Enhanced Hazing Techniques [Paul Krassner]

Satire and Speculation in the Age of Bush

http://counterpunch.com/krassner12222007.html

Enhanced Hazing Techniques

By PAUL KRASSNER
December 22 / 23, 2007

A few years ago, in my last album, right after the Abu Ghraib scandal
broke, I talked about how furious Senators and congressmen were,
looking at such photos as a prisoner forced to wear women's panties
on his head and a naked prisoner with a dog collar attached to a
leash held by a woman who is pointing at the man's penis and
laughing. Why were those legislators sputtering with such rage?
Because THEY have to pay EXTRA for those services.

Now, I asked Sam Leff--given his background as an anthropologist
studying and writing about the hidden rituals of American
sadomasochism--for his take on the CIA's cover-up of torture videos.

"I have been watching with fascinated horror," he said, "as America's
S/M patterns of culture have emerged into the open in the Abu
Ghraib/Gitmo Bush administration. I've been flashing on some clear
images of the fratboy reality underlying the White House torture tape
controversy.

"Picture this. Bush and Karl Rove sitting around a big plasma screen
(drinking beer?) and laughing their asses off watching helpless
prisoners drowning under a waterboard, or naked getting cigarette
burns, or maybe having analgesic balm applied to their genitals.

"Once the existence of the tapes became known, their cover story is
that they were having a big discussion about whether or not to keep
or destroy the torture tapes. Like that old pervert, J. Edgar Hoover,
the reality is they were getting off looking at them as sadistic
porn--over and over. Perhaps sharing them with the 'frat brothers' of
their inner circle."

Indeed, in November 2005, Garry Trudeau was queried by Editor &
Publisher about his Doonesbury strip the previous Sunday which had
George Bush defending the branding of Yale University fraternity
initiates with a red-hot coat-hanger in 1967, and Trudeau replied
that it was "Totally fact based. Bush's commen in panel seven is a
direct quote." He was referring to the collegiate Bush saying,
"Insignificant! There's no scarring mark physically or mentally!"

Some pledges told the Yale Daily News that their branding was
preceded by a physical beating. Said one: "By that time, my body was
so numb [from the beatings] that the iron felt good, like a match was
being held close to my body." Bush, who was president of the
fraternity, said that the resulting wound was "only a cigarette
burn." Or maybe enhanced hazing technique.
---

Paul Krassner is the editor of The Realist. His books include: Pot
Stories for the Soul, One Hand Jerking and Murder at the Conspiracy
Convention. He can be reached through his website: http://paulkrassner.com/

.

Why Leon Russell Still Matters

"Can We Burn the Gun Before the Next Time Comes?"

http://counterpunch.com/jacobs12222007.html

Why Leon Russell Still Matters

By RON JACOBS
December 22 / 23, 2007

There's a moment in the film of the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh that
shows how great rock music can be. Bob Dylan, George Harrison and
Leon Russell are singing Dylan's "Just Like A Woman." All three men
join in the chorus, creating an unusual and unique set of harmonies
that could probably only occur with those three voices. It's a
transcendent moment that kept me in a theater in downtown Frankfurt
am Main for most of a day in 1972 as I watched the film over and over
again until the usher asked me to leave before the evening shows
began. There's a performance of "That's the Way God Planned It" by
Billy Preston that is probably the most rocking' song in the original
film and the version of the Beatles' tune "While My Guitar Gently
Weeps" is typically emotive but it's that chorus that keeps me coming
back to this film.

Russell and Preston had more in common than their roles as
accompanists to some of the biggest names in rock music. Their vocal
inflections were gospel through and through, despite their different
backgrounds. Russell was born in Oklahoma and was playing Tulsa
nightclubs by the time he was fourteen. From there he went on the
road with Jerry Lee Lewis. By the mid 1960s he had backed up dozens
of bands as a studio musician working for Phil Spector. Preston was
born in Los Angeles in 1946 and was playing piano for gospel greats
Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland by the time he was ten. By the
time he was in his late teens he was a member of the Shindig
television show house band. A few years later he was playing with the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Right now I am listening to Russell's 1972 album Stranger in a
Strange Land by Russell and his band The Shelter People. This title
is quite probably taken from the Robert Heinlein novel of the same
name. For those unfamiliar with that work, it is the story of a human
raised by Martians and brought back to earth where he begins a
religion based on love and nonviolence only to be met with
persecution and eventual death. The opening song on the album is
written by Russell and also titled "Stranger in a Strange Land." It
begins with the image of a newborn baby confused upon its arrival on
the planet and ends with a plea to reorder our priorities and "stop
racing towards oblivion." Listen to the children sing. Russell's
classic rock piano honed in the hellfire of Jerry Lee Lewis and
perfected while on tour with the British working class interpreter of
rock and roll Joe Cocker in what was known as the Mad Dogs and
Englishmen tour backs up this holy song. The lead guitarist Jesse
Davis-perhaps the only Native American lead guitarist in the history
of rock-matches the plaintive gospel sounds of Russell and moves this
song into the astral choir loft.

Russell's interpretation of Bob Dylan's songs is unique. He is one of
the few artists that not only captures the always present
subterranean subtext of Dylan's work but makes that subtext even
darker and edgier. The Shelter People disc has four such renditions.
The one that echoes quite hauntingly in my mind is his version of
"It's a Hard Rain Gonna' Fall." Shortened by a couple of verses,
Russell's version on the disc moves this eery telling of an
apocalypse beyond the prescient gloominess of Dylan's many versions
and pushes the telling to a circle of hell that is at once far, far
away yet right inside your heart. There is no escape from that rain
and just in case you didn't understand this when Mr. Dylan told you
about it, Leon Russell is gonna' make sure you get it.

Six of the other tunes here are by Russell himself and run the gamut
from a lilting love song called "She Smiles Like a River" to the
rockers "Of Thee I Sing" and "Alcatraz." The latter is a song about
the takeover of the closed-down prison by American Indian Movement
activists and others in 1970. Also thrown in the mix is a tribute to
Little Richard that steals his licks and rocks the house down and the
title song from the self-titled movie made about the Mad Dogs and
Englishmen tour referred to above. This is an often overlooked album
by one of North America's greatest musical interpreters and rock and
roll pianists.

As evidenced by the song "Alcatraz," Russell was occasionally
political, especially in his earlier work. Two song that were
favorites with some of my GI friends back in 1970-1973 were the
anti-military/antiwar "Down On the Base" and "Ballad For A Soldier"
from Russell's first Asylum Choir album. The first is a bouncy ditty
that ridicules the overused bumpersticker slogan "Freedom Isn't
Free." In fact, as Russell tells it, "My life's a small price to
pay/To teach those commies the American way." When it's over, the GI
telling the story in Russell's song states sarcastically that he'll
get a dollar of his fingers and two dollars for his eyes. How nice it
might be if he could see the freedom he was fighting for, but he
can't because the war took his sight. "Ballad For A Soldier" is told
from the perspective of a young man who finds himself a soldier on
trial for murdering babies because he believed in all the lies about
the glory and honor of war, Russell's tune tells the familiar tale of
the lack of truth in those lies. Like its literary contemporary Born
On the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic and its historical equivalent of
My Lai, "Ballad For A Soldier" should be required listening for every
person thinking of joining Washington's current wars. "We're all
little children playing grown-up games,' sings Russell. "can we burn
the gun before the next time comes?"

Back to that moment in the film. Dylan has an acoustic guitar, Leon
Russell has an electric bass and Harrison has an electric guitar.
Three men playing a song that the audience recognizes with applause
even before Dylan has finished singing the first word. This time
around he's playing it in a slowed down countrified version. It's a
song about women and love. The next song in the film is Harrison's
"Something," also about love. Then comes the reason for the show-the
song "Bangladesh." The all-star revue plays the song with the
assumption that there work will go towards helping the people of
Bangladesh in their struggle to survive war and weather. Somewhere
between those hopes and the country of Bangladesh, money men took
most of the cash for themselves. That, too, is rock and roll.
---

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs'
essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on
music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short
Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625@charter.net

.

Elaine Brown Withdraws From Presidential Race

>For Immediate Release
>Brunswick, Georgia,
>December 28, 2007
>
>ELAINE BROWN WITHDRAWS
>FROM GREEN PARTY PRESIDENTIAL RACE
>Renounces Green Party Membership
>_____________________________
>
>OPEN STATEMENT TO THE GREEN PARTY
>
> As of today, I am no longer a candidate for the Green Party
> nomination
>for president of the United States, and I hereby resign from all
>affiliation with the Green Party. I believe the leadership of the Green
>Party of the United States has been seized by neo-liberal men who
>entrench the Party in internecine antagonisms so as to compromise its
>stated principles and frustrate its electoral and other goals. They have
>made it impossible to advance any truly progressive ideals or objectives
>under the umbrella of the Green Party, and, thus, rendered it
>counterproductive for me to go forward as a Green Party candidate or
>member.
>
> I believe this small clique that has captured control of
> the Party has
>transformed it into a repository for erstwhile, disgruntled Democrats,
>who would violate the Party's own vision and sabotage the good will and
>genuine commitment of the general membership. Indeed, these usurpers
>foster a reactionary agenda, supporting partisans in and backers of the
>Bush wars and disavowing the Party's more progressive tenets in favor of
>promoting high-profile participation in the politics of the
>establishment.
>
> This became clear to me almost from the moment I announced
> my candidacy
>in February of 2007. I intended using my campaign to bring large numbers
>of blacks and browns into the Party, particularly from the hood and the
>barrio—as would come to be reflected in the lists of supporters and
>delegates I've submitted in connection with my candidacy. As I asserted
>I would use the respect I enjoyed as a former leader of the Black Panther
>Party to do so, some in the hierarchy seemed utterly fearful of the
>prospect of a massive influx of blacks and browns into the Green Party.
>Soon, there was wide circulation of false rumors that I was a one-time
>"government agent," which was intended to discredit my history in the
>Black Panther Party so as to undermine my potential influence.—And, since
>then, I have had to devote significant time and energy to addressing
>these lies.—What this effort revealed, though, was how the Green Party,
>while advocating "diversity," remains dominated by whites. Indeed, the
>Party is able to count less blacks, browns and natives in its membership
>than our national population percentages and certainly less than the
>Democrats themselves.
>
> In effect, the present Green Party leadership promotes a
> kinder, gentler
>capitalism, a moderated racism, an environmentally-sustainable globalism,
>which I cannot support. They are dedicated to the underside of the
>Party's platform, which falls short of repudiating the capitalist state,
>source of all the social ills the Party would address. They equivocate
>by promoting "an economic alternative to corporate capitalism and a
>socialist state," advocate a "re-formulation" of the IMF, NAFTA, so
>forth, and advance the institution of "stakeholder capitalism."
>
> On the other hand, they demonstrate a willingness to
> override the best of
>the Party's platform. My sharp criticism of high-profile Party members'
>support for the "three-strikes" crime laws, the sole basis for the
>inhumane mass incarceration of people in the United States, particularly
>blacks—the repeal of which the Party's platform advocates—has been met
>with outright enmity. And, to divert attention from this and other
>critical issues, the leadership has employed chicanery in their
>promulgation of defamatory lies about me—which they finally extended to
>character assaults on my supporters and critics of their
>unscrupulousness.
>
> It is my sincere belief that the Green Party as it now exists has no
>intention of using the ballot to actualize real social progress, and will
>aggressively repel attempts to do so. To remain in the fray or in the
>Party, then, would require a betrayal of my lifelong and ongoing
>commitment to serving the interests of black and other oppressed people
>by advancing revolutionary change in America.

.

There's a riot goin' on [Wattstax]

There's a riot goin' on

http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/theres-a-riot-goin-on/2007/12/20/1197740450217.html

December 21, 2007

Wattstax is a groovy insight into the African American story, its
music and its solid-gold fashion sense, writes Michael Dwyer.

AUGUST 20, 1972, was Isaac Hayes' 30th birthday. That night, he
greeted 100,000 brothers and sisters at LA's Memorial Coliseum: an
entertainment audience unprecedented in African-American history.

Long lost footage shows the stadium scoreboard flashing "Black Moses"
as he raises his fists, a soul messiah in teardrop shades, pink
tights, zebra-fur ankle-warmers and gold chains circling his
glistening ebony torso.

Some birthday. Doubtless a little surreal for a Tennessee orphan who
was literally picking cotton not too many birthdays earlier.

"Those chains were a statement," Hayes says today. "I took a symbol
that had for so long meant slavery and entrapment and turned their
meaning around. They became a symbol of strength, virility and power."

They were the perfect accessory for "the Black Woodstock". The
Wattstax concert was staged by Memphis record label Stax to
commemorate the Watts riots of '65, to raise money (at $1 a ticket)
for the Martin Luther King Hospital, and to consolidate the passion
and pride of black America.

Bizarrely, Hayes' climactic performance was cut from the 1973 film
due to music licensing issues. His motorcade arrival, his
introduction by the afro-sporting Reverend Jesse Jackson and his
scalp-tingling performance have been reinstated for the film's
big-screen return.

"There was a lot of love there that day," recalls Hayes, one of
Stax's chief creative forces since the mid '60s. "It was a sense of
pride: Pride of our people, our music, our achievements. We had
something to say and it was said on a large scale.

"And most importantly, the whole event was totally peaceful. Not one
fight or incident. Everyone was there just to have a good time. When
I got on stage, I felt surrounded by my people. It was a day to
celebrate being black and being proud. I'd come a long way. Everyone
had come a long way."

The absence of white faces in Wattstax is striking. To minimise any
chance of confrontation, Stax vice-president Al Bell cut a deal with
the stadium to employ black security guards. The LAPD consigned black
police officers. All but three of the 48 film crew were drafted from
the local community.

To watch the movie now, in a world where rap, pop and R&B stars
mingle on the red carpets of televised awards shows, it's hard not to
feel the shock of social segregation, although Hayes' spin is more positive.

"Wattstax was a celebration, not a segregation," he says. "It was a
political statement by the black people: we could do this and we
could do it peacefully. After the riots at Watts, that needed to be
seen. And everybody got it that day."

The crowd footage leaves little doubt of that. The feel in the
stadium's stands is of people unchained for the first time, dressed
to be counted in skin-tight explosions of Blaxploitation chic. The
colour and motion in the audience is often as riveting as
performances by Rufus Thomas, the Staples Singers, Albert King,
Luther Ingram, the Bar-Kays and others.

Wattstax director Mel Stuart underscored the sense of a population
reaching critical mass with very real, sometimes funny, sometimes
shocking conversations filmed in the surrounding streets.

Wired improvisations by comedian Richard Pryor were strung into a
loose commentary. Extra performances ­ the Emotions, Little Milton,
Johnnie Taylor ­ were shot in bars, churches and streets to create a
panorama of Watts '72.

Again, the impression is of a world apart from mainstream America,
and on that score, Deanie Parker agrees. She cut her first record at
Stax's Memphis Studios in '64, a teenaged talent quest winner. Within
a year she would be the label's publicist. She retired just two weeks ago.

"The movie was a real view of our culture and our lifestyle," she
says, "and we are not that far away from that now. We may have better
jobs, we may drive larger cars, we may be crossing the colour line
and we may be living in bigger houses, but it's there."

She paints a sobering picture of the southern American touring
circuit of the '60s, in which black artists were unable to use
service station rest rooms, let alone play the same venues as white
artists or hear their records on "mainstream" radio.

"Wattstax was a social move on our part," she says, but "it was also
about providing increased exposure for the artists. We had to move
out of Memphis, into Chicago, into New York and Los Angeles, to try
and achieve that crossover."

She mentions the Monterey Pop Festival appearance of Otis Redding and
Booker T and the MGs in '67 as a landmark event for black artists.
"Here in Memphis, we were landlocked and stigmatised by all of the
'isms' that existed through the south at that time," she says.

It's in this light that the importance of Stax as a social force
comes alive. Parker describes an open house of creative expression in
the converted Capitol Theatre at 926 East McLemore Avenue. The walls
were avocado green and burnt orange, the floor sloped under thin
carpet ­ a key to "the Stax Sound" ­ and everybody was welcome.

"Oh honey, we were just trying to make hits, trying to master our
sound and style. We were like sponges, just soaking up everything we
could learn and just loving being in the studio. We didn't know when
morning turned to noon, we didn't care when evening turned to night.

"Everybody had to be part of the team. We all had to sweep the
floors, address the records going out across the country, and if we
wanted to do a demo session at night, heck, I'd go up there and run
the (mixing) board myself, just like anybody else."

Parker would co-write songs for Redding, Sam and Dave and other Stax
icons, but when she got to LA on August 20, 1972, she had to add
"wet-nurse" to her resume. "Backstage was bedlam. Bed-lam!" she says.
The artists may have shared a social conscience, but their dressing
room sizes, stage times, billing and wardrobe were all dog-eat-dog
considerations. "I clearly remember that Johnnie Taylor pitched a fit
'cause he was not goin' on if one of the artists came on after,"
Parker says. "It almost drove me to drinkin'!"

The frailty of the superstar ego is clearly unchanged in 35 years.
There also seems to be a clear through-line from the ostentatious
pimp culture depicted in Wattstax to the bling-laden hip-hop videos
of today. This suggestion horrifies Deanie Parker.

"Don't you even try to rationalise these rappers and compare them to
what we were all about," she snaps. "Hell, the pimps then wore their
pants up! They were men! You know what I'm saying? Our guys didn't
run around with guns trying to kill people. We did not glamorise
(that), we were not degrading men or women. We were trying to make
love to the men and women. We were trying to instil pride in people."

It might be argued that the cultural pride instilled by Stax in the
'60s, and by the Wattstax concert and movie in the '70s, had
something to do with hip-hop standing so tall in mainstream America
in later decades. Again, Parker isn't sure.

"Stax artists were a product of their environment," she says. "They
were very real. They didn't try to change their behaviour or their
lifestyles. I know we didn't work nearly as hard at trying to refine
our artists as Motown did. We didn't want our artists being pretentious.

"So I don't know that we influenced the culture so much as we were
the culture. We represented the culture. We were, in many ways, the
epitome of the culture."

Isaac Hayes has a more cavalier attitude to the excesses of the rap
generation. "There is nothing wrong with bling," he says, "as long as
you do it with style." Asked about his own trailblazing style, from
pink tights to the restyled steel of African slavery, he says: "You
know, those outfits were essential for that time in history. They
played a part just like our music did. Do I miss them? Sometimes. But
I sure don't miss wearing those chains all the time. They used to get
really hot in the sun and freezing in the cold!"

Deanie Parker has two things she wants to share with Australian kids
seeing Wattstax for the first time.

"They need to understand that the movement continues even today," she
says. "The same statements and messages we were trying to communicate
at that time, we are still trying to communicate today. Things
haven't changed that much in the last 40 years in this country."

Second is the unaltered, cross-racial imperative to boogie.

"Do it! Do it Down Under! Do it till ya can't do it no more, y'hear?"
---

Wattstax screens at ACMI in Federation Square from December 26 until
January 13.

www.acmi.net.au/wattstax

www.stax50.com

.

Fernanda Pivano and the Beat generation

Fernanda Pivano and the Beat generation

http://www.beniculturali-patrimoni.it/articolo_eng.php?id_pubblicazione=37595

In Verona, on the fiftieth anniversary of "On the road", an
exhibition of photos that tells the story of the protagonists of the
Beat movement and the woman that helped us to get to know them

24-12-2007

"Fernanda Pivano e la Beat generation – Mostra di fotografie e
memorie" is the title of this collection of photos on display in
Verona from 1st December last to 2nd February 2008, at the Modern
Section of the Biblioteca Civica in the centre of Verona, on the
corner of via Cappello (at number 23 is the home of Giulietta
Capuleti, a place of continuous pilgrimage to this day) and vicolo
San Sebastiano.
The exhibition was set up by the Verona City Council for Culture with
the help of Biblioteca Riccardo e Fernanda Pivano - Fondazione
Benetton studi e ricerche and the Verona Centro Internazionale di
Fotografia Scavi Scaligeri.
45 photos are on display, in two sections: in the first one there are
30 black and white pictures taken as far back as 1948 by Ettore
Sottsass – Pivano's husband – some on the occasion of the 25th
anniversary of the publication of "On the road".
In the second section, there are 10 photos of the poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, who then became the publisher of the Beat movement,
taken from the Conz Archive in Verona and 5 photos of Pivano taken
between 2002 and 2005 by Walter Pescara, the photographer and curator
of the collection.
Then there is a special section dedicated to autographed books,
documents and papers that relate mainly to Hernest Hemingway, Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
This exhibition is noteworthy because, among other things, it allows
young people to learn about the Beat movement that their "all and
now" generation feeds on.
A generation that is considered "as voracious as it is unknowing" by
Pescara, who denounces the fact that all too often in schools the
Fifties are barely mentioned.
However, Pescara also says, "that climate of holier-than-thou
conformism and prohibitionism that existed at the time has been
eroded in the West thanks to those poets, writers and musicians:
opinions that went against the tide, that dissociated themselves from
the ideas shared by most"; these are words that echo those of the
poet Gregory Corso: "Beat is whoever breaks away from the established
line in order to follow the line of his destiny".
And the faces of those pacifist-revolutionaries are all there, often
with Fernanda Pivano:
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Hemingway, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Rudolf Nureyev,
Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, Julian Beck,
Judith Malina.

The collection that celebrates two important anniversaries of the two
fathers of the movement, Kerouac and Ginsberg, is on display among
the shelves and the computers of the renewed artistic and high tech
version of the Library.
In fact, 2007 is the 50th anniversary of the Beat Bible: On the road,
written in 1951 on a roll of teleprinter paper and published in New
York in 1957 by Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books, while the author of
Howl, a scandalous book published in 1956 by the same publishing
house, who was taken to court for it the following year, died ten years ago.
The group was kept together by an extraordinary woman: Fernanda
Pivano, 90 last July, famous above all for being Hemingway's
translator, who also inspired Kerouac himself when he wrote the great
new American novel.
Of the over 40 translations from across the ocean, Italy owes Pivano
the Antologia di Spoon River by Edgar Lee Master, paraphrased to
music by Fabrizio De Andrè, and the made-in-Usa classics: from
Faulkner to Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom she met personally in order
to grasp their essence.
Finally, the event is enriched by a series of fringe appointments,
such as the screening of a video on the Beat Generation and a theatre
performance on Kerouac.

Q&A With Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant, Co-founders of The Well

[2 items]

Q&A With Stewart Brand, Co-founder of The Well

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-01/st_15thewell_brand

12.20.07

Wired: So, I guess one of my first questions is, back when you
cofounded The Well, did you have some sort of idea, or what sort of a
future were you envisioning as it pertained to online communities?
And I'm thinking as it pertains to today's social networking craze.
Did you have an idea of where something like The Well was possibly
headed? Or more specifically, what it might serve as a precursor to,
in years to come?

Brand: We were really building on two ideas, I guess maybe three. One
was a plain, old bulletin board system, which was what had really
been building­what became the Internet. We arrived, and so our
operation was kind of a jumped-up bulletin board system. The model,
in terms of content, was the telephone company, in the sense that all
the telephone company sells you is a dial tone and doesn't get
involved in what you say or who you say it to, or any of that. And so
that was part of what was behind the "You own your own words" slogan.
And just trying to get out of the content business and putting our
customers in the content business, which they readily did. And then
the third model was, there had recently been a book called The Great
Good Place. And the book is about the other place besides the
workplace and the home where people hang out. And it's the pub, or
it's the beauty shop, or it's the barbershop.

Wired: It's a communal environment.

Brand: It's a communal environment, the place to go and hang out and
see your buddies. The idea of The Well was that it would be a "great
good place." Indeed, that was chugging along, and then we got the
Grateful Dead into the picture and suddenly it wasn't chugging
anymore. Because this was an intense, social networking group, as we
would call it now, that was already in existence and widely
distributed and therefore in need of a great good place to go and
hang out with their buddies in cyberspace, and we were it. So what
was I expecting? I was expecting that we would play out the
interaction of lots and lots of groups that were self-identifying
with others of their interest, and doing it in a context where the
overlaps between those groups of interest would infect each other,
and so there were always several conferences that basically everybody
went to. And so the Grateful Dead folks leaked out into more public
conferences, and then other people starting hanging out with them in
their conferences. And that kind of easy migration from one group to
another was part of what made the thing take off. But basically,
everybody had the option to be as public or as private as they
wanted, and that was part of the story.

Wired: You know, back in the earliest days, The Well was a
very­obviously, as in all things that start out­was a very small
community and it stayed very inclusive for a long time. Nowadays,
with the social networking explosion that we've had, with millions of
people being involved in these sorts of communities where people with
common interests connected with each other, do you see The Well's
fingerprints in all of that?

Brand: Yes and no. I mean, one thing that we insisted on was no
anonymity. And lots of the systems out there now like anonymity or
encourage it, or individuals absolutely hold out for it. Personally,
I would have preferred to see it go the other way. Not so much on the
… I mean, The Well's compromise is pretty good, I think, which is
that people can have whatever amusing handle they wanted, but it was
linked and it was linked publicly to a real person. That gave the
accountability I wanted, which is, I knew that flame wars would go
over unless somebody's nose was identifiable so that if necessary,
you could go punch their nose. And they would know that, and you
would know that, and that would slightly ameliorate the otherwise
extreparous (sp?) behavior. What it did probably, in reality, was
connect cyberspace with real space a little better because you always
had the sense there were real people and real places behind whatever
they were doing online.

And one of the things that took off from the beginning was the
so-called Well Office Party, where people would come on Fridays, or
whatever it was, and initially at our office, which instantly got
overcrowded, and then a public place, where people wanted to go spend
the evening, and they would wear name tags with their Well handle on
it. Soon enough, people are getting married and starting businesses
together and nonprofits together­like the Electronic Frontier
Foundation­so the connection of virtual and real individuals was
something that we leaned on, and I think (except in operations like
MeetUp) is not strong in some of the social networking sense.

Wired: Yeah, MeetUp was one of the first­as you were describing
that­was one of the first things that immediately popped into my head
in terms of a representation of that ideal that's still around.

Brand: Well, for us, the Office Party was a byproduct. For MeetUp,
it's the main event that you go and connect with folks.

Wired: That's a good point. So, The Well has been online and live for
22 years now. And in a lot of ways, it's still functioning very much
in the similar manner as it did in its earlier days.

Brand: Probably a lot of the same people.

Wired: Yeah, providing a community to engage in conversations, share
ideas, building friendships, even after 22 years. Is that at all
surprising to you?

Brand: Somewhat. I mean there are people like Bruce Sterling and Paul
Hawken that insist on maintaining their Well email address. It's just
sort of a badge of something or other. I don't because I was getting
spammed to death.

Wired: I know Gary Wolf for us was still using his up until I think a
couple of years ago.

Brand: Well, there you are. And some of it, I suppose, is "first
loyalty, deepest loyalty" or something like that. I haven't been on
The Well in so long, I'm the last person to make any observations on
what's the same and what's different. What I hear by hearsay is that
Jon Carroll, jrc@well.com, is moving forth in ways we used to do and
feeding into his column and from his column and things like that. I
know that Howard Rheingold, as far as I know, is still hanging there,
despite having tried to start one or more alternatives to The Well.

Wired: Well, that's Howard.

Brand: Yup. And there was a lady in New York that started a Well-like
thing, but I don't know whatever happened to that.

Wired: Well, do you perhaps see a larger significance that, despite
everything over the past 20-plus years that the Internet and the Web
has been able to offer us, that in spite of all that, The Well still
thrives today?

Brand: Well, I think one of the things that we learned­and we didn't
learn it until we did it­was that these online communities, once they
get relatively tight, become tremendously conservative, in the sense
that you can take the business away that they live on and [say], "Go
find another business to live on."

Wired: Right.

Brand: And the explicit and implicit rules of behavior become pretty
stric, and people who just sort of show up and behave badly get
punished pretty quickly. Either find a way to blend into the norms or
they're gone.

Wired: But there is that accountability factor, though.

Brand: The accountability factor is a big part of that, but I
remember at Esther Dyson's conference, there'd be panels on various
corporations [that] were wanting to engage their customers through
Well-like interactivity. Esther would sort of prompt to stand up in
the audience and say, "Do you really want your customers to get in your face?"

Wired: It's a be-careful-what-you-ask-for mentality.

Brand: Yeah, they will gang up on you. Some of the downside of gang
behavior is more like sharks who smell blood.

Wired: Well, it's a bell that can't be un-rung.

Brand: Yeah, if you tell people, "Oh, well, stop doing this," then
they get really mad. And indeed, this was discovered by, I forget if
it was the Source or CompuServe, who were our competition at the
time. And they had a conference on PCs, on personal computers, and in
the conference on personal computers, people started talking about
CompuServe, or the Source, or AOL, or whoever it was. And those
conferences were immediately shut down by the host, and those
customers immediately left permanently because they felt like, "Wait
a minute! You don't get to tell me what I can talk about." And this
was one of the differences we put out there. These other systems were
pretending that your words were their words, and they were
responsible for them and they could tell you what you could not talk
about. Basically, censorship was the norm, and our approach was the
opposite. And that seems to have been what mostly prevailed. I think
it's well understood now that content you enter into these social
networks doesn't belong to the network.

Wired: It does seem to be the prevailing mentality nowadays.

Brand: Well, is that the case? Does Facebook pretend that everything
you do in there belongs to them?

Wired: Well, it is public.

Brand: Right, and do they tell you that you can't talk about Facebook
on Facebook?

Wired: Well, no. Good point, good point.

Brand: That is what used to be the case. It was very, very strange.
So that's changed, at least. And I don't know what the legal standing
of [whether] Flickr owns my photographs. I doubt it.

Wired: I should really read my fine print a little bit closer, I guess.

Brand: Well, no doubt there will be various legalistic defensiveness,
but I think it's pretty well understood that the phone company mode
has been, what's out there is that these operations offer dial tone,
they're not selling you content in the sense of …. They're selling
you scale, which has content, and the more people in one of these
systems, or the more relevant people­for you, like Facebook­in one of
these systems, the more value that stuff has for you.

Wired: Well, I think it's something that's only going to get much,
much bigger at this point.

Brand: Well, bigger and stranger. A lot of it is moving into the cell
phone world. Cell phones are now the fifth platform that you're
getting a new generation of hackers operating in, where the Internet
was the fourth platform and The Well was, in some sense, an early
part of that. Now, the really inventive stuff is coming on cell phones.

--------

Q&A with Larry Brilliant, Co-founder of The Well

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-01/st_15thewell_brilliant

12.20.07

Wired: I guess one of the first things I wanted to ask you about was,
back when you founded The Well-this was 22 years ago now-what sort of
a future were you envisioning, perhaps as it pertained to online
communities, especially with today's social networking crazy, which
has just exploded? Did you have any idea what The Well would grow
into or serve as a precursor to?

Brilliant: You know, I think it's a-and I think Wired magazine has
called me a visionary or prescient about a dozen times-but I would
just like to point out that's a curse.

Wired: Duly noted.

Brilliant: You know, "May you live in interesting times." It's a
curse. Unless you're also blessed with an understanding of how long
it's going to take and how much it's going to cost. [Laughs.] So I
can see The Well as an idea which was part of about six other similar
online communities. What's noteworthy is the other five died, and the
others were-one was in Atlanta, one was in Michigan, one was the
national one (which became Genie, the General Electric network which
lasted quite some time and then died) … But the real thing, first,
the time period, you really need to put it into perspective. Now, my
company owned 50 percent of The Well, and Stewart Brand, my friend
Stewart's nonprofit Point Foundation, owned 50 percent of it.

Wired: I spoke with Stewart this morning, and he says, "Hello."

Brilliant: Oh, yeah? Did he tell you the truth?

Wired: Well, I hope so.

Brilliant: Nah, I'm just kidding, of course he did. You know how I
had to talk him into it, and what his other offer was for that famous lunch?

Wired: Ah, no, we didn't get into that part.

Brilliant: Well, we were in San Diego at WBS, at Western Behavioral
Science, and I had started five organizations like The Well, and they
weren't doing that well. And they weren't doing that well because
modems were 300 baud acoustic modems. Because modem density was very
low in places like Michigan. Modem density, which you don't even
think about today, was the key issue on whether a social network
would survive or not. If you didn't have enough modems in an area,
there wouldn't be enough people to get on, even at 300 baud. That's
why Atlanta did so well, because that's where Hayes was, and Hayes
was the major manufacturer of modems. You tracked which ones would do
well by what the modem density was. And I thought the modem density
in the Bay Area was sensational, and I thought that Stewart had this
great community. And I had known Stewart from the old days. I
thought, with this great community-Stewart had once done me a great
favor in 1971 when I was doing a magazine. Stewart gave me 5,000
copies of the Whole Earth Catalog to give to people to thank them for
subscribing to that magazine.

Wired: The first edition.

Brilliant: Well, it was the first edition, but I think it was the
last edition. [Laughs.] But he was really wonderful, and so I
thought, I'm going to do him a favor, which is, I'll give him a
computer, which was a VAX, I'll give him a couple hundred thousand
bucks, which was a lot of money, and I'll leave him alone, which was
the biggest favor I ever did him. I'm sure he told you that.
[Laughs.] And so I said, "Stewart, let's have lunch. I'd love to
pitch an idea to you." And his wife said to Stewart, "Let's go
skinny-dipping instead of having lunch." [Laughs.] So here's Stewart,
we're in San Diego, and he's got to make a choice. And I think
ultimately, his amazing wife, Ryan Phelan, said to him, "We can go
skinny-dipping anytime. Let's have lunch with Larry."

That lunch, I pitched him. And my idea was wrong! My idea was to use
this new technology as a way of discussing everything in the Whole
Earth Catalog. And let's use the Item Response Paradigm, so there can
be a social network around Swiss Army knives or solar stoves or
anything. And Stewart took my money and took the machine and did
exactly the opposite, and he was right every time he did that. He
said, "No, let's just have a conversation and get the smartest people
in the world. And let them figure out whatever they want to talk
about." And he was right. And at the time, nobody believed you had to
have face-to-face meetings; [they thought] that this technology was
going to replace face-to-face meetings. And, of course, Stewart said,
"No, let's have a party once a month on Friday nights."

Wired: The Office Parties.

Brilliant: Right, yes. He was right. A party of all the Wellizens,
the citizens of The Well. And he was right about it again, because it
cemented the community. And then, now I had a public company-I had
taken this company public-and my board wanted Stewart to price this
high because it was a premium product, and Stewart said, "No, let's
price it at $2 a hour," which today sounds high, but it was a quarter
of what the going rate was. And again, he was right, because he
developed such fanatic loyalty that when people would go to India for
a year, they wouldn't turn off their subscription! $2 an hour, plus
$8 a month! Because The Well was a magic community, as I'm sure you
know, and whether it's Bezos or-you should talk to Craig Newmark
because Craig cut his teeth on The Well, and Larry and Sergey at
Google and all these communities cut their teeth on The Well. And
when I was announced as the head of Google.org, I would go into a
room and the first thing people would say is, "Here's Larry
Brilliant, the founder of The Well … oh, and by the way, he's head of
Google.org." It was the other way around! [Laughs.]

Wired: That was going to be my next question. So you're still an
active Well participant?

Brilliant: I still have my active Well address, larry@well.com, still
get a lot of mail from there. You know, I've got so many different
things now [that] I'm doing at Google, I'm not even an active
Brilliant family participant. [Laughs.] You don't want to know how
crazy busy I am.

Wired: Sure. After 22 years of being live and online, in many ways
The Well, sort of, still serves the same function as it did at its
conception: providing a community for people to engage in
conversations and share ideas and build friendships. Its survival
and, indeed, success-is it that surprising to you that after 22 years
it's still thriving?

Brilliant: No, no. What's surprising to me is that there aren't other
places in the United States where we can have that conversation about
the most important things in the world. We have a threat to our
democracy now. We have a form of government that doesn't look like
what the founders of the United States had in mind. We cannot have a
serious conversation in the Senate, in the House of Representatives
anymore because of acrimony. We do not have a good conversation in
the media, because the media owners do not benefit by having a real
hard, tough, honest conversation about the trade-offs that we have.
Our intellectuals are gone. You get Tom Friedman, you know? But what
happened to all the rest of the public intellectuals? The
universities are increasingly monoclones, vertical markets. Where
does the conversation take place in the United States and, indeed,
the world that we need to have? The Well was that.

When The Well was started, we had governors and senators-I think John
Markoff was one of our first people on The Well. We had conversations
about everything from the meaning of life to the meaning of
government to what it means to be a good citizen.

Wired:: You had guys like Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow on there.

Brilliant: Oh, everybody-some of the smartest people in the world.
You ask yourself, in the end, we struggled over things, like how do
you deal with somebody who says negative, inflammatory things? And I
don't know if it was Stewart or Howard Rheingold who came up with
this idea that you own your own words-we're not responsible for what
you say because we don't own them. You think about that. It's one of
these great ideas that falls along with civil liberties, the Bill of
Rights, and what America is. We became a utility. We didn't take
sides. We weren't Democrats or Republicans. We were not pro or con
anything. We were the utility, like the newspaper always was for
classified ads. You say whatever you want to say. You're responsible
for what you say. And that idea allowed people to think very deeply
about the world. A lot of people would go offline and they would
spend hours and hours and hours just crafting their response to
thoughts. People first published many books and newspaper articles as
replies to things on The Well. Business plans first appeared as ideas
on The Well. Where do we have that today? Unfortunately, our
conversations have become "Blackberry cryptic." You know, SMS is
great for saying, "I'll meet you at 4 o'clock." But it isn't great
for discussing the importance of the Bill of Rights.

Wired: Sounds like the whole idea of social networking has definitely
taken a sharp turn from how The Well envisioned social networking and
the original idea of an online community.

Brilliant: We had everything, just like a small city. We had our
markets, we had a chance for people to meet and date. We had a chance
to celebrate marriages and deaths and births-as Katie wrote about in
her book, by the way.

Wired: It's an amazing read.

Brilliant: Yeah, and I would say that many of the people who created
the first tech revolution, the second tech revolution, the third tech
revolution cut their teeth on The Well, but I'd like to see something
like The Well start all over again today, using the tools that we
have, because we've now got some amazing tools.

Wired: You know, the Internet and the Web have given us so much more
over the last 22 years, since The Well was conceived. And in addition
to that, like we said, it's taken a sharp turn. There are millions of
people today involved in some sort of social networking platform or
another. Where in all that do you see The Well's fingerprints or its influence?

