BP Accused of Violating Safety Regulations at US Refineries, Endangering Employees' Lives

Tuesday 04 May 2010

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Karen Eliot, Jef Harris)

BP Plc's troubles are not just limited to its Gulf of Mexico operations, where a deadly blast aboard a drilling rig two weeks ago ruptured an oil well 5,000 feet below the sea's surface and triggered a massive oil leak that is now the size of a small country.

The oil conglomerate is also facing serious charges from the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that it "willfully" failed to implement safety measures at its Texas City refinery following an explosion that killed 15 employees and injured 170 others five years ago.

The refinery is the third largest in the country and has a capacity to refine 475,000 barrels of crude oil per day. OSHA found BP to be in violation of more than 300 health and safety regulations and, in 2005, fined the company $21.4 million, at the time the largest in the agency's history. In 2007, BP paid a $50 million fine and pleaded guilty to a felony for not having written guidelines in place at the refinery and for exposing employees to toxic emissions. BP, which earned $19 billion in 2005, settled with the victims' families for $1.6 billion.

BP was placed on three years probation and the Department of Justice agreed not to pursue additional criminal charges against the company as long as BP agreed to undertake a series of corrective safety measures at the refinery ordered by OSHA.

Several investigations launched in the aftermath of the refinery explosion concluded that BP's aggressive cost-cutting efforts in the area of safety, the use of outdated refinery equipment and overworked employees contributed to the blast, which, according to John Bresland, the chairman of the independent US Chemical Safety Board (CSB), was caused "when a distillation tower flooded with hydrocarbons and was over-pressurized, causing a geyser-like release from the vent stack. The hydrocarbons found an ignition source [a truck that backfired] and exploded."

Bresland, whose organization spent two years probing the circumstances behind the explosion, said that CSB's investigation, completed in 2007, "found organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation."

"It was the most comprehensive and detailed investigation the CSB has ever done," Bresland said March 24, marking the fifth anniversary of the refinery explosion. "Our investigation team turned up extensive evidence showing a catastrophe waiting to happen. That cost-cutting had affected safety programs and critical maintenance; production pressures resulted in costly mistakes made by workers likely fatigued by working long hours; internal audits and safety studies brought problems to the attention of BP's board in London, but they were not sufficiently acted upon. Yet the company was proud of its record on personnel safety."

Since then, according to OSHA, BP has not only failed to comply with the terms of its settlement agreement, it has knowingly committed hundreds of new violations that continue to endanger the lives of its refinery workers.

"When BP signed the OSHA settlement from the March 2005 explosion, it agreed to take comprehensive action to protect employees," Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said in a statement last October. "Instead of living up to that commitment, BP has allowed hundreds of potential hazards to continue unabated."

"BP was given four years to correct the safety issues identified pursuant to the settlement agreement, yet OSHA has found hundreds of violations of the agreement and hundreds of new violations. BP still has a great deal of work to do to assure the safety and health of the employees who work at this refinery," added acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab, whose agency conducted a six-month review of BP's Texas City refinery operations to determine if the oil company complied with provisions of the settlement. "The fact that there are so many still outstanding life-threatening problems at this plant indicates that they still have a systemic safety problem in this refinery."

Specifically, OSHA said it found 439 new "willful" violations by BP related to "failures to follow industry-accepted controls on the pressure relief safety systems and other process safety management violations."

According to OSHA regulations, "a willful violation exists where an employer has knowledge of a violation and demonstrates either an intentional disregard for the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970, or shows plain indifference to employee safety and health."

OSHA imposed a record $87 million fine against the company, surpassing its previous record in 2005, which was also leveled against BP. A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to questions as to whether BP's alleged failure to comply with its settlement agreement would expose the company to further criminal charges.

Last October, however, Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the US attorney's office in Houston, said DOJ "will take all appropriate actions to ensure the plea agreement is not violated and cannot comment further at this time."

Some of the new violations BP for which was cited, according to OSHA, have already resulted in additional fatalities at the refinery.

On July 22, 2006, OSHA said a contractor was crushed between a "scissor lift and a pipe rack." On June 5, 2007, another contractor was electrocuted "on a light circuit in the [refinery's] process area." On January 14, 2008, an employee was killed when the top head of a pressure vessel blew off. BP received four citations from OSHA regarding continued violations over process safety management. And on October 9, 2008, a contractor, who was hit by a front-end loader and pinned between a guard rail and the bucket of the loader, died from his injuries.

BP has vehemently denied the charges alleged by OSHA and has formally contested the proposed penalties.

"We continue to believe we are in full compliance with the Settlement Agreement ... we strongly disagree with OSHA's conclusions," said Texas City Refinery Manager Keith Casey on October 30, 2009, the day OSHA announced that BP continued to skirt safety regulations. "We believe our efforts at the Texas City refinery to improve process safety performance have been among the most strenuous and comprehensive that the refining industry has ever seen."

BP, which says it invested $1 billion on safety and operational improvements at the refinery, claims that a vast majority of OSHA's allegations against the company are not true violations, but, instead, are related to a misunderstanding over the timing of its compliance under the terms of its settlement agreement, according to an October 5, 2009, letter BP attorney Thomas Wilson sent to Mark Briggs, an official with OSHA's Houston branch.

BP "pursued the actions plans as outlined in the [agreement it entered into with OSHA], including actions plans related to four recommendations that have completion dates beyond September 22, 2009," Wilson wrote. "It was not until a meeting in late 2008 that OSHA expressed verbally a differing interpretation of the date for completion of auditor recommendations and it was only in the OSHA letter of August 3, 2009 that BP Products first received written indication that OSHA expected all action plans to be complete by September 23, 2009."

