Celebrate Easy Rider's 40th Birthday With Dennis Hopper

Celebrate Easy Rider's 40th Birthday With Dennis Hopper At Taos
Summer Of Love 2009

http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/newsandupdates/122_0902_easy_rider_dennis_hopper_taos_summer_of_love/index.html

February 18, 2009 - TAOS, NEW MEXICO: Easy Rider reigns supreme as
the best biker movie of all time. The brilliance of writer, director
and actor Dennis Hopper paved the way for "the New Hollywood" by
sparking independent filmmaking fever in 1969. And, more importantly,
the film showed the country what it meant to be a free spirit in the
late '60s...the Cannes Film Festival winner has been called a
"touchtone for a generation" that "captured the national
imagination." Re-live the psychedelic era as you blaze a trail for
gorgeous Taos, New Mexico -- Hopper's home at the time of filming and
the location of many of the movie's famous scenes -- for Taos Summer
of Love 2009, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

From May through September, Taos Summer of Love 2009 will feature an
amazing array of events, art, film and music. Not only will you be
able to indulge in everything lovely, artistic and free about Taos,
you'll get to ride the same roads filmed in Easy Rider....talk about
bragging rights! And you could potentially meet Hopper himself, as he
will be master of ceremonies over all things Taos this summer.

Taos Summer of Love 2009 events include a feast with Hopper! On May
3, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos is hosting a fundraising dinner
with Dennis Hopper; all proceeds benefit the Harwood Museum of Art.
This dinner is the kickoff to the summer-long Dennis Hopper at The
Harwood event. From May 8 to September 18, you can enjoy two
Hopper-related shows: "Silver Gelatin Prints by Hopper" and "Hopper
Curates," which features artwork by five artists.

Also in May, you can join thousands of fellow bikers May 22 - 25 at
the 26th Annual Memorial Day Motorcycle Rally & Run-to Taos' Vietnam
Memorial. The weekend will feature live music and food. The Red River
Classic Car Show will be held the weekend of June 5-7, and Toast of
Taos Wine Festival starts July 3. No summer would be complete with
out a chili cook-off: You can taste to your heart's delight Aug 13 -
15 at Hot Chili Days, Cool Mountain Nights, located at Brandenburg
Park, Red River.

These are just some of the many things you can enjoy in Taos this
summer. But be sure to reserve some time for cruising the town on
your bike. Any motorcycling fan will drool over the rugged, scenic
landscapes and wide-open spaces that make Taos famous. More than
1,200 feet across from rim to rim, The Rio Grande Gorge offers
visitors views of astonishing lava flow, extending to the Rio Grande
Canyon, which is about 300 feet from side to side. And the Rio Grande
Bridge is the second highest bridge in the US.

One of the most fascinating and famous scenic spots around town is
the Taos Pueblo, home of the Taos-Tiwi Indians. It is located two
miles north of Taos, and is at an elevation of 7,000 feet. At the
Pueblo, you can experience the rich cultural heritage exemplified by
the exquisite Native American architecture and the seasonal
ceremonial dances. Please note: You can watch the dances but
photography is strictly prohibited, which makes a trip to the pueblo
all the more special.

Taos Summer of Love 2009 also features an exciting contest! Visit
www.taossummeroflove.com to enter your name in the Summer of Love
Sweepstakes for a chance to win a $4,000 trip to Taos! The package
includes airfare, three nights accommodations for two, a guided
Harley-Davidson tour of the town, spa treatments for two, museum
passes and more!

So dust off the love beads, don your fringed leather jacket, and roll
on into to Taos this summer! For information, visit www.taossummeroflove.com.

.

Britain faces summer of rage

Britain faces summer of rage - police

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/23/police-civil-unrest-recession#history-byline

Middle-class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on streets

Paul Lewis
The Guardian, Monday 23 February 2009

Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the
economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against
financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain's most senior police officer with responsibility for public
order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with
people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming
"footsoldiers" in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's
public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals
who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek
to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses
despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become "viable
targets". So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and
other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for
the financial crisis.

Hartshorn, who receives regular intelligence briefings on potential
causes of civil unrest, said the mood at some demonstrations had
changed recently, with activists increasingly "intent on coming on to
the streets to create public disorder".

The warning comes in the wake of often violent protests against the
handling of the economy across Europe. In recent weeks Greek farmers
have blocked roads over falling agricultural prices, a million
workers in France joined demonstrations to demand greater protection
for jobs and wages and Icelandic demonstrators have clashed with
police in Reykjavik.

In the UK hundreds of oil refinery workers mounted wildcat strikes
last month over the use of foreign workers.

Intelligence reports suggest that "known activists" are also
returning to the streets, and police claim they will foment unrest.
"Those people would be good at motivating people, but they haven't
had the 'footsoldiers' to actually carry out [protests]," Hartshorn
said. "Obviously the downturn in the economy, unemployment,
repossessions, changes that. Suddenly there is the opportunity for
people to mass protest.

"It means that where we would possibly look at certain events and
say, 'yes there'll be a lot of people there, there'll be a lot of
banner waving, but generally it will be peaceful', [now] we have to
make sure these elements don't come out and hijack that event and
turn that into disorder."