Brilliant: Everywhere. It's hard to imagine, but there was nothing
like The Well before. The closest was The Source and CompuServe user
groups and Usenet. Those were the closest. GE a little bit, but Genie
and The Well were coming up at the same time, and Genie was more a $5
an hour at night. And because it wasn't a physical place, it didn't
have that sense of community. CompuServe had user groups that were
based on, they're called SIG Groups, and they were based on Usenet
and Usemail-ah, Usenews, nah, it was just News. And it was very hard
to have a conversation using Unix News because you churn something
out on Tuesday and on Thursday, somebody would reply. It wasn't
really threaded together, and you couldn't put the whole conversation
together. The brilliance of The Well and of this product PicoSpan
that we based it in-because there were a lot of products like that.
There was Confer in Michigan. There was EIES in New Jersey, the New
Jersey Institute of Technology. There was Jacques Vallee's Notepad at
Stanford. There was Converse. These computer conference paradigms,
what they did was thread a conversation so that you could be 20
people having 50 different conversations and you could re-enter the
conversation three months later and it would be as fresh and alive as
it were when you were [last] there. It was the first time anyone ever
had store-and-forward, asynchronous, many-to-many conversations. I
know that's a mouthful, and it's really technical, but when you think
about it, it has to be asynchronous because everyone's chatting at
the same time. It has to be store-and-forward; it can't be like a
blog, where everybody is in a free-for-all. It's got to be moderated.
And it's got to be many-to-many. If it's not many-to-many, then you
wind up with a blast email or a blog where people can comment in a
chronological sequence, but you've either got to be on it all the
time synchronously or you miss the conversation. One of the greatest
things you can do is to get on The Well and pick a topic that you
know a lot about, like, you know, you look at ethics or morality or
Lichtenstein, or you look at the mating patterns of some arboreal
creature that you happen to know something about. You'll find a
conversation like that, but now it goes back for 20 years on The
Well, and probably every expert in the world has opined on it.

Wired: At some point or another.

Brilliant: Yeah, so I worry about the tyranny of the amateur. I worry
that there isn't a way in which the new technologies allow people who
have a lot to say to be heard-and other than, "Oh yeah, we were
talking about gorillas the other day, and this woman named Jane said
something from Africa, but it went past my screen so fast, but here's
something who thinks that they've got 14 legs, that's really
interesting." [Laughs.] Or what's a really funny one that-and I love
Wikipedia and I love Jimmy Wales, but look at some of the stuff on
famous people you know, like the description of Abraham Lincoln. Just
tell me if there should be as much attention paid to his dog as the
Emancipation Proclamation. But when you have a lot of people, you're
likely to get a dis- I'm not making this up, of course. [Laughs.]
You're likely to get a disproportionate amount of conversation on
areas that aren't as vital. And The Well, because of the way it
organized information, boy, that conversation was really to the
point, and when it wasn't, you had a human operator called a sysop,
who would just kick you off or shut you down or scribble your words.

Wired: Yeah, an admin.

Brilliant: Yeah, an admin, but-yeah, an admin. They give everyone
different titles now.

Wired: Yeah, just a last question, because I know you're very busy.
So do you think-

Brilliant: I love to talk about The Well, by the way.

Wired: No problem, I just don't want to take up too much of your
time. So we talked earlier about all of the new technologies that
have come around since 1985 and the ideals that went into creating
The Well. And you brought up the idea of whether we could start over
fresh with the technology that we have today and create something in
that likeness. Is that even something that's feasible? Can we
actually get there one day?

Brilliant: Absolutely! Especially if I can get Stewart Brand to run it again.

Wired: There you go.

Brilliant: Because, in the end, it was Stewart's values and that
community's values, which were kind, honest, inclusive, supportive,
community-based, highly intelligent, fact-based. I'd like to think we
have that community at Google as well. And that there's a great part
of-you know, in the world that I work in now where I have to deal
with children dying in Africa from diseases with names nobody's ever
heard of and an increasing amount of poverty, a decreasing middle
class, fear of climate change, rivers drying up. I have to deal with
some horrible things in the world. But what gives me my optimism is
that the generation spawned by The Well and their, I think, superior
offspring and successors-morally superior, in many ways-they had a
hope for the future. It's this community that will solve the problems
of global warming and malaria, kids dying of diarrhea,
overpopulation, the unfair distribution of wealth and power in the
world. This is the community that will solve it. And The Well, I
think, played a really, really important role in creating this
combination of intelligence and commitment to values.

.

Unbroken Chain: Revisiting The Grateful Dead at UMass

[2 articles]

Unbroken Chain: Revisiting The Grateful Dead at UMass

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=27783

Published: December 22, 2007
By Doug Collette

Unbroken Chain: The Grateful Dead in Music, Culture and Memory
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA
November 16-18, 2007

Attending this three-day event might not have wholly transformed a
skeptic's view of the Grateful Dead, their music and their culture,
but it would have provided abundant insight into the reasons for the
group's posthumous staying power. That understanding would have come
as a slow-growing realization because Unbroken Chain so closely
mirrored this influential band's musical approach along with the
dutiful, often-defensive devotion of its fans.

Rebecca Adams' Friday morning analytical presentations on the
traveling legions of Deadheads coexisted with PhDs' scholarly
dissections of the group‘s performances later that
afternoon­neither of which approach could recapture during the course
of the weekend that elusive element so often dubbed "magic," despite
the scholars' obvious passion for their subjects. Those academics
did, however unintentionally, demystify scholarship at least to some
degree by proving, elaborate PowerPoints aside, that some phenomena
cannot be represented neatly in a category, even one of its own making.

It was no real surprise (and no reflection on chairman David
Gans­host of The Grateful Dead Hour on radio and editor of
Conversations with The Dead book­that a panel discussion of criticism
bogged down in near argument about the downside of the Dead's rise to
fame: it was the one moment otherwise coy references to drug use over
the weekend carried a darker undertow. But such narrowly escaped
discord was in marked contrast to the illuminating likes of David
Lemieux' insight into the archiving of Grateful Dead music, both the
technical and esthetic challenges.

Likewise photographer Herb Greene's portfolio of images from the
Sixties: his photographs­together with an honest account of his
personal travails as related to his vocation­suggested more than any
self-referential statement might communicate precisely because it was
so ingenuous.

But it was the self-effacing presentation of Grateful Dead sound
engineer Dan Healy that supplied the most insight into the Dead
philosophy. Full of laughter and colorful language, Healy described
from his vantage point behind the soundboard in various venues how he
sculpted the live sound of Grateful Dead shows, the two fundamental
principles of the band's operations: enabling the band to play better
because they could hear themselves accurately and therefore assuring
the audience enjoyed themselves more because they could all hear the
band clearly no matter the venue. His casually pragmatic approach­to
only a slightly less degree comparable to Bob Bralove's more
high-tech approach­seemed the antithesis of the stereotyped
laissez-faire hippie attitude so pervasive in mainstream cultural
perceptions of all things Dead.

With the benefit of some academic hindsight combined with his insider
perspective, keynote speaker Dennis McNally's whimsical yet erudite
presence provided a thread of continuity for the symposium. Appearing
in panel discussions about the significance (or lack thereof) of the
Sixties decade in which the Grateful Dead came to be, contributing a
sagacious perception of the evolution of the band's business
(including face-offs with Ticketmaster) and attending the November
16th concert of The American Beauty Project, the Dead
biographer/publicist became a symbol of continuity at the heart of
the Grateful Dead spirit.

The aforementioned concert was, not surprisingly, illustrative in its
own way of the Grateful Dead ethos. Playing the entire songlist,
though not in sequence, of Grateful Dead's early Seventies watershed
works Workingman's Dead (Warner Bros./Rhino, 1970) and American
Beauty (Warner Bros./Rhino, 1970), the group, led by ace guitarist
Larry Campbell (Bob Dylan, Phil Lesh), created some scintillating
moments: an exquisitely sung and played “Box of Rain” that
brought out every bit of melody inherent to the tune and an intimate
rendition of “Attics of My Life,” with Campbell's soft electric
guitar accompanying angelic vocals by his wife Theresa Williams and
Amy Helm (daughter of ex Band drummer Levon).

The overall performance, often rendering all-too glossy arrangements
via musicianship lacking the Dead's inimitable charm, yet held its
share of merely pleasant moments. Likewise, Unbroken Chain contained
its own merely entertaining intervals. The storytelling of Healy,
Jerry Garcia's wife, Carolyn Adams Garcia (aka Mountain girl) and
late arrival Bill Walton played to the preconceptions and biases of
their after-lunch audience on Saturday November 17th. And with the
synchronicity appropriate to the moment (the theme of same an
undercurrent to this event and its subject), a UMass student given
the floor to explicate the rationale for the student strike that
occurred coincidentally with Unbroken Chain, was only slightly less
articulate: "...it wasn't just to cut classes...".

It's often been said that "there is nothing like a Grateful Dead
concert," and this multi-day affair including photo and art exhibits,
its efficient organization still prey to technical difficulties that
prevented recording of some speeches and panel discussions, would fit
that summary. And while there may not have been true epiphanies to
convince a naysayer, there were enough enlightening moments to lend
credence to the philosophy behind the event. For instance, to hear a
twenty-year-old, in the midst of a spirited discussion of Robert
Hunter's lyrics, state that her curiosity was been piqued about music
recorded before she was born, was more than a little provocative.

More important, perhaps, is how this symposium planted and nourished
the seed of inquiry about how the Grateful Dead evoke such passion,
and in so many diverse demographics, more than a decade after the
band's demise with the death of figurehead Jerry Garcia. The first
intellectual enterprise of its kind, Unbroken Chain, would ideally
only set the stage for reprise and, by extension, regular recurrence.
In that respect, as with a concert by the group itself, 2007 would
constitute only the first set…

Visit Unbroken Chain on the web.

http://www.umassconnections.com/unbrokenchain/index.html

Visit Grateful Dead on the web. http://www.dead.net/

--------

Tune in, turn on, but don't drop out: UMass class digs into Deadhead culture

http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/73031/

By Kristin Palpini
Staff Writer
Published on December 21, 2007

A wandering guitar riff recently greeted students slogging in from
the wintry cold to a University of Massachusetts class on the Grateful Dead.

With student notebooks and pens at the ready, Robert E. Weir (no, not
Grateful Dead singer/guitarist Bob H. Weir) fired up his morning
PowerPoint presentation, turned up the Dead's "Uncle John's Band" and
dipped into a lecture on the band's legacy and impact on American
culture - jam bands, zealous merchandising and Deadheads.

UMass has caught flak from people who question offering academic
credit for a course that ponders the implications of a traveling
hippie band. But the criticism isn't warranted, students said.

"There's a lot to learn from this class about history and culture,"
said Jessica M. Weinbrenner, a senior sociology major, during the
last week of classes. "It was fairly hard. I mean, it wasn't biology
or something, but it was pretty hard."

Weir contends there is more to music than notes plucked on guitar
strings and more to some bands than records and concerts. Music, Weir
said, is either a reflection or an attack on/escape from a society's
culture, and throughout the Dead's 30-year musical career, the band's
tunes acted as a living mirror for the era.

"All music has a social, political, economic and cultural context,"
Weir said. "As a historian I wanted to look at why music exists the
way it does in a particular time.

"People like to take potshots at the class, no pun intended," Weir
said, "but they just don't see the underlying value in music and
popular culture."

Weir's undergraduate class, "How Does the Song Go?: The Grateful Dead
as a Window into American Culture," is no Deadhead reunion, no long
strange trip.

Patchouli oil does not permeate the air, no one is grooving to tunes
between desks, and hardly anyone is wearing tie-dye.

This is academia, man, and UMass has found a way to intellectualize a
band well known for its political indifference, drug use and
hit-or-miss concerts.

"I didn't want to do the academic equivalent of a cover band," Weir
said of his class. "I wanted to wake people up, to show them that
music has a context. What they conclude from that is up to them."

The Dead's music is a psychedelic reflection of the civil rights
movement, folk revival, the war on drugs, the general attitudes of
the '60s and '70s and the development of consumerism, Weir said.

Within this music, the Grateful Dead gave rise to a thriving and
remarkable subculture of fans, the Deadheads, who include notables
such as former President Bill Clinton and right-wing rabble-rouser
Ann Coulter.

"Music is merely a social tool that helps in social change," Weir
said. "Social change happens through the collective energy of a group
working towards a collective goal."

This semester UMass hosted what might have been the first
weekend-long academic symposium dedicated to the Grateful Dead, "The
Unbroken Chain," as well as two classes, at the undergraduate and
graduate levels, on the band and its impact. Both classes are being
hailed by UMass as academic firsts.

The class "was better than I expected," said Nathaniel E. Dyer, a
resource economics student and Grateful Dead fan. "I learned not to
trust the given historic perspective and challenge preconditioned
notions that permeate our learning."

In his class, Weir wove a tapestry of Americana with the Dead's music
as the pattern. In addition to studying the group's social impact,
students learned about the political, economic and cultural aspects
of the years 1965 through 1995.

Students read John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Martin Luther
King's "I have a dream" speech, Arthur Miller's "Communist Fear," the
judge's decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court
case and Norman Mailer's "White Negro" - all set against the backdrop
of the Dead's improvisational, jazzy, acid rock.

"It was a retelling of history and the culture of the time period,"
said Michael E. Misiaszek, an accounting major. "It was pretty
interesting and exciting."

In addition to providing a window into American culture filtered
through the psychedelic lens that is the Grateful Dead, Weir's class
stands in defense of popular culture as a useful field of academic study.

"It's risky to teach popular culture. People still look down their
noses at it," Weir said. "People need to get over it. Pop culture is
American culture."

Semester-long, multidisciplinary projects on aspects of American
culture are expected to continue as a UMass tradition, said John R.
Mullin, dean of the graduate school. Who or what will be at the
center of next year's study is yet to be released.

"Universities like ours need to be courageous in propelling serious
scholarship in new directions, and in reaching out to communities far
and wide," Mullin said. "When we are timid in academia, we miss real
opportunities. We hope that the Grateful Dead is just the beginning."
---

Kristin Palpini can be reached at kpalpini@gazettenet.com.

.

In the Film & Wine Country with Les Claypool

In the Film & Wine Country with Les Claypool

http://www.jambands.com/Features/content_2007_12_20.05.phtml

Randy Ray
2007-12-20

Les Claypool has a very full plate. That isn't really news and that
fact probably won't change anytime soon as the musician continues his
parallel journey as a noted filmmaker. National Lampoon presents
Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo is enjoying a limited theatrical
release in the United States. The film runs in various cities through
February 2008, including a recent viewing at Warren Haynes' Xmas Jam
in Asheville. Claypool is also working on an animated project based
upon the film and fictitious band, Electric Apricot while composing
soundtracks for other filmmakers and pitching various screenplays
based upon the success of his directorial debut. If that wasn't
enough, there is always a possibility of a Claypool-helmed cinematic
version of his 2006 novel, South of the Pumphouse. He will also be
touring in February with a trio debuted at the Echo Project which
includes saxophonist Skerik and Mike Dillon on drums and percussion.
In his spare time, he managed to create his own wine, which will see
a fall 2008 release ("Claypool's Private Stash," quipped the Northern
California wine country resident).

National Lampoon presents Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo is a
documentary about the jamband scene as skewered by those that not
only love but can see the humor in all that binds every fan who ever
lit up a Nag Champa stick or grooved through a 45-minute odyssey into
noodle space. Starring Claypool as the drummer Lapland "Lapdog"
Miclovich and featuring a crack band of hippie-and-sage musicians,
the film progresses through one comical sequence after another before
landing at a festival and a brutally honest yet hilarious parody of
all that we have come to expect when out on the fringe. We sat down
with Claypool and discussed the film, other cinematic ambitions and
his long musical career from Primus to Sausage to Oysterhead and to a
little Las Vegas encore in December 1996 with a small band called Phish.

RR: I was a little hesitant to see the film because I thought it
would just be a really pointed attack on jambands without much humor.
I was very glad to be wrong after my initial doubts. What was the
genesis of the film, Electric Apricot?

LC: The genesis of the film itself was that there are always ideas
kicking around amongst my friends and many of them do not come to
fruition. I was originally talking about this idea with my
brother-in-law. He actually plays Doctor "Bucky" Lefkowitz in the
film. He's a theatre director down in Los Angeles. He teaches theatre
at UCLA. I was kicking the idea around of a live performance­because
he has a theatre group­based on this fictitious band. I was talking
to Matt Stone [South Park co-creator] about it on the phone one
day­randomly, we were just kicking ideas around and we just started
vamping on it. We thought it was a good idea and the next thing you
know, I'm talking to Jason McHugh­who produced the film­and he's a
mutual friend of ours. There again, we were always kicking ideas
around and we realized that we could actually pull this thing off
with very limited financial support.

The next thing I did was that I formed the band. Originally, there
was supposed to be some different people involved. We were talking
with Kyle Gass [Tenacious D] about being a part of it and some other
people and it just wasn't coming together. I didn't actually think
the film was going to happen. Like most ideas, (laughs) they tend to
not blossom. Jason just kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it
and finally, I decided to just work with friends of mine, guys that I
knew were talented musically as well as having the ability to improv.
I talked Adam Gates into being the bass player. Jonathan Korty [plays
Herschel, the keyboardist in the film] is a friend of Jason's and
I've known him for a while. We had the three of us and we started
talking about guitar players. I've known Bryan Keough since high
school and I called him up and he came on down and we had our band.

The first song that was written was "Burning Man." It came together
as a band first and I still didn't think it was going to be a film. I
was very skeptical. We booked a couple shows. We did the shows and
films the shows and from that we made our trailer. It wasn't really
until after we made our trailer that I thought, "Hey­we actually have
a film here. We can make a film. We have a point A, we have a point
B; we just need to fill in all of the middle stuff."

RR: The film has a great improvisational nature but there is also a
tight structure.

LC: There's a huge amount of improvisation in this thing. I do point
that out in the credits that it is written by me but all of the
supplemental stuff is written by the ensemble. Basically, what I did,
is that I came up with a story line and wrote all of that out. Then,
as we were moving through the piece, what I would do is to put the
characters in situations that they had to react to or put them in
interview situations and guide them through the story line with
questions. It was funny because I just assumed that everybody knew
what was going on and towards the end of the filming, (laughs) I was
confronted by a couple of the guys in the band. They had no idea how
it was going to end. I had to explain to them, "well, look­we're
doing this and this and this and the ending's going to be this." They
were somewhat oblivious. They knew it was a fictitious band and that
they were supposed to react as if it was a real band. A couple of the
guys had no clue­nobody had informed them­that something was supposed
to happen to Gordo [the guitarist in Electric Apricots played by
Keough] and he passes out in the forest and theoretically, there are
hintings of Jerry Garcia. I was more a shepherd than a director.

RR: When did these cast members know that you had a master plan?

LC: I don't think they realized what was going on until they were
sitting in the theatre, watching the film. There was such a limited
budget for this thing, such limited resources. This was the hardest
undertaking that I've ever put myself through. I've made jokes that I
equate it to climbing Mt. Everest wearing a Speedo. We lost a couple
of toes and appendages to frostbite but we still made it up Everest.
I look forward to doing it, again. (laughter)

One of the most stressful things you can do in life is build a house.
There's some high percentage of divorces that are attributed to a
couple trying to build a home. I was equating this for a while to
building a house with a bunch of apprentice carpenters and all of the
building material was on fire. On a daily basis, we were being kicked
in the testicles. It was almost as if it became a joke: "Well, what
is going to happen, today?" We had two trips to the hospital. We had
a hit-and-run. We had a major production person flip out and
disappear for two days with all of the footage. He sent us a
threatening e-mail saying that he was going to throw it all in the
fireplace and check himself into a mental institution. It was
non-stop. It is still non-stop. We're still getting kicked in the
balls. The exciting part about it is that we got into some festivals.
We won some awards. Now, it is being released by National Lampoon. It
is a limited theatrical release and then it'll be a DVD release. It
is getting great reviews so it is sort of a little film that
shouldn't have, that is doing it.

RR: What was the reaction at the initial screenings throughout the
United States?

LC: The screenings have been fantastic. It's interesting. I've been
to several of these things, now and the reaction is across the board
depending on the audience. L.A. audiences are very­even as a
performer­scrutinizing because they tend to sit back and analyze
whereas in Portland, it was just pandemonium. It was a very raucous
environment. We got an encore performance there and I always like to
say that we won the award for Most Inebriated Audience.

It's funny because what really works for this film, for me, is that
the four characters in the band­not even including the manager, who
is a great character, himself­represent different portions of the
demographic. You've got your pseudo-intellectual guy who is
continually stepping on himself [the bassist played by Gates]. You've
got the beer-drinking partier, "Hey, man" guy, [played by Keough] the
guitar player who appeals to…my editor loves him the best and my
editor's kind of a 'Dude', you know? You've got your spiritual,
grounded, centered Yoga teacher who has a short temper [played by
Korty]. You've got your nerdy, know-it-all drummer guy who reads
Popular Mechanics and watches Mythbusters [played by Claypool].

I've been in the audience and heard people. It's funny being in
different audiences or even talking with different people and hear
the different things that they relate to­you relating to the sweater
joke. There is one line in the movie that is sort of a barometer for
me of what the audience is and that's where they're in the
therapist's office and Aiwass says, "You know, I felt just like
Hitler at Waterloo." A lot of times, it just goes and flies right
over but there are certain audiences that die over that. Universal
Records is going to put out the soundtrack and they are very excited
about it. One of the guys at Universal said, "Oh my God­that line
"Hitler at Waterloo" just floored me." It's interesting.

RR: Definitely. At different points during the film, I would find new
things to like about each character based on whatever was happening.
How easy was it for the others to slip into their roles as filming progressed?

LC: It was all pretty easy for these guys once they found their
character. Fortunately, because we put the band together first, we
had to get together to learn the music. We spent a lot of time
rehearsing and finding our space musically and then, we started doing
rehearsals in full character. That's when it really started coming
together. Some of it was a little overt. Some of the guys were a
little too much into their character at first that it wasn't
believable. The first edit of this film was four and a half hours
long. There's a lot of stuff that's not in this film but I think what
made the characters really start sticking to the actors was all the
pain that we were going through. It just got to the point where "we
just got to get through this. We've got to get through this day." (laughs)

I was so stressed out, in so much pain and worrying about this, that
or the other thing that it did get to be "let's get through this."
When you're in a situation like that and you're not thinking about
anything but making it through, you lose that sort of self-conscious
edge that can sometimes cripple you and we were able to come up with
some cool stuff.

There were different ways you could kind of ease these guys into
their characters. Bryan Keough would show up and he'd been working
all day and he'd be stressed out. You give him a few beers and the
next thing you know, he turned into Gordo. (laughter) We're all very
good friends. Unfortunately, this film put a pretty good strain on
our friendships. We're all good, now. Because we're such good
friends, we were able to vamp off each other pretty well.

RR: There seemed to be tension in the studio scenes because of the
recording process, creating some hilarious sections. Was there any
stress filming those scenes?

LC: Actually, the studio stuff wasn't too bad. We were fairly
organized for that portion of it. We did that all in one weekend and
it was very smooth. What was stressful was a lot of the festival
stuff. It was a combination of a few different things­part of it was
High Sierra, part of it was Earthdance, and part of it was us driving
to a festival that canceled literally a half hour before we got
there. I forget the name of the festival; it was up in Portland,
Oregon someplace. All the stuff with us driving up Highway 5 was us
going up to the festival. Literally a half hour before we got there,
we got the phone call that some young promoter wasn't able to pay the
lighting company so all of the staging left.

The festival was cancelled and here, we didn't have an ending to our
film. "Shit­we don't have an ending to our film." Aiwass was just
getting ready to start a new job at Pixar and we weren't going to be
able to get him and he was going to have to cut off all of his hair.
(laughter) Bryan Keough had missed so much work that he said, "I
can't do this, anymore." That's when I had to sit those guys down and
say, "Look­we don't have an ending," and they would say, "What do you
mean? You've got all kinds of stuff." I would say, "We don't have an
ending." (laughs) My manager scrambled and got us on the Earthdance
Festival because we knew some people. That was the last festival of
the year and if we hadn't got on that, we would have been screwed. We
wouldn't have been able to have our ending and we would have had to
wait until the next spring, until the festival season started again.
So…just another one of the kicks to the testicles. (laughs)

RR: I see some serendipity in all of this…

LC: We got incredibly lucky with this film. It was a massive amount
of work and it still continues to be a massive amount of work with
all of this marketing shit. We really got lucky. I always like to say
that we had a gremlin on board. There were so many
mini-disasters­(laughs) almost major disasters­but, also, there was
something about it where the stars really aligned for us because
people are really taking to this film. The thing about it is like you
were saying­you were close to [the subject] and you were a little
trepidatious about watching it but it's really an endearing look at
the scene. It's more about these four or five characters and their
bullshit. I think Bob Weir is a champ and he's amazing in this thing.
Warren Haynes is incredible in it. Warren's got some skills, man. He
just took the ball and ran with it. Wavy Gravy's incredible in it.
Mike Gordon­just the little stuff we did with him, we had all kinds
of great nuggets from him. People that are worried that this is going
to offend the jam scene or whatever, it was never intended to and I
really don't think it does. I think it's endearing. Without giving
away the ending for your readers, the ending is uplifting, I think,
even though these guys go through such a big barrel of shit. (laughs)
It ends on a hopeful note.

RR: Oh, the film is hysterical and gets better as the momentum moves
forward towards the festival scenes. How were the scenes staged with
Warren at the festival?

LC: Our whole thing with Warren at High Sierra was "O.K. Warren,
we're going to send this guy over to you [Bryan Keough as Gordo, the
lead guitarist]." I think he had met Keough before because Keough had
played in the Frog Brigade. I said, "We're going to send this guy
over to you and the deal is that he's a big fan. He's going to react
to you like he is meeting you for the first time and he's a big fan
so just kind of roll with it." That was about all of the prep that I
gave him. It was one take and away we went. It was amazing. They did
a great job and afterwards, I interviewed Warren and he came up with
some great nuggets. We've got some outtakes with him that is just
fantastic. He was very comfortable in front of the camera and very at
ease and believable. Whereas some other people (laughs), weren't
quite so at ease and believable but I won't say who that is.

RR: I did enjoy the scenes with Mike Gordon because I've spoken with
him on several occasions and that's just Mike. He's so wonderfully
random­he's talking about something and suddenly, he's eating some
corn on camera.

LC: We were interviewing Mike and he was eating the entire time we
were interviewing him. He was eating corn. He was eating potato
salad. He was. Every time you see him, he's eating. The thing about
Mike is that I've known Mike for a long time. He has this kind of
erratic way of eating. He's like a chipmunk or something. He chews
really fast, he shovels a bunch of food in his mouth, he chews really
fast and he answers the questions. (laughter) It was hilarious
because we were watching him do this. We actually had a little more
of him in there but like I said, when we were whittling this thing
down­they call it 'killing your babies'­we had to pull out a lot of
stuff. The outtakes reel on this should be pretty interesting.

RR: It's funny because on the Electric Apricot website, you have
posted influences, turn ons and turn offs for each band member and
one of them­I think it must be Aiwass, the bassist­has listed Mike
Gordon as an influence and a turn off and then, he lists the
Necronomicon, of all things, which is ridiculously random, as well.

LC: There is some footage­I don't know if it'll ever see the light of
day­where Aiwass is offended by Mike Gordon. He talks a lot of shit
about him and he says to the camera, "Hey, Trey, if you ever want to
do anything with a real musician, give me a call." (laughter) It just
didn't play so…

RR: And Herschel, the keyboardist, lists Nag Champa as an influence.

LC: It's funny, too because a lot of the stuff from the web site was
put together before the film was made. A lot of those character
descriptions were from the [script] treatment. Who are these guys? We
need a pinched guy, we need a spiritual guy, we need the drug, party
guy and we need the nerdy guy so we just started compiling things and
those guys played into those characters.

RR: I didn't realize that was Gabby La La playing a key Beatles Let
It Be type of role in the film until the credits rolled.

LC: Yeah. She told me if I do another film, she's demanding a
speaking role. (laughter)

RR: You had a couple of famous faces playing tapers­Seth Green and Matt Stone.

LC: We had a die-hard taper coach them pretty heavily.

RR: Down to Seth's "I Was Educated by Lesbians" t-shirt?

LC: Yes, you know they had the Schoeps mikes and the whole bit­the
two different models of the mikes. It was pretty cool.

RR: Are there future plans for the film?

LC: Right now, to add to it all, we are in the process of pitching
the film as an animated series. We're in development, right now.
We've had a few meetings and we're going to move forward with a
little test­wouldn't necessarily be a pilot because it is going to be
very short because animation is expensive (laughs)­but a little test pilot.

Nobody really knows, yet about this so I'm kind of letting the cat
out of the bag. I think we were doing a comic strip for Jambands.com
and Relix and putting some stuff together. I found this kid out of
St. Louis that I just kind of stumbled across because we were talking
about doing this for a while but we couldn't find any artists that we
liked. I just stumbled across this little independent Xeroxed comic
book in a comic book store in Chicago and this guy's in St. Louis and
he did some designs for us and they're incredible. We've written up
some episodes, trying to get an animated series going out of this thing.

RR: What channel?

LC: Hopefully, Comedy Central or Adult Swim­one of those outlets.

RR: Fuse might work, too.

LC: Fuse? We're taking meetings for whoever wants it and whoever can
get it made. (laughs)

RR: Let's talk about some of your other work. Phish has just released
Vegas 96 and, obviously, you were a part of that show's encore. What
are your recollections?

LC: You know it's funny because we became friends with the Phish guys
by a mutual friend who was a girlfriend of my road manager. I guess
she knew all of those guys really well. I don't know if she grew up
with them or what. We hung out with them a couple of times here and
there. My band Sausage opened for Phish years ago at Laguna Seca and
there were maybe 3,000 people there. There was not that many people
there. [Author's Note: Laguna Seca Daze Festival which included
Phish, Four Non Blondes, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, The Mother
Hips, the Meat Puppets and Claypool's band Sausage in Monterey,
California on May 28, 1994. The Phish two set performance featured
the bass guitarist guesting on "You Enjoy Myself," which included a
bass duel between Claypool and Gordon with "Dueling Banjo" teases.]

When Trey had called us and said that "we are going to be in Vegas
and come on down and sit in," I said, "O.K. Sure." We headed down
there and I still really didn't know about the fervor (laughs) that
was the Phish fandom. I was really kind of blown away. There were all
of this people trying to get into the Aladdin. I had always gotten
the vibe that Phish was an extension of the Grateful Dead's audience
and that was the vibe that all of us not in the scene thought. I was
amazed that it really wasn't that. Sure there was that element but it
was a young, vibrant crowd. They had their own thing going and I was
really impressed by it. When we got there, Trey and I were hanging
out and Trey was rattling on that he wanted me to do some song of
theirs that I didn't know. I can't remember. It had some chant­oombagumbaumba…

RR: "Harpua."

LC: Yeah. Yeah. He said, "I want you to do this." I said, "Dude­there
is no way I'm going to remember that." (laughter) He said, "Come
on­blahblahblahblah." I said, "I will not remember that. I won't
remember that." (laughter)

RR: Trey told me last year that he felt sorry for some of what he
asked of Phish.

LC: I said, "Look­let me do "Wildwood Weed." (laughter) They said,
"O.K. Do whatever you want." I said, "Alright," and I got up on the
mike and I used to pull that out of my ass every now and again­the
old Jim Stafford from when I was a kid. I remember after the show,
Page [McConnell] said, "Man, I thought you were only going to do…you
went on forever. You were doing the whole song!" I said, "Sorry." I
remember they were trying to get some lions or tigers or something to
come down.

RR: Good Lord. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

LC: They had it all lined up. Tigers were coming but the building
said they couldn't do it.
It was great. We had a great time. I remember one of my favorite
things was that Trey had this insane suite at Caesar's Palace. This
thing was insane. It was this big two-tiered thing with a giant T.V
in the middle, it was all marble and it was just crazy. It was like
something out of Scarface.

One of the guys that we were hanging out with was the guy who played
Malachai in Children of the Corn [Courtney Gains]. Trey had some of
his friends there that I didn't know but have since gotten to know
over the years because of Oysterhead and stuff­some of his old high
school buddies. There was one guy [Chris Cottrell] who they decided
to play a prank on. They were all watching Children of the Corn in
this massive room. This guy had not met the guy who played Malachai.
They were watching this movie and I'm sure they were all enhanced in
some way. As they were watching this movie, everyone got up and
slowly left the room. This guy's sitting there watching this movie on
the coach by himself. They send Malachai and have him sit down next
to him while he is watching this movie. He sits down and this guy
kind of looks over at him, looks back at the screen, grabs his beer
and got up and walked out. (laughter)

RR: What about the origins of Oysterhead?

LC: Rick Farman from Superfly was a good friend of my manager at the
time and he said, "Hey­can Les do one of these Superjams down at
Jazzfest." I said, "What the hell's that? I don't even know what that
is." It was kind of towards the end of Primus. We were in a very
turbulent time. My manager said, "They book a club, you get some
friends together and you do an impromptu jam. It's kind of a free
form thing." I said alright but I didn't know that much about this
stuff but I thought, "Well, my old buddy Trey from Phish, he knows
about this whole jam scene, let me call him." To be honest with you,
I still had no clue how big Phish was. I called Trey and said, "Hey,
you know, I'm doing this thing down in…and you want to get involved
with it?" He said, "Sure. You know I've always wanted to do a project
with you and Stewart Copeland." I said, "Well, I know Stewart,"
because Stewart had produced a track for the last Primus record so I
said, "I'll call him up." I called him up and Stewart said, "YES!"
just like that over the phone­BOOM, he was in, he was going to do it,
"let's do this thing" and he had no idea who Trey was.

It's funny because when we started hanging out, Stewart really had no
clue how much of an influence he was on the music community as far as
a musician. He just thought he was the drummer for this pop band [the
Police]. He had no clue. After the Police, he delved into the
composing world and pretty much stopped playing his drums. He would
play every now and again and he was pretty clueless that he had this
impact on people. Oysterhead really pulled him out of his shell and
got him back into the scene. He started doing these things and seeing
these lines of people around the building to get his autograph and he
said, "What the hell?"

So we all came together down in New Orleans and the tickets sold out
in something like ten minutes or whatever. I don't even remember. It
was amazingly fast. We all said, "What the hell?" (laughs) We still
had no idea how big Phish was. We got together a couple days before
the show, wrote a bunch of tunes and went out and played this thing.
Then there was the notion that "Hey, this thing's pretty cool. Let's
do a record." We just made the time to make the record then, the tour
and then, Bonnaroo.

RR: Are Oysterhead on a suspended hiatus where it may happen again?

LC: It's one of those things where we all really enjoyed it. We had a
great time and we always talk about doing it, again but it is the
matter of finding the time to do it. Stewart's very busy, right now.
(laughter) We're all busy. We were talking about doing it in '04. We
were talking about doing it in '06. We've been talking about doing it
for a while but we just haven't found the time.

RR: Let's talk about your current trio with Skerik and Mike Dillon.

LC: It's just Les Claypool and it's a trio. The fans have been
calling my band The Fancy Band for a while and now I'm going out as a
trio this next February.

RR: And that trio will be playing at the Langerado Festival?

LC: It is.

RR: How did you get together with these two musicians?

LC: It sort of was an accident. I got asked to do this festival in
Atlanta called Echo Project [this past October]. Gabby wasn't
available so I thought, "I don't want to go out without Gabby; let's
do something different." We'd always talked about Mike Dillon playing
drums and percussion at the same time so I thought, "Let's just go
for it. What the hell? We'll do this one set" so when we got there,
the first rehearsal was a bit of a train wreck but it kind of had a
vibe to it and it was kind of cool. The second rehearsal was just
smoking and then, we went and did the show and I was really kind of
blown away. It has this really raw energy to it and it obviously
forces all of us­especially me­
to take up much more slack because there's no "hey, pass the ball
over to Gabby for a while" or "hey pass the ball over there." It's
me, Skerik and Mike and Mike's now playing drums so he can't be as
much as a soloist on marimba and vibes and yet, he does take his
little moments. I'm really digging it. There's a very raw quality to
it. It's a little more Neanderthal. It's like the Flintstones version
of a Claypool project.

RR: That's a great description. You've always been adventurous and
that trait was evident within your 2006 South of the Pumphouse novel.
I read somewhere that someone mentioned that the story should be a
film directed by Quentin Tarentino.

LC: Basically South of the Pumphouse started as a 60-page screenplay
that I wrote a while ago in the mid 90s. At that time, Reservoir Dogs
may have just come out or had been out for maybe a year or so and
Quentin Tarentino was a newcomer on the scene. At the time, it was a
little more cutting edge. Now, I think it's less cutting edge. It's
still a good story but Tarentino's had his time and I'm sure he'll
continue to have his time. He became a pretty big fixture in pop
culture there for a while so we've kind of seen that type of violence
and really dark humor mixed together. It was one of those things.
Writing a novel­that's really climbing Mt. Everest. (laughter)

RR: It's a very lonely task, too.

LC: It's not so much climbing Everest, it's more like a long
walkabout through the Australian outback because it's a long tedious
process. For me, I just kind of picked away at it but the story
itself and even the writing approach represents a different time for me.

RR: Are you continuing to write screenplays?

LC: I've written a bunch of screenplays. I just finished one a couple
of weeks ago that we are about to take around. Now that the film's
out, I've started to get some people that I'm working with that are
helping me get some of the projects off the ground. Basically, South
of the Pumphouse and Electric Apricot­they are all Suck on This.

Suck on This was the very first Primus record that was made by
ourselves because we were talking to all of these record companies
and we had an interest from record companies because we were pretty
popular in the [San Francisco] Bay Area but they all wanted to change
us. "Oh, we want you to work with this producer" and "You ever think
of maybe getting a lead singer?" All of this "we'll work together."
They wanted the Primus energy and the Primus audience but they wanted
to expand it by making us a little more palatable and all of this
crap. We were like, "Screw that."

We made Suck on This with a portable 8-track at the Berkeley Square
and that was back when there was actual vinyl. We borrowed money from
my father and my father doesn't have money. He's an auto mechanic but
we were able to get three thousand bucks. I think he took out a loan
or something and we made a thousand albums and took them around to
the stores. From that money, made another thousand, sold those, made
another thousand and ended up on Rough Trade Records and
subsequently, got on Caroline Records.

Basically, what it was is Suck on This was a calling card to get us
to that next step. South of the Pumphouse is a calling card to get me
my next novel. Electric Apricot. especially, was specially designed
to be a calling card for us to be able to make the South of the
Pumphouse film or one of these other projects we're talking about.

RR: It is good to hear that within a linear story in a film, one will
be able to continue to enjoy those unpredictable Les Claypool moments.

LC: It's very difficult to get somebody to hire you to build them a
custom home if you've never built a custom home before so this is our
custom home. (laughter)

RR: Apparently all of the trauma, tragedy and just plain ordeal of
making Electric Apricot has done nothing but spur you onto wanting to
do it again.

LC: Oh, it killed me there for a while. Every now and again, it still
kills me but I love the medium of film. People have asked me over the
years­and it seems so clichéd because creative people tend to always
want to do everything­"Well, if you hadn't been a bass player, what
would you have done?" I would have been a filmmaker. I don't know if
I would have been a popular filmmaker (laughs) but I probably would
have been like how I am with the music world as this sort of
under-the-radar guy and I would have been this sort of
under-the-radar filmmaker. I was making little 8mm films and what not
when I was a kid and I really love the medium and my heroes are guys
like Elia Kazan, Frank Capra, Sergio Leone and Terry Gilliam and now,
guys like Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers. I love the medium. I
hate the business aspect of a lot of this stuff but it's all
relative. There are elements of all that in the music world, too.

RR: You have a tendency to be perceived as eccentric and yet, you're
able to focus your skills in a very refined way to deliver various
forms of art. Do you ever feel that people would like you be someone
that you aren't?