BP may end up fighting the charges in federal court.

Widespread Safety Issues at US Refineries

Still, as highlighted in a January 2007 report issued by a panel chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker III, systemic issues related to process safety were not limited to the firm's Texas City refinery. In fact, they were widespread.

And that continues to be the case, as evidenced by a separate set of charges OSHA leveled against BP in March for even more "willful" violations that took place at its Husky refinery in Toledo, Ohio, "including 39 on a per-instance basis, and 20 alleged serious violations for exposing workers to a variety of hazards including failure to provide adequate pressure relief for process units," issues that appear to be identical to those that lead up to the refinery explosion in 2005.

The Husky refinery is a 50-50 joint venture between BP and Canadian-based Husky Energy, Inc.

"OSHA has found that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its refineries," Solis said. "There is no excuse for taking chances with people's lives. BP must fix the hazards now."

BP entered in a similar settlement with OSHA in 2007 over safety issues at Husky. Last September, during an inspection to determine if BP was in compliance with the terms of the agreement, OSHA found BP was compliant. However, OSHA found "numerous violations at the plant not previously covered" by the settlement.

"The inspection revealed that workers were exposed to serious injury and death in the event of a release of flammable and explosive materials in the refinery because of numerous conditions constituting violations of OSHA's process safety management standard," OSHA said in a March 8 news release. "OSHA has issued willful citations for numerous failures to provide adequate pressure relief for process units, failures to provide safeguards to prevent the hazardous accumulation of fuel in process heaters, and exposing workers to injury and death from collapse of or damage, in the event of a fire, to nine buildings in the refinery. Additional willful citations allege various other violations of OSHA's standard addressing process safety management."

What's notable about the nearly two dozen of the alleged violations at Husky, is that one matches allegations first leveled against BP a year ago by a whistleblower who said the company had been operating its Gulf Coast drilling platform Atlantis, the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, without a majority of the necessary engineering and design documents, a violation of federal law.

As Truthout reported last week, the whistleblower said BP risked a catastrophic oil spill, far worse than the one that began two weeks ago after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, because BP did not have updated or complete Piping and Instrument Diagrams (P&IDs) for the Atlantis subsea components. P&IDs documents form the foundation of a hazards analysis BP is required to undertake as part of its Safety and Environmental Management Program related to its offshore drilling operations. P&IDs drawings provide the schematic details of the project's piping and process flows, valves and safety-critical instrumentation.

In OSHA's list of alleged violations at Husky, the agency said BP failed to "assure the accuracy of P&IDs ... and proper documentation of pressure relief design information." 

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

67diggsdigg   

»

---

Jason Leopold is the Deputy Managing Editor at Truthout. He is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir. Visit newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. 

Comments

This forum is moderated by software. Please allow up to 15 minutes for your comments to go live and avoid posting the same comment multiple times.

Jason is doing what the

Tue, 05/04/2010 - 15:15 — David (not verified)

Jason is doing what the mainstream media refuses to do, which is to investigate the corporate corruption, greed and criminal neglect that led to the Gulf spill, other BP disasters, and the Massey Energy disaster. And the government is in bed with large corporations; that's why regulators are slow to close down energy-industry operations. One other thing- Americans who use petroleum toys such as leaf blowers, jet skis, weed whackers, ATV's and other wasters need to immediately cease such use. All of us can do our part to reduce our own personal petroleum addiction. It's not just BP's fault- it's the world economy, and individual choices, that spur the death petroleum inevitably causes.

Good arcticle - but as we

Tue, 05/04/2010 - 16:28 — Anonymous (not verified)

Good arcticle - but as we can see, it takes "explosions" and "massive environmental damage" before a muted, defanged, politically paranoid, nearly disabled agency slumps into the press. OSHA. (Fact, lots of workers die every year.)
Is this any different across the entirely compromised spectrum of agencies that behave as if (and are) on the Corporate payroll? When, oh when, will this constant smoke screen lift from any and all media: The lie that some bureaucratic Conquistador will save the day, (after the waste, the bodies and the damage is already done)

Finally some statements that

Tue, 05/04/2010 - 22:00 — Anonymous (not verified)

Finally some statements that appear to be kind of factual
By Dwight Baker
May 4, 2010
Dbaker007@stx.rr.com

BP knows why the blow out occurred, but they aint telling. All the ‘other bailey who goings on’ reminds me of a carnival sideshow.

Under-balanced drilling looks to be the single source causing the blow out. In the article it was said that the shear ram bop could not cut the collars, that would have occurred during a trip to change bits or otherwise. Pipe rams are too small to close over drill collars and should the annual BOP failed to hold back the 20,000 plus pressure then as last resorts the shear ram or rams BOP would have used. Thus in the article it was said the shear rams would not cut through the drill collar.

As a fact any annular BOP regardless of the flange size made to fit BOP stacks will not hold more than 5,000-PSI pressure.

Therefore it is my belief that BP drilling personnel in charge that fatal day made the age-old flaw of not keeping the hole full of heavy enough fluid to hold back the gas and oil as they tripped out of the hole.

Now the next huge flaw that I see with the dome they are planning to use is that to send the oil and gas to the surface to SELL------ will bring about more huge problems. The Pressure of the oil and gas zone is estimated to be 20,000 PSI or more. The water pressure at the depth where the dome will be placed is plus 20,000 PSI. That is a push and that is good ---- cement the dome in place and forget about trying to send it to the surface ----- for every foot that column of oil and gas comes to the surface the more dangerous it becomes. Once it reaches atmospheric pressure all hell will break loose with 20,000 PSI of flowing gas and oil from a virgin oil find. Just the surface equipment needed to separate the gas and oil with that kind of flowing pressure would occupy a huge footprint.
Hence I believe the reporters got some thought to be good news that was not complete or not stated right.