Hartshorn identified April's G20 meeting of the group of leading and
developing nations in London as an event that could kick-start a
challenging summer. "We've got G20 coming and I think that is being
advertised on some of the sites as the highlight of what they see as
a 'summer of rage'," he said.

His comments are likely to be met with disappointment by protest
groups, who in recent weeks have complained that police are adopting
a more confrontational approach at demonstrations. Officers have been
accused of exaggerating the threat posed by activists to justify the
use of resources spent on them.

Police were said to have been heavy-handed at Greek solidarity
marches in London in December and, last month, at protests against
Israel's invasion of Gaza. In August 1,000 officers, helicopters and
riot horses were drafted to Kent from 26 UK police forces to oversee
the climate camp demonstration against the Kingsnorth power station.
The massive operation to monitor the protesters cost £5.9m and
resulted in 100 arrests. But in December the government was forced to
apologise to parliament after the Guardian revealed that its claims
that 70 officers had been hurt in violent clashes were wrong.

However, Hartshorn insisted: "Potentially there will be more
industrial actions ... History shows that some of those disputes -
Wapping, the miners' strike - have caused great tensions in the
community and the police have had difficult times policing and
maintaining law and order."

Both "extreme rightwing and extreme leftwing" elements are looking to
"use the fact that people are out of jobs" to galvanise support, he said.

A particularly worrying development was the re-emergence of
individuals involved in the violent fascist organisation Combat 18,
he said. "They are using the fact that there's been lots of talk
about eastern European people coming in and taking jobs on the
Olympic sites," he said. "They're using those type of arguments to
look at getting support."

Hartshorn said he also expected large-scale demonstrations this year
on environmental issues, with hardcore green activists "joining
forces" with middle-class campaigners over issues such as airport
expansion at Heathrow and Stansted. With the prospect of angry
demonstrations against the economy, that could open the door to
powerful coalitions.

"All you've got to do then is link in with the environmentalists, and
look at the oil companies. They're seen to be turning over billions
of pounds profit in issues that are seen to be against the environment."

.

Julie Christie: ‘I feared Bush would unleash a wave of sadism - he did’

Julie Christie: 'I feared Bush would unleash a wave of sadism - he did'

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/julie-christie-lsquoi-feared-bush-would-unleash-a-wave-of-sadism--he-didrsquo-1628254.html

The language of the war on terror made her shudder - and provoked her
to become a fearless champion of its victims, notably the Guantanamo
Bay inmate Binyam Mohamed. Robert Verkaik reports

Saturday, 21 February 2009

Julie Christie has never felt comfortable in the glare of the public
eye. For long periods of her life, the actress who rose to fame in Dr
Zhivago and Far From the Madding Crowd has turned her back on the
film world, hiding on a hill farm in Wales while others gratefully
picked up the roles she spurned.

But even throughout these wilderness years, Julie Christie has never
felt so dislocated from the world that she could ignore its horrors.
Her campaigning record reads like a history of human rights abuses
over the last 40 years.

This week she was back again highlighting Britain's role in the
alleged torture of a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In a letter published earlier this week, she accused the Government
of duplicity and the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, of helping to
cover up the crimes of America. Mr Miliband responded with his own
letter, forcefully rejecting Christie's allegations.

The resident in question is Binyam Mohamed, 31, an Ethiopian refugee
whose lawyers have been trying to persuade the UK Government to hand
over documents which they believe will prove Britain's complicity in
their client's torture.

Christie says she knows she must come across as "disgruntled from
Tunbridge Wells" but she feels "sick to the stomach" about what her
own Government is doing.

"They should have released [the documents] ages ago. Binyam Mohamed
was being tortured in 2002. In all this stuff that [Mr Miliband]
writes, there is never any mention that unless they release the
documents to clear him he is always going to be known to the world as
a terrorist.

"That's a life that has been ruined. You never hear about the human
beings involved, there's never any sadness or any remorse.".

Although she would never say so, the emotional deprivations of her
troubled childhood must make it easier for her to empathise with
those who are taken from the bosom of their families and forced to
survive in an alien environment. When she was six years old, her
mother sent her away to a Catholic boarding school in England, her
parents separated and she was left living with a foster family. The
shock of this, she says, has never left her.

Perhaps then, this is partly why she feels she has to speak up for
those who have no voice, like Mr Mohamed.

"It's a terrible thing," says Christie, "to make someone disappear.
To have no contact with anyone. They are disappeared from life and it
is just about one of the most sadistic things you can do. Especially
to someone who has not been found guilty of anything."

What seems to anger her most is that after spending years protesting
against the injustices of other regimes she now finds herself
confronting the rights abuses of her own country.

She asks: "Have we learnt nothing from the Second World War and the
importance of the of human rights protections that we put in place to
stop it happening again?"

The global response to an evil threat is one of the themes that is
explored in her new film, 1939, which is directed by Stephen
Poliakoff and also stars Romola Garai, Bill Nighy and David Tennant.
The film follows the fortunes of an aristocratic family in Norfolk at
the outbreak of the Second World War.

