Prison – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2026-03-062026-03-15 by David Hughes

Ars Protestationis

Last month I spent two weeks in the Twin Cities, my annual sojourn to my wife Andrea Carney, who lives in Eagan, a suburb of Saint Paul. We didn’t visit memorials to the recently fallen, although we did drive past the Whipple Building where ICE jails abductees (on the way to celebrate our thirty-second wedding anniversary). Local network newscasts continue to cover roundups and reactions. We learned ICE was moving to the ’burbs, but we hadn’t seen that there. Nonetheless, we counseled our Filipina daughter-in-law to carry her passport.

I didn’t take in any live music while I was in Eagan, but I’ve been thinking it’s time to share a few songs sung in resistance to ICE as well as that exhibited in Gaza and the West Bank.

I just missed a January 30 appearance at Minneapolis’s historic club First Avenue by Tom Morello (ex Rage Against the Machine) and others. as a benefit for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Morello was joined by Rise Against, Al Di Meola (!), Ike Reilly, and a (Very Special Guest), documented below. The “boo”s you’ll hear are an indication of the political persuasion of many in Morello’s audience.

While The Boss’s sentiment is pretty pedestrian, he does pay tribute to the fact that, following the earlier killings of Philando Castile and George Floyd, “a city aflame” in 2016 and 2020 now “fought fire and ice,” pun intended.

2021-09-152025-08-20 by David Hughes

Attica @ 50

I wrote my first original post here three years ago this month after talking with a comrade at a prison strike support event. In part, that event commemorated the killing of George Jackson and the Attica uprising. During the event my memory went back to composers Steve Reich and Frederic Rzewski and their musical statements of solidarity with the Attica inmates and the defendants from the earlier Harlem “fruit stand” riot of 1964. In the course of our conversation I realized I’d outlined that post. See Attica: Coming Together.

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Jackson’s murder and the Attica revolt that followed.

2020-08-262026-10-24 by David Hughes

Le plus grand zombie is US

Pardon merci, je suis le grand zombie
I’m just not human tonight

— Mekons, “Big Zombie”

I haven’t thought about anthropologist Wade Davis much since his 1985 nonfiction book The Serpent and the Rainbow was turned into what I thought was an icky film by Wes Craven in 1988.¹

In L.A. I had a habit of picking up review copies and other first editions at Cosmopolitan Book Shop, where I got Davis’s book. I always had good luck there.

In his book Davis recounts his attempt to see if zombification in Haitian Vodou had a pharmacological component. I remember his tale being akin to Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods, published seven years later, taking the reader on a similar, esoteric journey regarding psychedelics.²

2020-02-212026-02-05 by David Hughes

Symonds, Whitman, Rossetti and Rake

Before Christmas I checked out a book from my little public library branch: Naomi Wolf’s Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. I had a lot of other things to read and left it for last, not knowing what it contained, vaguely recognizing the author’s name. Turning to it, I recognized Wolf’s photo. If nothing else, readers might remember her defense of Julian Assange when he was accused of sex crimes in Sweden. I thought the book would be a history of censorship, but it’s more comprehensive. By introducing and then returning often to her cast of characters, Wolf creates an intimate narrative against the mise en scène of her historical sweep and sociopolitical stance.

2019-10-282026-10-24 by Andrea Carney

Reopening the Rosenbergs

Note: This is the second in a series of my recollections about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953. See Part 1 and Part 3. My husband David Hughes contributed much research and text to what follows.

2019-10-092026-10-24 by Andrea Carney

Observing the Sabbath: Killing the Rosenbergs

Note: See also Part 2 and Part 3 of this trilogy.

As early as I can remember I was placed in front of the radio (we had no television). I was exposed to music, advertisements, dramas, and news. At age three I tried to read newspapers. I simply wanted to read about what I’d heard. By the age of five I was reading the “briefs” in the back pages because they were easier for me, but they also could lead me to bigger stories. In particular I remember reading briefs about spies.

2018-11-182025-08-08 by David Hughes

Seeing Things

This past summer in Cheyenne my uncle Richard Hughes told me of his hallucinations. That a man going blind might also view visions seems an insult to injury. Yet his condition has a name—Charles Bonnet syndrome—after an eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist and philosopher. As profiled in ACNR (Vol. 8, No. 5, 19) Bonnet first listed his grandfather’s

silent visions of men, women, birds, carriages, and buildings, which he fully realised were ‘fictions’ of his brain. Bonnet himself later underwent visual deterioration and experienced hallucinations typical of the syndrome named after him […].

(Compare with “Blinky” Watts, the sound effects technician character from David Lynch’s short-lived TV series On the Air, who suffers from Bozeman’s Simplex, which causes him to see “25.62 times as much as we do.”)

Six months prior I came across a song by Richard Dawson, which I wanted to write about tonight only to find that he too sees things (due to a genetic defect), but through a glass darkly, as Dawson told The Guardian‘s Michael Hann, who remarked, “There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity to his writing.”

2018-09-272025-08-08 by David Hughes

Attica: Coming Together

What follows is the recollection and reflection of a remarkable musical work, and my work experience around it.

The prison strike of late summer 2018 was in part a commemoration of the killing of prison organizer and author George Jackson on August 21, 1971 as well as the uprising his death sparked (in part) at Attica nineteen days later on September 9. Having just turned 16 at the time, although I was involved in antiwar activity in Boulder, Jackson and Attica were two coastlines away and easy enough for me to ignore. Two years later I was reacquainted with those struggles—through music.