Yet there are many other things about this un-raveling story that defies understanding but in the end between our government officials, and all others who job is on the line for not knowing what is going on ---- little by little the TRUTH will finally come out. Maybe too late for the good folks and all other living things on the gulf whose lives and jobs are on the line?

Remember back to the day the Challenger blew up and fell to all over East Texas on a try for re-entry. All news was garbled, the Federal Government and NASA weren’t telling so that is just the way things are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/04spill.html?th&emc=th

The biggest problem with BP

Wed, 05/05/2010 - 12:55 — Anonymous (not verified)

The biggest problem with BP is common to most British corporations, in that once anyone in the management class reaches a certain level they no longer have any interest in doing the job properly. Their only concerns are salary, status and the perks of the job. And too many in the country seem to "ape their betters." This is why the UK is in such a decline since the end of WWI. Without a slew of conquered people to actually do the work they can't manage.

BP(British Petroleum) is

Wed, 05/05/2010 - 15:20 — Anonymous (not verified)

BP(British Petroleum) is dumping toxic chemicals in to the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes is the largest group of fresh water lakes in the world.

At risk from BP's toxic chemical dump is Lake Michigan, source of drinking water for millions of Americans.

Ban BP(British Petroleum) from the United States!

A simple way to clean up the

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 06:26 — Anonymous (not verified)

A simple way to clean up the oil spill ~ you are going to be amazed at the simplicity of this...

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/22870

Picasso, Politics, Art, Dichotomies & Misunderstanding

 

"Because Picasso holds the position he does, every
misinterpretation of his work can only increase
contemporary misunderstanding of art in general."
~ John Berger

The Charnel House. Pablo Picasso 1944-1945. (Oil and charcoal on
canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

I came across this review in The Guardian this evening of an exhibition of Picasso's work that places his politics front and center. The review and the exhibition seem to lend credence to Berger's assessment. But it seems that Picasso himself invites the misunderstandings. Here is a passage written, according to The Guardian reviewer, at about the time Picasso was making the painting I've lifted above.

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he's a painter, ears if he's a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he's a poet – or even, if he's a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate or pleasing events in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How is it possible to be uninterested in other men and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy."

Here Picasso reiterates the dualisms - on the one hand, art as harmless decoration, the product of the raw talent or instinct or sheer insight and inspiration of the artist, on the other hand art as more or less purely instrumental, as propaganda, as a weapon in partisan conflict - that frame too much discussion of how art and politics interpenetrate. Clinging to such dichotomies misleads. It misleads us into thinking that art and politics do not interpenetrate, that they stand apart and that any effort to navigate the subtleties of these overlapping practices violates (in some ill-defined sense) the structure of the universe.

Picasso's politics

Tate Liverpool's new exhibition explores Picasso's politics. Despite his devotion to the French communists, the artist really subscribed only to a party of one – himself. By Alex Danchev

• 
• 
•  (100)
• Tweet this (51)
• Comments (16)

• Alex Danchev
• The Guardian, Saturday 8 May 2010
• Article history

Detail of Picasso's The Charnel House. Photograph: © Succession Picasso/DACS 2010 MOMA, New York/Scala

'Art is never chaste," said Pablo Picasso. "Art is dangerous." Picasso was not much of a speech-maker, but he could surely turn a phrase. His characteristic mode of intervention was single-burst point-scoring. He was a riddler. "Braque and James Joyce," he told Gertrude Stein, "are the incomprehensibles that anybody can understand." He relished the flip, the quip, the bon mot; he delighted in making mischief. "It's well-hung," he said, of a rival's exhibition. He who invented so much did not invent self-fashioning, but he is the supreme exemplar of artistic self-fashioning in modern times. He was a consummate self-publicist. "You can't be a sorcerer all day long," he remarked knowingly to André Malraux. It was but a short step from shaman to showman.

When it came to his art, he was serious as a pope. Towards the end of the second world war, he was goaded by an interviewer on the relationship between art and politics. He interrupted the interview to hurl himself on a piece of paper and scribble a statement, a mini-manifesto, so that he would not be misunderstood. "What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he's a painter, ears if he's a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he's a poet – or even, if he's a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate or pleasing events in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How is it possible to be uninterested in other men and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy."

That flash of grandiloquence might be taken as the text for the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, which sets out to explore the artist as a political being, through the causes he espoused, and above all through his commitment to the French Communist party (PCF), which he joined in 1944, with great fanfare, and never left. Picasso always hoped to go on for ever, and he very nearly did. In the course of a long lifetime (1881-1973) he had seen it all, from the Spanish-American war of 1898 to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He knew anarchists, bolshevists, socialists, communists, fascists, pacifists, falangists and Stalinists, to say nothing of cubists, futurists, dadaists, surrealists, suprematists, constructivists, destructivists and stridentists. He grew up with monarchism assailed by revolutionary anarchism; he grew old with republicanism served by monopoly capitalism. Ideologically, he had lived.

In the matter of the horrifying, he had form. Guernica (1937), then in the United States, was already a cause célèbre: "the Last Judgment of our age" or "Bolshevist art controlled by the hand of Moscow", it was gaining in iconic status with each passing decade. At the time of his outburst on the role of the artist, he was working on the most powerful political painting he ever made, The Charnel House (1944-45), the pièce de résistance of the Tate exhibition. Picasso himself said that the work was affected by revelations of the real-life charnel houses of the holocaust. In this instance there is no reason to doubt him.