"It's about the movement for appeasement by the English aristocracy
just before the start of the war. I play an advocate for appeasement.
She's a fictional character so she's not one of the Mitfords, but I
think she is in that area.

"It is all about that possibility that was real [that appeasement
could stop Hitler]. But of course if [the arguments for appeasement]
had succeeded, people like Stephen [Poliakoff] wouldn't have been around."

Christie thinks that parallels could possibly be drawn between a
policy of appeasement in the 1930s and the American-driven "war on
terror" against al-Qa'ida.

"Yes I think in both it was lack of imagination, stupidity and
ignorance. When I was acting my part I did not think like that,
because as you know you have to love your part. I think she thought
what had been done for Germany she would try to do for England."

But it is the twin dangers of terrorism and the misguided "war on
terror" that threaten the world today, says Christie, whose natural
elegance and preserved beauty belies her 67 years.

"My reaction to September 11 was shock, anger and fear. The shock was
obvious because of the amount of misery caused but also the
stupidity. Because who suffered the most? The Muslim world. Then
there was anger at the stomach-clenching media and government
reaction without reason or rationale. It was as if their brains had
stopped working. At this moment when they needed to be acting most
sensibly, they were incapable."

For Christie, one of the most chilling aspects of these developments
was the new language that was created to give force to the "war on terror".

"I felt something so terrible was going to happen when Bush came up
with this phrase 'unlawful combatant'. It meant that any terror
suspect could be kidnapped, incarcerated, tortured and never brought
to trial. I thought this is going to unleash a wave of sadism on a
large part of the world ­ and it did."

Appearing at last year's Academy Awards ceremony, after her portrayal
of a woman suffering from Alzheimer's in Away From Her had won her an
Oscar nomination for best actress, Christie wore an orange ribbon
calling for the closure of Guantanamo.

"I went around asking people at the Oscars, do you know what
"extraordinary rendition" means? Nobody did. I hate the phrase. What
does it mean? It just means disappearance."

For Christie, it has echoes of past human rights abuses which she had
campaigned against so vociferously in the 1970s and 1980s.

"We have come across this before in South Africa under apartheid and
in Indonesia in its awful war against the East Timorese. So we are
not unfamiliar with it. And I had come across it more personally in
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Argentina, where I had actually met people
who had been tortured and met people whose family had been
disappeared and whose children had been tortured.

"But I have to say that I never thought anything like this could
happen in America or here. It was so stupid of me because we have had
Northern Ireland [torture]. I had always liked to think there was
something not English and not American about it all."

Christie has been involved in protest campaigning since the early
1970s when she played a key role in the peace movement. She says her
then-debilitating shyness left her a marginalised figure in the
campaign against the war in Vietnam. That shyness was something that
her former lover, the American actor Warren Beatty, picked up on when
he described her as both the "most beautiful and the most nervous
person" he had ever known.

"I was too shy. I had to get over that. Of course I went on Grosvenor
Square march [in London] and all that. I went to a lot of
demonstrations but I wasn't as active as I could have been. I was too
shy to have my opinion counted."

She says that she partly beat her crisis in self-confidence by
studying the issues that she wanted to talk about in public.

"I was against nuclear weapons and so I went to classes and learnt
about the splitting of the atom. But I still couldn't find the
courage to stand on soap boxes or do anything like that." It was a
Chilean friend who finally gave her the confidence to take a more
high-profile role in political movements.

"I was debating whether to be one of the people leading a peace march
in Scotland with a famous musician, a communist and Robin Cook. She
said to me 'you have go and do it, to be a part of it'. And so I did.
And that was the first political action in which I was seen to be at
the forefront." Naturally it generated a lot of press coverage and
more of the many photographs of the Christie image that was already
synonymous with swinging London.

"That was the first one and later I learnt to handle it and go on to
do many more demonstrations. I also did a lot of public speaking
which I found hard and which I don't do any more, because I can't
find the words."

The 1980s would prove to be Christie's most active decade for
political protest. "When I go through cuttings of that time, I think
'good God I was busy, standing up for this and that and the other'."

She candidly admits that she is not able to recall the 1990s in quite
the same way. "I can't remember the 1990s. Perhaps it was eco-stuff
and animals. And of course the first Iraq war which got me going again."

These days, Christie is less the suffering artist. She lives happily
in the East End of London, travels around inconspicuously on public
transport and is rumoured to have married her long-time partner, the
journalist Duncan Campbell, at a private ceremony in India, the
country of her birth. Christie, who has become a patron for the human
rights group Reprieve, which is representing Binyam Mohamed and other
Guantanamo detainees, appears genuinely embarrassed that she can't
stop herself being drawn to so many different causes.

"We are talking about something so very serious and huge and then we
start talking about me," she says.

"It seems terribly inappropriate. Perhaps it's even egotistical to
think like that, so you have got to think of yourself [as someone]
who is representing something else."

So why does she feel the need to speak out?