LC: As far as people that I'm working with, the people who know me in
management and agents, they try and guide me and that's why they're
there. Otherwise, I'd be spinning off in all kinds of directions. I'm
making wine, now. Where the hell did that come from? I live in the
wine country and some friends are making some wine and the next thing
I know, I'm making 200 and some odd cases of Pinot Noir. To me,
that's like fun stuff. I went and pulled crab pots yesterday and now,
I have a whole bunch of crab here, now. That's all fun stuff for me
but for some people, that's how they make their living. I get a
little bored and been there, done that doesn't sit well with me. It's
kind of a folly for me because it's sort of bad business. If all I
really cared about was the business end of all this stuff, I would do
Primus all the time. Nothing but Primus all the time. Because with
friends that are in very, very, very successful bands, they adhere to
that basic philosophy of build the brand name, stick with the brand
name and don't dilute the brand name. That works for them on a
financial level and I see these guys and a lot of them are envious of
all the crazy stuff that I do and I'm envious of their massive bank
accounts. (laughter)

RR: And yet, you sometimes make your work seem so effortless.

LC: Well, it's definitely not effortless and the drawback of it is
it's hard for people to focus because they feel I'm not focused,
sometimes. There is that drawback. I sort of can't help myself.

RR: It is interesting that as the drummer, you are also the leader in
the band in most of Electric Apricot, as well. You still came across
as the leader even in scenes where you weren't the focal point i.e.
the scene with Dr. Bucky where it didn't seem right to call someone
named Bucky, Dr. Bucky. Was that a conscious decision to lead the
action while directing?

LC: It was me directing the film from in front of the camera. The
story line needed to move a certain way so when we all got in that
room with Dr. Bucky, it was "O.K. We need to talk about this and this
and this and somehow resolve the conflict that we just had about the
girlfriend situation." It's funny because we've done some interviews
and the interviewer will ask us a question and the answer is 20
minutes long because we're going back and forth. My job has always
been to reel these guys back in (laughs) when they're going off and
talking about whatever the hell subject on a tangent, it's my job as
the director to reel them in so I'm sitting there as the director but
also, as Lapdog Miclovich­"O.K. Look guys­let's get back to this
thing. I realize May Pang is a great girl but I don't bring my
bitches in," so I'm trying to get us back on track. (laughs) That's
probably why that comes off as Lapdog being the leader of the band
because I would always try to get the story back on track.

RR: In the studio, too. In the first playbacks of "Burning Man" in
the film, the drums are mixed really high in comparison to everything else.

LC: You mean when they are in the studio?

RR: Yeah, it's really funny.

LC: It's funny because I hate going to see movies where you see a
band playing and it is obviously a recording. When we're playing in
the studio, we're playing in the studio and the camera's right there
and that's what it fucking sounds like. (laughs) It's bombastic. It's
not like you go in and it's all mixed with compressors and it's all
mixed down so it doesn't sound bombastic. It's funny because one of
the guys from National Lampoon said, "God, it sounds horrible!" I
said, "That's the way it sounds like when you're
recording. It doesn't sound pristine." It's reality. I hate watching
movies and seeing scenes­whether they're in a club or playing in
somebody's garage­and it sounds pristine. It's ridiculous. It's
insulting to me. (laughs) What it sounds like in a recording
studio­not through your headphones­is it's loud and obnoxious. That's
the way those rooms tend to sound.

RR: Did you have to brush up on your drum skills prior to filming?

LC: There's this one song that we only hear a little bit of it in the
movie called "Yog Sagov" that will be on the soundtrack. It is
Aiwass's song that is this big prog rock epic (laughs) about Yog
Sagov and the Necronomicon. It's on the record and I think it's 20
minutes long. It's amazing and it's a bitch­it kicked my ass every
time we played it. We did a little mini-tour and by the end of the
tour, it was a good band. Keough's a great guitarist, Adam's a great
bassist, singer and songwriter, Korty's great and the weakest link
was me on the drums. I've been playing drums for a lot of years but
I'm a better bass player. (laughs) Besides Matt [Stone] and Seth
[Green], I'm the most recognizable figure in the movie that's not
playing himself. Me going up there and playing bass would have been
kind of silly.

RR: What other plans do you have for the immediate future?

LC: I'm working on a soundtrack for a film that I'm actually in that
a friend of mine is doing. It's a horror film about a 3,000-pound pig
that terrorizes the pot fields of Northern California. I think it'll
be a good cult horror film.

RR: Fantastic. Does he eat the pot?

LC: He eats people. (laughter) I'm doing the composing for it.
There's a couple of other projects that are coming up that I can't
really talk about yet because they're not done deals but I'm doing
some more scoring. I'm doing this tour in February and hopefully, one
of these film projects will get off the ground for spring and summer
if not, the animated series. And my wine comes out next year in the fall.

RR: Will your name be on the label or is there a company name?

LC: No, it'll be Claypool something or other. Claypool's Private
Stash. (laughter) That's what it is­I wanted some wine for myself and
some friends and you know, I can't drink 2,800 bottles so we'll be
selling some.
---

- Randy Ray stores his work at www.rmrcompany.blogspot.com.

.

Alternative Aladdin

Alternative Aladdin

http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2007/12/20/soundnstage/19752589&sec=soundnstage

December 20, 2007
By JASON CHEAH

KLPac straddles Christmas and the New Year with a fun take on popular
children's tale Aladdin.

FROM one Aladdin, to another. Soon after Istana Budaya's children's
theatre version ended its run, the Kuala Lumpur Performance Arts
Centre's (KLPac) staging of Aladdin - The Pantomime began at the
Pentas 1, KLPac on Monday.

So popular indeed, is the tale, that taking influences from other
genres of music and theatre and adding it to the mix might seem
irreverent but don't get yourself confused, that's all part of pantomime.

Written and directed by the same "panto" mastermind who brought the
hilarious and outrageous Cinderella (2005), Paul Loosley has once
again adapted a traditional British panto for the Malaysian stage.

"The Panto tradition is about fun," Loosley said during a press
launch recently. "Nothing compares with the laughter and excitement
on kids' faces when they see the fabulous and mostly silly costumes,
hear and see the craziest gags."

And because it was 40 years ago today that Sgt. Pepper taught that
band to play, Aladdin – The Pantomime will pay homage to the
wonderful music of The Beatles and the swinging 1960s.

"When KLPac did Cinderella we used, with great success, the music of
Elvis and the whole look and feel of the 1950s. This year with
Aladdin – which in itself is full of hippy atmosphere and eastern
magic – we chose to have music by the 'Fab Four' and theme everything 60s.

"This was not really a very hard decision given the great tunes
(perfect to sing along to), the great fashion (cute and, looking
back, fairly ridiculous), and the setting (big strong shapes and
psychedelic colours)."

To help realise this psychedelic vision is artistic director Joe
Hasham, executive producer Datuk Faridah Merican, musical director
Mervyn Peters, choreographer Pat Chan, costume designer Dominique
Devorsine, set designer Loo Jia-Wei and lighting designer Lim Ang Swee.

To bring the show bursting to life there will be a star-studded cast
of some of the funniest stage personas from the Malaysian scene,
including Indi Nadarajah, Douglas Lim, Joanna Bessey, Chacko
Vadaketh, Doreen Tang, Joanne Kam Poh Poh, Monti, Nell Ng, Sham
Sunder Binwani and Badrol Shah Manan.

So whether it's Aladdin (Bassey), his mother Widow Twanky
(Nadarajah), his dim brother Wishee Washee (Lim), the evil magician
Abanaza (Vadaketh), or Princess Paris (Tang), her parents Emperor
Chun Dek (Monti) and Empress Ho How (Kam), Won Ton (Ng) or even the
two genies – of the ring (Binwani) and the lamp (Badrol), it should
be a fun show to watch.

The main cast will be joined by a chorus of boys and girls who sing
and dance as townsfolk, prisoners and skeletons. And there's even the
possibility of some guest stars sneaking in from time to time. To top
everything off there'll be a totally live, totally rockin' four-piece
band singing songs such as A Hard Day's Night, Ticket to Ride, I Want
to Hold your Hand, Something, Help, Can't Buy Me Love, Yellow
Submarine, Yesterday, She Loves You, Hey Jude, From Me To You and All
You Need Is Love.

With all the ingredients for a great show, there is no other reason
than to live up to the heartfelt promise from Sgt. Pepper – "a
splendid time is guaranteed for all!"
---

Aladdin – The Pantomime is being staged at KLPac's Pentas 1. Dates
and times: today-Dec 22 and Dec 26-29, and Jan 2-5, 2008 at 8.30pm;
Dec 23 and 30, and Jan 6 at 3pm; Jan 1, 2008 at 5pm. (No shows on Dec
24 and 31). Tickets are priced at RM100, RM80, RM60 and RM40
(students, senior citizens and disabled). Family packages are available.

For more information, call the box office at (KLPac) 03-4047 9000 or
(The Actors Studio, BSC) 03-2094 9400 or visit klpac.com.

.

The Roger Corman Collection - DVD Review

The Roger Corman Collection - DVD Review

http://thedvdlounge.insidepulse.com/articles/72640/2007/12/20/ithe-roger-corman-collectioni--dvd-review.html

By Trevor MacKay
12.20.2007

Director:
Roger Corman
Release Date: September 18, 2007
Running Time: 641 minutes

The Movies

The Roger Corman Collection features eight different Roger Corman
films. There's not really a whole lot of obvious logic behind why the
particular movies were selected. The movies are presented on four
double-sided DVDs and the paired movies do share some similarities
(in theme, actors or title) but that's about it.

For the purpose of reviewing, I've written a mini-review of a
paragraph or two for each of the eight movies and simply averaged the
scores to produce a final 'movie' score.

Gas-s-s-s

An accident leads to the release of a gas deadly to everyone on Earth
older than 25 years old. The result? A rather bizarre movie about a
group of twenty-somethings roaming the country.

The plot of Gas-s-s-s is pretty thin. It's really more of a series of
loosely connected comedy sketches but it's so strange that the whole
thing really works. Some highlights include a shoot-out involving
shouting out the names of Western actors and a football team turned
roving gang (but retaining cheerleaders, marching, and the like).

Rating: 7/10

The Trip

In The Trip Roger Corman and Jack Nicholson attempt to recreate the
experience of being on LSD. Having never done LSD myself, I can't
judge how well they replicated the experience but The Trip is
definitely a surreal movie.

The plot is pretty much non-existent and at times it feels like
watching an infomercial for LSD.

Rating: 4.5/10

Young Racers

After a famous racecar driver, Joe Machin, steals away (and quickly
discards) Stephen Children's fiance, Children vows to get revenge.
Children plans to get his revenge by pretending to befriend Machin
and then, when Machin's guard is down, writing a mean book about him!

Fortunately, Children soon comes to empathize with Machin and the
result is much more interesting than an extremely lame revenge plot.
Unfortunately, the final fifteen minutes of the movie feel like an
extremely forced way to get some sort of climax.

Another oddity with this movie is that Children is played by Mark
Damon but voiced by a pre-Trek William Shatner. The dubbing itself is
fine but the voice is very recognizably Shatner and it takes a while
to get used to someone who isn't Shatner having Shatner's voice. Not
helping matters is the fact that William Campbell (who plays Joe
Machin) also appeared in a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Original
Series as a nemesis of Kirk. It takes quite a while to stop thinking
about Star Trek when watching this movie.

Rating: 5.5/10

The Wild Angels

Wild Angels is a 60s biker movie. There's not really anything all
that unique about it and there's not a single likable character to be
found in the entire movie. If you like 60s biker movies, you'll
probably enjoy this but I was bored.

Rating: 3.5/10

Bloody Mama

Ma Barker, and the rest of the family, go on a crime spree. Not a bad
movie, but I found it extremely hard to care about anything that happened.

Notably, the movie includes Robert DeNiro in an early role. It would
seem his acting was a little shaky in 1970 however.

Rating: 5/10

A Bucket of Blood

Dick Miller plays Walter Paisley, a bus boy who really wants to be an
artist but is completely lacking in talent. He accidentally stumbles
upon a rather macabre way to produce terrific sculptures.
Unfortunately, if he wants to keep getting attention and accolades,
he's going to need to produce more and more sculptures.

Rating: 6/10

The Premature Burial

Based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe's short story of the same name, The
Premature Burial is about a man, Guy Carrell (Ray Milland), who is
haunted by the fear of being buried alive. As his obsession grows,
Guy concocts increasingly elaborate safeguards against premature
burial. But in his lust for not dying, he risks losing the love of his life.

The Premature Burial, and Corman's other Poe films, is rather unusual
compared to Corman's usual fare. The story works really well though
and does a decent job of conveying just how much it would suck to be
buried alive.

Rating: 7/10

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

Ray Milland is back, this time as Dr. James Xavier. The good doctor
is researching a way to temporarily give humans x-ray vision.
Frustrated by bureaucracy, Xavier ends up using the technology on
himself. While it does prove to have many medicinal uses (and the
requisite scene where he checks out hot women), there are some
unfortunate drawbacks.

For the most part, X is a really good movie. The x-ray effect is
somewhat lacking, but considering this movie was made in the 1960s,
it's decent enough. Unfortunately the two scenes that should be the
most powerful are laughably silly (the window scene and the preacher
scene) and that negatively impacts the movie as a whole.

Rating: 6/10

The Video and The Audio

The video is something of a mixed bag. The formats vary from movie to
movie, and range from 1.66:1 up to 2.35:1. The quality varies
considerably from film to film as well, but all of them are at least
watchable. The audio is mono across the board, but still sounds okay.

The Extras

The extras are scattered throughout the eight movies. Most movies
have no extras at all, but some have quite a few.

Commentary for The Trip and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes - Roger Corman
talks about the movies. The commentaries give a nice insight into the
movie though Corman is a bit fuzzy on the details at times
(presumably since these movies were made 40+ years ago).

Psychedelic Light Box - This is basically a screensaver of a
psychedelic light show with music.

Roger Corman Unearths The Premature Burial - This featurette runs for
about ten minutes. Roger Corman talks about The Premature Burial: how
it was made, why he cast the people he did, etc.

The Premature Burial Original Theatrical Trailer - Definitely wait
until after seeing the movie to watch this. It gives away an awful
lot of the plot.

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes Original Theatrical Trailer - The only
thing worth noting here is that at one point the voiceover guy says
that Doctor Xavier "enjoys all the delights of secretly studying sexology."

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes Original Theatrical Prologue - A weird
little piece talking about the use of the five senses. Only a bit of
it (near the end) is directly related to the movie.

The Inside Pulse

There's quite a variety of movies to enjoy in the Roger Corman
Collection. There's everything from post-apocalyptic comedy to period
suspense to a psychedelic journey. For the most part, even the bad
movies are unique and worth watching. Even though the final score
isn't so great, if you're at all interested in the works of Corman
(and don't already own these movies), this is a solid collection to pick up.

.

The Monkees: 'Head'

The Monkees: 'Head'

http://www.austin360.com/event/events2/etc/userEventDisplay.jspd?eventStatus=Approved&eventid=154693

AA-S Best Bet: Co-written by Jack Nicholson, the Monkees' 1968
psychedelic comedy "Head" follows the pop group through a plotless,
dream-like adventure with appearances by Frank Zappa, Dennis Hopper
and Teri Garr. The farce, a cult classic, allowed the group to break
away from their industry-perfected image and featured a darker and
more artistic sound, with contributions by Carole King and Harry
Nilsson. Modeled after the Beatles' "Help," Peter Tork, Davy Jones,
Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith incorporated drug paraphernalia,
lewd innuendo and political allusions in the film to make fun of
their television personas as well as establish themselves as
legitimate artists. The film is a must see for "Easy Rider" fanatics,
a film that brought Nicholson, Hopper and director Bob Rafelson
together again. ­ Angela Grayson

From the promoter:
Preceded by Best Drug Story Contest! Are you a stoner, hopper, junkie
or space cadet? Well, I bet you've got some wild tales to tell that
aren't suitable for the grandkids! Feel free to take a place on the
Alamo stage and relate your most illegal adventures (in 2 minutes or
less) in a chance to win prizes and entertain an audience of
like-minded loadies!

Jack Nicholson (yes, that Jack Nicholson) co-wrote and produced The
Monkees' surrealistic madcap adventure through uncharted psychedelic
territory. The pre-fab four's feature film debut is so chock-full of
goofball segments and pie-in-the-face high art that you'll go
crosseyed with the best possible combination of confusion and
laughter. This must-see journey through the craziest circles of
late-'60s subconscious also contains cameos by everyone from Frank
Zappa to boxing superstar Sonny Liston and even ex-Mouseketeer/beach
bunny Annette Funicello! A truly hilarious adventure in chemically
altered comedy!
---

Schedule

December 24 at 9:45pm
December 30 at 7pm

Location

Alamo Drafthouse - Downtown at the Ritz
320 E 6th St.
Austin TX 78701

.

The music at the heart of the Indian movement

The music at the heart of the Indian movement

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/12752267.html

'He was a survivor of everything that the government has tried to do
to Native Americans.'

By LAURA WATERMAN WITTSTOCK
December 22, 2007

The New York Times favorably reviewed the film, "Dances With Wolves"
in 1990 but complained that it was "too long" at 181 minutes. It
opined: "A historical drama about the relationship between a Civil
War soldier and a band of Sioux Indians, Kevin Costner's directorial
debut was also a surprisingly popular hit, considering its length,
period setting, and often somber tone."

That description might have sufficed for white audiences, but all
across America and everywhere in the Western Hemisphere the film was
shown, American Indians were mesmerized by Floyd Westerman in his
role as Ten Bears. As much shining authenticity as could be crammed
into his role, Floyd delivered. There was no doubt he led his people,
and there was no doubt the child who came to learn was the white man.
To Indian people, Kevin Costner played a side role to Floyd's
magnificent performance.

But magnificence in life was definitely not the attitude of Floyd
Westerman the person. Recently he said when commenting on his work:
"Our struggle is all about our spiritual rights and the Indian point
of view ... they're so old, they make the Bible look like it was
recently written."

Every Indian's friend Floyd Westerman was set free in the early
morning hours of Dec. 13, 2007. He began his journey as he wished,
disconnected from tubes and regulators and breathing apparatuses. His
son Richard had the honor of bringing Floyd home to Sisseton, S.D.
The two were fleetingly acquainted when Richard was a young boy.
Floyd's concert schedule as a musician was demanding and unending.
But as men the two found their blood and history to be an everlasting bond.

Walking beside them in spirit are all American Indians: men, women,
and children. Everyone who has heard Floyd's songs know he taught
them to sing as no one else did. Whether performing at Wolf Trap or
coming to a community pow wow, Floyd gave his musical gifts freely.
Once in the turbulent 1970s he went to an "Indian bar" in Washington,
D.C., to play for those who requested it. As he began to sing, the
jukebox suddenly sprang to life and blared out an old country song. A
burley Indian marched over and pulled the plug, taking a little of
the wall with the cord. Everyone chuckled, but that night nothing
could compare to Floyd, not the jukebox nor anything else the bar had to offer.

Then he played. The size of the crowd never mattered. If Indian
people wanted to hear him, he came and sang. One song was about his
mother: "Thirty-five miles and you'll be free. Thirty-five more miles
to go. Through the wind and driving rain, I'll take you home again.
Oh, Mama, thirty-five more miles to go."

No Indian eyes were dry when they heard this. Indians all have
mothers to worry about. All know they have suffered in this life.
Floyd sang for all Indians. He gave voice to the love of and
dedication to ancestors. His was the definitive word on that connection.

Floyd's own early life was like so many others. He left the
reservation to attend a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. In
keeping with policies at the time, the school punished those who
expressed their Indian culture. "They cut his hair and they wouldn't
allow him to speak the language," his son Richard said. "He was a
survivor of everything that the government has tried to do to Native
Americans." Floyd graduated from a reservation high school, spent two
years in the Marines and earned a degree in secondary education from
Northern State College in South Dakota.

He made a friend named Vine Deloria. The two journeyed together for
the rest of Vine's life. "Custer Died for Your Sins" was Vine's
j'accuse of America. Floyd followed with an album of the same name.
He went on to play and sing with the greats in Western music, but he
kept to his roots home at Sisseton and with the American Indian
Movement and International Treaty Council. He was at the heart of the
movement. He was its song.

He joined the singer Sting to perform in many concerts in support of
the environment. He wrote a new song, "The Earth Is Your Mother," to
spread the word on what the land means to Indian people. Good roads,
Floyd. You leave us your powerful messages in song and image. Pidamiya.
---

Laura Waterman Wittstock, Minneapolis, writes on American Indian,
political and current events.

.

Why the Counterculture Should Support Ron Paul

Why the Counterculture Should Support Ron Paul

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/preston4.html

by Keith Preston
December 22, 2007

Strictly speaking, the term "counterculture" refers to any cultural
undercurrent that holds to a set of values different from those of
the mainstream society. Of course, most Americans think of
"counterculturalists" in terms of the various subcultures that
emerged from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s or whose
existence emanates from that time period. Perhaps a better term might
be "bohemians," a label that has traditionally been given to those,
usually artists, writers, or intellectuals, who exist outside of
cultural conventions or who possess a value system that is opposed to
"establishment" values. An even wider term might be the Marxist
designation "lumpenproletariat," originally used as a means of
classification of the urban unemployed but now more broadly utilized
as a description of a wide assortment of persons who exist on the
margins or among the bottom layer of society.

Such groupings include a substantial amount of variation among
themselves. Among the ranks of counterculturalists, bohemians and
lumpenproletarians are members of the many youth subcultures
(hippies, ravers, punk rockers, "goths"), adherents of spiritualities
outside the mainstream religions (New Age, pagans, Wiccans,
Buddhists), so-called "sexual minorities" (gays, lesbians,
bi-sexuals, transsexuals and transgendereds), a wide spectrum of
subcultures devoted to particular forms of art, music or fashion
(such the enthusiasts for massive tattooing and "body piercing"), the
various drug cultures, those whose livelihood in on the margins of
society or even the law (from bookies to midwives to "sex workers"),
and those with unconventional political views (anarchists,
primitivists, tax resisters) or social practices (polygamists, vegans
or nudists). These groups then overlap considerably with others, such
as students and other young people, low-income or unskilled workers,
residents of urban tenant housing, proponents of "alternative media,"
the casually self-employed "petite bourgeoise" (to use another
Marxist term), transients, the unemployed, the homeless and,
unfortunately, prisoners.

Though there are obvious exceptions (like bikers and skinheads),
counterculturalists generally favor the political Left. I know of no
intrinsic reason for this, except the frequently false stereotype
that "left" is synonymous with enlightenment, anti-authoritarianism
or anti-establishment attitudes with "right" being identified with
obscurantism or apologetics in defense of the status quo. It also
true that the majority of counterculturalists, bohemians and
(arguably) the wider lumpenproletarian sector generally think of
themselves as socially "progressive" and side with environmentalists,
animal rights activists, feminists, proponent of "gay rights,"
racial/ethnic minorities, the handicapped, and the poor and
downtrodden, no doubt because many of them belong to these groups
themselves. At first glance, it might appear that these people would
not have much in common with a multiple-term Republican congressman,
pro-life obstetrician, devout Baptist, "gold bug" who epitomizes
"family values" like Ron Paul. So why then would it be in the
self-interests of the "masses of the marginalized" to rally behind
Dr. Paul's candidacy?

Reasons aplenty exist as to why those on the margins or bottom of
society should support Ron Paul, some of them quite serious and
pressing. One of these is economic. At present, the American ruling
class is pursuing a path of economic suicide. Current economic policy
is an extravagant combination of currency devaluation, extreme fiscal
recklessness, public indebtedness and trade debt that is
unprecedented and unparalleled by any other state in the world,
massive importation of cheap immigrant labor, corporate-mercantilist
so-called "free trade" arrangements like NAFTA and the proposed North
American Union and much else whose eventual effects will be full-on
economic collapse of the kind not seen since the Great Depression,
perhaps worse. For the Great American Middle Class, economic collapse
will bring lower living standards and perhaps even relative poverty.
For the "underclass," lumpenproletariat and marginal sectors, the
result will be devastation, destitution or even death. Ron Paul
understands this perilous economic situation to a degree that his
rivals, Democratic or Republican, do not even begin to comprehend.

Ron Paul supports a non-interventionist foreign policy. This is also
a matter of life and death for the young, the poor, the marginal,
minorities and the working class. Each of Dr. Paul's Republican
rivals and most of the Democratic candidates (save a few flaky fringe
figures like Kucinich or Gravel) either display a militaristic
belligerence that is, well, more than a little frightening or, at
best, a non-committal attitude tempered with subservience to those
sectors who exhibit the greatest enthusiasm for further martial
adventures abroad. Extending the present neoconservative program of
military conquest of Muslim lands to Iran, Pakistan, Syria or
elsewhere (or, alternately do-gooder excursions to places such as
Darfur) will not only generate massive casualties among the present
regular armed forces (to say nothing of innocent civilians), but will
necessitate the implementation of conscription for the sake of
generating further chattel for the carnage. And it won't be the rich
white boys who suffer the most.

No member of Congress or national politician has been more outspoken
in opposition to the ever-expanding police state that has taken root
in the United States over the past few decades than Ron Paul. The
progressively escalating wars on drugs, crime, guns, gangs and
terrorism have had the effect of establishing repression and
incarceration as major growth industries, with these sectors being
larger in the United States than in any other nation, including such
supposed arch-tyrannies as Iran, China or Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
Recently, I came across an article in a business journal that
casually and plausibly stated that one in four Americans are now
employed in security work, rivaling the percentage of East Germans
employed by the Stasi. It is surely a sign of the utterly degenerate
and depraved nature of the present political class that such matters
as the legalization of torture of suspects, coerced confessions,
indefinite suspension of habeas corpus, whether or not
"waterboarding" actually constitutes torture, detention without
trial, secret tribunals and development of the legal framework for
martial law are all considered just another matter of public policy
debate in the same manner as traffic safety, tax policy, education or
Social Security reform.

For many middle class Americans, the expansion of the police state to
such grotesque levels many never mean more than occasional nuisances
like having to take your shoes off to board a plane. For the poor,
the homeless, drug users, the socially marginal and those most likely
to encounter the wrath of the state directly, such tactics are
potentially lethal. Rest assured the legitimation of such police
state methodology will result in such tactics being used to fight not
only the "war on terrorism" but the "war on drugs" as well. The
handling of inmates in Guantanamo Bay in such a manner will
eventually bring about the use of such tactics in domestic American
prisons. The suspension of habeas corpus and other basic procedural
rights will eventually result in the curtailment of such rights for
drug suspects, those who run afoul of gun laws, petty criminals,
proponents of "alternative medicine," those caught up in the state's
multitude of entrapment and scam racketeering prosecutions, and
political dissidents such as anti-globalization or antiwar
protestors, race militants among the minority groups, environmental,
animal rights and other activists. It is the nature of such things to
grow and expand with time, and only Ron Paul displays the motivation
to "nip it in the bud," though the bud of the police state is already
blooming.

Indeed, many other reasons exist why counterculturalists, bohemians
and lumpenproles should assist Ron Paul in his efforts. Dr. Paul's
program of authentically constitutional, limited and decentralized
government with respect for private property offers outcasts and
outlaws the means of achieving personal and collective sovereignty.
Who cares if your Christian fundamentalist neighbors don't like your
sexual practices or drug habits so long as you can do what you want
on your own property? So what if upper-middle-class civic, real
estate or business associations don't like punk rock clubs or tattoo
parlors so long as your proprietary rights and freedom of association
are respected? So the folks in rural Georgia want to have school
prayer and refuse to recognize gay marriage? Fine. Have Wiccan
prayers and polysexual polygamy in San Francisco or Boston if you
want. Don't like capitalism? That's cool. In Ron Paul's America, you
could organize all the anarchist communes, socialist collectives,
communist kibbutzes, mutualist cooperatives or anarcho-syndicalist
labor associations you wanted. You just couldn't force others to join
you, nor could they force you to join them in their tight-assed,
restrictive suburbs. Indeed, if the experience of her husband's reign
is any indication, such efforts in the America of Evita Clinton might
well result in a fiery death (remember the Branch Davidians?). Benito
Giuliani's reign of terror against those on the margins of society
during his time on the balcony in New York is widely known. In fact,
one aspect of Giuliani's dictatorship that is frequently overlooked
(even by libertarians) is his notorious campaign against the property
and associational liberties of "sex workers."

A head of state with a demonstrable, decades-long track record of
consistent support for civil liberties, constitutional rights, a
sound economy and a non-imperialist foreign policy will have an
enormous opportunity to lead by example and through the bully pulpit.
If a President Paul were to tell the motley crew of criminals and
sociopaths otherwise known as the federal government to mind their
own business and start making efforts to reign them in, and appealing
to the sovereignty and support of the American people when they
inevitably resisted, how long would it be before such a revolution in
political values began to trickle down to the average man on the
street and to all levels of government?

Another reason to support Ron Paul is that used by the aristocratic
liberal H.L. Mencken to justify his own support for the left-wing
"progressive" Robert La Follette, described by Mencken as "the best
man running as a man." Agree with all of his political views or not,
Ron Paul is head and shoulders above his rivals in personal
integrity, honesty and consistency when compared with the charlatanry
of the others, who often change positions as quickly as they change
underwear. Left or right, culturally conservative or countercultural,
Ron Paul is as good as it gets on the issues that matter most.
---

Keith Preston is a long-time radical writer and activist from
Richmond, Virginia.
See his website. http://www.attackthesystem.com/

.

Impressionistic Dylan biopic 'I'm Not There' movie of the year

Impressionistic Dylan biopic 'I'm Not There' movie of the year

http://www.montereyherald.com/entertainment/ci_7770251?nclick_check=1

By GLENN WHIPP
Los Angeles Daily News
12/20/2007

Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan may be playing with the rock biopic form
in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," but why wait to see the genre
demolished when you can buy a ticket to Todd Haynes' kaleidoscopic
homage to the artistry of Bob Dylan, "I'm Not There"?

Haynes enlists six actors to play Dylan, though none of the alter
egos actually go by Dylan's name. "I can change during the course of
a day," says Richard Gere's exiled Billy near the end.

"I awake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep, I know for
certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time."

The idea of multiple selves isn't new, but few cultural figures have
shape-shifted more regularly than Dylan.

Haynes presents such skin-shedding as a necessity for virtuosity and
freedom, though he doesn't soft-pedal the emotional costs on both the
artist and those in his universe.

It brings to mind Dylan's famous quote about his post- divorce album,
"Blood On the Tracks": "A lot of people tell me they enjoy that
album. It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know,
people enjoying the type of pain, you know?"

Having oddly cadenced quotes like that rattling around in your head
certainly enhances "I'm Not There," but I'd recommend Haynes'
masterpiece to people who think "Like a Rolling Stone" was an
autobiographical ditty written by Mick and Keith.

Any movie that manages to incorporate visual nods to Fellini and
Godard and imagine the Beatles as high-as-a-kite Teletubbies is
working on a high level that transcends generational signposts.

That said, when, in the movie's first few minutes, an 11-year-old
black kid (a fantastic Marcus Carl Franklin) holding a guitar case
bearing the inscription "This machine kills fascists" jumps on board
a freight train and introduces himself as Woody Guthrie, it helps to
know A) who Guthrie is, B) the influence he had on Dylan as a young
man, and C) how an 11-year-old kid passing himself off as Guthrie was
no less absurd than the tall tales that middle-class Robert Zimmerman
spun in his early days as a folk singer.

"I'm Not There" has about a hundred layers, each carefully,
purposefully, perfectly constructed and then deconstructed.

There's Dylan as the protest singer (Christian Bale) who is later
played in a biopic movie by an actor (Heath Ledger) whose crumbling
marriage resembles the one Dylan eulogized in "Blood on the Tracks."

There's Dylan the poet (Ben Winshaw) and Dylan the outlaw (Richard
Gere), the latter a character named Billy (as in The Kid) who heads
upstate (think Woodstock) to be invisible only to hear the distant
rumblings of Pat Garrett's land developers.

(This section echoes, of course, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," the
Sam Peckinpah movie Dylan acted in and scored, as well as the
Woodstock section in Dylan's own memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One.")

And, as you may have heard, there's also the Dylan of popular
imagination, the mid-'60s cultural icon sporting the electroshock
hair, black shades and prankster attitude.

That Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett in an astounding performance
that has already captured the popular imagination, and rightly so.

Blanchett surpasses her Oscar-winning portrayal of Katharine Hepburn
in "The Aviator" by nailing both the mannerisms and the spirit of
Dylan's Cosmic Trickster as seen in D.A. Pennebaker's 1965 doc "Don't
Look Back" as well as Pennebaker's subsequent, unreleased "Eat the Document."

It's a performance so convincing, so transfixing that you want to
watch it again immediately.

None of the Dylans intersect until the end, where myth and man meet
and disappear into the horizon, decades of triumphs and travails
awaiting, hitting the road, headin' for another joint. It's a
melancholy moment of beauty in a movie that's full of absurd humor
and aching regret.

Forget about calling "I'm Not There" the best movie of the year. It
is, but it's more than that ­ this is one for the ages.
---

---I'M NOT THERE ·Featuring:Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard
Gere, Heath Ledger, Charlotte Gainsborough, directed by Todd Haynes
·Where:Osio in Monterey ·Rating:R, for language, some sexuality and
nudity ·Running time:2 hours, 12 minutes

---I'M NOT THERE 4 stars R: language, sexuality and nudity. Starring:
Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger. Director:
Todd Haynes. Running time: 2 hr. 15 min. In a nutshell: Todd Haynes'
impressionistic take on Dylan manages to equal the artist. 'I'm Not
There' By Jon Bream Star Tribune (Minneapolis) "I'm Not There" is the
ballyhooed biopic in which Cate Blanchett stars as Bob Dylan. That's
right. A woman plays a very famous man, and she should land an Oscar
nomination for it ­ for best actress, I presume. Actually, Blanchett
is one of six actors who portrays Dylan at various stages of his life
in director Todd Haynes' oddly fascinating and obviously odd film.
Unquestionably, Blanchett does the best Dylan ­ much more convincing
and compelling than Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and a young black
kid named Marcus Carl Franklin. Yes, a young black kid and a woman
star in this rhapsody of a thin man. Confused? What did you expect
from an authorized Dylan movie by a notoriously nutty/arty director?
If you're not a fan of the music icon, you'll probably find this
impressionistic art film as confounding as "Like a Rolling Stone,"
"Idiot Wind" or any of his epic songs. If you dig Dylan, you'll be
riveted by this conceptual exploration of the myths and mien of His
Bobness. You'll want to see this over and over, possibly as a double
feature with 2003's enigmatic Dylan-scripted "Masked and Anonymous."
Haynes, 46, who has made other music movies including a Karen
Carpenter short starring Barbie dolls, knows his Dylan. For this
biopic, the director has pieced together key elements, incidents and
references from the legend's life, with startling attention to
minutiae (e.g., "If I kept playing piano with Bobby Vee, I'd be
millionaire by now," one character says; Dylan's gig with fellow
Minnesotan Vee in 1959 lasted two nights because he lied about his
piano-playing prowess). As the title might suggest, "I'm Not There"
explores Dylan the trickster, the maker of mysteries, the elusive
rebel. It's a role he has relished throughout the years, as Haynes
tries to illustrate with different characters. First, there's Woody
(Franklin), an 11-year-old train-hopping, fib-telling, left-handed
guitarist who idolizes Woody Guthrie. Arthur (Ben Whishaw) is an
engimatic poet and narrator of sorts, pontificating about art. Jack
(Bale) is a headstrong Greenwich Village folkie who later finds
Jesus. Jude (Blanchett) is a poufy-haired, chain-smoking American
rocker in London. Robbie (Ledger) is a self-absorbed Hollywood actor
who has no time for his wife and two daughters. Billy (Richard Gere)
is an Old West outlaw who tries to escape from reality. Some of the
dialogue appears lifted from biographies and the legendary Dylan
documentary "Don't Look Back," about his 1965 tour of London. That's
where Blanchett comes in, frighteningly suggesting the "Blonde on
Blonde" bard with her speaking voice, body language and vintage look
(polka-dot shirt and electrified hair). As the various stories
unfold, Dylanophiles will be struck by the realism (Julianne Moore as
a reflective Joan Baez-like character) and the fiction (his love
interest, played by singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, seems to be a
fictionalized French composite of Suze Rotolo, his New York City
girlfriend, and his ex-wife Sarah). Of course, music is heard
throughout "I'm Not There." Sometimes it's old Dylan recordings in
the background, sometimes it's a contemporary singer (Eddie Vedder,
Jeff Tweedy and Mason Jennings) covering a classic. The music serves
as both a glue and a distraction. Because there are times when you
might feel like "there's something happening here, but you don't know
what it is"; then just let the music bring it all home to you.

­­­ I'M NOT THERE 3 stars Starring: Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger,
Christian Bale, Richard Gere Directed by: Todd Haynes Rated R for
language and some sexuality and nudity ­­­ (c) 2007, Star Tribune
(Minneapolis)
---

'I'm Not There' By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel "I'm Not There"
isn't a Bob Dylan biography. It's a fantasia on the many guises of
the folk-rock shaman, changeling, hustler and icon. But as such, it
plumbs this pop changeling's psyche as no mere biography could. Todd
Haynes' endlessly over-inventive film dons its Dylans the way the
former Robert Zimmerman has donned his many disguises ­ with
insolence, insouciance and a cryptic wink at a world ready to be
put-on. Half a dozen actors play Dylan at various points in his life,
not one going by the name "Bob Dylan." Cate Blanchett is the '60s
rebel biker, turning his (her) back on folk and protest music,
plugging in, hopping on a motorcycle and crashing. It's one of the
conceits of Haynes' film that he takes each Dylan through to some
sort of logical conclusion in his life. That Dylan would have become
a James Dean cult figure, dying young and forever beautiful.
Christian Bale is the rising star of the folk scene, the one who used
Joan Baez, given another name here and played by Julianne Moore in
one of the many "interviews" in the film. Tiny Marcus Carl Franklin
is the adorably engaging youngest Dylan, hopping freight trains,
regaling hobos (at age 11) with tales of life on the rails as folk
singer Woody Guthrie. It's not lying. It's self-invention. Ben
Whishaw is the young poet, passing himself off as Rimbaud to an
inquisition of academics and intellectuals. Heath Ledger is the
matinee idol Dylan who might have pursued a movie career. And Richard
Gere is the "Billy the Kid" Dylan once played on the screen, a
recluse hiding in plain sight, leaving behind a world that changed
around him. Haynes and co-writer Oren Moverman build the script
around Dylan's own words, from testy, challenging interviews and the
too-revealing documentary "Don't Look Back" (a confrontational
British concert tour, filmed and re-created with Blanchett in
black-and-white). "I didn't come out of a cereal box," the
post-Elvis, pre-Beatles Vietnam War icon says. Do you have a message?
A cranky British journalist demands. "Do you?" You have to know at
least some of the story to figure out who the players are and which
setting we're in. But Haynes isn't going for the literal here, not
for a minute. This is an impressionistic comic book of Dylan's life,
his flings, first marriage, Pentecostal conversion and cultivated air
of mystery. The one man to maybe unmask him, the "Pat Garrett" who
trapped this "Billy the Kid?" That would be the British journalist
who got his goat during that "Don't Look Back" tour, played here by
Bruce Greenwood. He also turns up as Pat Garrett, famous lawman and
captor of Billy the Kid. It doesn't all work and it runs too long.
But every fragment of Dylan's life, every version of him, from the
funny to the tippy, rings true. And if the real Dylan can boast "I'm
not there" at the end of "I'm Not There," maybe that's because we've
never been able to figure him out while he was "here." It's only
later, after he's moved on, that any of his myriad guises seems like
the put-on it is.