The pages of his newspaper, the Communist daily L'Humanité, were full of graphic accounts of the camps, complete with illustrations. An article on the crematoria at Natzweiler-Struthof, near Strasbourg, included the macabre detail that the executioners had tied the hands and feet of their victims, like the central motif of the painting, and the heaped corpses in the death zone that constitutes the lower part of the canvas are reminiscent of the first shock photos of the camps – and of Goya'sDisasters of War (1810-20), images at once unprintable and unforgettable. In the death zone, crucified innocence and clenched-fist defiance grapple with mass killing and dismemberment. The upper zone is less horrific, though no less eerie. Some elements of a contemporaneous still life enter in Pitcher, Candle and Casserole (1945) – the candle, symbol of hope, obliterated. The Charnel House is the offensive and defensive weapon deployed: memento mori, indictment, tribute to sacrifice, howl of despair, and proof positive of lyric poetry after Auschwitz.

The depth of his political engagement remains controversial, however, not least because it is still relatively unexplored. The Tate exhibition, master-minded by Lynda Morris, mounts a spirited defence of the artist as a principled political actor. As its title might suggest, Picasso: Peace and Freedom is almost an apologia. Inevitably, it raises more questions than it answers, but the questions themselves are important – what did Picasso stand for? – and in daring to place politics centre-stage (or centre-show) Morris and her collaborators challenge us once again to reappraise this protean and inexhaustible figure.

What are we to make of Picasso politico? He was nothing if not individualistic, but in this respect he exemplifies a general tendency: with few exceptions, the intellectual lives of the artists have not yet been written. Their mistresses command more attention than their mental furniture. This may reflect a certain condescension. Painters in particular are often supposed to be either stupid or vapid, and in any event inarticulate, unable or unwilling to explain themselves; some painters connive at this deception. As the anarchist and abstract expressionist Barnett Newman noted caustically: "The artist is approached not as an original thinker in his own medium but, rather, as an instinctive, intuitive executant, who, largely unaware of what he is doing, breaks through the mystery by the magic of his performance to 'express' truths the professionals think they can read better than he can himself."

In fact, many painters are lucid expositors and vivid writers, though few are as vivid as Van Gogh. Art and thought (even political thought) are not incompatible after all. But the politics of the palette are seldom as simple as red, white and blue. "It is not necessary to paint a man with a gun," declared Picasso. "An apple can be just as revolutionary."

As always, "Don Misterioso" is a hard case. His convictions are seldom spelt out; his intentions are frequently obscure. With Picasso, it was never one thing or the other. His meaning, like his motivation, was plural, inscrutable, unstable. "A green parrot is also a green salad . . . He who makes it only a parrot diminishes its reality. A painter who copies a tree blinds himself to the real tree. I see things otherwise. A palm tree can become a horse. Don Quixote can come into Las Meninas." With such a worldview, mapping belief is a tall order; and interpreting the painting is not likely to yield unambiguous conclusions. On canvas and in conversation, it is unwise to take him too literally. He could never remember whether he had said "I don't look, I find" or "I don't find, I look" – "not that it makes much difference ". Typically, the saying itself was appropriated or adapted from elsewhere – Picassified – in this case from Paul Valéry's Monsieur Teste. ("To find is nothing. The trick is to add to what you find.") As his friends and rivals well knew, he was a thievish genius. Pablo Picasso was a great finder. As a painter, he found objects. As a riddler, he found words.

As a sorcerer, he found politics. That is the lingering suspicion – a suspicion that in the end the politics were gesture politics, and not to be taken seriously; that the political beliefs were rather shallow; that communism itself was more or less meaningless to this heedless party member; that the peace-mongering was little more than political posturing; that the trademark dove and all the drawing and lithographing for the cause (well represented in the exhibition) was so much agitprop; that the saluting of Stalin and his henchmen, however idiosyncratic, was at best deluded; that this was at bottom a mercenary affair, whereby the world-renowned painter was exploited by the party for his famous name, his fleet brush, and his financial donations; in short, that Picasso was a useful idiot.

The donations were certainly substantial. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Picasso bankrolled the post-war French Communist party, and underwrote various causes associated with it. In 1949, for example, L'Humanité acknowledged his donation of one million francs for striking miners in the Pas de Calais. The party basked in the reflected glory, and pocketed the cash. One of its cells felicitously took his name: Cellule Interentreprise du Parti Communiste Français Pablo Picasso. His value as figurehead was priceless, as Picasso: Peace and Freedom justly highlights, but it may well be that his greatest contribution was financial. Yet here, too, a note of caution is in order. The donation to the striking miners, touted in the exhibition catalogue as an example of Picasso's anarchist principles, was matched by a donation to Fernande Olivier, his former mistress, in return for an undertaking that she would publish no more "Intimate Memories" in his lifetime. Fernande was destitute. She was bought off. Picasso's principles were not much troubled. According to the catalogue, "it could be argued that Picasso belonged to the wider 19th-century socialist and anarchist traditions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Tolstoy, John Ruskin, William Morris and the Independent Labour party of Keir Hardie." That does not seem very plausible. The only thing Picasso had in common with Tolstoy is a work called War and Peace (a tub-thumping mural of 1952, for which he is not remembered). He knew more of hooliganism than anarchism. ("Picasso hooligan" was an epithet bandied around by his friends.) Moreover, one million francs, here or there, was not about to break the bank. Picasso was as rich as Croesus, and the means of production were safe in his hands.

Picasso's "committed" period is said to date from 1944, when he joined the party. His own account is a characteristic piece of self-fashioning. "I came to communism without the slightest hesitation, since ultimately, I had always been with it . . . Those years of dreadful oppression [the occupation] showed me that I had to fight not only through my art, but through my own person. I so wanted to return to my native land! I have always been an exile. Now I am one no longer; until Spain can at last welcome me back, the French Communist party opened its arms to me. I have found there all those whom I esteem the most, the greatest scientists, the greatest poets, and all those faces, so beautiful, of Parisians in arms which I saw during those days of August [1944, the liberation]. I am once more among my brothers."