"I was sad when the outrage began to abate, except for Clive [Clive
Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve] and other lawyers and
one or two newspapers who kept trying to push the thing. I think that
sometimes we get deadened by something that is so awful and too big
to believe. I think both American and British can't believe that they
are capable of this kind of thing. I think it is too easy to be quiet."

.

Joan Baez and politics strike a melodic chord

[6 articles]

Folk legend Baez is back in the spotlight

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20090222/LIFESTYLE/902210341

By Larry Rodgers • The Arizona Republic
February 22, 2009

Like many of her fans, folk icon and social activist Joan Baez has a
tough time grasp­ing the fact that she has been performing for five decades.

"It's hard to imagine when I listen to something from 45 years ago
that it's the same person," said Baez, 68, who performed at the
Lincoln Me­morial when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his
"I have a dream" speech, brought such folk classics as "House of the
Rising Sun" into popular music and helped introduce onetime lover Bob
Dylan to the masses in the early '60s.

In many ways, the confi­dent performer who is on tour in North
America through March 31 to spot­light her first new album in five
years, "Day After To­morrow," is quite different from the artist who
was at the forefront of the early-'60s folk revival and popular
mu­sic's foray into social issues.

"I had such terrible stage fright (then) that it wasn't much fun,"
Baez said. "I was riddled with neuroses and sleeplessness and panic
at­tacks and all this stuff."

Not only was she trying to build a career and deal with her
relationship with Dylan, Baez also was increasingly consumed by the
civil-rights struggle and her opposition to the Vietnam War.

It took two decades of liv­ing through some of Ameri­ca's more
turbulent times, a period that included a six-year marriage to war
pro­tester David Harris, before Baez dealt with her inner is­sues.

"Twenty years ago, when I hired my wonderful new manager (Mark
Spector), I started to tackle that stuff in a serious, therapeutic
way, which I hadn't done before, and I highly recommend it," said
Baez, who lives in Northern California.

"Most of those things have vanished completely -- fear of flying,
fear of this, that and the other. And so is stage fright gone. So in
a sense, starting maybe 10 years ago, I began to really understand
what it was like to just walk on the stage and have a won­derful time."

Baez has described herself as a glass-half-empty type, and she
doesn't feel the need to be defensive about it.

The woman who founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and
the Hu­manitas International Hu­man Rights Committee said, "Maybe
(that description) was all to do with politics and social change, and
I think I'm reasonable not be­ing optimistic."

A master at interpreting traditional folk and gospel songs, Baez has
performed such classics as "We Shall Overcome," "Swing Low," "Sweet
Chariot" and "Amaz­ing Grace" at events support­ing causes from
environ­mentalism to pacifism to gay rights to fighting poverty to
opposing the death penalty.

Despite her activism, Baez said she never endorsed a presidential
candidate until November's election. Given her stance on various
issues, it's no surprise that she backed Barack Obama over the more
conservative John McCain.

"It's fascinating to change the face of the world in a mat­ter of a
minute (by electing a new president)," Baez said. "It's crazy, and
it's absolute­ly wonderful. I'm enjoying the ride."

Baez also is enjoying a mu­sical partnership with Steve Earle, a
highly respected singer-songwriter in roots and rock music.

The "Day After Tomor­row" album, on which Baez interprets favorite
tunes by the likes of Tom Waits, Patty Griffin, Eliza Gilkyson and
Elvis Costello, is the pair's third recording project.

Earle nudged Baez to in­clude such instruments as mandolin, Hawaiian
guitar, Dobro and harmonium, put­ting a rootsy spin on her folk
inclinations. Baez sees the album as an updated way to bookend the
storytelling and commentary that launched her career.

"That was the trick," said Baez, who's touring with a small acoustic
ensemble. "Rose of Sharon" (penned by Gilkyson), I would have sworn
it was a 200-year-old English folk song.

"But we also realized (that), because of Steve, it had to be current
and totally contemporary, which it is."

-------

Dancing at 68: the night they drove Joan Baez down… here

http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/20/dancing-at-68-the-night-they-drove-joan-baez-down-here/

by Stephanie Garcia
February 20th 2009

It's been fifty years since she took the stage at Boston's legendary
Club 47, and folk icon Joan Baez is still celebrating. After more
than two decades off the major pop charts, her twenty-fourth studio
release, Day After Tomorrow, released in September, has put her back
in the limelight.

With a voice that has endured decades of musical variation, a
passionate activism that continues to fight for equality and justice,
and a spunk that has yet to dim, Baez shows no signs of slowing.

"I'm happy to be be here singing after so many years," Baez says of
her half-century musical reign. "I think it's a little nuts to be
doing it all these years, but what's even nuttier is that people come
to hear it."

One of the leading voices of the '60s folk revival, Baez solidified
her iconic revolutionary persona while on the front line of numerous
political and social issues: walking alongside the likes of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez during the Civil Rights movement,
protesting America's involvement in Vietnam, and speaking out for gay
rights­ experiences that still contribute to the words she sings today.

The Hook: You were friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., and very
involved in civil rights­ how do you feel about the country's first
African American president?
Joan Baez: I've never endorsed anybody on any level, but there's
something about this man that made me feel irresponsible if I didn't
support him publicly. When someone can come along and unify people in
this extraordinary way­ I haven't seen that since King.

