate viewers on the necessity of population control.”

Thamer brews coffee during a freak Arizona snowstorm. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

A trip on horseback from Mexico to Canada wasn’t unprecedented, of course, but there would be some notable differences between Masters’ group and its forebears. Sure, Masters was equipped with modern GPS gadgetry, which he says “tells you more about where you can’t go than where you can go”—revealing sheer cliffs and private land boundaries, for example. Yet the terrain they faced was arguably more challenging than it would have been in those cowboy days of yore: “What separated this journey from Kit Carson, the explorers, or the cavalry is they mainly stuck to the valley bottoms and the easy avenues of travel. There was no reason to go into the mountains. Well, a lot of those valley bottoms and easy places to travel now have golf courses and subdivisions and cities in them. That’s where people settled. What was made public was mainly stuff the early settlers didn’t want.”

Fitzsimons and Thamer in the southern Utah desert. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Back in southern Utah, the men finally managed to round up all their animals, reunite, and journey on. Over the next four months, they wound through the rest of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. They fly-fished, sometimes from horseback and in thunderstorms. They crossed treacherous rivers, cooked over open stoves, and lounged around bonfires. Even with the GPS, they got lost plenty and had to reroute around impossible terrain and territorial ranchers. There were injuries, too: “One guy got kicked in the head,” says Masters. And a cameraman took a good kick to the thigh: “He had this massive bruise and this big blood bubble. He couldn’t walk for about two weeks. We thought he broke his femur.” And Thamer came down with a case of dysentery. “He was a grumpy bastard after that, too,” Masters says, laughing.

From left: Masters, Thamer, Glover, and Fitzsimons. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Eventually, three of the four—for sentimental reasons, Fitzsimons turned around just one mile short of the border—reached Canada. The end of the trip, punctuated by a simple green road sign reading, “LEAVING USA. STOP AND REPORT TO CANADIAN CUSTOMS,” brought with it a strange mix of emotions. There were the bonds the riders had forged with their horses. Despite the setbacks, there was a nagging feeling that maybe their trip wasn’t challenging enough. (Throughout Montana, for example, the men were never more than a few hours drive from their film crew’s base, and safety.) For the last 1,000 miles, the guys had mostly run out of things to say to each other, and they felt confused, even sad, as the trip came to a close. But for Masters, at least, it was all worth it. “I feel as if I get a lot of pressure from school, my family, from society in general, saying, ‘Ben you need to go to college, get a job, get a house, do these things and take the steps to becoming a successful person,'” he says. “And that’s all good, but for six months of my life I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And I did. And I will never regret that.”

You’ll find more stunning images from the adventure, along with details and reflections on the trip, in the book and in Unbranded, the film, which has been winning rave reviews and audience awards at festivals across the United States. It will be showing in select theaters starting this weekend. To whet your appetite, here’s a trailer and some additional photos from the book. Wish you were there.

A river crossing in Wyoming. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Fly fishing, with lightning. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Fitzsimons fords the treacherous Gallatin River in Southern Montana. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Glacier National Park, the last leg before the Canadian border. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

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These Photos Will Make You Want to Quit Your Job and Ride a Mustang From Mexico to Canada

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Infographic: How Renewable Fuel Combats Climate Change

by Posted on September 18, 2015

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Infographic: How Renewable Fuel Combats Climate Change

Posted 18 September 2015 in

National

Simply put: the Renewable Fuel Standard is the only law on the books combating climate change. According to a recently released study by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the RFS has significantly lowered carbon emission levels and displaced nearly 1.9 billion barrels of foreign oil in the decade since it’s passage.

With so much progress on the line, the United States can’t afford to turn its back on renewable fuel.

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Infographic: How Renewable Fuel Combats Climate Change

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Is the Army Cooking the Books on ISIS and Iraq?

by SteveRRJpfpgjce Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Daily Beast reports that defense analysts are in revolt over what they see as too much happy talk about ISIS that doesn’t reflect their actual views:

Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts believe they are….That complaint was supported by 50 other analysts, some of whom have complained about politicizing of intelligence reports for months.

….Some of those CENTCOM analysts described the sizeable cadre of protesting analysts as a “revolt” by intelligence professionals who are paid to give their honest assessment, based on facts, and not to be influenced by national-level policy. The analysts have accused senior-level leaders, including the commander in charge of intelligence and his deputy in CENTCOM, of changing their analyses to be more in line with the Obama administration’s public contention that the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda is making progress.