What he found, in this touching fable, was his spiritual home. Yet plighting his troth to the party may have worried him more than he allowed. (The photograph accompanying the announcement is a picture of unease.) Marcelle Braque was convinced that he did not want to take the plunge on his own. Picasso spent a week with the Braques trying to persuade his old comrade from the cubist revolution to come in with him, and make a joint declaration. That would have been still more of a sensation, but Braque remained unmoved, even when appealed to by Simone Signoret. He had as much feeling for the workers of the world as did Picasso. But Braque was not a joiner. Adherence to parties and causes was not for him; only oysters adhere, as he once said. In any case, done like this, it smacked of a publicity stunt. The loathsome occupiers were on the run at last. This was the time for painting, not pantomime. Picasso's announcement was disappointing, possibly, but not unexpected. "It's hardly surprising that he should have joined the Communist party: it gives him a platform." The soap box was as unsuitable as the social whirl. "Picasso used to be a great painter," Braque observed. "Now he is merely a genius."

Picasso adhered, oyster-like, to the end. He attended congresses of Intellectuals for Peace, and even made a speech (against the persecution of his friend the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda), but the conscience-wrenching dramas of the cold war seemed to pass him by. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the Prague spring in 1968, he had nothing to say. In 1956 Czesław Miłosz wrote him an open letter. "No one knows what consequences a categorical protest from you might have had . . . If your support helped the terror, your indignation would also have mattered." Later in 1968, he drafted and then cancelled a statement for an article in Look magazine that tolled the bell on the political being: "I no longer understand the politics of the left and I have no wish to talk about it. I decided long ago that if I wanted to deal with such matters I should have to change profession and go into politics. But of course that is impossible."

Picasso painted furiously for peace. As art, much of this work was unworthy of him. Picasso: Peace and Freedom proposes boldly to circumvent this flaw by co-opting The Women of Algiers (1955), Las Meninas (1957), the variations on Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1959-62) and The Rape of the Sabine Women (1962-63), and sundry mothers (for peace) and musketeers (for war), with ingenious suggestions of contemporary political comment. Thus Las Meninas becomes "an indictment of Franco's dictatorship and his royalist aspirations" or "a satirical comment on contemporary Spain, as cruel in its condemnation of the Spanish monarchy as Goya's caricatures". The exhibition is immeasurably enriched, but nagging questions persist.

Picasso is perhaps best seen as a kind of political sleeper. His slavish devotions to the servile French communists notwithstanding, his true commitment was to the Cézannists. "Even a casserole can scream!" he said of The Charnel House. "Everything can scream! A simple bottle! And Cézanne's apples!" In the final analysis, however, he was already spoken for. Pablo Picasso, a painter without peer, lived and died an egotist. A party of one was his ideal station.

Picasso: Peace and Freedom is at Tate Liverpool from 21 May to 30 August (0151 702 7400). www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/ Picasso: TheMediterranean Years opens on 4 June at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London WC1 (020 7841 9960).

 

>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/08/pablo-picasso-politics-exhibition-tate

 

“Some Europeans who love Africa love it for exoticism”

by Sokari on April 25, 2010

in Music

Malian singer, Rokia Traore comments on the response to her decision to move from traditional Malian music to a more contemporary mix of African and European music.

“Some Europeans who love Africa love it for exoticism,” “Anything modern doesn’t interest them. I don’t know why they don’t realise that the traditional and the modern can exist alongside each other. I think they have an image of Africa which they don’t want to change. It’s horrible. It’s the same all over Europe, but France is the worst because here there’s that pretension of knowing Africa.

If they tried to think about it objectively they would be ashamed of themselves. They have decided how African music is supposed to be. So, when a European musician goes to Africa to make a record because he wants a different sound, then it’s amazing, it’s genius. But when an African does something with a European inspiration, it’s not normal.

Rokia Traore

 

Rokia Traoré has no desire

to be confined by genre

 

If the Malian singer’s mix of ancient and modern upsets blinkered Europeans, she’s in no mood to apologise

 

By Clive Davis

 

The young woman, chic and slender, who gets off the train at Gare Montparnasse looks much like any Parisian. No one pays her any heed. Rokia Traoré may be one of the world’s most adventurous musicians, yet today she is just another passenger. Another concert awaits in the evening. Before that, she is due to take part in a programme about francophone culture on French TV.

 

She spends much of her life travelling, physically and spiritually, commuting between cultures, floating between tradition and modernity. She explores the ancestral music of Mali — the revered guitarist Ali Farka Touré was one of her mentors — yet she is just as comfortable taking part in a Mozart festival with the opera maverick Peter Sellars. She sings of village life but grew up listening to Miles Davis, Bob Marley and Dire Straits. On her last album she paid homage to Billie Holiday with a treatment of The Man I Love.

 

In the record shops her work is filed under “world music”. Yet if the term seems perfectly suited to her cosmopolitan outlook, she fears being confined to a well-meaning cultural ghetto. Music is music in her eyes, which is why her latest British tour, which opens this week, finds her on a double bill with the experimental rock trio Sweet Billy Pilgrim.