The Hook: You've come upon fifty years in the public spotlight as a
performer­ what kind of fulfillment does that bring?
JB: It's become more and more important to follow your heart. People
have been too busy making money, and it's time to go back to our
roots of human decency and making music from the earth. But do I feel
fulfilled? In some ways I do, though I never thought I would. There's
a contentment I've found during meditation.

The Hook: You've always been involved in activism; what's your
passion right now?
JB: The one I'm focusing on now is my family­ they kind of got gypped
during the '60s and '70s. I'm not out on the front lines at the
moment, but anything I've ever supported has been in the context of
non-violence. I'm always anti-death penalty, anti-torture.

The Hook: How has the Greenwich Village scene changed throughout the
years? Has it changed at all to you?
JB: If it hadn't, we'd be in an odd pickle­ things have to change. I
was in the Village when we called ourselves bohemian, then 'hippie'
came along fairly quickly, then yuppie. How we describe ourselves is
in the context of where the world has put us in in the moment.

The Hook: How does it feel to be constantly compared to Bob Dylan?
JB: There are worse things that could happen, like being compared to
Genghis Khan. He was the best writer we've had in the movement. I
knew that I had brought him completely out of a shadow and it was my
pleasure to bring him along to concerts. The whole time I watched
[Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home], I felt like his
grandmother, watching this kid grow.

The Hook: You've said in interviews that after the Vietnam War, you
went through an identity crisis. How were you able to overcome that,
and what advice do you have for a country going through a similarly
complex situation?
JB: The first thing that comes to my mind is meditation­ it's the
only way we slow our brain down to let it figure itself out from
within. With so much happening in the world, it's so pleasant to have
our country in a decent context. Now when I travel, I don't have to
be embarrassed! If the country is in an identity crisis, it should be
attempting to turn in the direction of hope and decency.

The Hook: How was growing up Hispanic in the '50s and '60's political
and cultural environment?
JB: It was '50s Southern California­ so not the best place to be a
Mexican. I don't consider it crippling, but it did make things
difficult, and it took a long time to overcome, to feel that you're
as good as everybody. Musically, I haven't taken that much advantage
of it­ I might still do it.

The Hook: What kind of reactions have Day After Tomorrow garnered? It
was your first album to hit the charts in twenty-nine years, and it's
been said to sound most like your earliest work.
JB: Well, in those initial albums, my voice was about an octave
higher than it is now. There's a feeling with those early songs,
something really truthful. Some of it sounds like the a 200-year-old
English folk song, but with a really contemporary sound.

The Hook: What can we expect from you at The Paramount?
JB: I have a guitar player from Ireland, a bass player, mandolin,
banjo, accordion… they're the best band I've ever had. We just play
for three hours while the bus is rolling; and it can't get any
lovelier than that. If the roads are good, we can dance, at 70 miles
per hour, no problem.

The Hook: What will we be seeing from you in the next couple of months?
JB: We're making a documentary on me­ it's done in the form of
conversations, interviews. With my life being parallel to so many
other beings, it's exciting. It's an American Masters Production,
done by PBS, and it should be out next fall.
~
Joan Baez performs at The Paramount on Tuesday, March 3. Show starts
at 8 pm, and tickets are $39-65.

--------

Joan Baez at the Lobero

http://www.independent.com/news/2009/feb/20/joan-baez-lobero/

Iconic Folk Songstress Pays a Visit to S.B.

Friday, February 20, 2009
By Brett Leigh Dicks

While Joan Baez's musical delivery typically revolves around airy
acoustic orchestration, her songs carry an undeniable weight ­ so
much so that engaging with the tales she so eloquently presents can
leave a listener exhausted. The level of communication that Baez
conveys is astonishing. Her songs are intricate stories that wander
the social, political, and emotional spectrum. From a plea for
guidance from past activists ("Christmas in Washington") to a
heartfelt lullaby composed for her son ("Honest Lullaby"), Baez's
elegance and musical prowess not only pulls you in, it effortlessly
captures you until the very end.

In reaching back to "Lily of the West" from Ring Them Bells to open
the evening's proceedings, Baez declared, "We have many years to
traverse this evening." From there, Baez turned her attention to her
most recent recorded undertaking, the Steve Earle-produced Day After
Tomorrow and the beautifully delivered "Scarlet Tide." The musical
chemistry between Baez and Earle is undeniable, something that her
subsequent rendition of Earle's "God Is God" ably displayed.

In an evening brimming with musical highlights, Baez's howling
rendition of another Earle song, "Christmas in Washington," ranks
amongst one of the night's finest. While her rendering of Danny Dill
and Marijohn Wilkin's timeless murder ballad "Long Black Veil" was
equally exceptional, nothing in the night surpassed her own "Diamonds
and Rust." As the notes cascaded and frets squeaked, Baez took the
audience to the emotional core of the song, written about her complex
relationship with Bob Dylan via a moment shared from a Midwest telephone booth.