­­­ I'M NOT THERE 4 stars (out of 5) Cast: Cate Blanchett, Christian
Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Charlotte Gainsborough Director:
Todd Haynes Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes Industry rating: R for
language, some sexuality and nudity ­­­ (c) 2007, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

.

Man of constant vision [Bob Dylan]

Man of constant vision

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22943233-16947,00.html

Todd Haynes's camp conceit of Bob Dylan rubs oddly against the artist
who inspired his film, writes Imre Salusinszky | December 22, 2007

THERE is an earlier film that haunts the edges of I'm Not There, Todd
Haynes's new film "inspired by the life and work of Bob Dylan". It
isn't No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's sprawling 2005 documentary
about Dylan's earlier career, though that will tell youconsiderably
more about Dylan's folk and blues influences.

Neither is it Renaldo and Clara, Dylan's own attempt, 30 years ago,
at a movie "inspired by the life and work of Bob Dylan", whose
forgettable allegorical meanderings are punctuated by some of the
most memorable concert footage ever filmed.

It's not even Don't Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker's chronicle of Dylan's
1965 British tour. And that's despite the fact that, in a postmodern
touch, the central episode in Haynes's film re-imagines Pennebaker's classic.

Unfortunately, the movie that lurks behind this movie is A Mighty
Wind, Christopher Guest's 2003 mockumentary about the 1960s Greenwich
Village folk scene. As with his 2002 film, the Douglas Sirk-inspired
Far from Heaven, Haynes no doubt intends the new work as tribute, not
parody. But at certain moments -- including staged interviews in
which a Joan Baez-like Julianne Moore looks back on her touring days
alongside a Dylan-like Christian Bale -- I'm Not There exudes an
unmistakable aroma of camp, whether intentional or not.

But while the campiness of Far from Heaven was balanced by the
startling directness of one central performance -- Dennis Quaid, as a
gay '50s advertising executive trapped in a straight life -- there is
no similar, saving authenticity at the heart of I'm Not There. And
since Dylan does not have a camp or postmodern atom in his body -- he
is, indeed, all about authenticity -- the texture of Haynes's vision
rubs oddly against that of the artist who has inspired it.

In some ways, there is nothing wrong with that. One of Dylan's key
messages, after all, is that you should pioneer your own creative
path rather than slavishly follow somebody else's. "I must invent my
own system, or be enslaved by another man's," wrote William Blake,
which Dylan paraphrases as: "Don't follow leaders/Watch the parking meters".

But a key problem with I'm Not There is that Haynes's vision is built
on one of the tiredest critical commonplaces about Dylan, an artist
whom criticism has served poorly: that Dylan is mercurial, elusive, a
series of masks behind which lies no recognisable face.

What this cliche overlooks is that every significant artist functions
by assuming masks, otherwise known as genres. The fact Dylan can be
folkie, rocker, mellow country crooner or bluesman at will is
extraordinary, but only as a demonstration of blazing artistic
talent. It is no more a puzzle than that Shakespeare could be
comedian and tragedian, or that Blake could write delicate lyrics at
the same time as churning out sprawling epics.

As the world now knows, Haynes's gimmick for capturing Dylan's
supposedly protean nature is to use six different actors to portray
him, including, in the most audacious piece of casting since Russell
Crowe played a Nobel laureate in mathematics, Cate Blanchett as "Jude
Quinn", the speed-ravaged, mid-'60s Dylan of Don't Look Back.

In addition to Blanchett, laying waste to Swinging London in a fright
wig and a polka dot shirt, say hello to: Marcus Carl Franklin as
"Woody Guthrie", an 11-year-old hobo who travels to New York and
sings for the real Woody Guthrie, just as Dylan did in 1961;
Christian Bale as Jack, a '60s folk sensation who drops off the scene
and later reinvents himself as an evangelist; Heath Ledger as Robbie,
a Hollywood actor who plays Jack in a movie and whose marriage later
unravels under some of the same pressures that came between Dylan and
his first wife, Sara; Ben Whishaw as "Arthur Rimbaud", a lugubrious
poet who utters nuggets of Dylanesque wisdom ("a poem is a naked
person") direct to camera; and, finally, Richard Gere, as an
over-the-hill Billy the Kid who embodies the cowboy-rebel-outsider
motif in Dylan.

The fact that Haynes skilfully intercuts versions of all these Dylans
without hinting at continuities between them is a particularly
powerful account of the view that Dylan is, in the title of the
Canadian poet Stephen Scobie's study of him, A Man Named Alias. But
are continuities not precisely what we should be looking for in a
significant artist?

One gets the feeling a conventional biopic -- starring Adam Sandler,
who resembles Dylan much more closely than any of Haynes's crew --
could have told us more about the overarching themes in Dylan's life
and work. And such a biopic could give due weight to one
manifestation of Dylan that Haynes, oddly, avoids: Robert Allen
Zimmerman, the lower-middle-class Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota,
who, even as Bob Dylan, never sheds a distinctly midwestern outlook
on US and international affairs.

But I suggest the weakest plank in the man-of-masks argument is that
it goes directly against every Dylan fan's sense that, more than with
any other living artist, there is a centre, a continuity, an absolute
consistency across five decades to Dylan's artistic stance. Surely
the telling point about Dylan for the millions who love his work is
that he is there.

With all of that said, however, you could do a lot worse this festive
season than spend 135 minutes watching Haynes's film. (The ultimate
saving grace of I'm Not There is that it features 39 classic Dylan
numbers on the soundtrack, about half of them cover versions.)

Even if Haynes resists an overarching explanation of the Dylan
gestalt, his interlinked stories manage to raise many of the
interesting questions about Dylan.

Unfortunately, several of these questions are raised in the form of
yet more Dylan cliches. These include the idea he was universally
reviled at the Newport folk festival when he went electric there in
1965. This is what befalls Jude Quinn, but it is not what happened to
Dylan. Likewise, in the evangelistic manifestation of Jack, Dylan's
religiosity -- the aspect of his work that serious criticism has been
weakest at dealing with -- is reduced to some kind of holy-rolling
fundamentalism.

Haynes has some sharp observations to make about Dylan's place in
popular culture, especially in the scenes in which Jude Quinn
confronts a BBC arts host, "Mr Jones", played by Bruce Greenwood. But
once again, the fact vapid interviewers have come to grief demanding
the real Dylan come out from behind his masks is no reason to throw
up one's hands at the project of defining Dylan's poetic stance and style.

* * *

SO while I'm Not There is legitimately marketed as a film inspired by
Dylan, it says relatively little about Dylan's ouvre: the deep
influence of existentialism and the Beats; Dylan's roots in the
American blues, folk and hillbilly music of the '20s and '30s; his
eminent place in the American artistic and philosophical tradition
that begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; and the
spiritual dimension that is central to everything he has done.

But I'm Not There is released contemporaneously with an avalanche of
materials that can help us better understand all these things. For
starters, there is the new CD compilation, Dylan, which takes us from
the 1962 Song to Woody -- as prescient and powerful a statement of
poetic arrival as John Milton's Nativity Ode -- to selections from
Dylan's three late masterpieces, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft and
Modern Times.

The 48 songs on Dylan can give only a taste of Dylan's achievement.
(There are lyrics to nearly 500 songs on the official website.) But
by placing songs from Dylan's musically underrated evangelical period
in the late '70s alongside his other work, the compilation undercuts
the implication in I'm Not There and elsewhere that the religious
phase is an aberration. From first to last, Dylan has been a
religious artist, not a political one. His spiritual and artistic
quest places him in the mainstream of American transcendentalism, in
which the search for God is an isolating journey that separates the
seeker from family, friends and community.

In a strange way, the Billy the Kid sequence in Haynes, which has
least directly to do with Dylan, is the most revealing. As circus
animals, performers and grotesques invade the town of Riddle, joining
the cowboys and villains, Haynes conveys something of Dylan's mythic
method: the fact that his songs are not about real people and events,
but about the archetypes of people and events that have been
distilled through the Western imaginative tradition.

But any student who really wants to explore this element would do
better to read and re-read Dylan's impressionistic memoir,
Chronicles, which is replete with hints and suggestions about his
artistic method. Here he is on the real attraction of folk music:

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded
all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could
disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this
mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes,
vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each
rugged soul filled with natural wisdom and inner knowing ... I could
believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real,
so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified.

Then there is Theme Time Radio Hour, the weekly program of popular
music stretching back to early blues that Dylan has been hosting for
a year. In his bizarre and detailed excursions into every subject
under the sun, Dylan reminds us how much information there is in his
songs: they are filled, not with airy romantic generalities, but with
descriptions of Mozambique and Durango and detailed biographies of
boxers and gangsters. More effectively than the Woody Guthrie
sequence in Haynes, TTRH plugs us into Dylan as the living
incarnation of 100 years of American popular music. His commentaries,
which never hint at his status as a songwriter and performer, are
brilliant and revealing. Here he is on rockabilly legend Hardrock
Gunter's Gonna Dance All Night:

You know why that record sounds so good? Because it was a
performance. The whole band was playing together in the studio. It
wasn't a thing assembled from parts, put together in little bits and
pieces, until you had a complete take.

Everyone started at the same time and finished pretty much at the
same time, and all the time in between you just hung on for dear
life. You can feel that energy in the record. And you can hear also
in there how the line is blurry. It's a hillbilly record, but if I
told you Louis Jordan recorded that song you wouldn't blink aneye.

And finally, released almost simultaneously with I'm Not There, comes
a far superior Dylan film, The Other Side of the Mirror, which
captures Dylan's performances at the three Newport festivals
culminating with the electric performance of Like a Rolling Stone in 1965.

There is no distracting commentary or interview material in Murray
Lerner's documentary, just a young artist prepared to follow the
logic of his own inspiration. The film reveals the caricature of the
Jude Quinn sequence in Haynes. There is some consternation in the
1965 audience, but there is also rapt attention.

The performances are a vivid reminder of what is perhaps the greatest
continuity in Dylan: his belief in self-reliance and individual
responsibility. In Pawn in Their Game, he mercilessly deconstructs
one of the chestnuts of the radical movement that tried to strangle
him in its embrace: that our social circumstances determine our
beliefs and actions. Who Killed Davey Moore? is a coruscating survey
of the same theme. And at the end of it all, Dylan returns to the
stage in 1965 with his acoustic guitar and advises the crowd: "Leave
your stepping stones behind, something calls for you./Forget the dead
you've left, they will not follow you."

No popular artist has more consistently demanded his audience
clarify, in their own minds, what they expect of him. Even with the
intermittent distraction of Joan Baez yodelling in Dylan's immediate
vicinity, The Other Side of the Mirror is an incredible testament to
the artistic mind on fire. And it will do something that Haynes's
strangely affectless film does not even attempt. It will bring tears
to your eyes.

I'm Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, will be released in Australia
on Boxing Day. Dylan was released by Sony Music in October and is
available in one-disc and three-disc versions.

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk
Festival, 1963-1965 was broadcast by the BBC in October and
subsequently released on DVD by Sony.

Theme Time Radio Hour is broadcast weekly on XM Satellite Radio, a
subscription-based satellite radio service in the US. It is widely
available for download via the internet.

Chronicles (2005), Simon & Schuster.

.

Joan Baez celebrates 50th anniversary with US shows

Joan Baez celebrates 50th anniversary with US shows

http://www.livedaily.com/news/13398.html

December 21, 2007
By Kym Kilgore
LiveDaily Contributor

Folk singer Joan Baez has started to assemble spring dates for her
first US tour since last year.

So far, the trek is scheduled to launch March 21 in Albany, NY, and
stick to the East Coast through early April. Details are listed below.

Baez and Boston-area nightclub Passim will celebrate their 50th
anniversaries together as the venue hosts the singer/musician/social
activist for the March 27 "A Conversation with Joan Baez." The
following night, the songstress will play a concert at Harvard
University, where Club Passim will present her with a lifetime
achievement award.

Earlier this year, The Recording Academy also recognized Baez with
the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award.

The performer, who spent the spring and summer touring Europe, is
working on a new album produced by Steve Earle, according to Country
Music Television. Her latest studio set, 2003's "Dark Chords on a Big
Guitar," marked her first album of new material in six years.

In 2005, Baez released "Bowery Songs," a collection of live
recordings from her Nov. 2004 performance at New York City's Bowery
Ballroom. That set includes four songs the singer had never recorded
before: "Seven Curses" (by Bob Dylan), "Jerusalem" (by Steve Earle),
"Finlandia" and "Dink's Song."

.

Comrade George Jackson Warned Us

[See URL for numerous embedded links.]

Comrade George Jackson Warned Us

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=473&Itemid=1

by Chaka
19 December 2007

The American Prison Gulag is unique on the planet, both in size and
racial composition. The martyred George Jackson (1941-1971) saw
American fascism as the inevitable product "of genocidal
extermination of indigenous peoples and genocidal enslavement of
Afrikans." The logic of homegrown fascism is inseparable from the
nation's original, formative sins. One million incarcerated Black men
and women are captive testimony to the near-seamless transition from
the "peculiar institution" of slavery and the "pioneering spirit" of
mass murder, to the modern, industrial warehousing of human beings
and relentless assaults on civil liberties: "Destruction of the
prison industrial complex is a most critical front in our struggle
for a radically more egalitarian world."
---

"Comrade George recognized fascism and dared to challenge it."

H.R 1955, "The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
Prevention Act" passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representative
on October 23, 2007. I hope I have your full attention.

Years ago in Blood in My Eye, George Jackson wrote: "Death and prison
for all who object - fascism in its final and secure state. It has
happened here." It has been happening here.

To understand what Comrade George was saying we have to rely less on
establishment academics as to what fascism means. Most of them
understand fascism as something that happened in Europe during the
1930s. Comrade George tried to improve our understanding of fascism
by daring to look beyond continental Europe. He recognized US
fascism by locating it in the history of genocidal extermination of
indigenous peoples and genocidal enslavement of Afrikans. Comrade
George also recognized that fascism continued into the present
because he did not separate white supremacy from its logical
conclusion: genocide. Witness the attempts to destroy public housing
in New Orleans as homelessness there increases dramatically.

US concentration camps - prisons and jails - are sites of terror and
warfare. To some it seems undeclared, but the over 2 million people
imprisoned reveals high-intensity, racialized and class-based
warfare. Critically, this war against us is also highly
gendered. While Afrikan men are the vast majority of those
incarcerated, Afrikan women are currently being incarcerated at
higher rates. The incredibly disproportionate number of Afrikans and
other racialized people in the US gulags should make clear our deadly
reality. The recent ruling by the Supreme Court that asserts the
right of federal judges to sentence individuals below the guideline
recommendations in crack cocaine cases and the decision by the
Sentencing Commission to apply that ruling retroactively, should be a
reminder of how much work we have left. The mandatory minimum terms
imposed by Congress remain along with their devastating impact on our
communities. Mass incarceration remains not only a means of social
control for populations rendered surplus by changes in the global and
US capitalist economy - US mass incarceration is genocidal.

On the frontlines trying to halt genocide were/are our freedom
fighters. Some of them organized themselves under the banner of the
Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army; others formed the
National Committee to Combat Fascism; and others were/are part of
other revolutionary formations and collectives. What they share(d)
in common was a willingness to up the ante of struggle as the
apparatus of US state terrorism intensified their brutality.
Confronted with overwhelming state violence, often in the form of
police assassinations, they resisted. And those who dared to
struggle have paid, are still paying, with their lives.

Today, our freedom fighter - Assata Shakur - remains in exile. The
terror mongers have placed a $1 million bounty on her head. Others
remain exiled, suffering separation from loved ones, yet giving us
hope, as they avoid direct repression. But many of our freedom
fighters - Jalil Muntaqim, Herman Bell, Robert (Seth) Hayes, Mutulu
Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Field Marshall Eddie Conway, Leonard Peltier,
Sundiata Acoli, Marilyn Buck, Mumia Abu Jamal and many others- remain
incarcerated. They are political prisoners and prisoners of war,
individuals who remain caged because they fought and continue to
fight against the forces of US fascism.

In these times of global apartheid, "disaster capitalism," and
intensifying white supremacist violence we should call upon the
spirit of George Jackson to "possess" us. "As a slave, the social
phenomenon that engages my whole consciousness is, of course,
revolution," Comrade George stated boldly. This is what made him so
terrifying to the ruling class. Comrade George recognized fascism and
dared to challenge it.

The pressing task we face is to make revolutionary transformation the
social phenomenon that engages our whole consciousness and that of
more people. Intensifying our struggle to emancipate all our
political prisoners and prisoners of war and to permanently dismantle
the prison industrial complex is a crucial aspect of this work. It
is also one of the most important ways we can challenge the forces of
imperialism abroad and fascism at home.

Emancipating our freedom fighters is no easy task. The US state
refuses to recognize them as political prisoners and prisoners of war
and keeps them locked up although they have already had decades of
their lives stolen. The criminal injustice system continues to be
used to criminalize organizing for social justice and to prevent
resistance to political repression and US state terror. It is from
this vantage point we must resist the "legalization" of "The Violent
Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act." As the
Center for Constitutional Rights has pointed out this legislation is
so broad and sweeping that it can easily be used as a tool for state
repression. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, kidnappings (extraordinary
renditions), illegal wiring tapping, and the legalization of torture
(e.g. water boarding) all reveal that the legal framework for
increased repression is being rapidly expanded.

And, political repression continues to intensify. In fact, our
freedom fighters continue to be subjected to human rights violations
and political repression. For example, in the aftermath of the
attacks on the world trade center in September 2001, many of our
freedom fighters already incarcerated were placed in solitary
confinement. The justification given was that they constituted a
threat to the society. More recently, we witnessed the renewed
attacks on the members (past) of the Black Panther Party and the
BPP's legacy of resistance to empire. The San Francisco 8 case
reveals that there is no action too reprehensible for the forces of
repression. Even though a Los Angeles judge, in 1975, dismissed a
case brought against some Black Panther Party members because police
had systematically tortured BPP member Harold Taylor, the police have
re-opened this more than 30 year old case against Taylor and other
activists. The struggle to end this specific attack continues.

Emancipating of freedom fighters is becoming more difficult. The
so-called "war against terror" is the fig leaf behind which US State
terror and corporate plundering is being intensified. They are using
this as a means to expand the corporate warfare-police State and its
systems of control, containment, repression and death. To ignore our
responsibility to our incarcerated freedom fighters is to lay idle as
fascism intensifies. And its intensification is not only at the
level of the fascist State.

If Comrade George was correct in noting that the "fascist state has
found it essential to disguise the opulence of its ruling-class
leisure existence by providing the lower classes with a mass
consumer's flea market of its own," the capacity to participate in
this "flea market" is shrinking for the lower and middle classes as
wealth inequality increases. Consequently, the danger to racialized
people, especially those who are poor, increases exponentially, given
that the US continues to be a white supremacist social formation.

State terror widely manifested in mass incarceration is today enabled by white
acceptance of the "necessity" of Black social death and the societal
retreat from racial justice. (It is also enabled by our
indifference; for the black political mis-leadership class, those
incarcerated have largely become disposable.) However, the dangers
to Afrikans and other racialized people is amplified because the
increase in white economic/social insecurity, real or imagined, will
likely feed the growth of non-governmental white terrorist
organizations (e.g. KKK, Minutemen etc.). This could easily lead
whites to engage, as participants or spectators, in the anti-Afrikan
pogroms (disingenuously called "race riots") of the not so-distant
past. Unfortunately, at this time, the likelihood of massive white
flight to even more explicit fascism remains more likely than the
rejection of "whiteness" and its wages. Witness the epidemic of
nooses and police murders.

If this is so, there is a dire need for stronger resistance to
genocide. A multi-pronged effort to emancipate all the political
prisoners and prisoners of war held in US gulags as well as to
abolish prisons may serve to revive and build revolutionary
consciousness. Already, the Jericho Movement, the Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement, Center for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR),
Critical Resistance, ABCDF and others are forwarding the struggle to
emancipate our political prisoners and prisoners of war. It is
imperative that we support them in realization that the emancipation
of our PPs/POWs, securing the safety of our political exiles, along
with the destruction of the prison industrial complex is a most
critical front in our struggle for a radically more egalitarian world.
"Fascism has temporarily succeeded," but as Comrade George said, "the
only way we can destroy it is to refuse compromise with the enemy
state and its ruling class."
---

Chaka can be contacted at nalsoja@yahoo.com

.

Brazilian artist Walter Goldfarb has eye-popping exhibit in Long Beach

Brazilian artist Walter Goldfarb has eye-popping exhibit in Long Beach

http://www.ocregister.com/entertainment/goldfarb-series-art-1947013-lysergic-most

Review: His arsenal of visual techniques is on display at the Museum
of Latin American Art.

December 20, 2007
By DANIELLA WALSH
Special to the Register

Since its opening in 1996, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long
Beach has introduced Southern California to art that significantly
differs in temperament from works made by U.S. and Canadian artists,
and the current exhibition titled "Walter Goldfarb: D+Lirium" fits
well into the pattern.

Curated by Agustin Arteaga (Director of the Ponce Art Museum in
Puerto Rico), the exhibition is divided into three distinct sections:
The White Series features early work (circa 1996), the Black Series
evidences Goldfarb's skill at presenting social commentary through
appropriation of European old masters and in the most recent Lysergic
Series, he revisits 1960s psychedelia and gives it a contemporary twist.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, Goldfarb has been inspired by his
family history for the "White Series," by art history and current
social trends for the "Black Series," and in the "Lysergic Series,"
he suggests that psychedelic art has evolved, most remarkably, into tattoos.

After Goldfarb surveyed tattooed Brazilian men and women and found
that women favor floral designs while men had a marked preference for
tigers, he incorporated the motifs into his newest paintings. They
turn up, rendered in raised lacquer and embroidered onto luminous
tie-dyed surfaces that, in some instances, are meant to signify
stages of hallucination. Colors range from a benignly pink haze to an
almost heavenly blue and to a paranoia-inducing, inky black.

As a craftsman Goldfarb is obsessive and fearless: Starting with raw
canvas, he uses tie-dye to achieve the stunning effects that hallmark
the "Lysergic Series" (named for altered mental states achieved by
use of LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide) and hand-dyes the thread
he uses to embroider the lilies and other motifs found in the
background of several paintings ("A Passion in the Lysergic Garden
III," 2007). Several luminous canvasses have been chemically treated
to change color over time. (The 2007 "Lysergic Rose" series.)

He has done appropriations of Michelangelo, Veermeer and other
Northern European masters, and Monet is the inspirational source for
the myriad lilies. Matisse's dancers can be juxtaposed into several
depictions of tribal tattoos.

There are suggestions of Michelangelo's "Last Supper" and a very
loose allusion to Van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Marriage" in the
intriguing "The Psychotic after the Beach without Cats after Van Eyck."

To appreciate his work, it helps to have at least a rudimentary
knowledge of art and world history and, most importantly, enough
imagination to study and interpret Goldfarb's multitiered concepts
involving religion, war, power and shifting gender relations. The
last subject is addressed in several paintings such as the humorous
"Blue from the Mirror Mirror on the Wall series," 2002 where an
impish young woman exposes her lacy bloomers to viewers, and the
rather spectacular painting/installation titled "Rapunzel and the
Manipulator's Milk after Vermeer and Cornelis van Haarlen," 2004. It
consists of an embroidered image of a Vermeer milkmaid pouring milk
from a pitcher. As the stream of "milk," made from several thick
strands of hand-twisted fiber lays coiled on the floor, it also turns
into itself, traveling upward into a composition featuring a
grisaille painting of several men in the throes of varying
discomfiture. One can read into this, that men are not exactly elated
over the power women have always wielded behind the scenes and now
freely bring into the open.

Still, to some, the White Section may be the most powerful, since it
addresses Goldfarb's Jewish ancestry and its history, including the
Holocaust and preceding anti-Semitism ("Night and Day I after an
anti-Semitic German cartoon, 1889") There are works addressing the
legacies of two diverse Popes (Pius XII and John Paul II) and two
multimedia paintings that reveal that his father was a musician
(first violinist at the Rio de Janeiro symphony) and his mother a
concentration camp survivor who would not tolerate Richard Wagner's
music played at home. Thus, the embroidered 1998 replication of a
score sheet for Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser" and the "War of the
Singers/Vocalists at Wartburg." speaks of remembrance, atonement, the
humanity of art and its corruption since Wagner was a favorite of Hitler.

Goldfarb's first museum exhibition in the United States introduces
him as someone who has an arsenal of techniques and a way of
juxtaposing ideas that will strike one as exotic and yet familiar. It
seems to matter little whether one wants to judge the works as "good"
or not. They are. What is important here is that Goldfarb, trained as
an architect and self-taught in art, has the courage and skill to
give emotions like fear, excitement, passion and delirium (hence the
title) physical form.

.

Revolution Tomorrow! [SDS]

Revolution Tomorrow!

http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/33/revolution-tomorrow

The Most Powerful Activist Group Of The '60s Returns To Ohio

December 19th, 2007
By James Renner

Student radicals have kidnapped the president of Ohio University. His
picture, anyway. Until recently, a poster depicting President
Roderick McDavis could be found hanging in the university library.
But members of Students for a Democratic Society have absconded with
it and are holding it for ransom at an undisclosed location. They
have filmed a shaky video which shows the poster surrounded by masked
revolutionaries. They want "bobcat cash" (university currency) and
some additional freedoms for students - or the poster gets it.

"We're trying to create an environment where students are a part of
the decision-making process on campus," says Will Klatt, a junior
media-studies major who helped organize the OU chapter of SDS last
year. This stunt, which he claims not to have participated in, is one
example of how SDS is using unconventional means to generate
political awareness in an apathetic student body. Other
demonstrations have been more productive.

For instance, when university officials laid off union janitors at
the same time they hired new administrators with inflated salaries,
Klatt and his fellow SDS members staged a protest near the student
center. When President McDavis created "Free Speech Zones" to limit
protests, SDS rallied 150 students to march to the administration building.

"They weren't prepared for it," says Klatt. "The president left
campus and ran home. We ended up negotiating with the vice president."

Last spring, SDS was able to generate enough support to place an
issue on the annual student ballot. Ten times as many students voted
than did the previous year, and 76 percent gave the school
administration a vote of "no confidence." The faculty followed a week
later with its own vote of no confidence.

President McDavis tried to call the SDS issue invalid because not
enough students had voted. Regardless, it was a victory for Klatt and
SDS. They proved that they could create awareness locally. They
proved that they could organize the student body into a voting block
- something that hasn't been done all that successfully since the
first incarnation of SDS, during the Vietnam War.

It's a promising start.

"We need control of the local institutions before we can affect
change nationally," explains Klatt. Next year, he intends to run a
dog for student body president to signify how students are treated
like animals by the corporations that actually control the
university. He also hopes to elect an SDS member to the student senate.

These stunts and protests may seem like college pranks to some, but
as membership in SDS grows on campuses across the country, these
quirky demonstrations might finally open the eyes of America's youth
to the bigger battle: ending the war in Iraq.

THE RISE AND FALL of the original SDS is chronicled in a new graphic
novel written by Harvey Pekar called, simply, Students for a
Democratic Society, out this January. Edited by Brown University
professor and publisher of Radical America Paul Buhle, and mostly
illustrated by Gary Dumm, the book covers SDS in exhausting detail.

Formed in 1960, SDS was originally an offshoot of the student
socialist movement. Unlike liberal activist organizations that had
come before, SDS had an open-door policy that welcomed communists and
even Republicans. This "New Left" group fought for civil rights and
against the "military-industrial complex" that was distorting
America's development. It staged sit-ins, boycotts and draft card
burnings as nonviolent demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. At
the same time, each chapter of SDS took an interest in local causes
as a means to motivate the working class into forming blocks of
voters to instigate social change. There was a national SDS office,
but the organization was loose by design. Policy was voted on during
annual conventions and anyone was free to debate its merit.

Unfortunately, this participatory democracy eventually became mired
in petty disagreements between different factions within SDS. Some
were disillusioned with the lack of progress following years of
nonviolent protest. These members formed a new group called
Weathermen, taking their name from a Bob Dylan lyric ("You don't need
a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"). The split brought
about the end of SDS in 1969. The Weathermen movement ended badly in
March 1970, when three members died after a bomb they were building
in a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded.

But for awhile anyway, SDS was a powerful anti-war movement. Nixon's
corporate-bought war-hungry government was so concerned about
political unrest caused by SDS members that the FBI placed undercover
agents on campuses. At first, these spies just gathered intelligence:
names and photos of members, dates and times of upcoming protests.
But there is evidence that, at times, the FBI deliberately used
undercover agents to spark violence in order to damage the image of SDS.

The FBI had undercover agents at Kent State in the late '60s, spying
on members of SDS. An informant named Terry Norman, who was being
paid by the FBI to take pictures of former SDS members, was on campus
May 4, 1970, and was seen carrying a handgun shortly before the
National Guard opened fire on students. A later analysis of his gun
revealed that it had been fired. Some National Guard members later
said that they only fired upon students after they heard a single
gunshot coming from the crowd of protestors where Norman was standing.

Pekar remembers the era with his special prosaic nostalgia. "SDS was
fairly big around here," he says. "But they couldn't get the
government to change its policies."

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2006, SDS was resurrected by a
Connecticut high school senior named Pat Korte and the first
president of the old SDS, Al Haber. With the help of a new tool - the
Internet -they have spread the word that SDS is back and recruiting
new members. Several chapters have sprouted up in Ohio, though Ohio
University appears to be the biggest so far.

Part of what interested Pekar in writing the book was the hope that
by sharing the history of SDS, more of today's students might be
inspired to join the cause and try again. "I don't think it's unusual
for this leftist organization to be founded again at a time when you
have George Bush ruling this country for eight years. Not only is he
a rightist, whose policies a lot of people don't agree with, but he's
also an incompetent. Everything he touches falls apart. He's also a
liar. And we have this war again that seemingly won't go away."

But on Northeast Ohio campuses, where the SDS was once influential
enough to attract the FBI's attention, the revolution is slow going.

Greg Schwartz attempted to start a chapter of SDS at Kent State last
year, when he was a senior, but was met with resistance not from the
administration but by activist groups that didn't want to work
together. "The left is so fractured at Kent State," says Schwartz. "I
thought it would be great to unite the May Fourth Task Force and the
International Socialist Organization under SDS, but everyone was so
focused on their own narrow goals."

It would have been easier to start SDS as its own separate group but
even the well-established lefty organizations at Kent State are
fighting for membership these days. Schwartz points to the one major
difference between 1967 and 2007 as the cause: In this endless war,
there is no draft. "Students don't have to worry about having their
number drawn. And I'm sure that's by design."

Also limiting student protests is the ever-rising cost of tuition -
driven, Schwartz believes, by corporations tied to universities that
have a profitable stake in the war machine. "Back in the '60s,
college was a lot cheaper. Now, almost all students need a crummy job
to make ends meet. People have less time to devote to those causes.
This too is by design."

Still, the recent events at Ohio University are promising. It proves
that change is possible, at least locally, and that was the whole
point of SDS in the first place. Maybe it'll catch on.

Area students interested in starting up their own local SDS chapter
can do so at studentsforademocraticsociety.org.

jrenner@freetimes.com

IN MY DAY ... From Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm's book, Students for a
Democratic Society: A Graphic History.

.

FBI: Fingerprints Don't Match Those Of Vietnam-Era Fugitive

FBI: Fingerprints Don't Match Those Of Vietnam-Era Fugitive

http://www.wisn.com/news/14889558/detail.html

FBI Continues Search For Burt

December 19, 2007

MADISON, Wis. -- The search for a man wanted in a 1970 bombing on the
University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is continuing.

A request for fingerprints last week had produced speculation that
authorities might finally have Leo Burt in custody after 37 years on the run.

But FBI spokesman Leonard Peace said that authorities don't have Burt
in custody and a routine check of someone's fingerprints didn't match
Burt's prints. The motion last week was sealed.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Grant Johnson said that the lead was
generated from a recent "America's Most Wanted" episode that
described Burt's case, but he said that it was unsuccessful.

The bombing occurred in 1970, when there was ongoing protests of the
Vietnam War on the UW-Madison campus. On Aug. 24, 1970, prosecutors
said that Burt and three other radicals parked a van full of ammonium
nitrate -- fertilizer and jet fuel -- and exploded it outside
Sterling Hall to protest weapons research.

Just before 4 a.m., a huge blast erupted and was heard for miles. It
didn't wipe out their target, the Army's Math Research Center, but it
caused heavy damage and sent debris flying for blocks.

Robert Fassnacht, a 33-year-old graduate student who had been working
late, died in the explosion.

Within seven years, everyone had been caught and prosecuted, except
Burt. The FBI said he remains at large. His last official sighting
was with accomplice David Fine in 1970 as they headed across the
Canadian border.

"If he's alive this many years later, he would have to continue to
avoid everybody and everything he knew. But since it's 30 to 35 years
later, he would have assumed a new identity and gotten to know new
people. And if he never did let on and never wants to let on, he
could be in Deforest or Mount Horeb or Madison," said Chris Van
Wagner, a former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney.

However, Van Wagner said he thinks that's "highly unlikely." He said
he believes Burt is dead -- as strongly as another defense attorney
believes Burt is alive.

Madison attorney Stephen Meyer said he is "absolutely" certain Burt
is alive because he was the smartest of the four men.

Meyer insists the now 57 or 59-year-old could disappear and stay
hidden, and points out that Burt's new identity could have been set
up long before technology tightened up U.S. identity documents.

On the other hand, Van Wagner said he finds it hard to believe
someone could keep a secret and stay away from family and friends for so long.

Ringleader Karl Armstrong apparently is still in the area. He is
believed to be working and living in Madison after serving seven
years of a 23-year sentence.

.

Storming the Ramparts of Camelot

Book Review

Storming the Ramparts of Camelot

http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/12/storming_the_ramparts_of_camel.php

Did the assassination of John F. Kennedy shatter American liberalism,
as the subtitle of a new book by James Piereson suggests? James
Sterngold says Camelot and the Cultural Revolution attempts to
discredit one of America's most powerful icons and reads like a
"conservative magical mystery tour."

(PJM will publish James Piereson's response to Sterngold's review on Sunday.)

by James Sterngold
December 21, 2007

I was startled some years ago by a sort of subliminal political
message implanted in an episode of HBO's heralded miniseries about
the Apollo space program, "From the Earth to the Moon." I'd written
about the culture wars and knew firsthand how far each side would go
to score a few points, but I was surprised by the naked ideological
ambition of the HBO episode, called "1968." It dismissed the
assassinations, racial protests and political tumult that defined
that trying year ­ presented as grainy black-and-white flashbacks ­
as peripheral events. What was central to our national narrative, the
show maintained, was the moon mission, depicted (in vivid color) as a
paragon of courage, achievement and right-minded clarity amid the
upheaval on terra-not-so-firma. And then came the clincher: the
episode ends at Christmas, with Houston reading to the Apollo 8
astronauts, the first men to orbit the moon, a telegram from an
ordinary American: "You saved 1968."

Yes, at least on one front, conservatives have won a skirmish in the
culture wars, seizing the moral high ground in the popular
understanding of what "failed" in the 1960's and what "succeeded."
The HBO episode swallowed whole the notion not just that 1968, a
seminal year that helped make us who we are, like it or not, needed
"saving," but that three men in a tin can hurtling through space,
military men at a time when the military was mired in a terrible,
tragic war, were the heroes who redeemed the era. They were, in this
view, a sort of special ops rescue mission from the Right. So much
for the lefties who supposedly control Hollywood. An argument can be
made that all the moon missions left us was Tang, space blankets and
some wonderful photos of the earth, while the voices of protest gave
us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and a healthy
skepticism toward foreign military adventures, but what seems
indisputable is that the revisionist view of the 1960's has become
prevalent. The guys with the crew cuts, it would seem, saved us from
the dope fiends with pony tails, making America safe for disco,
muscle cars and Watergate.

But some far Right conservatives have not been content with that
cultural victory. They want us not just to embrace the idea that the
forces of sanity on the Right saved the country but to destroy any
positive liberal symbolism that might be salvaged, a sort of
Biblical-style salting of the earth of your enemies. That is the
tactic employed by James Piereson's odd book of right-wing agitprop,
Camelot and the Cultural Revolution . He is out to discredit
liberalism and one of its most powerful, if ambiguous icons, John F.
Kennedy. More, for those who revere Kennedy at least in part because
he was killed in the spring of his reign of hope, in November, 1963,
Piereson tries to discredit even the assassination mythology as
little more than propaganda that obscured the conservative ascendancy.

Piereson's book is simplistic, absurdly reductive in places and he
gets a lot of historical context badly wrong. But he does make some
important points about the self-destructive course of some liberal
thinking during the 1960's. He also hints at some reasons why the
country has become so ideologically polarized.

Many of Kennedy's supporters, as Piereson notes, chose to blame the
assassination not on a sad, deranged misfit who had flubbed his
defection to the Soviet Union, but metaphorically on Kennedy's
enemies on the Right. Piereson struggles to make the case that since
Lee Harvey Oswald, a high school dropout, Marine dropout and
perennial loser, was an avowed communist the assassination ought to
be declared a communist-inspired hit. He cites no evidence, however,
justifying the claim that Kennedy was thus a victim of the worldwide
communist conspiracy. Piereson is right, though, that Kennedy's
allies, even his widow, quickly blamed, in a symbolic manner, the
opponents of desegregation and of international engagement. It was an
emotional effort by the supporters to marshal the grief and anger
over the assassination into a force to carry out Kennedy's ambitious agenda.

Piereson downplays how many of President Kennedy's domestic policy
programs were enacted, supported by both Democrats and many
Republicans – including the race to the moon, which Kennedy had first
championed. But the effort to lay blame on the Right was a tactical
error that, in the long run, contributed to the demonization of
conservatives and widened the partisan divide. Piereson's argument is
that youthful members of the Left were radicalized by this false
charge that the far Right had "killed" their youthful president.

It's a ridiculous charge. What Piereson ignores is that the seeds of
disaffection on the Left were sown long before Kennedy's death in
November, 1963, and that many members of the Left were already well
on their way to being radicalized. Piereson repeatedly talks about
the counterculture and protest movements as the progeny of the
assassination when in reality they predated it by many years.

The rebellion that came into full flower during the 1960's had deep
roots in the 1950's – some strands led back to the Depression, of
course, and its movements supporting unions and the rural poor. The
serene 1950's "consensus" that Piereson refers to was already shaky
by the time Kennedy was elected. Young people were already rebelling
against racial injustice and hypocrisy, even "the Bomb." For
instance, the terrible murder of the young black man Emmett Till by a
mob of racist whites in Mississippi, which started to rally Liberals
around the civil rights cause, took place in 1955. Allen Ginsberg's
beat masterpiece, Howl, was published in 1956, and Jack Kerouac's
anthem of living for the moment, On the Road, came out in 1957.