 

She cut an unconventional figure from the moment she arrived on the international circuit. Here was an unassuming young woman who strummed an acoustic guitar, much like a West African Tracy Chapman, while surrounded by the accoutrements of ancient Malian music. Some of us, frankly, did not know what to make of her a decade ago when she played a low-key show at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho. Could such introverted work ever find an audience beyond a narrow coterie of roots enthusiasts? It seemed unlikely at the time. Traoré pushed on regardless, each successive album experimenting with new sonorities. By the time she released the acclaimed Tchamantché — easily one of the best albums of 2008 — she had incorporated the rough-hewn textures of the rockers’ Gretsch guitar.

 

The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, yet Traoré still feels she has to win over the sceptics. In France, in particular, she argues, there remains that stubborn sense among some world music purists that she is simply too cosmopolitan for her own good. As we sit in a Lebanese restaurant around the corner from the station, she does not mince her words. “Some Europeans who love Africa love it for exoticism,” she says. “Anything modern doesn’t interest them. I don’t know why they don’t realise that the traditional and the modern can exist alongside each other. I think they have an image of Africa which they don’t want to change. It’s horrible. It’s the same all over Europe, but France is the worst because here there’s that pretension of knowing Africa.

 

“If they tried to think about it objectively they would be ashamed of themselves. They have decided how African music is supposed to be. So, when a European musician goes to Africa to make a record because he wants a different sound, then it’s amazing, it’s genius. But when an African does something with a European inspiration, it’s not normal.”

 

Her footloose upbringing as the daughter of a diplomat gives her a wider perspective on the mingling of cultures. The fourth of seven children, she spent time in the Middle East, the US and Europe, acquiring most of her secondary education in Brussels. If that makes her sound like a pampered child of the globalised superclass, she is actually refreshingly down to earth.

 

Although her family did not belong to Mali’s caste of traditional singers, much of her love of music came from her father, who had played saxophone in bands in his youth. A pan-African idealist who was educated in the Soviet Union (Mali’s postcolonial rulers were very much men of the antediluvian Left), he encouraged his daughter to study social sciences and anthropology. Music, however, proved a much stronger attraction.

 

She made her name in Mali first as a member of a rap band. It was only later that she gravitated to the folk end of the repertoire. In some respects she was approaching her own culture as an outsider. Having concentrated on writing French lyrics at the outset, she set herself the task of composing in her native language, Bambara. And when she first returned to Mali she self-consciously immersed herself in traditional female tasks — “learning about the life of African women”, as she put it in one interview — from doing the housework to cutting wood. On the musical front, she came up against a tight-knit musical community that was not always welcoming to outsiders. Traoré persisted nonetheless; that Ali Farka Touré gave her his blessing made all the difference.

 

In some respects she seems destined to remain the eternal outsider. Married to her French manager, Thomas Weill, she still has an apartment in the cathedral city of Amiens. But in the past year or so she has taken the decisive step of shifting her base back to the Malian capital, Bamako, so that she can focus on the work of her recently launched music education project, the Fondation Passerelle (French for “footbridge”). Injecting some of her own money and raising funds from corporate sponsors such as the telecoms company Orange, Traoré is setting up training schemes for young people who seek a career in the music business. It is a small organisation; she and a colleague take on most of the daily workload. Still, given the lack of infrastructure in the country, every little bit helps.

 

As she explains: “I started it because I felt ashamed at having nothing to tell young people when they approached me for advice when I was touring. They would say they wanted to go to Europe and I would say, ‘No, don’t do that’, without having anything concrete to offer them.”

 

Each small step — such as getting recording equipment past customs officials eager to have their palms greased — can be a struggle, and a sound and lighting scheme has encountered more than its share of obstacles. But Traoré is delighted with the progress that a group of trainee singers is making: a choir has been formed, with a concert due to take place next month. Traoré is so busy with administration that she has time to see her parents only once a week, when she drops off her son at their house. Although she plans to work on a 2012 Olympics project with the Kronos Quartet — an ensemble that is always looking for ways of broadening its palette — she will cut back on touring for a while once she finishes this summer’s dates. The foundation will take precedence.

 

As Traoré has discovered, watching the young hopefuls take their first steps in the profession has changed her own priorities. “Of course, I want to develop beyond world music. But the foundation has changed my point of view on things in general. I’m not so stressed about my career.

 

“One thing I don’t like about being a musician is that you have to become very selfish. It’s very hard to keep on this Earth and remember that you are nothing. Yes, I’m as narcissistic as anyone else. But this work has made me very serene. It has helped to remind me that I’m not the centre of the world.”

via: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7105204.ece

 

============================

 

A Malian Chanteuse With Modern Grace

by Banning Eyre

Listen Now

[3 min 40 sec] on All Things Consideredadd to playlist | download

Richard Dumas

Rokia Traore's new album was inspired in part by the sound of a vintage Gretsch guitar.

SONGS FROM 'TCHAMANTCHE'

'Dounia'

add | purchase music

 

'The Man I Love'

add | purchase music

 

Reviewer Banning Eyre also wrote about Rokia Traore's cover of "The Man I Love" (by George and Ira Gershwin) for NPR Music's Song of the Day feature. Read it here: 

• Rokia Traore: Gershwin, By Way Of Mali

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 3, 2009 - Malian singer Rokia Traorehas never been a traditionalist. The daughter of a diplomat, she grew up assimilating European and African cultures, and in her 10-year career, she's developed a sound that uses elements of Malian tradition in her own way. Traore's fourth album, Tchamantche, is just out, and it's her best and most daring work.

"Dounia," the opening track, tells the whole story. Traore always stood out as a West African female singer who also plays guitar. Here, she trades in her usual acoustic axe for a vintage Gretsch jazz guitar and matches its dark tones with a moody, whispering melody.