….But the complaint also goes beyond alleged altering of reports and accuses some senior leaders at CENTCOM of creating an unprofessional work environment. One person who knows the contents of the written complaint sent to the inspector general said it used the word “Stalinist” to describe the tone set by officials overseeing CENTCOM’s analysis.

Hmmm. The “Stalinist” jibe sets off some alarm bells. It could mean one of two things: (a) the work climate at CENTCOM is really, really bad, or (b) the senior analysts who filed the complaint are cuckoo. For better or worse, I usually associate accusations of Stalinism with all-upper case rants written by lunatics.

Still, even if one guy is a little over the top, there are 50 more apparently willing to sign on to the general complaint:

Many described a climate in which analysts felt they could not give a candid assessment of the situation in Iraq and Syria. Some felt it was a product of commanders protecting their career advancement by putting the best spin on the war.

….For some, who have served at CENTCOM for more than a decade, scars remained from the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, when poorly written intelligence reports suggesting Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, when it did not, formed the basis of the George W. Bush administration’s case for war. “They were frustrated because they didn’t do the right thing then” and speak up about their doubts on Iraq’s weapons program, the defense official told The Daily Beast.

If this turns out to be true, I wonder what’s really going on. My sense is that the Obama administration itself hasn’t been especially inclined to rosy scenarios. The Daily Beast article tried to find examples of sunny public statements from Obama officials and didn’t come up with much. But it’s quite possible that commanders on the ground are loath to admit how poorly things are going, and are insisting that analysts do nothing to muddy the waters.

In any case, now that the scope of these complaints are public, it will be hard for either the administration or CENTCOM to ignore them. Perhaps as a result we’ll finally find out what’s really happening in Iraq.

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Is the Army Cooking the Books on ISIS and Iraq?

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Book Review: A Carlin Home Companion by Kelly Carlin

by MeghanNobbs Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Courtesy of St. Martin’s Press

A Carlin Home Companion

By Kelly Carlin

ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

The late George Carlin was among the world’s most revered and subversive comedians, but in this memoir, daughter Kelly Carlin offers a look at a side of her dad we’ve never seen, from his earliest stand-up routines (on Manhattan stoops at age 11) to his cocaine abuse in the 1970s. She recalls baking “special” spice cake with her dad, and the drug trip that convinced him the sun had exploded, but there are tender bits too—like the time he woke her up to watch the Apollo moon landing or sent her a series of postcards from the road with a single word on each so she could string together the sentences. A Carlin Home Companion, which simultaneously documents Kelly’s own attempts at self-discovery, is a must for fans who want to understand the legend behind the mic.

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Book Review: A Carlin Home Companion by Kelly Carlin

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Book Review: Mess by Barry Yourgrau

by CallieDunford Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act

By Barry Yourgrau

W.W. NORTON

After a me-or-the-mess ultimatum from his girlfriend, Barry Yourgrau reluctantly tackles his cluttered apartment, sorting through treasures, trash, and our messy relationship with accumulation. As part of what he comes to call his Project, he shadows “Disaster Masters” as they empty a hoarder’s stash and navigates the “goat paths” of a British man’s “hoarding Valhalla.” Yourgrau, best known for his surreal fiction, comes to understand why it can be so absurdly hard to break free of the “intimate pull of objects.”

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Book Review: Mess by Barry Yourgrau

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Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

by LeaMichalski Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Rachel Hills tells men that she wrote a book called The Sex Myth, she typically gets one response.

“Hah, sex isn’t a myth to me,” she recounts, deepening her voice in mimicry. “Yeah, you definitely get the eye roll from the men.”

But for Hills, a New York-based magazine writer, the way people talk about sex is plenty mystifying. While working as an opinion columnist in her native Australia nearly a decade ago, Hills began to notice how the media seemed obsessed with the idea that young people only wanted no-strings-attached sex—and lots of it. “What was being said about young people and sex very much did not fit my own life,” says Hills. “And I felt a sense of insecurity around that.”

She wasn’t alone, as she soon discovered by talking to hundreds of people about the topic. Over the next eight years, Hills became something of a “sexpert” through her columns for Cosmopolitan and Huffington Post. Her research culminated in her first book, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, which went on sale Tuesday from Simon & Schuster.