By the time of the assassination, Bob Dylan had already released two
albums, filled with anti-war tunes, and his fiery third album, The
Times They Are A-Changin, had been recorded prior to Kennedy's death
and was released just six weeks later. The Students for a Democratic
Society had laid out their political program ­ opposition to nuclear
weapons, war and racial injustice ­ at the Port Huron Convention in 1962.

The great split between the traditional, intellectual left of Kennedy
and Adlai Stevenson and the new Left hipsters – the real source of
revolutionary fervor – had been playing out for years. The divide was
on display famously at Hunter College in 1958, when James Wechsler,
the editor of the then reliably liberal New York Post, shared a
podium with Kerouac. Wechsler earnestly argued for banning nuclear
weapons and for racial equality, while a drunken Kerouac pranced
about the stage, ridiculed Wechsler and declared, "I believe in love.
I vote for love."

"I was grappling with a man from Outer Space," Wechsler later wrote.

Because he so badly misses the roots of 1960's rebellion, Piereson
also misses the critical factor that pushed the youth movement to
extremes. Kennedy's assassination may have robbed some young people
of the hope that a new kind of president would forge a new kind of
history marked by social progress, but it did not force them into the
streets. Far more important to the eruption of rhetoric, anger and,
at times, violence was, of course, the senseless course of the
Vietnam War, being fought by baby boomers, many drafted into service
against their will. The forces of alienation were unleashed by the
war and heightened dangerously by it. Optimism was crushed and
idealism was replaced by cynicism. Kennedy's death was a secondary force.

This is exactly where Piereson's conservative magical mystery tour
smacks into the brick wall of reality. His fundamental thesis is that
the Right "saved" the 1960's as the Left became unmoored because
conservatives never lost their focus on anti-communism. It was this
crusade that eventually brought the country around. One small
problem: Piereson's view ignores the painful reality that the United
States' obsession with and failed effort at fighting communist
expansion in Vietnam – led by a liberal Democrat President ­ was the
trauma that nearly destroyed the country. Young men did not flee to
Canada because Kennedy had been shot.

Not letting the facts get in the way, Piereson pushes the notion that
the violence once employed by far Right groups, such as the KKK, now
became a tool of the far Left. It is a misguided view of history.

Certainly, he's correct that some elements of the far Left ­ the
Weather Underground or the bizarre assemblage calling itself the
Symbionese Liberation Army ­ resorted to violent tactics. But
Piereson makes the ridiculous claim that the overheated rhetoric of
the Left "led inevitably to acts of political violence," such as
urban race riots ­ not poverty, racism or violent white resistance to
desegregation? ­ and violent anti-war campus protests ­ not
frustration with the escalation of the fighting in Vietnam or police
overreaction, as at Kent State?

Piereson tries to go one further, alleging that post-JFK political
violence "came largely from the left." Oh? The assassinations of
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 were by Leftists? How
about Timothy McVeigh's bombing later of the Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, the worst case ever of domestic terrorism? How about
Eric Rudolph and his terrorist acts against abortion providers and
gays and lesbians, or his bombing at the Atlanta Olympics?

But Piereson is a political agitator, not an historian, so such
errors mean little to him. It's a shame, because we are seeing once
again in this presidential campaign how many of the arguments started
during the 1960's remain alive. Thoughtful examination of those
disputes could help inform the battles. But Piereson has other aims,
perhaps clearest when he scolds Kennedy for being a centrist and a
pragmatist. He questions Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book,
Profiles in Courage, for lauding both Democrats and Republicans.
Rather than seeing this evenhandedness as a sign of strength,
Piereson accuses Kennedy of being "confusing" in his outlook and his
book as "muddled" because he had not downed the Kool Aid of
ideological intolerance. The criticism says more about Piereson than
either Kennedy or the 1960's.
---

James Sterngold writes on national security, criminal justice and the
prison system and business. He spent 18 years with The New York Times
as a domestic and a foreign correspondent and 5 years as the national
affairs correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the
author of Burning Down the House: How Greed, Deceit and Bitter
Revenge Destroyed E.F. Hutton .

,

From draft cards to pop music, '68 had it all

From draft cards to pop music, '68 had it all

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2007/dec/21/from-draft-cards-to-pop-music-68-had-it-all/

By Good Morning Tri-State
Friday, December 21, 2007

The year 1968 had it all. Assassinations. Racial tension. An
increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia. Campus protests.
Generation gap. Burning draft cards. Flower power. Hair down to there.

How much do you know about one of the most turbulent ­ and pivotal ­
years in recent United States history?

All the questions in this quiz are about events of 1968. Answers are
at the end.

1. In a sometimes forgotten chapter in the civil rights movement, a
protest at a white-only establishment in Orangeburg, S.C., led to the
deaths of three college students. What business was it? (a) Bowling
alley (b) Beer joint (c) Auto dealership (d) Laundromat.

2. This tune was not among the top 10 hits of 1968. (a) "Honey" by
Bobby Goldsboro (b) "Love Is Blue" by Paul Mauriat (c) "Sunshine of
Your Love" by Cream (d) "Revolution" by the Beatles.

3. This soap opera premiered in 1968. (a) "Tiny Bubbles" (b) "One
Life to Live" (c) "Days of Our Lives" (d) "Guiding Light."

4. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, these two African-Americans raised
their arms in a black power salute after winning the gold and bronze
medals in the 200 meters. (a) Tommy Smith and John Carlos (b) Bob
Hayes and Willie Davenport (c) Carl Lewis and Jim Hines (d) Cuba
Gooding and Chris Rock.

5. Who was not born in 1968? (a) Mary Lou Retton (b) Molly Ringwald
(c) Jim Carrey (d) Eric Bana.

6. Who did not die in 1968? (a) Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (b) Singer
Frankie Lymon (c) Helen Keller (d) Wally Cox.

7. In January 1968, a Navy intelligence-gathering ship ­ the USS
Pueblo ­ was captured by patrol boats from what country? (a) North
Vietnam (b) Japan (c) North Korea (d) China.

8. By 1968 the number of United States airplanes lost over Vietnam
exceeded (a) 10,000 (b) 2,500 (c) 5,000 (d) 7,500.

9. Walter Cronkite's coverage of this 1968 event was critical of the
military's handling of the Vietnam War and led some to rethink our
country's involvement in the fighting. (a) The expansion of the
conflict into Cambodia and Laos (b) The bombing of harbor cities in
North Vietnam (c) The use of torture tactics against captured Viet
Cong soldiers (d) The Tet Offensive.

10. He was runner-up to Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 New Hampshire
Democratic primary. (a) Robert Kennedy (b) Eugene McCarthy (c) Hubert
Humphrey (d) Gary Puckett.

11. Which was not a landmark during the Vietnam War? (a) Mekong Delta
(b) Hue (c) Haiphong (d) Fleury Islands.

12. One of the longest songs in pop music history was performed at
the Newport, R.I., Folk Festival. Which song was it? (a) "Tighten Up"
by Archie Bell and the Drells (b) "A Beautiful Morning" by the
Rascals (c) "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie (d) "I Thank You" by
Sam and Dave.

13. The My Lai massacre in Vietnam was about (a) American troops
killing scores of civilians (b) A shootout between rival governing
factions along the 20th parallel (c) Reaction to the leaking of the
Pentagon Papers (d) A failed coup attempt in Saigon.

14. Approximately how many United States soldiers were in Vietnam in
1968? (a) 100,000 (b) 500,000 (c) 1 million (d) 2 million.

15. Police clashed with thousands of anti-war protesters outside the
1968 Democratic National Convention. Where did the head-knocking take
place? (a) San Francisco (b) New York City (c) Poseyville (d) Chicago.

Answers: 1. A. 2. D. 3. B. 4. A. 5. C. 6. D. 7. C. 8. A. 9. D. 10. B.
11. D. 12. C. 13. A. 14. B. 15. D.
---

­ Garret Mathews
464-7527 or mathewsg@courierpress.com

I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary

Friday Mini Book Review:
I Have America Surrounded

http://reason.com/blog/show/124065.html

Brian Doherty | December 21, 2007

I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, by John Higgs
(Barricade Books, 2006). Timothy Leary is a 20th century American
character who suffered, until 2006, perhaps the most skewed ratio of
importance to biographical attention of anyone I can think of. In
2006, he got both the doorstop major publisher slash-and-burn from
Robert Greenfield (reviewed by Nick Gillespie in the Washington Post
and Jesse Walker in American Conservative) and this thinner, but more
sympathetic and idiosyncratic, take, from a more obscure house, which
got almost no attention from anyone.

Higgs, a British documentarian, gets the basic story down­a story, as
many have rightly noted, that would be unbelievably baroque and
absurd for a novelist. Higgs is also better, and more sympathetic, on
Leary's intellectual and cultural significance than was Greenfield,
even in about half the wordage.

The Leary that interests Higgs the most is the post-prison break
Leary of the early 1970s, living an alternately harrowing and
decadent life in exile with Eldridge Cleaver in Morocco and Michel
Hauchard in Switzerland, until the Feds kidnapped him in Afghanistan.
It takes Higgs only 107 pages to get Leary to the point where he's
over the wall of the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo, and
the narrative gets much thicker from there. (The book's main text
weighs in at 274 pages.)

Before then Higgs has dutifully, though entertainingly (it's
certainly a hard story to make boring) hit the high points of the
life of Leary: the rogue with his troubled West Point and collegiate
career; his innovations in, and growing dissatisfactions with,
psychological classification and testing methods and his explorations
in interpersonal/transactional psych as an on-the-rise star in what
could be seen as the Psychological Decade of the 1950s; his troubled
first marriage that ended in his wife's suicide; his dogged pursuit,
against the advice of his more prudent co-conspirators, of a
gleefully populist approach to the spread and study of psychedelics;
the madness of his psychedelic training camp at Millbrook; his
self-recasting as religious guru; the arrests and gubernatorial campaign.

It seems inevitable that this reckless scamp is gonna end up in jail;
and equally inevitable that he'll escape. Leary made himself feel
better about being in jail by deciding that all truly successful
philosophers face state punishment as a common occupational hazard.
He'd lie back and think of Socrates.

An interesting interpretive take on Leary, not taken up by Higgs, is
how perfectly trendy and emblematic of the classic version of every
American decade Leary's life tended to be, from West Point (he was
booted out) and World War II to ex-soldier boy turned egghead college
boy in the '40s; suburban angst wife-swapping psychological
Organization Man-controller in the '50s ended up at Harvard; drug
guru revolutionary in the '60s; '60s hangover refugee turned Me
Decade jail bird snitch in the '70s; coke party Hollywood sub-celeb
in the '80s; avatar of the computer revolution in the '90s. It's a
theory I don't have time to expound on here myself but I think a
fruitful one in Leary Studies.

Higgs is especially taken with Leary's '70s-exile strange
intellectual partnership with occult devotee and researcher Brian
Barritt, a very interesting figure who Higgs, clearly fascinated with
more than most other writers (Barritt gets two whole chapters in this
book), makes a grand case for as biography-bait of his own. Higgs
makes perhaps too large a case for Barritt as a shaper of Leary's
thought from then on, in his "eight-circuit brain/SMI2LE" days,
though further research is certainly warranted. I am glad that this
book has more info on Leary's curious and wonderful collaborative LP
with Ash Ra Tempel than I've found elsewhere.

Leary was a man whose importance, while subterranean, is vast­and it
underlies, in that subterranean way, a lot of what was interesting in
American culture in the second half of 20th century, a historical
league in which baseball obsessive Leary could be well considered an
MVP, though a controversial and truculent one. I Have America
Surrounded is a good book; anyone interested in Leary beyond seeing
him traduced will be sure to enjoy it, if not love it.

But I still dream of a biography of Leary by a writer ready and able,
and with the space, to dig deep into his work and standing as an
important psychologist in the 1950s before that fateful day in Mexico
in 1960 that he ate psychedelic mushrooms and the Timothy Leary the
rest of the world came to know was born; a writer who is learned in
and able to position Leary vis a vis all his influences and all the
roles he played, all the figures he interacted with and emulated or
needs to be understood in terms of, all the Sullivans and Szaszs, the
Huxleys and Hollingsheads, the Hoffmans and Dohrns, the Gurdjieffs
and Crowleys, the Wilsons and O'Neills, all the fancies and positions
this self-consciously trendy philosophical polemicist (a far better
description of his role from 1961 on than scientist or scholar) Leary
played with. Leary was also, which both Greenfield and Higgs note but
neither makes much of, an advocate of libertarianism­alas, not as
successful an advocate as he was of psychedelics.

A random bloggy aside: Dr. Leary and I talk about food.
http://www.gourmandizer.com/ezine/leary/index.html

.

Laura Huxley, Her Husband’s Biographer, Dies at 96

Laura Huxley, Her Husband's Biographer, Dies at 96

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/books/19huxley.html

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 19, 2007

Laura Archera Huxley, a writer who was best known for her memoir of
her years with her husband, the novelist Aldous Huxley, died on
Thursday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.

The cause was cancer, said Karen Pfeiffer, who was reared by Mrs. Huxley.

Mrs. Huxley's memoir, "This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of
Aldous Huxley" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was published in 1968, five
years after her husband's death. The book recounted her seven-year
marriage to Huxley, best known for the dystopian novel "Brave New
World," which was published in 1932.

Reviewing "This Timeless Moment" in The New York Times Book Review,
Nona Balakian wrote: "Despite its soap-opera title and occasional
discursiveness, Mrs. Huxley's memoir makes absorbing reading. It
captures, if not the totality of Huxley's genius, certain integral
and warmly human aspects of it."

Over the years, Mrs. Huxley was also a concert violinist; a freelance
filmmaker; a lay psychotherapist; a self-help author; the head of a
children's foundation; a lecturer on the human potential movement;
and, in her words, a restrained investigator of LSD.

Laura Archera was born in Turin, Italy, on Nov. 2, 1911. A musical
prodigy, she made her United States debut in 1937, performing
Mozart's A major violin concerto in Carnegie Hall with the New York
Women's Symphony Orchestra. Miss Archera later studied at the Curtis
Institute of Music in Philadelphia. At the outbreak of World War II
in Europe, she chose to remain in the United States, eventually
settling in Los Angeles.

After a close friend, Virginia Pfeiffer, became seriously ill, Miss
Archera gave up her musical career to study psychology and
alternative medicine. She later donated her Guarnerius violin to
Yehudi Menuhin, Karen Pfeiffer said.

Miss Archera befriended Mr. Huxley and his wife, Maria, in the late
1940s, while working as a freelance associate producer of documentary
films. In 1956, the year after Maria Huxley's death, Miss Archera and
Mr. Huxley were married at a drive-in wedding chapel in Yuma, Ariz.

In 1963, as Mr. Huxley was dying of cancer, Mrs. Huxley ministered to
him by injecting him with LSD and by reading aloud to him from the
manuscript of "The Psychedelic Experience," by Timothy Leary and others.

In the mid-1970s, after her friend Virginia Pfeiffer's death, Mrs.
Huxley, then in her 60s, took in and raised her young granddaughter,
Karen. Besides Karen Pfeiffer, of Los Angeles, Mrs. Huxley is
survived by Karen's daughter, Kaya.

In the late '70s, Mrs. Huxley started Children: Our Ultimate
Investment, a foundation concerned with the well-being of young
people. Her other books include several self-help volumes, the best
known of which is "You Are Not the Target" (Farrar, Straus, 1963),
which has a foreword by her husband.

The book offers a set of what Mrs. Huxley called recipes for getting
through life's many difficulties. These include punching a
tetherball, imagining one's own funeral and dancing in the nude.

.

Harvard, US army 'partners in crime'

[2 articles]

Harvard, US army 'partners in crime'

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=36007&sectionid=3510203

Sat, 22 Dec 2007

American academics have been strongly criticized for collaborating
with US military forces in the wars waged on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some Harvard faculty members are concerned that the university's Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy helped revise the counterinsurgency
field manual, the New York Times reported.

"Universities are not that innocent. In the era of Abu Ghraib, such
cooperation does damage the university's credibility and autonomy,"
said Harvard Professor Richard Parker.

"How could Harvard sit there and put the imprimatur of a human rights
center on counterinsurgency? It lends an Ivy League cloak of
legitimacy to counterinsurgency, which is inherently secret," said
Vietnam War-era activist Tom Hayden.

Members of the American Psychological Association have also come
under fire by anthropologists who rail against a Pentagon program
that uses these social scientists in war zones.

Although the association has passed bans on participating in any form
of torture, some psychologists argue that the association should
forbid psychologists from even being at Guantanamo or in locations
where secret CIA interrogations take place.

--------

[See URL for embedded links.]

Scholars and the Military Share a Foxhole, Uneasily

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/books/22harv.html

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: December 22, 2007

The United States military is frequently criticized for not doing
enough to reduce civilian casualties or to stabilize the places it is
fighting to protect. Yet what happens when the outside experts who
can offer such advice are condemned for doing exactly that?

Questions about collaboration between soldiers and scholars have been
around at least since World War II, but they have arisen with
particular urgency in recent months at professional meetings, in
journals, on campuses and on the Internet over programs related to
Afghanistan and Iraq.

At Harvard, some faculty and activists have been troubled that the
university's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy helped revise the
counterinsurgency field manual, even though the center's aim was to
reduce civilian casualties. Members of the American Psychological
Association have had fervid exchanges over what role ­ if any ­ its
members should have in military interrogations. And anthropologists
have passionately argued over a Pentagon program that uses these
social scientists in war zones.

These sorts of controversies have appeared "in various permutations
at different times," said David Wippman, a professor at Cornell Law
School who worked on humanitarian affairs for the Clinton
administration, mentioning similar debates over participation in
humanitarian assistance, the Iraqi war crimes tribunal and the
proceedings at Guantánamo's detention camp.

In the Harvard dust-up, the worry is that the essential secretiveness
of the military will transform the long-cherished openness and
transparency of the university, bringing the campus green a bit too
close to the parade ground.

"How could Harvard sit there and put the imprimatur of a human rights
center on counterinsurgency?" said Tom Hayden, the Vietnam War-era
activist, who has complained about the collaboration in The Nation
and on The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). "It lends an Ivy
League cloak of legitimacy to counterinsurgency, which is inherently secret."

For Mr. Hayden; Richard Parker, who now teaches at the Kennedy School
at Harvard; and Harvey G. Cox Jr., a faculty member of the Harvard
Divinity School for more than 40 years, the Vietnam War is a
touchstone in these debates.

"I'm of a generation that is skeptical about this," Mr. Parker said.
"Universities aren't innocents," he added, noting that he was
speaking from a campus building "named after a convicted felon." (His
office is in the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local
Government, named for the former chairman of Sotheby's who was
convicted of price fixing in 2002.)

"In the era of Abu Ghraib," he said, such cooperation "does damage to
the university's credibility and autonomy."

It is not as if the military "is unaware of these issues," he added;
"there's nothing that they couldn't get on the Internet" if they were
interested in improving their practices.

Participants may think they are immune to being compromised, Mr. Cox
said, but human nature being what it is, "I'm not confident that a
lot of people who think they can humanize the system can prevent
themselves from getting carried away."

Sarah Sewall, the faculty director of the Carr Center and a former
Pentagon official, said: "I hear grumblings from faculty at Harvard.
For people who don't understand, it can be a little mystifying."

But once she has had the opportunity to explain how the center is
trying to instill institutional change within the military, she said,
skeptics have come around. "I have yet to find anyone with whom I've
spoken for any period of time who doesn't understand why," she said.

The decision to explore where humanitarian and military interests
might intersect dates back to 2000 ­ before 9/11, before the invasion
of Afghanistan and before the Iraq war, Ms. Sewall said.

The work on the counterinsurgency field manual ­ considered the
military's "war-fighting doctrine" ­ grew out of a conference
sponsored with the Army War College in 2005, in which the center
tried to show that protecting civilians was critical to the success
of counterinsurgency programs, she said.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, was
impressed with what he heard, she said, and on the spot began
assembling a team to revise the doctrine. That group met with
additional human-rights groups the following year.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with cooperating with the
military, said David Rieff, who has frequently written on the moral
complexities of human-rights assistance. "The counterinsurgency
manual is really a manual about maintaining hegemony in the world,"
he said, and if one thinks that American might can be harnessed for
doing good, then it makes sense to collaborate.

"I don't believe that," he said, but he knows others do. As it turns
out, the Pentagon program that employs anthropologists is part of the
new counterinsurgency doctrine, although the idea of using social
scientists to interpret the culture of an enemy has a long pedigree.
In perhaps the most famous example, Ruth Benedict's wartime study of
the Japanese, eventually published as "The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword," played a critical role in how President Roosevelt shaped the
terms of surrender with the Japanese.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists explain tribal customs and
work to improve health, security and education, efforts that have
helped significantly reduce combat, Army commanders say. Some of the
anthropologists' colleagues nevertheless insist that such programs
compromise the entire discipline, put all practitioners working
abroad under suspicion and prolong the war. At the American
Anthropological Association's annual meeting three weeks ago, a
special commission issued a report that analyzed this ethical
minefield, though it did "not recommend nonengagement."

Among psychologists, the arguments are even more pointed. The
American Psychological Association has passed wide-ranging bans on
participating in any form of torture, but some psychologists argue
that the association should go further and forbid psychologists from
even being at Guantánamo or in locations where secret C.I.A.
interrogations take place. Situations in which prisoners are denied
due process, are kept in isolation or jailed for an indefinite period
are by nature inhumane, and psychologists who are there are
inevitably complicit, opponents of the cooperation maintain.

But Navy Capt. Morgan T. Sammons, a psychologist who has worked with
detainees, argued at the psychology association's annual meeting in
August that military psychologists had consistently opposed
mistreatment and promoted safeguards.

"We cannot absent ourselves," he said. "It would be irresponsible for
us to do that. Only by becoming as involved as we have can we ensure
that abusive practices do not occur."

Bonnie Docherty, a human-rights researcher who also teaches at
Harvard Law School, does not see what all the fuss is about. "We
don't want to be co-opted by the military," she said, "but I think
there can be an important dialogue between the two groups."

Ms. Docherty recently completed a report on the National Training
Center at Fort Irwin near Barstow, Calif., that was published by the
Carr Center. She complimented commanders at Fort Irwin, saying they
were "receptive to our recommendations" about protecting civilians
and had followed some earlier advice.

"We offer recommendations to other governments and other bodies," she
said, "so I don't see why we shouldn't be able to offer them to the
military as well."

.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/22001234/It-was-40-years-ago-today.html

The spirit of freedom is alive and well and Haight and Ashbury

by Salil Tripathi
Dec 22 2007

I am at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, and the clock is stuck at
4.20. The summer of love was 40 years ago, and the smell that wafts
through the most famous crossroads in the history of counterculture
is not of marijuana, but of mocha java. Has the revolution gone limp?
Across me is a Ben and Jerry's (B&J's) ice-cream parlour that looks
as messy as Leopold's Café in Colaba but, instead of relics of the
1960s, I see eager young people wearing T-shirts and shorts, buying
dollops of ice cream, fortifying themselves before hitting the
streets. B&J's sells Cherry Garcia; Jerry Garcia's home is the
proverbial stone's throw away­if you aren't stoned, that is.
The colours around me are vivid and psychedelic. Orange and purple,
green and yellow, red and pink: Everything is meant to shock and awe,
but not in the militaristic sense; arouse, but not only in the
orgastic sense; numb, but not in the anaesthetic sense; and calm, but
not in the meditative sense; all at the same time.
Why 4.20? It has nothing to do with the blackbirds, though the stoned
man on the sidewalk laughs at the nursery rhyme simplicity of the
idea. He claims to be a Gulf War veteran, seeking donations from
pedestrians with a banner by his side saying "Donate generously. Want
to get stoned tonight." He tells me 4.20pm is the hour to get stoned.
I tell him 420 is a section of the Indian Penal Code dealing with
cheating and forgery. He laughs, as if saying the whole world is a
forgery, man.
As we say goodbye to 2007, it is worth recalling that it has indeed
been a year of anniversaries­of the summer of love, of course, but
equally importantly, the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's
monumental novel On The Road. During a month-long vacation in the US
this summer, I had been reading the adventures of Kerouac and Neal
Cassady (the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in the novel),
encapsulating mad, meandering journeys across the American heartland,
as soldiers returned to the US after liberating Europe and Asia, but
did not fit into the conservative, Eisenhower-era US.
It was called the Beat Generation, a phrase the critic Louis Menand
traces to an old carny slang. Menand says the poet Allen Ginsberg and
Kerouac picked up the term from a man called Herbert Huncke, a gay
street hustler from Chicago they met near Times Square in New York in
1939. Beat means beaten down and poor, exhausted, at the bottom of
the heap of history. But it is only when you are flat out on the
ground on a dark night that you can see stars shining in their full,
scintillating glory. In what has been a difficult year, the balmy
weather of San Francisco, and the spirit of freedom the city
encapsulates, has just that sort of feeling for us.
The stories Kerouac wrote­ the sexuality, the outré behaviour­may
sound banal, boring and conventional today. We have all grown up and
learned to get our hair cut every month and tell our children why
drugs are bad and the only good sex is safe sex. But it was
revolutionary in that time, and that spirit pervades through that
city, even if all those revolutionaries now have iPods, drink coffee
at Starbucks and even B&J's, as a brand, has been sold to a multinational.
But the spirit isn't lost. When I step out of our friends' home in
the morning and walk down from Noe towards Castro to board the
streetcar, I find foot-stamp size silhouettes of George W. Bush on
the road. The line below says: Impeach the Idiot.
Earlier that day, we have been to that temple of the First Amendment,
the City Lights bookstore, co-owned by the poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, which published Ginsberg's Howl and Kaddish (and held
open readings from those) at a time when many in the US would have
wanted to see such books banned. There's a banner there asking San
Franciscans: "Where is the courage? Why is that man still the
President?" Dixie Chicks would have been feted as queens at this
bookstore, the intellectual counterpoint to the sensation of feeling
spaced out that Haight and Ashbury induce.
We are surrounded by the musty smell of books, ready to lose
ourselves in the magical tapestry of words. Banned books have a
special section here as a kind of in-your-face defiance.
In a sense, that distance between Haight and Ashbury and the City
Lights bookstore encompasses the trajectories of American
counterculture. When Timothy Leary said: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop
Out," some dropped out at Haight and Ashbury, others at this
bookstore. In the chasm between rose strait-laced skyscrapers,
reflecting post-war American prosperity. But its conscience was
rocked by the music strumming through parks in Haight and Ashbury,
and the words, the inspiration, and the rebelliousness were nurtured
at bookshops such as City Lights.
I had come to Haight and Ashbury to discover the mood of that summer
of love. Standing with my sons at that corner of Haight and Ashbury,
sipping magical chocolate milkshake, in a corner of the US where it
is always 4.20pm, seeing people walking all over the face of the man
who is their president, reading a book that in so many other
countries would have been banned outright, we got a glimpse of the
meaning of the word, freedom. Like the image of the Golden Gate
Bridge surrounded by fog, freedom seems elusive; it is imperial and
grand, it is within reach, it often gets clouded, but it is always
there, within our firm grasp.
---

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com

,

Swiftboating History

Swiftboating History

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/12/swiftboating_history.html

December 23, 2007
By Denis Keohane

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana

It may be Providential that a book of history is soon to be released
dealing extensively with certain shameful events of nearly four
decades ago, just as others are now seeking to shamelessly and
eagerly repeat those events.

Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler have co-authored To Set The Record
Straight with the apt subtitle How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the
New Media Defeated John Kerry. The book all but begins with details
of the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) of 1971, an event I wrote
about here at American Thinker last October. The WSI, organized by
the Vietnam Veterans Againt the War (VVAW) was pure anti-American and
anti-soldier leftist political theater.

Owing to leading Senators and the monolithic liberal big media of the
time, WSI was the primary catalyst in legitimizing the longstanding
and widely accepted defamation of 2.9 million Americans who served in
Vietnam as baby killers, rapists, war criminals, losers, misfits,
drug abusers and psychological "time bombs", to use Makubin T. Owens
terminology.

Those broad sweeping charges against the Vietnam vets have survived
as a part of our established historical narritive for millions and
has been all but enshrined in the arts community, particularly film.

The left side of the web is busy spreading the word that next March
the ideological descendent of the VVAW, the Iraq Veterans Against the
War (IVAW) is planning another WSI dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan,
thereby intending to smear another generation of over a million and a
half Americans who have served to date in those wars and those who will serve.

Swett and Ziegler's book may serve to prevent history from repeating
and in so doing facilitate a cleansing light shining back in time on
that first WSI and the despicable defaming of those veterans.

The Book

Since the 2004 Presidential election the Democrat left and their
auxiliaries in the MSM have used the term swiftboating to mean
something in the order of a politically motivated and top-down well
coordinated character assassination of an innocent party based on
lies. Swett and Ziegler have now provided the definitive and
exhaustive historical account of what the swiftboating of John Kerry
actually was, how and why it happened and how it accomplished the
mission intended. The forward was written by John O'Neill, author of
'Unfit for Command'.

Ziegler is a former Marine Captain. Swett is the proprietor of
WinterSoldier.com, a site he established nearly four years ago. The
site is a veritable gold mine of information about the 1971 WSI and
the events it brought about, including young John Kerry's infamous
testimony to Senator Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee in April
1971. Swett also ran the SwiftVets' website during the 2004 election.

It is not my intent here to write a review of the book. Bruce Kesler
of the Democracy Project is far better suited to that task and has
delivered. In April 1971 Kesler was enraged by the well publicized
antics of the VVAW and John Kerry, and the former Marine sergeant
founded the pro-American and anti-left Vietnam Veterans for a Just
Peace, of which John O'Neill was a member.

However, as it relates to the upcoming WSI on Afghanistan and Iraq,
Swett and Ziegler clearly demonstrate in the book that the
liberal-left lock on mass media that existed in 1971 is gone,
replaced by a new media that accomplished in 2004 what could not have
been done decades before. The Swifties and POWs were a grassroots
movement of veterans that gave voice to an anger at injustice that
had been simmering for nearly forty years.

The Swifties and POWs started with several thousand dollars of their
own money. Later they were supported with money by a few who were
well heeled, like T. Boone Pickens, but most of their support came in
small donations from many thousands of people. The MSM for the most
part tried to run interference for Kerry, but the heady days when the
three networks and a few big city papers could effectively manage the
news were long gone.

The Swift Vets' own website was receiving millions of hits, and the
Internet and its bloggers were spreading the word and doing in-depth
analysis, as was talk radio and the new kids on the big media block,
like Fox. Rather than a political dirty trick run by a few plotters,
the Swift Vets had started an avalanche that buried Kerry's hopes to
win the Presidency. Swett and Zeigler justifiably call it "the
perfect political storm".

The new media is accessible and effective, and Swett and Ziegler
provide something of a blueprint but even moreso encouragement and
hope that when the upcoming WSI proceeds, it can be met head-on and
publicly crushed by truth.

The WSI Pattern

It often appears that former (and not so former) sixties and
seventies radicals are forever frozen in those bygone glory days when
they believe they caused America to lose a war. Senator Kerry himself
is something of a tragicomic emblem of that behavior. In his posting
to both Daily Kos and the Huffington Post last September not long
before Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crockett delivered their report
to Congress on the Surge strategy, Kerry wrote of that effort being a
failure. However, he could not bring himself to call it the Surge,
and instead used a Vietnam era term, calling it "the
escalation" several times. Delusional nostalgia!

Since the inception of the IVAW, the old hands of the VVAW have been
offering support, guidance and planning. The new WSI is no doubt an
example of the seniors leading the newcomers to engage in an action
designed after what those elders perceive as their finest hour.

Like the initial WSI, the current promoters of the new WSI are laying
the groundwork for the same blackmail as the first. Those who
testified at WSI in 1971 would not sign affidavits or depositions
about their claims of crimes they committed or witnessed, thereby
hampering attempted investigations and likewise guarding themselves
against charges, including such as perjury for making false statements.

According to the IVAW's testimony questionnaire they also do not want
the names revealed in testimony of any soldiers or Marines involved
in such crimes lower than the officer rank of O3 (Army or Marine
Captain) or enlisted E8 (Army or Marine Master Sergeant). During a
debate between Kerry and John O'Neill on the Dick Cavett show in June
1971, the subject of affidavits or depositions and names was brought
up by O'Neill. Kerry explained their unwillingness this way:

"... the reason that some of these men have not signed
depositions...is that specifically they are not looking to implicate
other people.... They don't want men to... be penalized for those
things that they did that were the result of the mistakes and the bad
decisions of their leaders.."

That was Kerry and the VVAW stating that they would not cooperate in
investigations of crimes they participated in or witnessed unless
they were assured beforehand of where the investigations would lead!
IVAW is following suit. No one is legally entitled to such a
position. If a person claims to have been a witness to a serious
crime, and refuses to cooperate with a legal investigation on the
claim that he will not do so unless the investigation pursues a party
he concludes bears a burden of guilty, based on an opinion but not
established by the particular events he witnessed, that person could
and should face legal penalty for obstruction if not complicity. For
investigations of crimes to proceed properly they must follow the
evidence wherever it leads. One cannot demand the investigation go
somewhere while withholding evidence.

The 1971 WSI and VVAW also had credibility problems. The executive
director of the VVAW, Al Hubbard, had lied about his own claimed
military service in Vietnam. People who testified at the hearing were
not who they claimed to be, but used the names of actual veterans who
never attended WSI. Others could never be found.

The IVAW also has its own credibility problems. One of its founders,
former Marine Jim Massey was found to have lied about atrocities by
both the Associated Press and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Jesse MacBeth (foreground) was a member of IVAW, appearing at IVAW
marches and rallies. MacBeth had claimed to have been an Army Ranger
who had engaged in and witnessed atrocities in Iraq. When he went
public with his claims in a video, Greyhawk of Mudville Gazette and
other assorted milbloggers spotted him as a phony immediately. Yet
for six months that he was a member he was not found out by IVAW to
be what he was, a complete fraud.

IVAW knows from the VVAW experience that "phony soldiers", whether
the "phony" is their claimed service or the incidents they claim to
have witnessed or participated in are a potential weak spot. Their
site has this:

"If you would like to submit your testimony to Winter Soldier: Iraq
and Afghanistan, contact the Winter Soldier testimony/verification
team...This team will be responsible for collecting and verifying the
authenticity of the testimony. We need combat veterans to join our
verification team. Contact Perry O'Brien for more information."

That stated need for combat veterans to join their verification team
is somewhat striking. The IVAW main page claims over 700 veteran
members (or one out of every two thousand three hundred or so who
have served in Iraq and Afghanistan). I would have assumed that
several dozens at least, if not a few hundred, are combat veterans.
Yet they are publicly asking for those combat veterans from outside
of their current membership. More than an admission of a possible
vetting problem, that also may indicate that while their membership
is made up of veterans, they may be extremely light in the number who
have actually served in combat or even in Iraq or Afghanistan,
contrary to the image they try to present to the public. The IVAW
membership criteria specify that a person served in the military
since September 11, 2001, not that the person served in a war zone.

Critics of the 1971 WSI and the Kerry Senate testimony have always
readily admitted that atrocities were committed by American troops in
Vietnam. Supporters of WSI will cite examples of verified atrocities
like My Lai and claim that vindicates WSI and Kerry's lies. 2.9
millions Americans served in Vietnam. In any such large population,
and particularly one heavily weighted toward young males, there will
be crimes, even extremely heinous ones. The question has always been
have they been isolated incidents or a routine occurence systematic
of policy. In justifying its new WSI, IVAW states:

"Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition
to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such
crimes were isolated exceptions. The members of VVAW knew
differently. Over three days in January, these soldiers testified on
the systematic brutality they had seen visited upon the people of
Vietnam. Over thirty years later, we find ourselves faced with a new
war. But the lies are the same...Once again, politicians and generals
are blaming "a few bad apples" instead of examining the military
policies that have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan."

That is the standard boilerplate of the anti-war left, but another
statement by the IVAW is a jaw-dropping unintended admission that
what drives them is hatred of America and by extension hatred of the
men and women in uniform who protect and defend that nation. In their
questionnaire they write:

"Some veterans might ask why we are not investigating insurgent
atrocities. First, we can only speak to the practices and policies of
our own government. Second, we recognize that individual atrocities
occur in all wars."

That they or anyone can only speak to the practices and policies of
their own government is blatant nonsense. But to recognize that
"individual atrocities occur in all wars" when speaking of such as Al
Qaeda in Iraq, while denying that very point when speaking of
American soldiers is despicable and evidence of blind hatred. AQI and
the assorted Sunni and Shia insurgents have intentionally targeted
civilians for death for years as policy and combat strategy. AQI
released a long and horrifying sequence of videos of the beheadings
of bound and screaming captives in 2004 and used them as a recruiting tool!

AQI intentionally set off the sectarian violence that exploded in
2006 by killing civilians to encourage the killings of more civilians
in reprisal, as a military strategy and policy! They've slaughtered
whole villages including the children and livestock and driven bombs
into crowded markets. Only for AQI and the terror-insurgents will
IVAW recognize the idea of "a few bad apples" engaging in crimes and
"individual atrocities" during a war!

Prepare the Counterattack

Swett and Ziegler have documented the way. The new media, beginning
at the grassroots, should welcome this new WSI and engage it with
truth. Despite the now universal acceptance that since the Surge
civilian deaths in Iraq have fallen drastically, the IVAW site claims that:

"Currently over 100 civilians die every day in Baghdad alone."

Icasualties, by no means a supporter of the war, places the number of
civilians killed in all of Iraq for November at 471.

If Americans are committing atrocities and war crimes as a matter of
course and policy, and AQI and the terror-insurgents are the forces
with the few bad apples committing "individual atrocities", as IVAW
sees it, what explains the numbers? When AQI set off the sectarian
bloodbath last year, 3,389 civilians were killed in September alone.
In March of this year, as the Surge troops began to arrive and our
forces began to move out of their bases and into the civilian areas,
2,762 civilians were killed. April to June 2006 saw an average of
just under 1,500 civilians killed per month, a more than fifty
percent decrease since the previous September. That was also the
worst three month period of the war for our forces, as we suffered an
average of 110 killed per month. That was the direct result of our
troops aggressively engaging AQI and the terror-insurgents in the
areas where they had been slaughtering and terrorizing the civilians.
By September 2007, when the full compliment of Surge forces were
deployed and engaged, civilian deaths had dropped to 752 for that
month. October fell to 565, and November to 471.

If our troops and our policies are what causes the deaths of
civilians, how did 30,000 more American troops and our forces pushing
out into the civilian areas cause a drop in civilian deaths from
3,389 per month to 471? If AQI and the insurgents had a "few bad
apples" committing "individual atrocities", how did killing or
driving them out of those areas lead to that drop in civilian
killing? Thousands of Iraqis have had their lives spared by those
American soldiers and Marines who sacrificed their efforts, blood and
even their lives. Those soldiers and Marines are IVAW's target.

The anti-American and anti-soldier left may be about to march a smear
too far! Unlike Kerry and the VVAW in 1971, what Swett and Ziegler
demonstrate in To Set the Record Straight is that in 2008 the IVAW
will have to contend with the likes of Hume, North and Hannity on FOX
and Limbaugh, Hewitt and the Northern Alliance on talk radio. They
will have to contend with such as Lifson, Feldman, Baehr, Lasky and
Moran at American Thinker, Owens at Confederate Yankee, Johnson at
Little Green Footballs, Wretchard at The Belmont Club, Maguire at
JustOneMinute, Hewitt, Ruffini and Patterson at Townhall, Morrissey
at Captain's Quarters, Hinderaker, Mirengoff and Johnson at
Powerline, Reynolds at Instapundit and on and on. No doubt that will
include Scott Swett at a possible WinterSoldierTwo.com site.