In "Dounia" — meaning "the world" — Traore touches on the themes of Mali's traditional praise singers, who belt out mighty proclamations about life's inevitable course. "No one can see, [even from the highest point of existence] what tomorrow will be," she sings. "Days that are honey sweet? Days that taste of gall? ... Hours of glory, hours of disappointment." But her mode is less assured than the griots, more delicate and mysterious. With this introspective mood established, Traore's ensemble joins in, led by a traditional lute.

Traore's meld of African and rock aesthetics is understated and as comfortable as it is cool. In this one song, her vocal style shifts from an opening whisper to bird-like cooing and ultimately a growling crescendo in which she laments the remoteness of the heroes who built the great societies of the past — as she puts it, "the story of an Africa we miss." It's the work of a mature artist who embraces the contradictions of her African ancestry and looks ahead with hope, but also a poet's wariness.

So begins Tchamantche, which means "balance." The world's less-developed societies have produced many singers who seek to balance musical style and cultural perspective, and to address the larger world. Few manage it with the grace and style of Rokia Traore.

 

 

via: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100200274

 

 

Cote d'Ivoire: Re-blowing Up Paul Sika:

One of the African blogosphere' favorite photographers, Paul Sika,...

..recently blew up, again - this time on CNN's Inside Africa. He explains his cinematic approach to photography, which we feel is like looking at Africa through Wong Kai-wai's viewfinder then amping the colors to the neon degree. The result? Color Saturated Africa. The title of one of Soyinka's plays - "beautification of an area boy" - also comes to mind. Coffee Table book ahead:

greenbryano — July 23, 2007 — a visual adaptation of Baraka's scathing and foreboding social commentary (music by The Roots.) Shot on three different types of film and two different types of video over three months with at least fifty actors/extras in about twenty-five locations in the West Philly area by one guy. (Bryan Green, 22, senior film & video major at Drexel University)

InkSpotter's 7th Annual

Finding the Right Words

Flash Fiction Contest

Open Theme

1st Prize: $60 plus publication 2nd Prize: $30 plus publication Theme: Open Genre: Fiction Length: 500 words or fewer Deadline: July 21, 2010 (postmark) Entry Fee: $2.00 per story (Paypal preferred)

You may also send your entry and payment by postal mail. (No signature items please.) Betty Dobson InkSpotter Publishing 163 Main Avenue Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada B3M 1B3 PLEASE NOTE: Money orders must be in Canadian funds and negotiable in Canada. Cheques may be drawn on any currency using current exchange rates and must be made payable to Betty Dobson or InkSpotter Publishing.

All dollar figures are quoted in Canadian funds

THE RULES

	Write a self-contained short story in 500 words or fewer. No predetermined theme this year, so let your imaginations run wild!
	Be original. Be concise. Be spelled correctly.
	Send your story in plain text in the body of an e-mail to contests@inkspotter.com (subject line = "Annual Contest Submission") or to the address above. Do not indent paragraphs. Leave one line space between each paragraph.
	All stories MUST have a title.
	Be sure to include your full name and e-mail address. If your story wins, we'll contact you for your preferred method of payment.
	Enter as often as you like, but payment must be received for each entry.
	You retain copyright of your story.
	All entries will be acknowledged if an e-mail address is included.
	EFFECTIVE MARCH 2008: By entering the contest, you agree to have your name and email address added to the subscriber list for InkSpotter News, our monthly ezine. Contest news and winning stories appear in the newsletter. (Our subscriber list will never be shared with or sold to a third party.)

The Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award for 2010   CONGRATULATIONS TO Rich Ives of Camano Island, WA THE 2009 FRANCES LOCKE MEMORIAL POETRY AWARD WINNER FOR HIS POEM CONFIDENTIAL Coming up in 2010 will be our 14th annual competition for which there is a $1,000 cash award, publication in the Fall-2010 Award issue and 5 complimentary copies of that issue. There is a reading fee of $10.00 for up to five (5) poems each of which should be no more than two (2) pages in length. Any additional poems are $2.00 each. All work should be typed or computer generated and legible. Include a short biography with your submission. Put your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address only in your cover letter and not on any of your submitted work. Deadline for submissions must bear a postmark of no later than June 15th, 2010. No e-mail submissions will be allowed. Include a SASE for notification of winning poem. Without the SASE, you can expect no response on our part, unless you live outside the United States and are eligible to be contacted by an e-mail response. No poems can be returned. Please do not send originals. No previously published poems or simultaneous submissions. Just send us your most imaginative work. Serious work that allows the language of your imagination to reveal an entirely new perception from your singular life. This life will be based on your own individual perception and never one that's been conditioned into your sense of reality by conventional wisdom or sentimentality. Those familiar with The Bitter Oleander already know the poetry we publish. If you are unfamiliar and want to be a more certain and informed participant in this competition, please consider purchasing a recent issue for $10.00 (U.S. Funds). Any other related questions concerning this Award may be forwarded to us by e-mail: info@bitteroleander.com Send entries to: Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award - 2010 The Bitter Oleander Press 4983 Tall Oaks Drive Fayetteville, New York 13066-9776 USA

Short Essay Contest:

$1000 and publication in Sonora Review will be given for the first annual Concentrated Nonfiction Contest. The inaugural contest will be judged by Ander Monson. Submit a work of unpublished nonfiction, up to 1,000 words, by June 1st. Entry fee is $15, which includes a copy of the Summer 2010 issue of Sonora Review. Include a cover letter with full name, title of work, mailing and email address. The author’s name should not appear anywhere on the manuscript. No previous published work will be accepted.

By “concentrated nonfiction” we mean a short essay of any variety under 1000 words, not limited to any specific type of essay. In fact, we encourage creativity that projects the malleability of the form. We also are willing to publish multimedia essays as long as the main force of the essay is through language (and it is short).