In a time defined by sound bites and punch lines, the experience of
sharing the lyrical substance that has defined Baez's musical career
for some five decades is certainly one to be cherished. And that was
a sentiment clearly shared by the at-capacity audience Tuesday night.
A standing ovation heralded the closing of Baez's set, but an equally
enthused reception greeted her return to the stage and execution of
The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Baez has always had
a lot to say, and this week the Lobero gave her a fitting platform
from which to speak.

--------

Joan Baez remains more than the song

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/02/joan-baez-remai.html

Feb 18 2009
by Randy Lewis

The singer-songwriter, who performs Thursday at UCLA, has found a new
intimacy in her music and her life.

If all the stars had aligned for her, Joan Baez would have come away
from this year's Grammy Awards with the first recording academy
trophy of her long and distinguished career. She was nominated for
her critically lauded album "Day After Tomorrow," a sparsely produced
collection of pointed and illuminating songs by contemporary writers
including Steve Earle (who produced it), Patty Griffin, Tom Waits,
Elvis Costello and Eliza Gilkyson.

As it happened, Baez, along with Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris and Rodney
Crowell, had the misfortune of being nominated in the contemporary
folk/Americana category with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, whose
"Raising Sand" superstar collaboration turned into the unstoppable
juggernaut of this year's Grammy ceremony.

But Baez, who plays a UCLA Live concert Thursday at Royce Hall in
Westwood, always has set her sights on loftier goals than music
industry awards, and to her 68-year-old eyes and ears, "Day After
Tomorrow" doesn't need any additional validation.

"Most people seem to have gotten the feeling of what we intended to
do," Baez said by phone recently from the home outside San Francisco,
which she shares with her 95-year-old mother. "We took songs that
sound as though they were written a long time ago and we made them
feel contemporary."

There's the internal spiritual confidence of Earle's "God Is God,"
Costello and T Bone Burnett's haunting portrait of unbridled power,
"Scarlet Tide," and the Waits-Kathleen Brennan title tune, a song
that takes the form of a heartbreaking letter from a soldier in Iraq.

Earle stripped away all the sonic sweetness that's often been applied
to Baez's heavenly soprano voice, opting for a dry aural ambience
that resulted in one of the most intimate recordings of her career.

"What was daunting was that this particular engineer wanted me to be
one-quarter of an inch from the mike," she said. "He would keep
coming into the booth and saying, 'Can you get a little closer?' I
couldn't get any closer without bumping my nose into it."

Since the album came out last fall, Baez has been weaving the new
songs into her concert set lists, even though she might easily, and
comfortably, assemble several nights' worth of music from material
she recorded decades earlier.

"Sometimes you feel people just itching to get to the songs they came
to hear," Baez said. "But, with this thing, people are very
attentive. It's a record I'm really very pleased with . . . I'm being
cautious," she added with a little laugh. "I'm delighted with it."

The same could be said of her reaction to the election of Barack Obama.

"I was a big Barack Obama supporter from the beginning," she said,
noting that during George W. Bush's administration, "for a number of
years I haven't sung the really blunt protest songs. When Bush came
into office the second time around, I started singing things like
[Bob Dylan's] 'With God on Our Side' again, because we needed them.
Now I could even do some of those old songs in that sense of joy,
that sea change that this election represents."

Baez seems to keep her focus closer to home these days, on her mother
and her own children. From her nonagenarian mother, "I'm studying to
see how to get old." And with her son, she's made an attempt to make
up for some of the time she felt she lost when she was often in the
spotlight as one of the leaders of the political and social protest movement.

"I spend a lot of time with them when I'm home, because I didn't
spend that time with them in the '60s and '70s when I was doing
everything else," she said. "I had a talk with my son one time and
told him 'I feel guilty for not being around so much when you were
growing up.'

"He said, 'Look, it was an important time in the world, and you
played a key role. Don't sweat it,' " Baez said. "That was so nice of
him. . . . What a beautiful gift."

--------

Joan Baez and politics strike a melodic chord

http://www.austin360.com/xl/content/music/stories/xl/2009/02/0219xlmusic.html

By Ed Crowell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 19, 2009

This fall, Joan Baez celebrated her 50th year as a performer - and
she put out one of the best, most spiritual albums of her career. On
Wednesday , her tour behind "Day After Tomorrow" reaches Austin's
Paramount Theatre. With so many Texas connections on this Steve
Earle-produced CD, that was the subject of our first question for a
recent phone interview from Baez's home base in Northern California.

American-Statesman: Your new CD is sort of a made-in-Nashville Austin
album. Two songs from Eliza Gilkyson, one from Patty Griffin. And we
like to claim Steve Earle because he grew up in San Antonio. All
those Austin ties coincidental or did Steve bring you the songs?

Baez: We found them. We being managers, assistants, me, except for
Steve's songs, which he brought. I wasn't really familiar with Eliza,
but her "Rose of Sharon" in any case would have drawn me. It was like
a 200-year-old folk song. The aim of this album was some kind of
reminder of the feeling that was there 50 years ago but having it be
totally contemporary.