So what is the Sex Myth? For Hills, it’s the misconception that people need to be good in bed in order to be “adequate human beings.” “We internalize this idea of sex as something that is constantly available and that everyone is doing, and if you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you,” she explains. The book intertwines anecdotes, scientific research, and occasional moments of self-reflection to make the argument that people too often allow their sexuality to be defined by factors outside themselves.

Here are some of the other myths Hills debunks:

Myth No. 1: If you’re not having tons of sex as a young adult, there’s something wrong with you.
During her younger years, Hills writes, “sex was an unspoken assumption…I, on the other hand, had made it not only through high school a virgin, but through four years of college as well.” But research shows college students might be having less sex than we are led to believe. For example, the Online College Social Life Survey, a project out of New York University, found that 72 percent of college students “engage in some kind of hookup at least once by their senior year.” But forty percent said they hooked up with three or fewer people during their college career, and only a third of the students had engaged in intercourse during their most recent encounter. One in five students hadn’t hooked up during college at all.

Myth No. 2: Your desires aren’t normal.
Hills interviewed young adults from all types of backgrounds across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The one thing they all had in common is that each felt that their sex life wasn’t “normal” in some way. Whether it was not reaching climax, not having sex frequently enough, expressing interests in kink, identifying as LGBTQ—no one was 100 percent sure that they were doing it “right.” Hills thinks the media plays a big role in fortifying this insecurity. Though progress has been made with shows such as Orange is the New Black and Transparent, the majority of mainstream entertainment portrays a very narrow spectrum of sexuality. “The ideal world that I’d like to see us move to, the liberated world, if you will, is the one where people aren’t made to feel shame about their sex lives, whether they’re being shamed for being considered too ‘slutty’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘weird’ or ‘prudish’ or too much of a ‘loser,'” Hills says. “So if you can remove that weight, then those decisions become less stigmatized.”

Myth No. 3: You’re not hot because Hollywood said so.
Hills points out that those who would be considered unattractive by Hollywood standards are also typically considered less sexual. Sex “serves as a proxy for our physical attractiveness and how well we fit in with the people around us,” Hills writes. The key to overcoming this attitude, she says, is introspection, and being much more critical of messaging about sex and how it applies to our own reality.

Myth No. 4: Men don’t worry about sex.
Perhaps the most surprising section of The Sex Myth is the chapter on male sexuality. Hills, a feminist, goes directly to where many feminist writers don’t—right into the hearts, rather than the hormones, of men. She writes sympathetically about unbidden erections and the pressure men face to perform sexually. “The absence of straight men from public conversations about sexuality also means that expectations of what men should do, be, and desire when it comes to sex often go unchallenged,” she writes. Hills argues that men are confined to a single definition of sexuality, which makes them “arguably more vulnerable to the Sex Myth than young women.”

The one weak spot in Hills’ analysis of male sexuality is her discussion of male sexual aggression in the context of rape culture. “The really ugly side of masculinity is a small part of it,” Hills writes. She adds that because rape is a well-covered topic at the moment, she didn’t feel compelled to dwell on it.

Myth No. 5: “Female sexual dysfunction” is all your fault.
How many jokes have been made about the female ability (and necessity) to fake an orgasm? Another aspect of the Sex Myth, as Hills describes it, is the pressure to turn pleasure into a performance. Hills thinks this impulse distracts from deeper issues. “If there’s anything ‘dysfunctional’ about our current approach to sex, it does not reside in our bodies,” she writes. But instead of drilling down on the nuances of female desire, companies would rather treat female sexual dysfunction as a problem that only medication can fix. As health journalist Ray Moynihan argued in a piece in the British Medical Journal, pharmaceutical companies are searching to “build markets for new medication” in the wake of Viagra’s financial success. Endless procedures and prescriptions have ensued, all of which lead to what one researcher describes as a “corporate-sponsored” disease.

So how best to avoid letting these myths creep into our consciousness and dictate our desires? Hills often turns to the antics of such comediennes as Amy Schumer and Tina Fey, who never shy away from sex as less-than-glamorous. “I feel like in making a joke about something, it creates permission for it,” she says. “The fact that you can say it makes it okay.”

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Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

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