As for the milbloggers, like Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette, Blackfive,
Laughing Wolf and Uncle Jimbo at BLACKFIVE, Yon, Sanchez and Totten
at Middle East Journal , a request. Please offer your services and
those of your acquaintances to help IVAW vet those who want to
testify. IVAW should welcome that, since such milbloggers spotted the
phoniness of Jesse MacBeth's and Scott Thomas Beauchamp's stories in
something like nanoseconds. Those milbloggers don't have to agree
with IVAW's goals to do that vetting, and if they do so, it will only
add to IVAW's credibility and should be accepted. That would also
close down any suspicion that this vetting process contains -
coaching. Regardless of whether IVAW accepts such an offer, when the
new WSI launches, the milblogging community will be the a combination
of the biggest guns and smartest weapons they face.

And for you 1.6 millions Iraq and Afghanistan vets, be prepared to
speak up. Loudly. Your elder brothers in arms of the Vietnam War did
so, but belatedly, after they returned from war and nobody had their
back at home. They have had yours when you were faced with having a
Commander-in-Chief with a history of turning on the troops. God bless
them, and Swett and Ziegler for telling the story.

.

How I (accidentally) helped put the Oz team behind bars

How I (accidentally) helped put the Oz team behind bars

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3263510.ece

By Peter Popham
Published: 19 December 2007

As a London schoolboy growing up in the 1960s, I spent my adolescence
pressing my nose against the window of hippie counter-culture –
fascinated, delighted, disgusted and inspired by the churnings of the
underground but always on the outside, too young to take part,
condemned merely to gawp.

So when the editors of my favourite magazine put a notice in Oz
saying they felt tired and old (none of them was over 30) and
inviting interested children to take over for an issue, nothing would
have stopped me from turning up. I had just turned 18 and, as editor
of our school magazine The Latymerian, had tried with my co-editors,
Deyan Sudjc and Colin Thomas, to inject something of the underground
into its sedate pages. We quickly ran into the objections of the grey
school establishment. The cool men at Oz would surely let us run amok?

We turned up at Richard Neville's basement flat on the Kensington
side of Notting Hill Gate at the appointed time one spring evening in
1970. Richard, his fellow Australian Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis
did their best to make the shy, pimply, uncertain gang of us feel at home.

Thanks to his magazine, Richard was already pretty famous and had
more of the rock-star charisma than any journalist before or since,
with his shoulder-length hair and Afghan coat, his silver Porsche and
beautiful hippie girlfriend, Louise. In fact he WAS a rock star, who
just happened to do magazines instead of music. Whatever he brushed
against he made hip. Spoken languidly by him, for example, "Strine"
lost its sad, Earl's Court bedsitting room aura and became the true
freak twang. And here he was among us, grinning, chatting, possibly
regretting the whole idea but gamely trying to find what we might
bring to Oz. If we were lost for words, it was hardly surprising.

Charles Shaar Murray saved the day, being precociously articulate and
already strongly focused on becoming a rock journalist. He was in the
right place and he knew it, and did he himself proud, both in the
meeting and in the magazine we went on to produce. The rest of us
slowly emerged from our shells. The most obvious thing we could bring
to the Oz mix was schoolkid rage against the education machine, and
smut. The rage always looked really fake – we were practically all
quite privileged children and it showed – but Viv Berger and one or
two others finally came up with some pretty stunning smut. If
Richard, Jim and Felix had wanted anything from us, it was an
authentic voice from the teens – and Rupert Bear with a vast erection
was about as authentic as it got.

We became friends with the editors over the following weeks, with
Jim, in particular, being curious about us and kindly. The magazine
came out and I don't think we appreciated at the time how lame it was
– well below Oz's phantasmagorical best. Nor did we guess that it
would end up putting all three of its editors in jail – an impressive
start to a journalistic career which I have often dined out on since.

I remember going round to the Oz office a few days after publication
and finding Felix in the entrance, stunned, with all copies of the
magazine removed by the police and the editors served with a summons.

It slowly sank in that the Obscene Publications Squad was bent on
making an example of this fizzy, irreverent, anarchic but mostly
harmless magazine. We had innocently served up just what they needed to do it.

.

Scandal in the 1960s: A long, strange trip into the past

Scandal in the 1960s: A long, strange trip into the past

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3263509.ece

Oz was the hippie periodical which provoked the longest obscenity
trial in British history. But a new film which recalls the events
stands accused of rewriting history. By Kathy Marks

Published: 19 December 2007

It was the Swinging Sixties, and London was in the grip of free love,
flower power and psychedelic drugs when a group of young Australians
arrived and began making waves in the underground arts scene. They
produced a magazine that led to the longest obscenity trial in
British legal history.

Contributors to Oz included the future author and academic Germaine
Greer, the art critic Robert Hughes, and the artist and illustrator
Martin Sharp. It was edited by Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and the
Englishman Felix Dennis, who later founded a publishing empire.

Those colourful individuals, and the bohemian environment they
inhabited, are the subject of a new British-made film, Hippie Hippie
Shake, directed by Beeban Kidron. Although not due for release until
late next year, it has already stirred up a whirlpool of controversy,
with many of the original protagonists complaining about the manner
in which they are portrayed.

Chief among those excoriating the film, perhaps predictably, is
Greer, who wrote recently: "You used to have to die before assorted
hacks started munching your remains and modelling a new version of
you out of their own excreta... Reducing the person to excremental
artefact before she is dead is worse than cannibalism."

But more sober voices have also spoken out. After expressing serious
concerns about the script, Martin Sharp, who lives in Sydney, was
shown a revised version in which he counted 55 scenes featuring his
character, all of them fictitious. "It's a form of theft," he said
yesterday. "They're stealing your identity for their own purposes,
without bothering to even inquire whether you mind or not."

Other protagonists have signed waivers allowing the production
company, Working Title Films, to use dramatic licence with their
names and characters – reportedly accepting fees of about £10,000 apiece.

The film tells the story of Richard Neville and his girlfriend,
Louise Ferrier, who posed naked on one Oz cover with her friend,
Jenny Kee, a fashion designer. Ms Ferrier, who is played by Sienna
Miller, is among those cooperating with Working Title.

Oz was founded in Australia in 1963, and within a year had landed its
editors – all fresh out of university – in legal trouble. But it was
not until Mr Sharp and Neville moved to Britain in 1966 and launched
a London version that the satirical magazine achieved international notoriety.

The counter-culture of the 1960s was at its height, and Oz tapped
into it, tackling subjects such as sex, drugs and the Vietnam War. In
1970 the editors invited a group of secondary school pupils to edit
an issue, called Schoolkids Oz. Mistaken for a children's
publication, it featured a parody of Rupert Bear with a giant
erection. The Obscene Publications Squad swooped and Neville, Felix
Dennis and Jim Andersen were arrested.

The trio were charged with conspiracy to corrupt public morals, which
carried a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. At their Old Bailey
trial in 1971, their defence lawyer, John Mortimer, QC – who later
created the Rumpole of the Bailey series – declared that the case
"stands at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our
freedom to think and draw and write what we please".

The prosecution claimed the offending issue of Oz dealt with
"homosexuality, lesbianism, sadism, perverted sexual practices and
drug taking". Defence witnesses included the musician George Melly
who – in one of the trial's more memorable moments – was asked by
Justice Michael Argyle to elucidate the term cunnilingus to the jury.
"They may not have done Latin," he said.

The comedian Marty Feldman, the disc jockey John Peel, and the
academic Edward de Bono also appeared for the defence. Outside court,
meanwhile, protest marches were organised with John Lennon and Yoko
Ono speaking out against the prosecution. The defendants were found
guilty and jailed. Although the convictions were later overturned on
appeal, the magazine had lost its lustre and it closed in 1973.

Oz and the obscenity trial became history – until in 1995 Richard
Neville published his memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the
Trips, the Trials, the Screw-ups: The Sixties. Not long afterwards,
he sold the film rights to Working Title, which has been working on
the chequered project on and off, with a variety of directors and a
succession of scripts, for the past decade.

The current director, Ms Kidron, whose previous films include Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason, flew out to Australia earlier this year
and met some of those unhappy about their portrayal. But Martin Sharp
said his concerns had not been allayed. "I wouldn't sign a contract.
I said 'Just leave me out of it, make up some other character'. They
said they couldn't alter certain things because they'd already shot
them. I had a falling out with the film company and I haven't been in
touch with them since."

Mr Sharp said an early version of the script depicted him as "a
cursing drunkard maniac". The fictionalised scenes include one in
which he goes for a romantic night-time swim with Ms Ferrier on
London's Hampstead Heath. "I never had a swim on Hampstead Heath in
my life, let alone with Louise. If they want to make a fictional
film, I have no objection. But I don't like the way they use me as a
character in their fantasy of what happened. If you want to make a
fantasy, why use real people? It's uncomfortable when someone is
fiddling with your persona and portraying you as doing things you didn't do."

Others critical of the project include Philippe Mora, an Australian
artist who worked on Oz who is now an acclaimed film director based
in Los Angeles. "I couldn't believe it when I read the script,
knowing the people involved," he said yesterday. "It would have been
very easy to talk to everyone and get the story straight, instead of
making false images of people. The truth is what made this a great story."

Mora added: "They've got people bonking the wrong people, and they're
using real names. Why not change the names?" He said it was
"extremely odd", given the story's uniquely Australian perspective,
that non-Australian actors were being used. Emma Booth, who plays
Greer, is Australian, and so is Nina Liu, who plays Kee. But Neville
is played by Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor, and Martin Sharp by
Englishman Max Minghella.

According to Mora, Felix Dennis is also unhappy. Mr Dennis was
travelling yesterday, and could not be reached. But Mora said: "Felix
contacted me. He was terribly upset. He said 'it's a lie from
beginning to end'."

Meanwhile, Neville – described by Greer as "one of the least talented
people on the London scene in the '60s" – is trying to lie low. "I
wrote the book a long time ago, I sold the rights, and I wish the
movie well," he said yesterday. "The latest script I read I thought
caught the spirit of the era pretty well, and it has detached itself
from trying to be a documentary, which is all to the good."

Neville said most of his friends and former colleagues were "feeling
pretty positive", adding: "There are certainly one or two people that
don't believe in the concept of real life humans being portrayed in
the cinema, but I think that's a pretty specialist view." He
described Greer's reaction as "a mixture of madness and malice".
Neville said: "Speaking with Germaine Greer would be a waste of both
our times. Why would Germaine listen to reason?"

.

McGovern Still on the Antiwar Path

McGovern Still on the Antiwar Path

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3459/mcgovern_still_on_the_antiwar_path/

The retired senator and former ambassador to the United Nations is
stumping for a book he co-wrote with foreign policy analyst William
R. Polk called Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now while
buttonholing dozens of members of Congress and urging our immediate
withdrawal from Iraq

December 27, 2007
By Laura S. Washington

The old antiwar horse is still kicking.

In 1972, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern (once a World War II
bomber pilot) won the Democratic presidential nomination on an
antiwar platform. In 2007, he's still got game.

In March 2007, McGovern called on Vice President Dick Cheney to
resign. A month later, opining in the Los Angeles Times, he revisited
the trauma of the Vietnam War era and excoriated George W. Bush and
Cheney for blithely sacrificing American lives once again. "We, of
course, already know that when Cheney endorses a war, he exempts
himself from participation," he wrote. "On second thought, maybe it's
wise to keep Cheney off the battlefield ­ he might end up shooting
his comrades rather than the enemy."

For more than a year, the retired senator and former ambassador to
the United Nations has been stumping for a book he co-wrote with
foreign policy analyst William R. Polk called Out of Iraq: A
Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. He has buttonholed dozens of
members of Congress, urging our immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

McGovern lost the presidential election in 1972 because of his
conviction that the Vietnam War was wrong. To this day, conservatives
blast him for being a liberal anti-American. He's still not backing down.

"I'm very proud of the things that I stood for in '72 and I make no
apologies for anything," McGovern told me in a Nov. 28 phone
interview. "I said what I thought was right. And I am proud of what
we stood for in that campaign. We didn't win, but lots of people in
history have proposed ideas that were good for the society of their
time but weren't accepted until years later."

McGovern, 85, was in Chicago in late November to accept an award from
the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law for his efforts to
fight hunger, a cherished cause since he led John F. Kennedy's Food
for Peace Program in the '60s.

McGovern bemoaned America's feeble memory. He recalled often
comforting his young daughters. "And I said, 'Look, maybe something
good will come from this Vietnam tragedy. It's such an obvious
blunder, we'll never go down that road again. So maybe it will save
us from repeating this on an even more costly scale.' And of course,
now I don't know what to tell my daughters."

Why, I asked him, don't Americans learn from their history?

"One disturbing thing is that they don't study it. It's not even
pressed in the schools as a high priority, as it used to be. … People
are more interested in learning how to do e-mail, do a computer or
whatever, than studying the history of humanity," McGovern said.

How does his hatred of needless war square with his recent
endorsement of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who voted to send us to Iraq?

"Obviously, I wish she hadn't voted for that war resolution," he
replied, then added, "I have no doubt that if she is elected, she
won't lose any time ending that war."

While he would be "perfectly happy" with any of the Democratic
frontrunners, "2008 is Hillary's year," he said. "She's highly
intelligent, she's got the grit to stand firm … she knows the heads
of state, people all around the world … she was in on all the decisions."

No doubt it helps that they go way back. Thirty-five years ago, two
fresh-faced political activists named Bill and Hillary Clinton helped
coordinate McGovern's Texas operation.

"I don't forget that. I've got a long memory," he recalled. "To try
to sell George McGovern in Texas in 1972­that was a tall order. And
they went down there and did it cheerfully and did a good job."

Did he spot their talent then? He laughed. "What I remember was, keep
in mind, this was '72, Bill had a hairdo that made him look pretty
much like a buffalo. A huge mass of hair. I was always kind of
jealous of him because mine was pretty thin even then."

Ironically, Bill and Hill later eschewed McGovern's liberal politics
and won the White House from the center.

While McGovern is backing Clinton, he eagerly lays on the
superlatives for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). "Brilliant."
"Promising." "Another Lincoln."

The Democratic Party's elder statesman showed his age a bit when he
ventured into Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) territory. "He's got a mastery
of English diction, he's grounded morally." Clean and articulate, too?

Still, you gotta love an octogenarian who can still give it as good
as he gets. As he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Instead of
listening to the foolishness of the neoconservative ideologues, the
Cheney-Bush team might better heed the words of a real conservative,
Edmund Burke: 'A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.'"
---

Laura S. Washington, an In These Times senior editor, teaches
journalism at DePaul University and is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

.

A biographical toast to Hunter S. Thompson

Forever Gonzo

http://www.boulderweekly.com/?site_id=619&id_sub=13539&page_id=13539&pagenum=20

A biographical toast to Hunter S. Thompson

by Ben Corbett
December 27-January 2, 2007

Once replete with freaks and rooted in the counterculture, Boulder
has always enjoyed a fetish for the author of Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas. Likewise Hunter S. Thompson was equally fond of Boulder ­
a city that would occasionally appear in his writing, where some of
his allies conspired like sores on the body politic, and where a
flock of admirers rallied to the newsstand when the next dispatch
from Woody Creek hit the racks. Every dispatch was an event.

After Thompson's February 2005 suicide, most fans began asking "But
who was Thompson ­ the man ­ exactly?" A natural question, but only
his friends and those who worked closely with him at some point
really got past the surface to experience the light and dark forces
boiling beneath. These forces that inspired both the writing and the
writer are explored through four new books by those who knew Thompson
intimately in varying capacities.

Hunter's wife, Anita, dropped into the author's life first as a
budding football enthusiast, later to become his literary assistant,
and eventually his bride. Without her, Hunter was lost, and he was
the first to admit it. Taking a Zen/Taoist approach to Thompson's
life, work and mission, she plots out seven lessons in how to live
one's life in her beautifully written The Gonzo Way (Fulcrum, Aug.
2007). Anita came to know Thompson intimately at one of the most
crucial stages of his life ­ as he entered old age ­ which brought
with it much reflection, frustration and a renewed burst of energy
directed at both humanity and a resharpening of his talents. Her
insights are priceless in that she communicates the ever-changing
stimulus that drove Hunter in his last years. While the drugs are
touched on, they are seen as a means to an end, with the bigger
picture of Thompson's philosophy captured through her own experience
with him. Although she avoids describing the emotional strain
involved with being Thompson's wife, through Anita's book we get to
know a side of Hunter rarely seen ­ the sometimes tender, always
caring, scholarly mind that was ready to learn new things, add them
to his collective wisdom and pass them along after being refined
through his craft.

Gonzo (AMMO Books, Oct. 2007) is a vibrant photo odyssey that takes
the reader through Thompson's life beginning with his 1950s
sportswriter stint at Eglin Air Force Base and ending with the
153-foot cannon that blasted the author's ashes into the Colorado skies.

Edited by Steve Crist and Laila Nabulsi, besides hundreds of photos
of the author interlaced with memorabilia and rough drafts of his
writing, the journey includes rare photos shot by Thompson: vintage
images of the Hell's Angels, the '72 Campaign Trail, and even a shot
of Joan Baez butchering a pig in Big Sur. Only partly finished when
he died, this project was one of the things that excited Thompson ­
so much care went into the volume, ensuring it was published the way
Hunter would approve. Steve Crist handled Thompson's last project
before he died, the 1000-copy signed, limited edition Taschen release
of The Curse of Lono. After leaving Taschen, Crist formed AMMO Books,
with Gonzo as its debut release ­ a 3,000-copy limited edition box
set. The October release is the trade version of the collector's
edition ­ a captivating foray into the life of this complex man.

Too often, standard biographies sway toward the biographer's own
prejudices and romantic notions. Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S.
Thompson (Little, Brown, Oct. 2007), an oral biography, captures
Thompson from his childhood until the end of his life through the
eyes of 100 of those closest to him. Slightly polished, sometimes
brutally honest, the book mirrors Rolling Stone's March 2005 HST
tribute issue with testimonials from people who knew Thompson's
angels and demons. Edited by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour, Gonzo
gives us Thompson in a verbal journey through high school friends and
past lovers, his first wife Sandra and son Juan, literary luminaries,
former assistants, the list is enormous. Doug Brinkley's insights are
true gems in that he analyzes Hunter more thoroughly than any other
writer has in the past ­ and analysis is what makes this book a
testament rather than a mere collection of reminiscences.

If you thought Thompson's writing was outrageous, brace yourself for
his day-to-day existence. Co-authored by Woody Creek artist Michael
Cleverly and Sheriff Bob Braudis, The Kitchen Readings (Harper
Perennial, Feb. 2008), brings the reader straight into the Hotel
Jerome, the Woody Creek Tavern and Thompson's infamous kitchen for
some of the kinkiest, wildest, sometimes hair-raising events that
studded the author's already adventurous life. Through their own
experiences and retelling stories by the likes of documentary
filmmaker Wayne Ewing and former assistant Deborah Fuller, Cleverly
and Braudis undermine the Hollywood image often associated with
Thompson and in its place give us the real Hunter. From exploding
acetylene-filled inner tubes to Hunter's legendary shotgun art,
pornography to poignant, private moments at home, the book offers a
fearlessly honest glance at Thompson's playful side, his cranky side,
his everyday side, his vulnerable side and his last days on earth ­
through two of his best friends.

.

Students oppose war in new ways

Conflict over Iraq

Students oppose war in new ways

http://dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2007/12/26/torresvet.ART_ART_12-26-07_A1_VT8SMVC.html?sid=101

Wednesday, December 26, 2007
By Stephanie Czekalinski
DISPATCH FRONTERAS

Many of Omar Torres' friends at Ohio State University opposed the war in Iraq.

But when he went to fight, they supported him and did not publicly
oppose the war. Then, on Aug. 22, Torres stepped on a homemade bomb
that killed him instantly. His friends were devastated and angry.

Still, they did not protest the war. Better to support the troops,
they decided.

"It's not made me more patriotic," said Julian Valencia Suesun, a
friend of Torres. "I was against the war before and I still am.… It
boggles my mind that we could lose someone with so much potential."

But Torres' death hasn't inspired Valencia to protest the war or
become more politically active.

"I used to have arguments about the war with Omar," Valencia said.
"I'm confused myself as to whether it's respectful to protest in his
name. I believe they practically brainwashed him, but I don't think
it's fair to put words in his mouth."

As the Iraq war drags on, college students have been actively helping
their friends and strangers who served and were injured overseas.
They hold memorial services for their peers who were killed and help
soldiers adapt to campus life again.

But unlike students in the Vietnam era, they haven't been quick to
hold massive protests against the war.

Reasons vary for the lack of public outcry. The lack of a draft has
dampened protests of a war that uses a volunteer military force.
Young people are more cynical about the government, so the war didn't
shock them, said Benjamin Schiff, professor of politics at Oberlin College.

Students are opposing the war in other ways, such as becoming active
in politics online, calling their representatives and voting, said
Lorrain Bieber, an outreach coordinator for Progressohio.org and the
director of the League of Young Voters Columbus affiliate.

Some students, including Torres' friends, say they are worried that
protesting the war means turning their backs on the troops fighting in Iraq.

"I didn't support the war before," said Alexandra Morales, Torres'
girlfriend and a sophomore at OSU. "But while Omar was overseas, I
couldn't say that because I felt it degraded what the soldiers were
doing. So I'd just say, 'I support the troops.' "

People who speak out against the war might take some heat, said Susan
Terbay of Dayton. When her son first went to Iraq, she didn't say
much about the war.

"People saw speaking out against the war as an attack on the troops,"
she said. "I was so fearful of hurting my son. I didn't want to hurt
his career."

During the Vietnam War, spirited protests dominated college campuses,
and the peace message spread from there. But the message was often
interpreted as not only anti-war, but also anti-troops.

Bill Schools, 60, of the Northwest Side, has painful memories of
returning from Vietnam, where he served from 1967 to '69.

"When I came back, I was spit on, called all kinds of names and
everything else," he said. "I was almost ashamed to be a veteran when
I came back."

The mentality of the American people changed during the Gulf War, and
especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, said Schools, president
of Vietnam Veterans of Ohio. That's when people realized they weren't
as safe as they thought and started appreciating the troops more.

Schools said respectful protest is appropriate, especially "if it
saves American lives." He would like the war to end.

Omar Torres studied political science and Chinese and was part of the
ROTC program at the university. He decided to leave the National
Guard and join the active Army in late 2006.

"He and his family are very social service-oriented," Valencia said.
"His dad's a firefighter, his mom works in the public schools. ... He
wanted to be a politician. I said, 'Graduate first -- do it for your
parents.' He said, 'No, they are my brothers over there and they're dying.' "

His mother, Doris Torres, 48, was on the cusp of adolescence during
the Vietnam War. She remembers her father watching it on the news.

"They only had negative media," the Chicago resident said. "It's our
responsibility to treat these soldiers better than the Vietnam vets
were treated."

That's a realization baby boomers came by the hard way, said Chuck
Underwood, president of the Generational Imperative, a consulting
firm based in Cincinnati that studies the characteristics and
differences of generations.

"Baby boomers learned a lesson -- as an American citizen, it is your
right and responsibility to protest loudly if you disagree with your
government's action in military combat, but you always, always
support the men and women wearing the uniforms," he said.

Changes in technology have also affected some young people's
attitudes toward the war and the soldiers.

"With e-mail and instant messaging there's a lot more communication
with the troops," said Courtney Camillus, a senior staff clinic
therapist at OSU. "We get to know these people better. This war has a
very personal face on it."

Morales, a registered voter in her hometown of McKinney, Texas, used
the Internet to stay connected with Omar Torres while he was in Iraq.
They decided via e-mail to start dating while he was stationed in Kuwait.

"I would e-mail him every day, and he'd write me back. We got to talk
a lot on instant messenger. We did the whole webcam thing, too," Morales said.

She learned of his death when she signed on to her Facebook account
and saw an invitation to a group titled "Omar Torres, Rest in Peace."

Hundreds of people attended Omar Torres' funeral, his mother said.
She hopes that young people will learn another lesson and become more
politically engaged.

"I know that Omar himself didn't feel that we should be (in Iraq),
but he was focused on what his ultimate goal was going to be. He
wanted to be a politician."

He would have been a good one, Valencia said.

"I would have voted for Omar for anything," he said.

sczekalinski@dispatch.com

.

Clueless Crusaders

"Join the Race," Cries Tom Hayden. But Where's the Horse?

Clueless Crusaders

http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh12242007.html

By JOHN WALSH
December 24, 2007

Tom Hayden has been given the cover article for The Nation's December
17 issue to instruct the peace movement for 2008. Not since the cover
page endorsement of the prowar John Kerry in 2004 has there been such
an embarrassing face to this journal. In essence Hayden's call is to
vote Democraticocrat in 2008 - and keep your fingers crossed. That is
about it. Confronted with prowar Democraticocrats and prowar
Republicans, Hayden cries, "Stop the war. Vote prowar
Democraticocrats." At the same time his co-counsellor for the
official peace movement, Phyllis Bennis, has been lamenting that
antiwar voters, in the depths of their benightedness, may fail to
understand "intuitively" why they should vote for prowar
Democraticocrats in 2008.

Hayden begins with what cannot be denied, conceding that the
"leading" Democraticocrats, HRC, BO and JE do not pledge to end the
war, always hedging their promises to remove troops by limiting the
pledge to "combat troops," a recipe for "Vietnamization" which Hayden
should be able to recognize; by speaking of keeping troops in Iraq at
least until 2013; by failing to give dates for Democraticolishing the
gargantuan bases still going up; and of course by labeling hapless
Iran as a "danger." Hayden even quotes one anonymous voice within the
Beltway Democratic establishment: "It's beginning to look a lot like
2004." But how does Hayden characterize 2004? In that year he says,
the Democraticocrats "muted and muddled their antiwar position."
"Mute and muddled"? "Antiwar position"? Wth a few hiccups, John Kerry
ran an explicitly prowar campaign in 2004. In 2006 the Democrats ran
what looked like an antiwar campaign until you read the fine print.
Of course since they gained control of Congress, they have supported
the war funding at every turn. "Mute and muddled" it's not;
full-blown complicity in the war it is.

Hayden then suggests that independent groups like MoveOn, a brand
name that is no longer trusted, will carry their message to the
people. What will that message be? It will be "consistent with, if
not identical to, the candidates' message." But Hayden has already
stated that the message of the leading candidates is prowar.

Next, Hayden proceeds to the real problem, in his opinion ­- the
voters. Hayden identifies "public opinion" as one of the pillars of
the war ­ on a par with "ample military funding," the latter courtesy
of the Democrats, although he fails to mention that. So what does he
propose? It is simple, "greater efforts at persuading the ambivalent
voters." Now Hayden has been forced into blaming the victim, knowing
full well that upwards of 70 per cent of the voters want out of Iraq
asap. What more does he want? Is he waiting for Dick Cheney to come
around? But Bush's "surge success" propaganda, entirely unopposed by
the Democratic candidates, may erode that precious 70 per cent.
Instead of building on that 70 per cent, HRC, JE and BO are allowing
it to be taken away by Bush. This is yet one more betrayal of the
peace movement by the Democrats.

Turning at last to the primaries and candidates, Hayden cautions:
"Voting for Kucinich, Richardson or Gravel is a legitimate choice to
support an important voice--but not a nominee." Here Hayden shows he
knows, and approves, how the game is played. Kucinich and Richardson
are decorations, providing sops to the peace movement without any
chance of winning in the framework of the Democratic Party ­ and
their antiwar credentials are dubious anyway, Kucinich having
endorsed Kerry in 2004 and Richards having been a major player in the
Clinton administration which killed 500,000 Iraqi children with its sanctions.

Those are a few lowlights of Hayden's meandering and contradictory
guide to action in 2008. Hayden's predicament is that 2008 is a race
with no Democratic peace horse. Nevertheless he gallops obliviously
along on foot, with only an imaginary steed beneath him, looking very
much like Monty Python's undaunted, clueless crusaders.
---

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com

.

SDS Comic Roadshow Visits City University

SDS Comic Roadshow Visits City University

http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/?p=381

By Thomas Good - December 18, 2007

New York, NY - December 10, 2007. The City University of New York
(CUNY) Graduate Center, on NYC's Fifth Avenue, was home to an
installation of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) "Comic
Roadshow" on Monday, December 10, 2007. The roadshow, a means of
promoting the new graphic history of SDS, featured Paul Buhle who
edited the book, Harvey Pekar who wrote it and Nick Thorkelson, a
cartoonist who illustrated a section of the book dealing with the
Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in Hazard, Kentucky in
the mid 1960s. In addition to the team who authored the book, the
roadshow panel included former SDS national officer Jeff Jones and
New SDS member Senia Barragan.

The SDS Comic Roadshow is an art installation - featuring panels
drawn from the graphic history - and an opening event where the work
is introduced by various speakers. The first installation occurred at
the John Nicholas Brown Center in Providence last April. The roadshow
recently visited Chicago and is currently installed at CUNY where it
will reside through the month of December. The last week of January
it sets up shop at the Workmens Circle on Robertson Boulevard in Los
Angeles, for five weeks. A weekend of events at the Circle is being
planned by Educational Director Eric Gordon. Austin MDS is likewise
planning some events for a Spring installation and The Niebyl-Proctor
library/artspace in Berkeley will host the show sometime in March
(date to be announced). Additional stops will include Boston,
Madison, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and possibly Portland,
Seattle and Ann Arbor. The Roadshow will will wrap up at the American
Labor History Museum in Haledon, NJ, sometime in the Fall.

The CUNY opening began with an introduction by historian Mike Wallace
who passed the gavel to Paul Buhle, at home in his role as Master of
Ceremonies. Buhle described the project as a central story, penned by
Pekar, with individual episodes drawn from the experiences of SDSers
who contributed their stories. Gary Dumm and other cartoonists
illustrated the tales and Pekar's narrative tied them all together.

Illustrator Nick Thorkelson, who contributed a piece on ERAP in
Hazard, Kentucky, spoke after Buhle - projecting some of his cartoons
on a screen while he described how young SDSers traveled to Hazard in
the mid-Sixties to help the miners there who were striking despite
the AFL's refusal to recognize the strike. Thorkelson concluded his
remarks with an observation that the "short life of ERAP" (as an SDS
project) "is misleading". Many of those who worked in ERAP in Hazard
- and Chicago, Cleveland and Newark - remained active for decades
after ERAP ended. Their experiences in Kentucky forever changed their
view of America.

Jazz critic and writer Harvey Pekar spoke after Thorkelson,
describing in detail his experiences as an artist who chronicled
ordinary life in such works as American Splendor, which fellow jazz
fan Robert Crumb illustrated. Pekar described how he had been as
surprised as anyone when his work caught on. While working as a file
clerk in the Veterans Administration hospital in his native
Cleveland, Pekar wrote stories about his "mundane" experiences -
years later these tales would be wound into a film that became
"somewhat hip". Describing his pathway into the SDS project, Pekar
related how editor Paul Buhle sought him out for the effort - and
commented on the importance of comics as vehicle for writing history
and bringing it to the public. In addition to the SDS book, Pekar is
working on a history of the Beat generation, a biography of Lenny
Bruce and a history of the Middle East. Humble, honest and plain
speaking, Pekar captivated those present.

Jeff Jones, former SDS national officer and Weatherman, spoke briefly
about his experiences in Students for a Democratic Society ­ in which
he served as the Regional Office Coordinator for New York City, April
1967 - December 1968 ­ attending pivotal protests and being subjected
to arrest. Jones noted that: "I haven't really thought of my life in
comic book terms…maybe not as much as I should have" but related how
he thinks about R. Crumb's comic legend "Mr. Natural" almost daily,
commenting that the comic icon's recommendation to "use the right
tool for the job" is the most important lesson he ever learned. Jones
described what motivated him to be active in Weatherman, one of
several factions that existed in SDS's last days: the Weather
activists were outraged at the fact that the US, with 6 per cent of
the world's population, consumed 40 per cent of the world's
resources. Weatherman, with its emphasis on resistance to
imperialism, gave the youthful Jones "a way to fight". Weatherman is
covered in the SDS graphic history - prompting Jones to state: "I
have no idea what the comic book history of SDS is going to look like
but I can't wait to see it".

The last panelist to speak was also the youngest - by a few decades.
Brown University senior and new SDS member Senia Barragan, one of
Buhle's students, spoke about the revived organization. An activist
prior to joining SDS, Barragan was not sure about joining the
organization being wary of joing a "sexy, Sixties, romantic,
nostalgic" grouping. The 2006 Northeastern SDS Convention was held at
Brown and it was at this event that Barragan began to feel connected
with the other students in SDS. Impressed by the energy of the young
activists, and their commitment to an antiauthoritarian approach,
Barragan helped build a viable SDS chapter at Brown University.

The evening program ended with a discussion in which audience members
posed questions to the panelists. Some of the discussion focused on
the end of SDS in 1969 and Steve Max, who was in the audience,
remarked that all social movements end at some point - and in the
case of SDS it "simply wasn't sustainable at that level". Jeff Jones
agreed but noted that "you have to fight the bastards" and that "the
most important thing is to have a Movement that is anti-war,
anti-racist and anti-imperialist." The audience and panelists agreed
that SDS should play a role in this movement and one member of the
audience asked how his daughter could join up. The discussion period
ended with Harvey Pekar commenting on the threat to human survival
posed by global warming. "We're all going to fry," he said. "We're
involved in these stupid little wars", he observed - rather than
addressing the threat of irreversible damage to the environment. The
need for a multi-issue, radical, organization like SDS to address
these issues was a point on which all present were in agreement.

.

Anti-war activist Tom Hayden visits [Vietnam]

Anti-war activist Tom Hayden visits

http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=07SOC211207

(21-12-2007)

Ha Noi ­ President of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front (VFF) Central
Committee Pham The Duyet yesterday hailed Tom Hayden, a former member
of the California legislature, for his role in ending the American
War and restoring peace in Viet Nam.

VFF President Duyet thanked Tom Hayden and other American and foreign
friends in the world for their support for Viet Nam's past struggle
for national independence. He affirmed that the Vietnamese people
always bear in their mind their valuable sentiment.

Tom Hayden, a Democrat, is on a visit to Viet Nam from December 17-27.

Hayden, 71, joined other peace-loving people to visit Viet Nam during
the fierce US war escalation in the country in the 1960s.

He then became co-author of the book The Other Side on the US war in
Viet Nam, which called for the US's troop withdrawal from the country. ­ VNS

.

Lakota Sioux Secede From US, Declare Independence

Lakota Sioux Secede From US, Declare Independence

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/21/5946/

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2007/12/21/news/local/doc476a99630633e335271152.txt

Published on Friday, December 21, 2007 by Rapid City Journal (South Dakota)
by Bill Harlan

Political activist Russell Means, a founder of the American Indian
Movement, says he and other members of Lakota tribes have renounced
treaties and are withdrawing from the United States.

"We are now a free country and independent of the United States of
America," Means said in a telephone interview. "This is all completely legal."

Means said a Lakota delegation on Monday delivered a statement of
"unilateral withdrawal" from the United States to the U.S. State
Department in Washington.

The State Department did not respond. "That'll take some time," Means said.

Meanwhile, the delegation has delivered copies of the letter to the
embassies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and South Africa. "We're
asking for recognition," Means said, adding that Ireland and East
Timor are "very interested" in the declaration.

Other countries will get copies of the same declaration, which Means
said also would be delivered to the United Nations and to state and
county governments covered by treaties, including treaties signed in
1851 and 1868. "We're willing to negotiate with any American
political entity," Means said.

The United States could face international pressure if it doesn't
agree to negotiate, Means said. "The United State of America is an
outlaw nation, we now know. We've understood that as a people for 155 years."

Means also said his group would file liens on property in parts of
South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming that were
illegally homesteaded.

The Web site for the declaration, "Lakota Freedom," briefly crashed
Thursday as wire services picked up the story and the server was
overwhelmed, Means said.

Delegation member Phyllis Young said in an online statement: "We are
not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue
the struggle for our children and grandchildren." Young was an
organizer of Women of All Red Nations.

Other members of the delegation include Rapid City-area activist
Duane Martin Sr. and Gary Rowland, a leader of the Chief Big Foot Riders.

Means said anyone could live in the Lakota Nation, tax free, as long
as they renounced their U.S. citizenship. The nation would issue
drivers licenses and passports, but each community would be
independent. "It will be the epitome of individual liberty, with
community control," Means said.

To make his case, Means cited several articles of the U.S.
Constitution, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and a
recent nonbinding U.N. resolution on the rights of indigenous people.

He thinks there will be international pressure. "If the U.S. violates
the law, the whole world will know it," Means said.

Means' group is based in Porcupine on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

It is not an agency or branch of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Means ran
unsuccessfully for president of the tribe in 2006.

Lakota tribes have long claimed that the U.S. government stole land
guaranteed by treaties ­ especially in western South Dakota. "The
Missouri River is ours, and so are the Black Hills," Means said.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1980 awarded the tribes $122 million
as compensation, but the court did not award land. The Lakota have
refused the settlement. (As interest accrues, the unclaimed award is
approaching $1 billion.)

In the late 1980s, then-Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey introduced
legislation to return federal land to the tribes, and California
millionaire Phil Stevens also tried to win support for a proposal to
return the Black Hills to the Lakota.
---

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com

.

Fonda served many well, helped save lives

[2 items]

Fonda served many well, helped save lives

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/printedition/2007/12/20/shawed1220.html

By Michael L. Shaw
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/20/07

I read with interest Terry Garlock's column concerning Jane Fonda and
I can understand his feelings ("Media glow on Fonda ignores her
treason," issue, Dec. 18). [see below]

I, too, am a Vietnam veteran, a former combat engineer platoon
leader, but have a different take on Fonda.

While many of the points Garlock made are valid and mistakes were
made ­- mistakes acknowledged by Fonda ­- I believe there is a
broader picture to consider. In hindsight, most will agree that the
Vietnam war was a mistake. We, the American government, propped up
one corrupt regime after another in the hopes of creating a democracy
and maintaining a pro-American government in Southeast Asia.

We incorrectly subscribed to the domino theory that as South Vietnam
goes, so goes Southeast Asia. Although most of our reasons for going
in could be construed as noble, the reasons were based upon
inaccurate information. It was based on information frequently
thumped up by U.S. leaders to provide a cause for which to fight.

Say what you will about Fonda, but she helped end a war of mistakes
sooner than it would have had she stood by and done nothing. I don't
know if what she did, be it right or wrong, shortened the war by a
year, a month or a day, but her actions did help end an unjust war.

There are many alive today who owe their existence directly to Fonda.
Lives were saved on both sides of the conflict along with their
descendants. I believe that result alone atones for many of Fonda's
shortcomings. Unfortunately, there were not more Fondas around at the
time or perhaps 58,000 plus Americans and thousands more Vietnamese
would not have died.

So from this vet, Jane, I want to say, "Thank you for having the
courage to right a wrong. Happy birthday, and may you have many more.
Thank you, too, for giving an untold number of people the opportunity
to experience birthdays as well."
---

Michael L. Shaw lives in Stone Mountain.