Many of the songs reference a God of some kind or Mary or Biblical
places like Jericho. Have you felt yourself turning to help from
those quarters more in recent times?

You know sometimes what we do is not even conscious, what we chose
and so on. It turns out there was a lot of God and Mary on this
album, and we hadn't even noticed it. There was actually another song
about a Mary that didn't make it. So I don't know where that comes
from, and then I realize that the end result maybe is a little more
spiritual than a lot of the things I've done. I heard someone
interviewing Steve if he believed in God and he said, "I don't have
any problem with God." And I thought that being an old lefty he would
shrug it off and say that's just a song.

There's some hopeful sentiments on the album after eight years of
things going in the wrong direction. This fall, when it was released,
did you think Obama would win?

No, I argued with friends of mine who were Hillary supporters and
were saying wasn't I betraying the cause? I said, "Which one?" My
fear was that he would be outfoxed and out-moneyed but that turned
out to be a joke, and it became more and more of a serious hope. I
don't get hopeful about governmental stuff, ever really.

I think it's not just a phrase thing now. He's gonna need us.... It
is going to be as hard as he says, but already there are some things
that bring a light back to your eyes - Guantánamo (closing) and
things like that are a huge relief. I don't have to be embarrassed
when I travel to other countries now.

Did you go to the inauguration?

Yes, I ended up behind the stage, so I could see the podium, barely,
and I probably was looking out at a million people - when I wasn't
crying. That's part of the phenomenon that I don't really understand
except that he's so real, so intelligent, such a statesman. He is the
glue we have been missing for so many years. I do think there is a
lot of hope with someone who has in his top 10 books "The Life of
Ghandi." He has a pretty good leg up.

Will you be singing "Oh, Happy Day" on this part of the tour?

(Laughs) No, but you'll see, it comes out no matter what we sing. The
last (live) CD I made, it was the day after Bush was re-elected and
it was in New York and the audience was as depressed as I was. I
don't know how we ever made that album. It's hard to sing when
something is that depressing. This is the opposite here.

Obama's moving fast on the economy. Do you think he'll be able to do
the same to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do you sense any
more pressure from the public on that count?

The public is there, that's my own conjecturing, but it's a question
of how much people who say, "I really hope this will happen," how
much are they willing to do and participate?

There are some great, timeless anti-war songs on the album about
lives torn apart. Will you keep singing such songs after these wars are over?

I don't know. I don't know what makes a song stick and makes it
relevant again after so many years. I didn't sing "With God On Our
Side" for 20 some years and then all of a sudden during the Bush era
it was sort of desperately needed. And if I sang it now it would be a
jubilation. Whatever I sing now takes a different meaning.

You've sung at anti-landmine concerts and for other issues. What are
the priorities for you now?

I don't know how you're going to tackle the list. There are so many
things. Maybe at this point all the work people did fighting against
interrogation and the CIA stuff ? I wonder if what those people did
year after year doesn't somehow form the possibility of what comes next.

This album is dedicated to your 96-year-old mother who lives with you
in California. Do those good genes from her mean you expect to be
performing into your 90s, like Pete Seeger?

I don't know. I read a long article in the New Yorker about how we
all assume longevity is about that and it isn't.

What's a fun day at home for you?

A fun day at home is something I've had to learn to do - which is not
to overschedule myself. If I succeed at that, there's a lot of
puttering, visiting with my mom, puttering in the garden, drawing.
It's a challenge not to plan what I'm supposed to be doing.

Bob Dylan recently sold `Blowin' in the Wind' for British
advertising. Are you getting used to such things or does it grate to
hear such commercials?

No, it didn't surprise me at all? after the Victoria's Secret ad.

Have you sold any of your classics for commercial use?

No, no. I did one ad in my lifetime and that was for Apple - "Think
Different." That's the only one because Steve Jobs is a friend, and
he's given me computers for years and the company wasn't bad, so I said OK.

What did you think of Todd Haynes' Dylan film `I'm Not There' and
Julianne Moore's character of you?

I didn't see it. I heard it was, uh, interesting.

Any chance Steve Earle will play with you on this tour?

We've talked about it and if he's in shouting range I'll try to get him.

--------

CAPA Presents An Evening With Joan Baez 3/9

http://broadwayworld.com/article/CAPA_Presents_An_Evening_With_Joan_Baez_39_20090217

February 17, 2009

"A half century into her career, folk icon Joan Baez is making a
return of sorts-not to vintage material, but to songs that evoke the
spirit and message of her defining early work...Baez has never
sounded wiser, or more deeply human." - The Boston Globe

Singer, musician, social activist, and goodwill ambassador Joan Baez
has had a profound and durable influence on American and
international music for 50 years. She celebrates that anniversary
with a 2008 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana
Album for her 24th studio album, Day After Tomorrow, and a tour stop
at Columbus' Southern Theatre.

CAPA presents An Evening with Joan Baez at the Southern Theatre (21
E. Main St.) on Monday, March 9, at 8 pm. Tickets are $52.50, $47.50,
and $42.50 at the Ohio Theatre Ticket Office (39 E. State St.), all
Ticketmaster outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets
by phone, please call (800) 745-3000 or (614) 469-0939. The Southern
Theatre Ticket Office will open two hours prior to the performance.
Students between the ages of 13-19 may purchase $5 High Five tickets
while available.