Submit Online Through Submishmash. Click Here.

Simply click on the type of contest you’d like to submit to, register, pay, and we’re all good to go.

Send Submissions To:

Sonora Review. Contest

Department of English, University of Arizona

Tucson, AZ 85721

Congratulations to Peter Jay Shippy, winner of our Winter poetry contest judged by Caroline Bergvall! Also, congratulations to the finalists Michael Tod Edgerton, Nadine Lockhart, and Matt Mauch.

Save the Date: Monday, May 10, 2010

Diana McCaulay reads from Dog-Heart @ Books & Books

Dog-Heart (Peepal Tree Press, $15) is a novel about the well-meaning attempt of a middle-class single mother to transform the life of a boy from the ghetto who she meets on the street. 


Set in present-day, urban Jamaica, Dog-Heart tells the story from two alternating points of view – those of the woman and the boy. They speak in the two languages of Jamaica that sometimes overlap, sometimes display their different origins and world views. Whilst engaging the reader in a tense and absorbing narrative, the novel deals seriously with issues of race and class, the complexity of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change by their own actions.

Monday, May 10 2010

8:00pm

Books and Books

265 Aragon Avenue

Coral Gables, FL 33134

Resolved: Inmates Make Tough Debaters

Brian Harkin for The New York Times

Students from the Eugene Lang College of the New School leaving the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island after a debate Thursday against a team of inmates from the prison.

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: May 7, 2010

The two debate teams sat across a large room on Thursday night waiting for their face-off to begin. On one side were the visitors, four undergraduates at the New School, and their equally young coach poring over documents and comparing last-minute notes. Across the room the home team, four men in their 30s and 40s, leaned back in their seats, pictures of poise, their neatly arranged index cards at the ready but untouched.

 Brian Harkin for The New York Times

CHALLENGERS The New School team, from left, Johanna Goosens, Skanda Kadirgamar, Nick Olson and Santiago Posas, conferring.

___________________________________________

Brian Harkin for The New York Times

POISED Andrew Cooper, an inmate, and his teammates in the debate. The topic involved government support for higher education in prisons.

_______________________________

 

The students from the Eugene Lang College of the New School were nervous because their team had lost here the previous year; in fact, the opposing team was undefeated in its two-year history, besting opponents like St. John’s University and New York Law School. The students were nervous because they were young and earnest and, as one of them put it, “afraid of offending someone.”

And they were, as one put it, “meta-nervous,” perhaps because they had to argue that the government should not finance higher education in prisons, right there at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, against a team of incarcerated men who could be seen as Exhibit A for the opposing view.

So the Arthur Kill team had the home-turf advantage, plus passion, not to mention direct personal experience — of the four debaters, three are currently special students at the New School, as are many of the two dozen inmates who were on hand to watch. Then there’s the advantage of general life experience, on the outside and in.

“I’m kind of used to public speaking,” Andrew Cooper, 43, said.

In his dark green uniform and wire-rimmed glasses, Mr. Cooper had the look of a graduate student working some night shift to play the bills. He said that he had done some teaching while in prison, and that he occasionally spoke to at-risk youth about the consequences of “bad choices.” Fifteen years ago, while a student at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, he made a bad choice and joined a robbery on Long Island. “I was a fair student,” Mr. Cooper said. “But I went for the quick fix.”

He and his teammates displayed a consistently confident, Obama-inspired style: some measured, almost soothing oratory; some strategic finger-pointing; some appeals to reason. Statistics poured out at a steady rate, about the country’s high recidivism problem and the links between higher education in prisons and lower recidivism rates. Higher education, Mr. Cooper argued, represents “the last bastion of civility and the last hope for inmates to slip the bonds of incarceration and become tax-paying, productive, caring members of society.”

The New Schoolers could not quite bring themselves, as one of them, Santiago Posas, put it, to make some “Republican we-can’t-coddle-criminals argument.” Instead, they went nuclear, debate-style, rejecting the education system altogether: Even if higher education in prisons is ethical, Mr. Posas argued, that premise “does not address the basis for true equality within our society that is structured by complex and hierarchal racist, classist and gendered norms that produce the prison-industrial complex.”

Why import into prisons the same flawed educational system that landed inmates there in the first place? The undergraduates spoke of “the dominant discourse” and “hegemony”; there was talk of “the revolutionary praxis” and, of course, Foucault.

There were also more than a few awkward pauses. “I was reading my speech about how to deal with the fact that education comes from the oppressors to the oppressed, using big words sometimes I myself don’t understand,” Mr. Posas said later. “And I’m thinking: I’m the oppressor! I’m the oppressor here!”

Listening to revolutionary fervor delivered in academia’s native tongue, the Arthur Kill debaters looked amused. “I think they misinterpreted,” one said to the others as they conferred during a short break. “I think they’re misquoting Foucault.”

George Milligan, a lanky man with a smile that flashed gold, finished strong for the Arthur Kill team. “We agree it would be intellectually dishonest not to recognize a correlation between education and crime,” said Mr. Milligan, 40, who was convicted of robbery and assault 19 years ago.

But he hammered back the points about recidivism — sure, failing public schools might essentially funnel poor black men into prison, but once they’re there, receiving some higher education seems to help keep them out, and keep the citizenry safer. Then he asked, “So why are we allowing the criminal justice system to function in a way that does not protect us?”

It came as a surprise to no one when the three judges decreed the debaters from Arthur Kill the victors. But their winning streak — does that surprise the Arthur Kill team, considering they’re up against law students, criminal justice students and, in the case of the New School, theory-happy academics?

“Yes,” said Leonardo Cepeda, who is 30 and serving time for robbery. “They have the upper hand. They have the Internet.”

 

E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com