--------

Media glow on Fonda ignores her treason

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/12/17/garlocked_1218.html

By TERRY L. GARLOCK
Published on: 12/18/07

It might help the drought that so few flowers are left to water in
Atlanta, so many having been thrown at Jane Fonda to celebrate her
70th birthday.

The AJC predictably gave her glowing coverage, with only the mention
that Fonda has to deal with criticism by Vietnam veterans.

Here is one Vietnam veteran who is bothered far more by how the media
portray her than by Fonda herself.

Now that the threat of communism is gone, the Cold War stand against
it is sometimes ridiculed, likened to looking for boogeymen under the
bed. Fonda's own affinity for communism is brushed aside as paranoid rubbish.

But it shouldn't be.

Among those who protested the Vietnam War were many honorable,
patriotic and faithful citizens. Fonda was not one of them. Well, she
certainly did protest, but if she was a faithful citizen and
patriotic, it must have been for another country. Her anti-American
roots are evident to any reporter setting willful blindness aside
long enough to do some research.

In November 1970, in a speech to University of Michigan students,
Fonda said, "If you understood what communism was, you would hope,
you would pray on your knees that we would some day become Communist."

Shortly thereafter at Duke University in North Carolina she said, "I,
a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society,
all the way to communism."

A year later Fonda said at the University of Texas, "We've got to
establish a socialist economic structure that will limit private
profit-oriented businesses. Whether the transition is peaceful
depends on the way our present governmental leaders react."

The complete list is a long one.

What she actually did matters far more, of course, than what she
thought or said as a young woman long ago. When Fonda took a camera
crew to North Vietnam late in the war, her actions easily crossed the
line of "aid and comfort to the enemy."

While in Hanoi, Fonda delighted our enemy by cavorting for cameras on
an anti-aircraft gun, pretending to shoot at U.S. aircraft. Under
pressure in recent years, Fonda said that was bad judgment, but her
other actions were far worse.

She made speeches and recorded propaganda radio broadcasts in Hanoi
expressing solidarity against " . . . our common enemy - U.S.
imperialism." She called our troops, our POWs and our president war
criminals and begged U.S. troops to disobey orders from their officers.

Fonda returned to the U.S. and reported our POWs were well treated.
When the POWs later came home to tell stories of their sustained
starvation diet, maltreatment and torture - real torture, not the
kindergarten variety we now debate - she called them liars.

Youthful indiscretions and rebellious ideas are one thing; Fonda's
actions betraying her country are quite another. Prosecuting Fonda
for her Hanoi escapade was considered, but set aside. Nobody could
find a spine.

Fonda and Tom Hayden, the Marxist activist who would become her
husband of 16 years, also organized lobbying efforts to cut off
congressional funding for opposition to their friends in the
communist regimes of Hanoi and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. After
funding was indeed cut off and America turned its back, the Khmer
Rouge starved and murdered 1.5 million.

Just as bells cannot be unrung, some things cannot be forgiven.
Nevertheless, Fonda seems to me just another aging radical. There
have always been left-wing and right-wing kooks. My heartburn is
reserved for you in the media who give her legitimacy, the reporters
and editors and pundits who give her a pass.

Why is it that Fonda, who betrayed her country by going far beyond
legitimate protest, is a media darling?

Why do news stories featuring her leave out those sordid details of
her past, making only neutral reference to her clash with Vietnam veterans?

Why is it left to Vietnam veterans to balance Fonda's tributes with
the details of her treason, as if Vietnam were somehow a war we
created, as if she betrayed just us, and not you and the rest of the country?

When our troops returned from Vietnam through California airports,
protesters often gathered there to shout insults and spit at them,
sometimes throwing unmentionables to splatter their uniform. Those
protesters were a tiny part of the population, but everyone else
always seemed to be looking the other way.

That is what you in the media have been doing with Fonda for decades.
Looking the other way.

.

Jane Fonda, 70, still stirring controversy

Jane Fonda, 70, still stirring controversy

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/161146.html

19 Dec 2007

Los Angeles - Movie star, fitness guru and activist Jane Fonda has
aged but remained consistent in all the things that matter to her.
Fonda, who played a sexy role in the '60s movie Barbarella and who
still is winning major roles, would still show some skin on the silver screen.

"I want to make an erotic movie about a woman over 70," she told USA
Today in an article published in October. "There's this cultural
vacuum that, when you a hit certain age, you are not sexual anymore.
The contrary is true. We'll see if I can do it, got to get it written
first. I have already mapped out the love scene."

That's easy to believe coming from the attractive senior citizen, who
turns 70 on December 21.

Fonda is also remembered, and in some circles detested, as a fierce
Vietnam War protestor. And she's still taking it to the streets,
these days against the war in Iraq.

In January 2007, she joined 10,000 people in a demonstration in
Washington against the Bush administration's Iraq war policy.

She stood out at the rally not just as a Hollywood celebrity but
because so many Americans have not forgiven her visit to Hanoi, the
North Vietnamese capital, in 1972. The Vietnam War was still being
fought, and she allowed herself to be photographed sitting on an
anti-aircraft battery used against US aircrews, and was indelibly
stamped with the hostile nickname of Hanoi Jane.

Fonda's private life has been no less turbulent.

She has divorced three times. Her new boyfriend, New York businessman
Lynden Gillis, 73, was at her side in October at the Rome Film Festival.

In May, they strolled the red carpet together at the New York
premiere of Fonda's latest film, Georgia Rule. In that movie, Fonda
portrayed a strict grandmother who fires up a rebellious
granddaughter, played by Lindsay Lohan.

Two years earlier in the romantic comedy Monster-In-Law, Fonda had
the role of a future mother-in-law who made life hell for her future
daughter-in-law, played by Jennifer Lopez. Prior to that movie, it
had been 15 years since Fonda appeared on screen.

Acting is a family vocation for Fonda, the daughter of stage and film
star Henry Fonda and sister of actor Peter Fonda.

At the age of 12, Jane Fonda had to cope with her mother's suicide,
and was sent to Connecticut to be raised by her grandmother. After
graduating from elite Vassar College, Fonda initially pursued
painting and piano in Paris and also tried her hand as a journalist.

But in the late 1950s, she met Lee Strasberg, founder of New York's
famous Actors Studio. She learned the craft from him and found rapid success.

In 1960, Fonda was named best new actress by New York film critics
for her debut in Tall Story. Shortly afterward, she followed the
French director Roger Vadim, who had discovered Brigitte Bardot, to
Paris, and he immediately gave Fonda four roles, including the
starring role in the sexy science-fiction film Barbarella. She
rocketed to world stardom and became Vadim's wife.

A short time later, back in Hollywood, Fonda earned her first Oscar
nomination for her portrayal of a marathon dancer in They Shoot
Horses, Don't They?

Two years later, she won the coveted statuette for her starring role
in Klute. She grabbed a second Oscar in 1978 for Coming Home, a film
that grappled with the bitter results of the Vietnam War.

But the engaging roles and status of a Hollywood star were not enough
for Fonda. She always stood publicly and uncompromisingly behind her
political views.

In the face of bitter opposition from the Pentagon, Fonda went on an
anti-war rallying tour of Vietnam with actor Donald Sutherland, her
Klute co-star. At the side of her second husband, radical activist
Tom Hayden, she championed women's equality and civil rights.

More starring roles followed, and commercial successes with the
movies The China Syndrome in 1979 and On Golden Pond in 1981, the
only film in which Fonda starred with her father, who was terminally
ill when the film was being shot.

Between acting and political activism, Fonda found time to make
workout videos that helped touch off a fitness wave in the US,
starting in 1982. She created a fitness empire with aerobic and later
stretch and yoga videos, whose value has been estimated at more than
600 million dollars.

Her third husband, CNN founder Ted Turner, was the first to slow her
pace. They were married for 10 years until their 2001 divorce.

Vanessa Vadim, Fonda's daughter with her first husband, has made her
a grandmother, and her son with Tom Hayden, Troy Garity, carries on
the family acting tradition.

In May, Fonda received a seldom-bestowed honor at the Cannes Film
Festival - a Golden Palm for lifetime achievement. In the festival's
60-year history, only three others - French directors Alain Resnais
and Gerard Oury and actress Jeanne Moreau - have received Golden
Palms in recognition of their life's work.

"You are a woman who fights and wins," said festival President Gilles
Jacob in awarding Fonda the prize. She said it made her feel "overwhelmed."

.

LA Weekly on 'I'm Not There'

[4 articles]

Todd Haynes: Far From Hollywood

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/todd-haynes-far-from-hollywood/17725/

With his kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan anti-biopic, the director takes a
bold leap back to his avant-garde roots

By DAVID EHRENSTEIN
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Though we first met back in 1991, when the NEA-funded homoeroticism
of his first aboveground feature, Poison, was rattling the halls of
Congress, Todd Haynes and I "bonded" (as the saying goes) in April of
1995, when we served as jurors for the short-film competition at the
USA Film Festival in Dallas. On our day off from jury duty, we went
downtown and visited the spot where John F. Kennedy was assassinated
­ Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum created out of the
erstwhile Texas School Book Depository ­ and came to the immediate
conclusion that not only did Oswald "do it," but that shooting fish
in a barrel would have presented a greater angle of difficulty.

As excited as I was by Haynes' prospects then, I never could have
imagined they would take the shape they have or move so swiftly into
the sightlines of a large public. Released two months after our
Dallas confab, Safe, his drama about a woman suffering from an
"environmental illness" that does double duty as a metaphor for AIDS,
had no gay "shock value," but shocked many who hadn't suspected this
heretofore fringe figure was so cinematically accomplished. Starring
his soon-to-be-muse, Julianne Moore, as a San Fernando Valley
housewife, the film was in many ways Haynes' own nightmare of
becoming a San Fernando Valley housewife, for he hails from that
fabled L.A. region ­ home of middle-class tranquillity and hardcore
pornography.

Three years later, Velvet Goldmine picked up from where Poison left
off in detailing the polymorphous perversity of the glam rock era,
complete with a nod to the man Haynes saw as its patron saint: Oscar
Wilde. But things got queerer (if also more accessible) still with
his next feature, Far From Heaven (2002), a full-blown re-creation of
the melodramas of Douglas Sirk that dealt frankly with subjects Sirk
couldn't have touched: interracial love and gay husbands bursting out
of the closet. Another showcase for the talents of Moore, with great
support from Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert and Patricia Clarkson, and
the last film score by the great Elmer Bernstein, Far From Heaven won
the hearts and minds of critics and discerning art-house audiences,
and picked up four Oscar nominations in the process.

But rather than move further into the mainstream, Haynes has taken
his most radical leap to date with I'm Not There. Initially subtitled
"Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan," but now more modestly
labeled as "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," it
features six different actors playing six differently named
characters that either embody or reflect aspects of Dylan's life and
art, ranging from Christian Bale as the Dylan of early fame and
born-again Christianity to Ben Whishaw as an enigmatic Dylanesque who
calls himself Arthur Rimbaud to Heath Ledger as an actor who plays a
Dylan-type character in a film-within-the-film. That's not to mention
Marcus Carl Franklin as a black 11-year-old who calls himself "Woody
Guthrie," Richard Gere in a period setting as Billy the Kid, and,
most queer-radical of all, Cate Blanchett as "Jude," a '60s-era pop
star whose frizzy hair, sardonic manner and controversial penchant
for electric guitar plainly represent the Dylan of his most
artistically aggressive '60s period. Add Julianne Moore as someone
not unlike Joan Baez, Charlotte Gainsbourg evoking both Dylan's
important girlfriend Suze Rotolo and his first wife, Sara Lowndes,
cinematography that veers from black and white to color and back
again, and a host of Dylan covers by a raft of contemporary artists,
and you've got yourself two hours and 15 minutes of rich and strange
filmmaking that's seldom been seen before.

I'm Not There is an instant classic of the most experimental end of
the rock-movie genre ­ which is to say, Peter Watkins' Privilege,
Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, and a little-known
film called Renaldo and Clara made by Dylan himself (see "Dylan by
Dylan" sidebar). Above all, it's a film by Todd Haynes, capped by its
dedication to the memory of James Lyons, Haynes' editor, frequent
actor (he starred in Poison) and, until their 2000 breakup, his
lover. Lyons, who died this past April of AIDS-related causes, is
what semiotician Roland Barthes would call "a structuring absence of
the text." And being that Haynes majored in semiotics at Brown, this
was bound to come up when we spoke recently by phone.

L.A. WEEKLY: Coming after Far From Heaven ­ your My Own Private
Idaho, as it were ­ this is the point at which you should be making
your Good Will Hunting. But you've gotten more experimental rather than less.

TODD HAYNES: [Laughs.] Well, [with Dylan] I had quite a standard to
live up to in terms of not shying away from challenging the popular
form. And I took that very much to heart with this film.

It might be described as an "anti-biopic."

Yeah, I guess it could be. Yes.

You were born in 1961, so you were a toddler during most of the years
the film covers. I remember New York very, very well from back then,
and I'm amazed at how much of it you got right. 1961 was my freshman
year at the High School of Music and Art. I remember Bob Dylan from
back then. He dated a Music and Art girl.

Before Suze Rotolo?

Around that time. There were women all over the place. He was a babe
magnet. He was an incredibly romantic figure. But we Music and
Art­ers were very, very snotty: "Oh, his real name is Zimmerman, and
he's just this Woody Guthrie imitator." Laura Nyro was going to Music
and Art right at that same time, and we didn't like her either.

Was there a point when you guys started to feel differently about
Dylan after he got over his Woody Guthrie act?

Oh yeah, certainly with Bringing It All Back Home. Just like the
Beatles, he was the soundtrack of that period. "The voice of a
generation" sounds terribly pretentious, but it's apropos. Because if
you want to know what was on people's minds in that era, the best way
is to listen to some of those songs. And [D.A. Pennebaker's
documentary] Don't Look Back was quite the deal. There are little
bits of Don't Look Back in I'm Not There, but you don't really use it
as a template. The main movie you're "sampling" is 8½, which strikes
some people as truly odd.

The reason for 8½ in that part of the film is that, basically, I was
looking for cinematic references for getting to the root of each of
these little stories and what they were about ­ how to differentiate
them. And usually that had everything to do with the music that was
defining that particular period of Dylan or phase of Dylan or psyche
of Dylan. And in the "Jude" story, I knew I wanted to do it in black
and white. The very first movie proposition that came to mind was
Don't Look Back, of course. But when I was thinking of the music of
that period ­ Highway 61 and, especially, Blonde on Blonde ­ I very
quickly realized that Don't Look Back, a cinéma vérité masterwork, is
far from the sensibility of the music at that point in Dylan's
career. It didn't take me long to come up with 8½ and find in that
film, and in Fellini in general at that time, what I thought was a
beautiful parallel to that sensibility of Dylan's ­ baroque but utterly urbane.

To me, the "Jude" section is the "most Dylan" because it deals with
when he "went electric." The backlash was quite pronounced from a lot
of people who saw him as a simple folk/protest singer, and you
re-create that. We see people coming after Jude in the same way they
came after the Guido character in 8½. And the journalist played by
Bruce Greenwood is a bit like the co-screenwriter character played by
Jean Rougeul in Fellini's film.

To some degree, they're alike. I think the demands people make on
Jude in my film come across a bit more gently than what goes on in Fellini.

And you rebuilt that chair from 8½ ­ that enormous curved white thing
that Barbara Steele sits down in at the spa to put on her shoes.

Yes, we did ­ we absolutely did. That was the clincher for me. It
wasn't just a stylistic sensibility that was involved. The language
of Fellini's film made perfect sense in relation to Blonde on Blonde.
For it also had at its center the story of an artist being besieged
by the media, and questioned as to his motivations: Why was he making
these weird movies that nobody could understand anymore? That's why
8½ just seemed absolutely inescapable.

Your film seems to be directed at an audience that knows a lot of
things, like about Dylan's novel Tarantula, and therefore will react
when you show an actual tarantula onscreen. On the other hand, the
extreme Dylan may be very upset by what you've done. Of course, you
don't go through his garbage like [Dylan to English Dictionary
author] A.J. Weberman, but I can imagine some people seeing you that way.

I didn't intend it. I wasn't tailoring the film to people who would
pick up on every single reference. They're all there to be found, to
be discovered ­ if you choose to do so. But to my mind, the film
doesn't rest on that extra knowledge, that secondary level. All films
are made up of references, whether they're conscious or not, whether
they're generic returns to certain forms, or references to other
films we've seen before. The audience is "reading" all the time, but
not cognitively. This film just takes that further, and has every
component of it come out of the Dylan universe. But if it doesn't
work purely on a sort of graphic and gut level as well, then it isn't
really working.

To me, the film is 50 percent Dylan and 50 percent the '60s.

Well, that was a conscious choice. I realized that all of these core
characters I'd settled on had their roots in the '60s. This was the
era that defined him and that he defined. There was so much going on
in that period at the same time Dylan was becoming a star, so making
this film was a chance to do a film about that period ­ and do it in
a different way.

The other part of I'm Not There that really stands out are the
sequences with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Heath Ledger, which you can
say relates to Dylan's marriage and relationships but is also about
other things about the '60s, like the first stirrings of the women's movement.

Yeah. It's an extrapolation of things I collected in my research
about his relationship to both his girlfriend Suze Rotolo and his
marriage to Sara Lowndes. My criteria of how I put together the
pieces of the film is that I tried to pay as much attention to his
life as to his work. So the love songs themselves, which are outside
the specifics of his relationships, are the product of those
specifics. But they stand on their own, which is, of course, why we
all can identify with them. So it was the love songs themselves that
ultimately formed that particular story. In other words, not just the
marriage but all sorts of things about the women he was attracted to.
It made me very happy to hear that Suze Rotolo saw the film and
really loved that section of it ­ and actually felt it was all about her.

Where is she now?

She actually just finished a book ­ her own memoir of the period.
Finally, the woman speaks! I don't know a lot of what she's done over
the years, but I know she's maintained various careers in the arts.
She was a visual artist at the time she and Dylan were going out. And
she really did provide him with that sort of political involvement.
Her interest in Brecht, Rimbaud and the other poets ­ that totally
informed Dylan.

Where did you find Marcus Carl Franklin?

Isn't he amazing? [Casting director] Laura Rosenthal found him in New
York. He was the little boy in Lakawana Blues. I met him before I saw
that film, and then I saw it and met with him again. He just floored us all.

Did you conceive the character as being a little boy, or did you make
the character a little boy once you found the actor?

It was always an 11-year-old black kid.

Because it's hard to get an 11-year-old kid who can act that knowingly.

Oh, I really lucked out. Every impossible demand this film made on
me, I lucked out. It was only after I found what I needed that I was
able to look back and consider the ways it could have failed ­ and
get terrified in retrospect. But I guess that's part of being a
director ­ you're just in a state of fright all the time and you keep
marching forward. If you look back, you'll turn into a pillar of salt.

The other cinematic disparity that's really interesting is that the
Richard Gere/Billy the Kid sections aren't like Peckinpah's movie Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid, which Dylan acted in and wrote the score for.

No, they're not. It's not the most beautiful film, Pat Garrett &
Billy the Kid. I was much more taken with films in the same category,
like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller ­
and Dylan's Renaldo and Clara.

In watching the movie, there's a kind of generalized logic to why
we're moving from one story to another and one style to another. But
there are many people who will have never seen anything like this
before. I think there are going to be a lot of people very angry with
you over this for reasons that they can't quite explain. There's a
kind of sneaky audacity to doing a movie like this ­ an "art movie"
for a general public. You're prepared for a backlash, I trust?

I am, but I was prepared for a lot more of it than I've been
receiving. You may have encountered resistance in conversations with
some people you know, but the general reaction to the film has been
good. I've been stunned at how positive people have been and that
they've just let it all flow. But believe me, I was prepared for the
contrary in today's market. I was resolved to not care, to just let
it be in the world and take the time it takes to be appreciated.
Instead, starting with the premiere in Venice and the awards we got
right away, the reception has been open and warm. I don't mind trying
to talk to people about it and helping them relax a little bit. But
again, as you say, it's the kind of movie people aren't prepared for
today. That doesn't mean we were at other times ­ particularly the
time the film's reflecting. When I went to see 2001 with my dad at
age 7 or 8, you went to that film, and so many other films, to not
understand it. That was the excitement ­ to go and have
interpretations, to see it again and basically go on a trip that was
not cognitive, that was not rational, but that was so ultimately
cinematic that you couldn't look away.

Well, that was the big '60s film experience. You went to see
L'Avventura to argue about what happened to Lea Massari and why she
disappeared. Blowup even more so.

Exactly. But there were a great many films like that then. And those
are the kinds of films, when you're young and you have a creative
sensibility, that blow it wide open and make you want to make things
like that yourself. But the key ­ what people forget 'cause Dylan is
so famous, and so successful ­ is how unbelievably radical and
"unclear" and untraditional a popular artist he was. What he did to
the popular song was inconceivable before he entered the scene. And
the amazing thing is that he was actually popular.

"When you're lost on the road to Juarez and it's Easter time too" ­
what in hell was that?

Exactly. And you don't question it ­ you go with it. That's how music
works. I don't understand all of Dylan's lyrics or sources or
references. That's not the point. You just got to hope people are open to this.

When did you first come across Dylan?

In high school. I'm sure I heard "Blowin' in the Wind" as a kid. I
also have a memory of singing it in Hebrew school, along with "Silver
and Gold" and other true traditional folk songs and not knowing that
one was a contemporary song that had been written only a few years before.

Do you remember when Dylan first really grabbed you?

Blonde on Blonde was my favorite album. It probably still is. It's
one of those astounding pieces of work that is both popular and so
much more. But I remember loving Blood on the Tracks and The
Freewheelin' Bob Dylan too. I vaguely remember Desire and Street
Legal, but I definitely remember Slow Train Coming. Then I really
stopped listening to Dylan for about 20 years. Not out of rejection,
though I'm sure "Oh, he's gone all Christian now" was part of it. But
I was going to college, and it was time for David Bowie and Roxy
Music and Iggy Pop and all that stuff.

Blonde on Blonde was as big a "concept album" as Sgt. Pepper, and to
me, everything Dylan related will always center on that. It was a
two-record set...

The first of that era.

Right. And these songs just went on forever. "Sad-Eyed Lady of the
Lowlands" was a whole side of a record. That really blew everyone's mind.

It's incredible to think that something so sophisticated, elegant,
rich and complex could be that popular. It was an instant classic.
Minds were ready to be opened at a certain point in our recent past,
and we really haven't been that kind of a culture in a long time.

Well, now we're getting into the stuff where I wish I was right there
instead of talking to you over the phone.

Yes, it would be so much easier to talk in person, and hang out.

I would rather be looking at you face to face right now because ­
well, let's cut to the chase. The film is dedicated to James.

Yes.

Would you say there's a lot of you and your relationship with him in
the movie? Some of it?

[Pauses.] I don't think it ever occurred to me.

Well, among other things, this is the first movie of yours he hasn't edited.

That's right. But I hadn't really thought about it... maybe I should
have... it wasn't part of any conscious thing.

I'm not talking about in a literal way. I'm talking about echoing or
relating to, for example with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Heath Ledger's
characters having this big tumultuous relationship. I was thinking
that there might be something there that was you guys back in the day.

Yeah, there probably is. It's funny how little I "identify" with
Dylan on conscious levels. But I am a fan. I love his music. I was
utterly obsessed with him when I returned to him in 2000. He entered
at a transition point in my life as a kind of guide for positive
change at a time that I really needed to be reminded that change was
possible. It coincided with my leaving New York and going to
Portland. I made Far From Heaven there. And then I decided to stay.

How is Portland?

I love Portland. I love it every day.

You're there. Gus Van Sant is there. If a bomb drops on Portland,
that kills off half of the New Queer Cinema.

It's great here. It's a creatively vital place.

Do you hang with Gus much?

Oh yeah. As much as I can. We knew each other before, of course,
before I moved there. But we've become closer. Not like every day.
We're both very busy. We see each other whenever we can. But it's
been so cool 'cause he's been doing such great work during the years
I've been living there in Portland. He was so excited when he saw I'm
Not There.

Well, it's right up his alley.

He dug it, and you never know how people are going to react to stuff.

Scorsese says the audience has an advantage that the filmmaker
doesn't because "They're going to see my movie for the first time."

Completely. When you hear from a viewer, it's one of those rare
moments when you really see your own work.

WEINSTEIN CO. PUBLICIST: I'm sorry, but we're going to have to wrap
up the interview now.

Okay. Todd, I'll see you next week in L.A. and we'll hang.

Yeah, we'll hang!
---

More Dylanography:

I'm Not There: Tackling Pop Culture's Greatest Enigma By SCOTT
FOUNDAS One of us must know

Dylan by Dylan By TIM GRIERSON Revisiting the music icon's pre­I'm
Not There filmography

Bob Dylan's Most Mysterious Recording By RANDALL ROBERTS Inside the
elusive history of "I'm Not There"

--------

I'm Not There: Tackling Pop Culture's Greatest Enigma

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/im-not-there-tackling-pop-cultures-greatest-enigma/17723/

One of us must know

By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Something about that movie though, well I just can't get it out of my
head/But I can't remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed
to play. ­Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard, "Brownsville Girl"

Literally speaking, Bob Dylan isn't "there" in Todd Haynes'
staggering mixtape biopic I'm Not There. Or rather, he's everywhere
and nowhere ­ a Heisenbergian particle whose locus shifts with our
every attempt to pin him down. Of course, his words are there, in the
nearly three dozen Dylan songs that fill out the movie's soundtrack.
As is his voice, belting out "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis
Blues Again" over the panoramic opening credits. And his image, from
the blue jeans and work shirts of the Freewheelin' days to the outré
Jew-fro and polka dots he sported circa Blonde on Blonde. But not
once in all of I'm Not There do the words "Bob Dylan" pass anyone's
lips, and the various Dylan surrogates who parade before Haynes'
camera range from the eerily look-alike "Jude Quinn" (played with
jaw-dropping mimicry by Cate Blanchett) to a pint-size, pre-teen
African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself "Woody Guthrie."

The concept is as simple to describe as it is audacious to behold: a
portrait of an artistic giant not as an A-to-Z chronology of his
life, but rather as the sum of his influence and influences, and of
the many fragmentary identities he has donned. Just how many Bob
Dylans have there been? Fans will argue that point into oblivion, but
Haynes and co-screenwriter Oren Moverman set the number at six (or
seven, depending on how you interpret the double-sided Dylan avatar
played by Christian Bale) and make a compelling case for each of them.

In addition to Woody and Jude, there's "Jack Rollins" (Bale), a
stand-in for the folksy, acoustic Dylan of the early '60s,
reconstituted later in the film as "Pastor John" (also Bale), who
represents the critically derided, born-again Dylan of the early
1980s. The waiflike British actor Ben Whishaw appears fleetingly as
"Arthur Rimbaud," an amalgam of Dylan's poetic influences seen
spouting coy, discursive testimony ("I don't call myself a poet
because I don't like the word; I'm a trapeze artist") before a
vaguely Kafkaesque tribunal. For Dylan at the time of his divorce
from his wife Sara (here a composite character played by Charlotte
Gainsbourg), we get Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark," an actor who once
played Jack Rollins in a Hollywood movie. Finally, there's Richard
Gere as an autumnal "Billy the Kid," having survived his final
confrontation with Pat Garrett and retired to a landscape somewhere
between the Old West and the lush hillsides of Woodstock, New York,
where Dylan (who co-starred in and composed the soundtrack to Sam
Peckinpah's 1973 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) himself laid low
following his purportedly near-fatal 1966 motorcycle accident. I'm
Not There begins and ends with that crash and resurrects Dylan a half
dozen times in between, hopscotching the decades with Proustian grace.

Having said all that, I've still barely scratched I'm Not There's
dynamic, polymorphous surface. Within each of the individual strands
there are more, densely packed layers of references and meaning ­
regarding Dylan, of course, but also the cultural epochs he's
traversed and helped to inform. In one of his more audacious strokes,
Haynes (in collaboration with the cinematographer Ed Lachman) styles
each section of his movie after the movies of the corresponding time
period ­ not just any ones, but the ones Dylan (who has dabbled in
filmmaking over the years, and who has written songs for and about
movies) may have been inspired by or seen something of himself in.
For the public persecution Jude feels in the wake of "going
electric," I'm Not There adopts the form of the paranoid fantasias
from Fellini's 8½, while the muddied palate and moody malaise of the
1970s' acid Westerns give shape to the Billy the Kid sections.

It sounds like a recipe for the most pretentious movie ever made ­ or
at least since the '70s ­ with mainstream stars and a decent budget,
by a director whose best work (Safe, Far From Heaven) has never fully
belied the academic touch of his Brown semiotics education. But I'm
Not There turns out to be a triumph of intellect and cinematic
imagination that feels light rather than heavy, and such a novel
approach to film biography as to leave every Ray and Walk the Line
looking especially clueless. Haynes pulls off the seemingly
impossible ­ he takes one of the most discussed, written-about,
imitated, lusted-after public figures of the 20th century and shows
us not something new, but something deeper. Indeed, the Bob Dylan
whose "music and many lives" are the credited inspiration for Haynes'
film isn't the mere mortal who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in
Duluth, found his way to New York at the dawn of the '60s folk boom,
and whose songs formed the soundtrack to the last great hurrah of
American counterculture. He's another kind of being ­ a pop
star-child hurtling through the cosmos beneath our immortalizing gaze.

If Blanchett's Jude is the most recognizable Dylan ­ and the
performance that even those who hate the film won't be able to stop
talking about ­ then Gere's Billy the Kid is the most enigmatic, the
one who seems at once the ghost of the musician's roots-music past
and the spirit of his eternal present, the living phantom embarked on
his self-proclaimed "never-ending tour." "You've got yesterday, today
and tomorrow all in the same room/There's no telling what can
happen," he muses late in the film, at once paraphrasing Dylan (from
a 1978 interview about his songwriting style) and succinctly
summarizing the Moebius-strip structure of Haynes' film. And so the
most indelible image of I'm Not There may well be its last, in which
the Kid picks up Woody Guthrie's guitar and hops yet another boxcar,
as a train pulls down the line and a soulful harmonica blows its ageless tune.
---

I'M NOT THERE | Directed by TODD HAYNES | Written by HAYNES and OREN
MOVERMAN | Produced by CHRISTINE VACHON, JAMES STERN, JEFF ROSEN and
JOHN GOLDWYN | Released by the Weinstein Company | The Landmark,
ArcLight Hollywood, Monica 4-Plex, ArcLight Sherman Oaks

--------

Dylan by Dylan

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/dylan-by-dylan/17726/

Revisiting the music icon's pre–I'm Not There filmography

By TIM GRIERSON
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

After seeing I'm Not There, some Bob Dylan fans will undoubtedly
accuse director Todd Haynes of committing heresy with his radical
reinterpreting of the singer-songwriter's mythic persona. But such
dissenters would do well to remember that when it comes to
desecrating Dylan's good name onscreen, no one has done the job as
meticulously as the man himself.

Though he has been the subject of two celebrated documentaries ­ D.A.
Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967) and Martin Scorsese's No
Direction Home (2005) ­ that, respectively, contributed to and
dissected his legend, Dylan has authored several films on his own
that present a first-person perspective on his mysterious inner self.
Those movies have been forgotten, derided and/or nearly impossible to
obtain. But examined as a whole, they provide a fascinating (if not
always pleasurable) overview of Dylan's five-decade relationship with his fans.

The 1972 documentary Eat the Document sets the tone for Dylan's
self-made films. Shot by Pennebaker during Dylan's 1966 U.K. tour ­
the infamous "gone electric" tour that followed the one chronicled in
Don't Look Back ­ Document ostensibly covers the same thematic
terrain as the earlier film: celebrity, the media, the agony of the
road. But with Dylan overseeing the editing, Document became a
confrontational, nonlinear exercise in how much jerking around a
loyal audience can withstand.

Where Don't Look Back maintained a critical distance from its subject
­ a boyish 24-year-old artist at once toying with and spurning his
adoring throngs ­ Document both suffers and gains from its lack of
any such distance. The contemptuous Dylan of Don't Look Back, who
enjoyed taunting clueless journalists, calls the shots in Document,
and the film's disjointed snippets of late-night bull sessions, angry
folk-purist fan commentaries, celebrity encounters (including John
Lennon and Johnny Cash) and some stellar live footage are clearly
meant to reflect the mindset of a cocky prodigy high on his own
genius, confident that anything he creates will be brilliant. Fight
the urge to smack Dylan, though, since Document's sometimes-grating
incoherencedoesexpertly convey the blurry, sleep-deprived rush and
soul-deadening monotony of the life of a touring musician.

The indulgences of Eat the Document are easy to excuse because of the
pivotal creative period the film covers. Plus, it's relatively short.
Neither of those factors is in play, however, in Renaldo and Clara,
the grandly disastrous 1978 feature debut of Dylan as writer (with
playwright Sam Shepard), director and leading man. Running just under
four hours, this amalgam of concert movie and pseudo-autobiographical
art film (with Ronnie Hawkins playing "Bob Dylan," and Dylan and
then-wife Sara starring as the enigmatic title characters) is
terrible for obvious reasons: Dylan can't act; his musician co-stars
can't act; and the non-concert sequences are fraught with ponderously
"symbolic" imagery that would get their maker laughed out of a
freshman film class.

Still, once you accept what a laborious, pretentious mess it all is,
Renaldo and Clara wields a hypnotic appeal. Like David Lynch's lesser
films, it represents an artist's vigorous working-through of his
issues in dreamlike non sequiturs. Such purely instinctive impulses
have been the hallmark of Dylan's songwriting genius, but while
Renaldo and Clara has a few stunning wordless passages, too often the
film's ruminations on identitystink of bitter, insular ego. Suffering
through a dissolving marriage and a recent string of mostly
underwhelming records, Dylan looks besieged, but, tellingly, only
during Renaldo'simpassioned concert performances (filmed during the
Rolling Thunder Revue tour) does he turn that disillusionment into art.

If Dylan's cinematic trifecta were a typical Hollywood biopic,
Renaldo would be the story's low point, where our hero's early
promise has collapsed under the weight of self-destructive behavior.
His story then finds its feel-good resolution with Masked and
Anonymous. Debuting at Sundance in 2003, Masked was perhaps the
most-anticipated film of that year's festival. Not only did Dylan
star, but he also co-wrote the film (under the pseudonym Sergei
Petrov) with director Larry Charles, and the cast included John
Goodman, Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. Once it screened, the film
was quickly branded a vanity project. But Masked has aged rather
nicely, and much of its success has to do with the latest of Dylan's
many public transformations.

Coming after the 20 years that were Dylan's darkest period ­ waffling
from dispirited arena warhorse to born-again Christian and spiteful
has-been railing at a society that didn't want to buy his new records
­ Masked celebrates his artistic rebirth. Heralded by his magisterial
'97 comeback disc, Time Out of Mind, the late-'90s Dylan suddenly
seemed older than time itself, his authoritative, grizzled voice
singing tunes haunted by the nation's musical history: spirituals,
murder ballads, lovelorn blues. The renaissance continued with 2001's
even better Love & Theft,which lightened Time's Old Testament
despondency with hilarious one-liners and Dylan's courtly savoir-faire.

That newfound gracefulness and sense of humor also shine through in
Masked, which is by no means a model of airtight three-act
construction, but is easily Dylan's most pleasurable film. Unlike his
previous screen incarnation as a bratty or entitledenfant
terrible,the Dylan who waltzes through Masked is a wiser man who's
witnessed the worst of humanity and treats it all like a cockeyed
cosmic joke. The plot ­ about the staging of a benefit concert
featuring forgotten musician Jack Fate (Dylan) ­ is merely a
clothesline on which the songwriter hangs his lyrical obsessions:
political corruption, the nobility of the common man, the search for
lasting values in a materialistic world. Almost every line of
dialogue is a pithy witticism that feels plucked from a Dylan song,
and the mostly superb cast deliver their lines with the right
combination of conviction and good-natured playfulness, as if they
(like Dylan) understand that life is inherently unhappy but that this
shouldn't ruin your day.

For once, Dylan seems fully comfortable up on the screen. Watching
him ride off into the sunset at Masked's conclusion­ or rather, in
perfect Dylan style, heading stoically off to prison for sticking to
his principles ­ I was reminded of a line from Renaldo and Clara that
seemed to sum up what Dylan had finally achieved cinematically: "If
the world was like music, the world would be beautiful."

--------

Bob Dylan's Most Mysterious Recording

http://www.laweekly.com/music/music/bob-dylans-most-mysterious-recording/17724/

Inside the elusive history of "I'm Not There"

By RANDALL ROBERTS
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

In a West Saugerties, New York, house dubbed by its tenants "Big
Pink," Bob Dylan and a band who later named themselves The Band
gathered daily for six months in 1967 to mess around with American
music, and recorded the results. Dylan was recuperating from a
motorcycle crash, and the Big Pink basement was his recovery room.
Among the many songs generated down there are some of Dylan's
deepest: "Tears of Rage," "This Wheel's on Fire," "You Ain't Goin'
Nowhere" and the title song of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There ­ a track
that, until now, has never been officially released.

Perhaps the most mythical of all Dylan's unreleased gems, "I'm Not
There" is an absolute mystery. A long, extended meditation built
around a four-chord acoustic-guitar strum, it was recorded only once
by Dylan and never finished or revisited. Lyrics and lines float by,
some discernible, others elusive. Among Dylan fanatics, it's a kind
of Rosetta stone because it seems to capture the artist in the midst
of his creative process. The magic of "I'm Not There" is its lack of
definition. Critic Greil Marcus devotes five pages of The Old, Weird
America to the song, writing that "'I'm Not There' is barely written
at all. Words are floated together in a dyslexia that is music
itself, a dyslexia that seems meant to prove the claims of music over
words, to see just how little words can do."

True, but what's most engaging about the song is the revelation it
provides about Dylan's creative process. Unlike many outtakes and
bootlegged tracks, "I'm Not There" feels like someone channeling,
speaking in tongues, handling snakes, conjuring out of the mist the
blueprint of a song. In The Old, Weird America, Marcus quotes Band
guitarist Robbie Robertson's wonder at Dylan's method: "He would pull
these songs out of nowhere. We didn't know if he wrote them or if he
remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn't tell." No recording
better illustrates Robertson's point than "I'm Not There." There's
something going on inside the song, but you're not sure what it is.
The narrator might be dead, and contemplating his relationship with
an unnamed lover. He might have abandoned her. He seems sorry for
something. Or angry.

Bootleg copies of the song have long been available, but until the
arrival of the soundtrack to I'm Not There this month, it had
remained undergound. For that reason alone, Dylan fans have reason to
applaud Haynes and his music supervisors, Jim Dunbar and Randall
Poster. With the release, a better picture of the circuitous route
the song took from basement to film title is revealing itself. The
widely bootlegged version has been tainted by engineers attempting ­
and failing ­ to liven the song. The true recording has been buried.
"So it's never been heard ­ except by a rarefied few folks, obviously
­ in its pure form, as it was straight to tape," says Dunbar. "It's
like a field recording, almost."

Among those rarefied few who heard the original recording was Neil
Young, who, it turns out, possessed the most pristine and
unadulterated copy of the so-called Basement Tapes, which he received
from his longtime engineer Elliot Mazur. Mazur was assigned by
Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, to transfer the original tapes for
storage, and ended up dubbing a copy for himself. A few years later,
Mazur duplicated them again with the intention of giving Young a
copy, but accidentally gave him the original transfers, which sat in
Young's archives until they were unearthed a few years ago. With the
song's release on the fantastic I'm Not There soundtrack, those not
exposed to the bootleg can finally attempt to discern meaning for
themselves ­ if they dare.

Randall Poster would rather not. "I don't approach it that literally,
really," he says. "To me it's about a kinetic feeling, a song that
brings me into the realm of 'Positively Fourth Street.' As a kid, the
first time I heard that song, it taught me that there's something
that goes on between men and women that I hadn't experienced yet, but
that I was so hungry to experience. I sort of get that same feeling
from 'I'm Not There.' In a sense, it speaks to a potential intimacy
between people ­ it clearly exists in a sort of divine realm."

"The song subtly builds," adds Dunbar. "For me, it's very intense. It
starts off and you think, 'Aw, there's not much going on here.' But
by the end of it, it feels like an epic." Asked what he thinks the
song means, Dunbar pauses. "Uh, I don't know. It's, uh, definitely
someone with... uh... uh... great regret." Exactly.
---

More on Dylan and I'm Not There

I'm Not There: Tackling Pop Culture's Greatest Enigma by Scott Foundas

.

1968: The Long Goodbye

1968: The Long Goodbye

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/1968_the_long_goodbye.html

November 15, 2007
By Daniel Henninger

It's too bad Barack Obama wasn't able to meet Abbie Hoffman. I don't
know if Hillary Clinton ever met Hoffman, who died in 1989, but like
any young person up and running in America in the late 1960s, she
knows him well.

One of the touchstone events in U.S. political history was the
Democratic convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968. Among the
demonstrators arrested, put on trial and acquitted for battling the
police amid photogenic clouds of tear gas was Abbie Hoffman, a
founder of the Youth International Party, a k a the Yippies. Years
later, Hoffman said: "Revolution is not something fixed in ideology,
nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a
perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."

Last weekend, Sen. Obama said this is more or less bunk. What he
actually said on Fox News was: "There is no doubt that we represent
the kind of change that Senator Clinton cannot deliver on. And part
of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they have been
fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very
difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

After Sen. Obama said that the '60s were so over, Sen. Clinton's camp
counter-spun that he had alienated voters over 50. Really?

In this age of paint-by-the-numbers political campaigns, there is no
chance we'd ever get to hear Sens. Obama and Clinton discuss whether
the 1960s belong in the doggie bag of history. Still there are a few
other interested parties we would want to invite to our mythical
summit on the '60s. Such as John McCain.

During an October TV debate, Sen. McCain noted that Sen. Clinton
wanted to spend $1 million on a museum at Woodstock, a concert he
missed because "I was tied up at the time." His quip about being held
in a North Vietnamese prison camp from 1967 to 1973 may have been
scripted, but boy did it hit the target.

There should be one more participant, a man who won't mince words
about the Age of Aquarius--Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of
France. When Mr. Sarkozy was campaigning in April against the
Socialist Ségolène Royal, he said: "In this election, it is a
question of whether the heritage of May '68 should be perpetuated or
if it should be liquidated once and for all." He described the
political Left born out of that period as "cynical" and "immoral."

In 1968, Nicolas Sarkozy was 13 years old. John McCain was 32 and
Hillary Clinton was 21. Barack Obama was 7. It is not beyond
imagining that the precocious Messrs. Sarkozy and Obama were alert to
events in 1968, but for the first wave of baby boomers just touching
adulthood that year, it was the beginning of a strange journey.

Nearly any one of the events that went off in 1968 would have been
enough to dominate another year. To list what actually happened that
year even today boggles the mind, and spirit.

The year began with sales of the Beatles album, "Magical Mystery
Tour." In retrospect, it was a premonition. In late January, North
Korea captured the USS Pueblo and crew members. A week later, the
North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive. On Feb. 27, Walter
Cronkite announced on CBS News that the U.S. had to negotiate a
settlement to the Vietnam War. On March 12, Sen. Gene McCarthy nearly
defeated incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire
primary, aided by antiwar students that Sen. McCarthy called his
"children's crusade." Two weeks later, LBJ announced on TV that he
would not run for re-election. One week later, Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated. It was only April 4.

There were race riots everywhere. On April 24, students occupied five
buildings at Columbia University, protesting the war. In May bloody
student riots erupted in France, likely witnessed by the
impressionable Mr. Sarkozy.

On June 3, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in a New York City loft.
Two days later, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. In
August, the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia. Seven days later,
antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention fought pitched
battles with the Chicago police.

On Nov. 4, having absorbed all this, the people of the United States
voted. They gave 43.4% of their vote to Richard Nixon and 42.7% to
Hubert Humphrey. Alabama Gov. George Wallace got 13.5%. Four years
later, George Wallace was shot while running for president. 1968
lasted a long time.

Whatever civic culture the U.S. had until the 1960s, it was now
transformed. After '68, we had a new kind of political and social
culture, pounding like a jackhammer into the older bedrock. The
country cracked. Look at those 1968 popular vote numbers; half the
country went left and half went right.

Barack Obama says these endlessly booming babies have been at it for
40 years. He's right, though let's note that like the War of the
Roses (1455-1485), this one is waged today with the tireless
recruitment of new fighters not born when the fires started in 1968.
Check the Web.

It's hard not to share Sen. Obama's weariness with these people, even
if one is over 50. But is he right to imply that their long fight has
lost its point? I don't think so.

What fell out of 1968 was a profound division over what I would call
civic vision.

One side, which took to the streets in Chicago or occupied Columbia
University, concluded from Vietnam and the race riots that America,
in its relations with the world and its own citizens, was flawed and
required big changes. Their defining document was the March 1968
Kerner Commission report, announcing "two societies," separate and
unequal. The press, incidentally, emerged from Vietnam and the riots
joined to this new, permanent template. That, too, has never stopped.

The other side was, well, insulted. It thought America was
fundamentally good, though always able to improve. The Voting Rights
Act passed in 1964 on a bipartisan vote, opposed mainly by southern
Democrats. This side's standard-bearer called the U.S. "a shining
city upon a hill." But after 1968, no Democratic presidential
candidate would ever speak those words. Nor will Mr. Obama ever
repeat Mr. Sarkozy's explicit repudiation of that era.

If it's Hillary versus Rudy, McCain or even the placid Mitt Romney,
we will be in those streets again. Besides, her candidacy comes with
Jumpin' Jack Flash himself, Bill Clinton. Would it be a good thing if
the country's politics said bye-bye baby to the children of 1968?
Probably. But it won't happen this time.
---

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

.

Drugs, leather and good times in the '70s at 9th & 9th

Understudy:
Fringe Friends: Drugs, leather and good times in the '70s at 9th & 9th

http://www.slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=article.details&id=CF854A01-D782-190A-0373A12087A6FBC0

By John Rasmuson
Posted 12/13/2007

The two old guys sat at a sidewalk table drinking coffee from paper
cups. Wisps of gray hair feathered out from under their hats, and
when the light changed at the 9th East and 9th South intersection,
traffic noise intruded on the conversation. They smiled as they
recalled their salad days on 9th and 9th, a time when the buildings
had charm, hippies wore leather, drugs were plentiful and there was a
party every night.

Ken Rodgers and Darel Barton met in the art department at the
University of Utah more than 40 years ago. After graduation, the two
jobless artists needed money, so in an upstairs studio (currently
occupied by Centered City Yoga), Barton painted signs for grocery
stores, Rodgers hand-stitched leather purses.

They soon recognized opportunity in the counterculture's yen for
leather goods. In 1969, they drove to Denver to attend Cream's final
concert and to buy an industrial sewing machine.

The sewing machine enabled them to make clothing. "It's amazing that
we actually figured out how to do it." Rodgers said with a laugh that
set his Andy Rooney eyebrows in motion. Vests came first and, before
long, they were producing, you name it, even jumpsuits, all
embellished with fringe. "Fringe was important," Barton said.

They hung out a "Skin Company" shingle. Business was brisk, and
despite the fact that the "real" hippies had gone to Haight-Ashbury,
there were plenty of wannabe hippies in Salt Lake City who had
day-job money to spend on leather duds, they said. So they bought
more machines and hired seamstresses.

It was a seasonal market, however. Sales of leather clothing dropped
off as temperatures rose, so they turned to footwear to sustain the
business through the summer months. Phillips Gallery owner Denis
Phillips sold them the Good Sole Sandal Shop for $100, and they
taught themselves how to make them. "Sandals kept us going," Rodgers said.

When Phillips moved his gallery out of the corner building, the Skin
Company moved in. "It was a neat building," Rodgers said, with
hardwood floors, ceiling fans, awnings and French doors. Rent was
$100 a month. On Saturday night, they opened the doors for free
concerts. "The band wasn't making any money and neither did we,"
Rodgers said with a smile.

In fact, Barton and Rodgers were more artisans than businessmen. When
it came to pricing the sandals, Rodgers said, "we damned near gave
them away." Not surprising considering a zeitgeist in which Dr.
Timothy Leary's Harvard psilocybin project was of more interest to
the average guy than anything at the Harvard Business School. It's
likely that in the commercial enclave at 9th & 9th­and in the city's
head shops­the profit motive was eclipsed by a devil-may-care hippie
ethic reflective of Leary's famous admonition to turn on, tune in and
drop out.

"We didn't get rich," Barton said.

Purple microdot acid and other drugs prescribed by Dr. Leary were
readily available in Salt Lake City, and at 9th & 9th, there was a
party every night. Rodgers said that the end of the business day at
the Skin Company coincided with the beginning of the party across the
street in his studio. The scene evoked Andy Warhol's Factory, sized
to Salt Lake City's bohemian contours, and in the nightly comings and
goings­potheads, preppies, hippies, jocks, voyeurs, fun seekers of
either gender­none was turned away. All newcomers were welcomed, but
they were subjected to an unconventional, introductory frolic whereby
they lost their pants. "Once they were pantsed, they fit right in,"
the two old guys said, nodding in agreement like Muppet oldsters,
Statler and Waldorf.

By the time Barton opened his own shop in Trolley Square in 1972,
their talents were in demand across the country. The clientele
included most of the Utah Stars basketball team, other professional
athletes, and a number of Hollywood studios. Rodgers estimates he did
200 jobs, including for productions like The Life and Times of
Grizzly Adams and Touched by an Angel. He made clothes for Robert
Ulrich in the 1992 TV show Crossroads.

There was a downside to the celebrity trade, however. Both remember
stars who stiffed them. Barton wrote off $1,500 that "Bad News"
Barnes, an ABA basketball player, owed him. Deep Space Nine's
shape-shifting Odo (aka Rene Auberjonois) has yet to pay his 1971
Skin Company bill, Rodgers said. "We quickly learned about C.O.D."

As the counterculture reshaped itself­forsaking bongs, beads,
waterbeds and fringed vests­business at the Skin Company began to
decline. What kept it afloat were orders from bikers and gays. "It
was a huge business," Rodgers said. One guy alone bought 100 items.
The more Rodgers' handiwork went on display at the Sun and other gay
bars in town, the more customers walked in the door. Many of them
wanted leather jock straps and skin-tight chaps, all in black.
"Everything had to fit perfectly," he said "and they were heavily
into chaps with a bare ass."

Although business was pretty good, it wasn't good enough to absorb
rent increases imposed by a new landlord. "The rent quadrupled,"
Rodgers said, causing him to vacate the storefront the Skin Company
had occupied for 10 years. Two moves later, Rodgers settled on 500
South across from the library, but by then, the business was
moribund. "The thing that killed it was leather clothing from Mexico
and China," Rodgers said. "I couldn't compete." Before he closed the
door for good last year, he made a motorcycle jacket for Anthony
Hopkins to wear in The World's Fastest Indian.

The two old guys finished their coffee and evaluated the sculpture
sprouting around the 9th and 9th intersection. "Rookie art," Rodgers
said dismissively. "I liked it better in the old days."

.

OBIT: Karlheinz Stockhausen

[2 items]

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928 - 2007

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-stockhausen8dec08,0,4248797.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

Influential experimental composer of grandiose works

By Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 8, 2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the great German composer who envisioned music
as a force of cosmic revolution and who himself became a musical
force of nature, having an unprecedented impact on both high and
popular post-World War II culture, has died. He was 79.

Stockhausen died Wednesday at his home in Kurten, Germany, according
to an announcement on his website. No cause of death was given.

At the height of his fame in the 1960s, his name became synonymous
with the future of music. His experiments with the structure of sound
and his innovations with electronics made him a pioneer of the
musical avant-garde but also attracted the attention of the most
venturesome jazz and pop groups. He helped inspire Miles Davis' most
extreme musical experiments, and the Beatles included Stockhausen's
photograph on the collage cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

Although he never minded the attention, Stockhausen remained the
epitome of the uncompromising artist. He was a prolific composer of
362 works. He wrote numerous texts explaining his often arcane
theories. He taught courses about his music and encouraged acolytes.
He demanded selfless devotion from his chosen performers, many of
them members of his extended family. A true visionary, he never let
expense or practical matters stand in his way. He cared little for
worldly possessions and was photographed for decades wearing the same jacket.

Among his most important pieces was what has come to be considered
the first classic electronic score, "Gesang der Junglinge" (Song of
the Youths), which he described in 1955 as the birth of space music.
Another classic, from 1958, is "Gruppen," which requires three
orchestras and conductors. Once, when asked what he might suggest be
programmed with the difficult score for a performance by student
ensembles at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, Stockhausen replied that
the evening should be "Gruppen," a lecture on "Gruppen" and then
"Gruppen" again.

"He was the rock star of my youth," Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los
Angeles Philharmonic's music director, said Friday. "When I was a
teenager, my classmates listened to rock and pop, but I got the same
kind of kicks listening to Stockhausen."

In "Gesang," Stockhausen worked by splicing magnetic tape by hand.
"The resulting richness of the sound," Salonen said, "is more
expressive than a lot of computer-generated music despite today's far
superior technology. It all boils down to somebody being a real composer."

But Salonen also says that he, like many of his generation of
Stockhausen admirers, couldn't relate to the late works, especially
"Licht" (Light). A cycle of seven long operas, one for each day of
the week, "Licht" took Stockhausen 26 years to complete and is the
most grandiose project in the history of a grandiose art form.

By the time he wrote "Sonntag" (Sunday) in 2003, Stockhausen had
become a mystic. He was ridiculed for the prophetic cavorting of
biblical characters and all manner of strange goings-on in the cycle.
In "Freitag" (Friday), a typewriter copulates with a copying machine.
In "Mittwoch" (Wednesday), four helicopters circle above the theater
carrying members of a string quartet, their music piped back into the
hall, mixed with the propeller noise.

Yet his music never lost its amazing power to draw a listener in and
to sound completely fresh and original. Though an environmentally
objectionable way to produce music, the Helicopter Quartet turned out
to be a dazzling work.

And Stockhausen always managed to find new fans to take the place of
the older ones he alienated. The bins of his exorbitantly priced,
self-produced CDs at Amoeba Records in Hollywood are a small mecca
for ultra-hip listeners. Bjork has repeatedly mentioned Stockhausen
as an influence.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born Aug. 22, 1928, in Modrath, near
Cologne. By the age of 16, he was an orphan. His father, a Catholic
schoolteacher who became a German army officer, never returned from
World War II. His mother, who suffered from severe depression, was
one of the first victims of Hitler's "euthanasia policy."
Stockhausen's own wartime experience was as stretcher-bearer in a
military hospital.

Although he said one effect the war had on him was a lifelong phobia
about march rhythms, he did not begin his music career as a radical.
In Cologne, he studied piano and music education, then philosophy and
musicology, working his way through school playing piano for an
operetta company and playing jazz in nightclubs.

A local music critic, Herbert Eimert, introduced Stockhausen to some
of the more progressive new music that had sprung up in Europe after
the war. In 1951, he attended the summer sessions in Darmstadt,
Germany, which was the center of Serialism, a method of developing
Schoenberg's 12-tone technique into a highly rigorous means of
mathematically determining all aspects of music. With a new wife,
Doris Andreae, Stockhausen went to Paris in 1952 to study with
composer Olivier Messiaen and came into contact with Pierre Boulez,
who was also entranced by the latest discoveries of Serialism.

Stockhausen's first pieces from this time, such as "Kontra-Punkte"
(Counterpoints), already revealed an ear for striking new textures
and fantastically intricate techniques of organization. Back in
Cologne the next year, he began applying these methods to producing
electronic music, and in the next several years created major works
for tape, instruments and combinations of the two. In "Kontakte,"
"Mikrophonie" and "Mixtur," he helped lead the way in developing
instrumental music that was electronically altered during
performance. Meanwhile, his theoretical studies into the nature of
time and perception led him to develop increasingly convoluted
structural principles.

Whether understood or not, Stockhausen had become widely known and
performed by the 1960s. His domineering personality and unwavering
sense of historical purpose made him a divisive figure in new-music
circles, particularly among Americans. But America at the time held a
great attraction for the German composer, who taught at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and at UC Davis in 1966 and 1967.

The Bay Area, then becoming a hippy haven, had a new radicalizing
effect on Stockhausen. While at Davis, he came up with new theories
of intuitive music. Astrology and alternative lifestyles also proved
appealing, although he apparently rejected drugs. About this time,
Stockhausen began spending time in Tokyo as well, and elements of
ceremonial ancient Japanese music entered his compositional vocabulary.

The late 1960s and early '70s brought a wide variety of masterpieces,
with each major new work seeming to be a reinvention of music. These
included "Mantra" for two pianos and electronics, "Stimmung" for a
vocal ensemble singing in overtones and "Hymnen," a convoluted
refashioning of national anthems for orchestra and tape.

More and more, unusual theater became part of his performances.
"Sternklang," so-called star music, must be performed outdoors in a
park setting at night. "Inori" is an orchestra piece that includes
"adorations" for dancer-mimes. "Harlekin" is a solo for a dancing clarinetist.

Stockhausen's personal life took on a more theatrical flavor as well.
In 1967, after the end of his first marriage, from which he had four
children, he married Mary Bauermeister, a painter with whom he had
two more children. By the late 1970s, when he had begun his huge
operatic project, he was living in a specially designed house in
Kurten on the outskirts of Cologne with two of his most trusted
performers, flutist Kathinka Pasveer and clarinetist Suzanne
Stephens, along with his children, many of whom became virtuoso performers.

They became the characters in his operas, an extraterrestrial,
mythic, Christian saga that defies description. Meanwhile,
Stockhausen became so involved with the epic struggle between good
and evil he was producing that he seemed unable to separate his own
ego from his creations.

And that got him in trouble when he infamously described the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center as the greatest
artwork of all time. He immediately retracted the statement, saying
he had been misunderstood since he meant that the destruction was the
work of Lucifer, who just happened to be a figure in "Licht."

Although the first five operas were staged between 1981 and 1996 at
La Scala in Milan, Italy, the Royal Opera in London and Leipzig Opera
in Germany, Stockhausen was never able to get the final two produced.
But he could be his own worst enemy by insisting on staging notions
that made extraordinary music feel foolish.

Still, Stockhausen carried on. At the time of his death, he was busy
creating "Klang," a new cycle of chamber works, one for each hour of
the day. The 13th had its premiere in Rome in May. Although the
composer's death, which was said to have followed a short illness,
came as a surprise to the musical world, the fourth hour of "Klang"
is called "Heaven's Door" and may well have been a premonition.

Premiered last year in Italy, the piece consists of "a percussionist
knocking, battering, drumming, in 2 X 7 moods," Stockhausen's program
notes read, "with wooden beaters on a heaven's door made of wood."
Finally the door opens, and a terrifying noise erupts, leading to a
wailing siren. A little girl from the audience walks onto the stage
and through the door. The siren stops.

Funeral services have not been announced, but Stockhausen will be
buried in Waldfriedhof (Forest Cemetery) in Kurten.

mark.swed@latimes.com

-------

Karlheinz Stockhausen

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10281353

Dec 13th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Karlheinz Stockhausen, seeker of new sounds, died on December 5th, aged 79

OTHER children had teddy bears and dolls; but Karlheinz Stockhausen
had a little wooden hammer. As he toddled round the run-down family
farm in the hills near Cologne, he would hit things with it to see
what sound they made. Each note, he established young, sent him a
different message. No plink or plunk was quite the same as any other.

Most folk at his premières in the 1950s and 1960s might have wished
he had never discovered that. Each Stockhausen piece was a shock to
the system. It was not just that he had decided tonality was dead;
Schoenberg's 12-note serialism had already made dissonance routine.
It was not just that he thought "intensive measuring and counting"
the key to music's future; Stravinsky had got there long before him.
It was that Stockhausen kept on looking for, and finding, sounds
never heard before. He made a formula out of the individuality of
notes­their particular pitch, timbre and duration, and whether they
were soft as a leaf or knocked your hat off­and revelled in it in the
most alarming way.

"Mikrophonie I" (1964), for example, was inspired by hitting the
tam-tam that hung in his garden with spoons, tumblers and an
egg-timer. "Kurzwellen" (1968) was based on the "foreign sounds" of
short-wave radio. His most famous piece, and possibly his most
popular­though he was never popular­was "Stimmung", or "Tuning"
(1968), a sextet for unaccompanied voices on a six-note chord of
B-flat that sounded sometimes like a digeridoo and sometimes like
blowing across the top of the bottle, and in which the most beautiful
harmonics would be interrupted by this:

Pee peri pee pee: right over my tree
Let it gently run down
God is that warm

Small wonder that Sir Thomas Beecham, asked if he had conducted any
Stockhausen, said no, but he thought he might once have trodden in some.

Stockhausen's great passion was electronic music, which in the 1950s
seemed suddenly to give a pure, bright sound, like "raindrops in the
sun", to all the processes of the universe. He was studying then in
Paris with Messiaen and Milhaud, but preferred to hole up in studios
playing with tapes and sine waves. The result of his labours might be
mere background noise, but he liked even that, especially if it could
be run through big loudspeakers to a baffled audience. He was
delighted to find that metallic sounds could become human voices, and
that human voices could be made to quack like a duck. He could
conceive and make the cosmos over again.

Electronics also made him funky. In the late 1960s he found jazzmen
and rock bands­Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead­quoting
him and even sitting at his feet when he lectured at the University
of California. He appeared on the cover of the Beatles' "Sergeant
Pepper". And there was probably no one else who could make electronic
sounds so lusciously melodic (as in "Kontakte", of 1959-60), by sheer
contrast with all the rattling and plicking that had gone on before.

String quartet for helicopters

Stockhausen's music was constructed on mathematical principles; but,
as the years passed, he liked to throw in more elements of motion,
freedom and chance. You could play his "Zyklus", for percussion,
upside down or back to front or in any order you liked. In "Gruppen"
(1955-57) he used three orchestras, playing different notes at
different tempi from different directions. But even this was not
enough for the man who often dreamed he was a bird flying; and in his
last, huge opera project, "Licht" (Light), he included a string
quartet in which the players were in four separate helicopters
whirling above the concert hall.

Was this music at all? He thought it was. He whistled his own
melodies, he said, as readily as he had once whistled Mozart's. And
he was looking for "a new beauty" all the time. There was a deep,
obsessive seriousness in him, underlined by a disarming stare, which,
he hoped, would "yet reduce even the howling wolves to silence".

Sheer ego-tripping, countered his detractors. "Licht", which proposed
an opera for every day of the week, needed five orchestras, nine
choirs and seven concert halls. Other pieces required purple lighting
or Star Trek costumes. And he was ruthlessly protective of the brand,
using his own paramours and children to play his compositions, acting
as his own soundman and marketing his recordings only through
Stockhausen Verlag, at sky-high prices. But he had reason, in his
view, to be weird and exclusive. He was special.

Just how special was not readily apparent to those who saw him, in
his old Beethoven frock-coat or his shapeless orange cardigan. After
the 1970s, Stockhausen seemed to disappear up his own cul-de-sac of
experimental noise. But this was his mission. He often dreamt that he
had been born and trained on Sirius, and was on Earth "to bring
celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings".
To ensure that contact, some of his pieces had to be performed under
the stars. By making new sounds, he was preparing the way for a
higher kind of life.

Yet again, the general public did not get the message. But when he
died, his small band of devoted followers was blissfully sure that he had.

.

Book reviews: Philip Whalen & Joanne Kyger

'The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen,' edited by Michael Rothenberg,
and 'About Now' by Joanne Kyger

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-macadams16dec16,0,4887796.story?coll=cl-books-features

Two poets who, whether they write of the exalted or the mundane,
leave plenty of room for splendor.

December 16, 2007
By Lewis MacAdams

The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen
Edited by Michael Rothenberg
Wesleyan University Press: 872 pp. $49.95

About Now
Collected Poems
Joanne Kyger
National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine Press: 798 pp., $34.95

PHILIP WHALEN and Joanne Kyger are often viewed as "poets' poets" --
a kiss of death that generally implies their music is out of most
people's range. But really, what this means is they're the types of
poets to whom other poets turn for their perfect pitch, to proclaim
who they are.

Whalen and Kyger are essentially School of Backyard poets, who look
out their kitchen windows and see the universe. Both have given
themselves permission to write about what is immediately in front of
them and/or on their minds, no matter how exalted or mundane. They
are both domestics who leave plenty of room for splendor. Both have
mastered the conversational; both feed off slang. Everything is the
subject of their poems. Now, these two remarkable careers are
represented by a pair of retrospective collections: "The Collected
Poems of Philip Whalen," edited by Michael Rothenberg, and Kyger's
"About Now: Collected Poems."

Whalen was born in 1923 in Portland, Ore., and raised in the Dalles,
a small town in the Columbia River Gorge. After serving in the Air
Force during World War II, he went to Reed College on the GI Bill.
There, he lived off campus with poets Gary Snyder and Lew Welch and
met William Carlos Williams when he came to visit the school.

Whalen was a few years older than his roommates. To Snyder, he was
erudite. "Philip seemed to have read everything important in the
English language, including a lot of basic Buddhist texts," Snyder
writes in a foreword to "The Collected Poems." In October 1955,
Whalen and Snyder joined Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia and Allen
Ginsberg to read their poems at San Francisco's Six Gallery. This was
the night that Ginsberg debuted his epochal poem "Howl" and helped
usher in the Beat Generation.

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, Calif. After graduating
from UC Santa Barbara, she arrived in San Francisco in 1957 during
the "Howl" censorship trial. She got a job at Brentano's bookstore on
Union Square and absorbed the informal teachings of San Francisco
poet luminaries Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer.

San Francisco was the poetry capital of the world in 1957, and Kyger
stumbled into all sorts of lineages, from pacifists who had been
incarcerated in the Pacific Northwest during the war to students to
the freshly shuttered Black Mountain College in North Carolina, as
well as every kind of anarchist and Beat. In the late 1950s, Kyger
became one of a handful of persons gathered around a Japanese Zen
Buddhist missionary named Shunryu Suzuki. They practiced meditation
in an old wooden building in Japantown that would become the San
Francisco Zen Center.

In 1958, Kyger met Snyder, who introduced her to Whalen. At the time,
she saw herself as "a practicing poet, learning. Philip was sure of
his work." She admits to having been a little overwhelmed by the
unfurled rhetoric of Duncan and Spicer; but with Whalen, "I read it
and I could understand every word!" Two years later, she and Snyder
traveled to Kyoto where they were hurriedly married at the insistence
of their patron, the formidable Ruth Fuller Sasaki. Snyder threw
himself into Buddhist practice while Kyger struggled with daily life.
By 1963, she and Snyder were meeting up with Ginsberg and his
companion, Peter Orlovsky, in India. For Snyder and Ginsberg, the
trip heralded their emergence as culture heroes to the proto-hippies,
but for Kyger, it signaled a different kind of turning point.

At the beginning of 1964, Kyger returned to San Francisco by herself,
"a bit wiser and a bit more disciplined," her marriage to Snyder at
an end. The only person to meet her was Whalen. There was a synergy
between them, a sympathy; when Whalen published "You Didn't Even Try"
(1967), the first of his two novels, his heroine, a petulant but
beautiful woman with a keen mind, resembled Kyger.

In 1971, Kyger moved to Bolinas, in Marin County, where she has lived
ever since. Whalen, on the other hand, trundled from house to house
for years. A lifelong bachelor who hated living alone, he exuded a
certain neediness. He loved books; he loved classical music. He
wanted to be fed. Kyger says that Whalen "liked being in the middle
of a domesticity so that he could report on it. He liked to write
long letters filled with the news of what everybody was up to."

Eventually, at the invitation of Suzuki's successor Roshi Dick Baker,
Whalen moved into the San Francisco Zen Center, where, in 1973, he
was ordained a priest. He would later become the abbot of the
Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro district where he lived
until shortly before his death in 2002. Whalen essentially stopped
writing 15 years before he died, macular degeneration having reduced
his eyesight to little slits of light. Not so for Kyger, who, even as
"About Now" is being published, is writing some of the funniest, most
elegant, beautiful and political poems of her life.

You can see where Whalen is going from the very earliest work in "The
Collected Poems." Though it's only 16 lines long, "A Country Without
Ruins" -- written at the end of 1949 or the beginning of 1950 --
contains bits of overheard conversation, ancient Greek and even sound
effects ("Crash! Rattle! Whoops!"), all triggered by a homespun and
typically cranky image of "his kids / raising hell in the grape arbor
/ throwing all they don't eat." A decade later, when publisher Dave
Haselwood needed a press release for Whalen's "Memoirs of an
Interglacial Age," the poet explained his aesthetics this way: "This
poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body
being here and now which is history . . . and you."

In "The Preface," which opens his 1965 collection "Every Day," Whalen
goes deeper, noting that for the reader, a poem is "a continuous
fabric (nerve movie?) -- 'continuous' within a certain time-limit,
say a few hours of total attention and pleasure: to move smoothly
past the reader's eyes, across his brain: the moving sheet has shaped
holes in it which trip the synapse finger-levers of reader's brain
causing great sections of his nervous system -- distant galaxies
hitherto unsuspected (now added to International Galactic Catalogue)
-- to LIGHT UP, bring out new masses, maps old happy memory." Or, as
Whalen would later shrug, "I'm trying to wreck your mind is all."

Whalen and Kyger reflect Charles Olson's approach to poetry.
According to Kyger, Olson's essay on projective verse -- which
includes the dictums "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF
CONTENT" and "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY LEAD TO A FURTHER
PERCEPTION" -- "was like a bible for me." Like Whalen, she is a poet
of the moment, writing about the briefest conceivable transit between
reception and perception, the instant when thoughts appear and
disappear like clouds in a blue sky.

Both poets are adept at plucking words and phrases from the sensual
continuum, relying on the way these words are printed to function as
a kind of musical score -- what Olson in "Projective Verse" called
"FIELD COMPOSITION." Both write poems that function as meditations on
meditation, moving from detail to interesting detail in the world.
Both tend to date their poems to show you how they slice the data, to
locate the work at a particular intersection of time and space. And
both work in notebooks, or daybooks.

What they do might in fact be called "journal-ism," in that their
poems are built from pieces of journals. You could also call it
"quilting" since it is stitched together from the fabric of the day.
In many of his poems from the 1960s, Whalen transcends language
entirely, weaving in drawings of owls, roosters, mushrooms and
nasturtiums, as well as indescribable doodles and Buddhas sitting on
lotus blossoms.

Only Kyger, though, can truly break your heart. She writes with that
old-school plangency so central to the Pacific Rim poetry both these
poets have done so much to help create. In "September," she deftly
evokes the way the physical world draws her inward, until it informs
her identity.

The grasses are light brown

and ocean comes in

long shimmering lines

under the fleet from last night

which dozes now in the early morning

Here and there horses graze

On somebody's acreage

Strangely, it was not my desire

that bade me speak in church to be released

but memory of the way it used to be in

careless and exotic play

When characters were promises

then recognitions. The world of transformation

is real and not real but trusting.

Enough of these lessons? I mean

didactic phrases to take you in and out of

love's mysterious bonds?

Well, I myself am not myself.

and which power of survival I speak

for is not made of houses

It is inner luxury, of golden figures

that breathe like mountains do

and whose skin is made dusky stars.

Taken together, these two volumes make a compelling case for a
particular kind of West Coast poetry -- by turns disciplined and
serendipitous, suspicious of the climax statement, inclusive, less
overtly poetic than its more formal counterparts. On their own, they
allow us to reconsider two significant careers. Rothenberg has done
an exemplary job with "The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen," which
weighs in at 872 pages. He includes a short biography of the poet, as
well as an extensive bibliography, various of Whalen's own prefaces,
Snyder's astute and heartfelt foreword and a thoughtful essay by poet
Leslie Scalapino. He's even reproduced the tables of contents of
Whalen's original collections.

"About Now," on the other hand, comes with much less of an apparatus.
In addition to the poems, the book contains an essay called "Some
Thoughts on the Work of Joanne Kyger" by Linda Russo. Kyger's
biography is little more than a blurb. But in the end, it doesn't
matter, really. The poems in her nearly 800-page door stopper can and
do speak for themselves. *

.

French court backs ex-Red Brigade's extradition

French court backs ex-Red Brigade's extradition

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1411952520071214

Fri Dec 14, 2007

PARIS (Reuters) - A French court approved the extradition to Italy of
Marina Petrella, a former member of the far-left Red Brigades
movement sought by Rome on murder and kidnapping charges, a judicial
source said on Friday.

However, Petrella, who was arrested in August following a request by
Italy, will remain in preventive detention pending an appeal to the
Cour de Cassation, France's highest court, the source said.

Petrella was convicted by an Italian court in May 1993 of a number of
offences including the murder of a police officer, kidnapping,
attempted kidnapping and armed robbery.

If Petrella loses her appeal it will be up to French Prime Minister
Francois Fillon to sign the extradition decree, but that can also be
appealed to the State Council, France's top administrative law body.

The entire legal appeals process could take one to two years, legal
sources say.

The Italian's arrest and subsequent moves to extradite her follow
controversy earlier this year over France's role in the arrest of
another fugitive Italian radical, Cesare Battisti. He was detained in
Brazil with the help of French police.

The Red Brigades carried out a campaign of violence in the 1970s that
culminated in the kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo
Moro in 1978.

Numerous former members took refuge in France where former President
Francois Mitterrand refused to extradite left-wing radicals who
renounced violence.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi thanked French authorities for
Petrella's arrest, which he said showed the importance of
international cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism.

Petrella had started a new life in France with her partner, with whom
she had a child.

(Reporting by Jon Boyle; editing by Robert Woodward)

.

In Europe, Some Still Cling To Dreams of Revolution

In Europe, Some Still Cling To Dreams of Revolution

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119751147856325567.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Group Nabbed in Italy Appears to Hark Back To Lethal Red Brigades

By GABRIEL KAHN and KRISTINE M. CRANE
December 13, 2007

GASSINO TORINESE, Italy -- One night in February, 40 police officers
in ski masks burst into a house in this small town near Turin and
arrested Vincenzo Sisi. The charge: running an armed terrorist group.

Giancarla Lorenzin, his wife of 26 years, thought it was a mistake.
Her husband, a press operator at a factory, had no criminal record
and professed nonviolence. They spent weekends hiking, bicycling and
gardening. "I'll see you in a few days," she told him as he was
hustled out by police. He caressed her cheek and shook his head no.

Mr. Sisi knew things she didn't. For years, he had lived a double
life, appearing as a model citizen while secretly running a radical
group that plotted bank heists, bombings and assassinations, police
say. They describe Mr. Sisi and more than a dozen others arrested
that day as the new face of the Red Brigades, a violent left-wing
group that haunted Italy during a bloody era of the 1970s called the
"Years of Lead."

Some of those arrested had been underground for years. Mr. Sisi, for
one, is 54 years old. Others weren't yet alive in the 1970s; they
include 20-something factory hands, a call-center operator, a
pony-tailed mailman and a student named Amarilli Caprio.

Ms. Caprio, 26 when arrested, seemed above suspicion. She came from a
middle-class family in Padua, had good grades in high school, wrote
poetry and was studying languages at a Milan university.

Police uncovered clues they say make clear members of the group were
armed and preparing to act. Dogs sniffed out a Kalashnikov assault
rifle buried under the garlic bulbs in Mr. Sisi's garden. They found
a cache of automatic weapons buried near an abandoned farmhouse,
sophisticated surveillance equipment in a Milan basement, ingredients
for explosives and fake police uniforms. Among the group's targets,
police say, were the Milan headquarters of oil company Eni SpA and a
professor of labor law.

Hearings to decide whether the matter goes to trial began this week.
Attorneys for both Mr. Sisi and Ms. Caprio said their clients planned
to fight the charges but declined to discuss the case. From jail, Mr.
Sisi has written letters calling himself part of the
"politico-military wing ... preparing for the struggle to finally end
the barbarism of exploitation." Ms. Caprio, before a transfer to
house arrest, signed prison letters "as always, with a clenched fist."

Traces of a Dream

Beneath the archaic rhetoric and sweeping ambitions is a remarkable
story of a political movement's survival. Long after Soviet communism
collapsed, traces of a left-wing dream of revolution live on in
corners of Europe, sometimes in virulent strains.

Adherents say they're motivated by profound disappointment with how
political struggles from a generation ago have played out. Instead of
a more equitable society, they see one more out of kilter. Partly
through years of strikes, European workers have won greater job and
welfare protections. But debt-laden governments can no longer pay for
it all, and a system of haves and have-nots has emerged. Young people
chafe at a rigid job market with few opportunities.

Communist parties espousing workers' rights still garner support.
Italy has two, each with ministers in the government; France has five
far-left groups. The parties retain the trappings of a militant era,
like the hammer-and-sickle symbol, but most have lost their edge as
they join governments and forge compromises.

One result is that some who still cherish the dream of revolution
have been forced to the margins of society or gone underground.
Although the mass worker movements that fed the political violence of
the 1970s have long vanished, left-wing political terrorism retains a
romantic appeal. Italian movies such as "The Best of Youth" and
"Buongiorno, Notte" -- co-written by a former Red Brigades member --
paint a seductive picture of idealism and violence that resonates with some.

Investigators were struck by the sympathy the arrests kicked up.
Graffiti in support of the Red Brigades and those arrested appeared
on factory walls around Padua, and there were two protest marches. A
Molotov cocktail was left, unexploded, at the home of a police
investigator. That has left investigators with nagging worries. "We
have dismantled this wing, but we don't know if there are others,"
says Bruno Megale, head of Milan's investigative police unit. "I
think the siren call of revolution is buried deep inside this society."

Ideological Struggle

In the 1970s and '80s, a bloody ideological struggle in Italy pitted
workers against bosses and left against right. Communists garnered up
to 34% of the vote in elections. Strikes were frequent and often
violent. Some elements, impatient with the pace of change, began
seeing the unions and even the Communist Party as obstacles to a
profound transformation.

A group with roots in the sociology department of the University of
Trento in northern Italy evolved into the Red Brigades. Highly
secretive, they counted 5,000 members, many with training in
explosives, firearms and forging documents. Their attacks were
brazen, including bank heists and prison breaks, and hit factory
owners, politicians, journalists, police and military officers.

Attacks organized by the Red Brigades an