In 1958, a 17-year-old Joan Chandos Baez moved with her family from
Palo Alto to Boston where she entered Boston University School of
Drama. At 18, she was introduced onstage at the first Newport Folk Festival.

Baez recorded her first solo LP for Vanguard Records in 1960. Her
earliest records-with their mix of traditional ballads, blues,
lullabies, Carter Family, Weavers and Woody Guthrie songs, cowboy
tunes, ethnic folk staples of American and non-American vintage, and
much more-won strong followings in the US and abroad.

In 1963, Baez began touring with Bob Dylan and recording his songs, a
bond that came to symbolize the folk music movement for the next two
years. At the same time, she began her lifelong role of introducing
songs from a host of contemporary singer-songwriters.

Baez sang about freedom and Civil Rights from the backs of flatbed
trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she
withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest military
spending and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at
UC Berkeley. A year later, she co-founded the Institute for the Study
of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. In 1966, Baez stood in
the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking
for fair wages and opposed capital punishment at San Quentin during a
Christmas vigil. As the Vietnam War escalated, Baez traveled to Hanoi
with the US-based Liaison Committee and helped establish Amnesty
International on the West Coast.

In the wake of the Beatles, the definition of folk music-a singer
with an acoustic guitar-broadened and liberated many artists. Rather
than following the pack into amplified folk-rock, Baez recorded three
remarkable LPs with classical instru ment ation. Later, she began
recording in Nashville. The "A-Team" of Nashville's session musicians
backed Baez on her last four LPs for Vanguard Records including her
biggest career single, a cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove
Old Dixie Down" in 1971 and her first two releases on A&M.

Within the context of those albums and the approaching end of
hostilities in Southeast Asia, Baez turned to the suffering of those
living in Chile under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. To those people,
she dedicated her first album sung entirely in Spanish. One of the
songs on that album, "No Nos Moveran" (We Shall Not Be Moved) was
banned from public singing in Spain for more than 40 years under
Generalissimo Franco's rule and excised from copies of the LP sold
there. Baez became the first major artist to sing the song publicly
when she performed it on a controversial television appearance in
Madrid in 1977, three years after the dictator's death.

In 1975, Joan's self-penned "Diamonds & Rust" became the title song
of an LP with songs by Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie
Wonder & Syreeta, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band, and Bob
Dylan. His Rolling Thunder Revues of late '75 and '76 (and resulting
movie Renaldo & Clara, released in 1978) co-starred Baez.

In 1978, she traveled to Northern Ireland and marched with the Irish
Peace People, calling for an end to violence. She appeared at rallies
on behalf of the nuclear freeze move ment and performed at benefit
concerts to defeat California's Proposition 6 (Briggs Initiative),
legislation that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in
public schools. Baez received the American Civil Liberties Union's
Earl Warren Award for her commitment to human and civil rights issues
and founded Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which she
headed for 13 years. She won the San Francisco Bay Area Music Award
(BAMMY) as top female vocalist in 1978 and 1979.

In 1983, Baez performed on the Grammy awards telecast for the first
time. In the summer of 1985, after opening the US segment of the
worldwide Live Aid telecast, she later appeared at the revived
Newport Folk Festival, the first gathering there since 1969. In 1986,
Baez joined Peter Gabriel, Sting, and others on Amnesty
International's Conspiracy of Hope tour; her subsequent album was
influenced by the tour, as it acknowledged artists and groups whose
lives in turn were influenced by her, with songs from Gabriel, U2,
Dire Straits, Johnny Clegg, and others.

After attending an early Indigo Girls concert in 1990, Joan teamed
with the duo and Mary Chapin Carpenter (as Four Voices) for a series
of benefit performances.When her album, Play Me Backwards, was
released in 1992, it featured songs by Carpenter, John Hiatt, John
Stewart, and others.

In 1993, Baez became the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo
since the outbreak of the civil war as she traveled to war-torn
Bosnia-Herzegovina at the invitation of Refugees International. In
1994, Baez and Janis Ian sang for the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force's Fight the Right fundraising event in San Francisco.

In 1995, Baez received her third BAMMY as Outstanding Female
Vocalist. Her nurturing support of other singer-songwriters came full
circle with her next album, Ring Them Bells. This idea of collabo
rative mentoring was expanded on 1997's Gone From Danger, where Joan
was revealed as a lightning rod for young songwriting talent, with
compositions from Dar Williams, Sinead Lohan, Kerrville Music
Festival newcomer Betty Elders, Austin's The Borrowers, and Richard Shindell.

In 2003, Baez released Dark Chords on a Big Guitar supported with a
22-city US tour.

In 2007, the 49th annual Grammy Awards presented Baez with the
Lifetime Achievement Award.

In advance of Day After Tomorrow's 2008 release, Baez launched the
2008-09 lecture season at New York City's 92nd Street Y (where she
made her official NY concert debut in 1960). She also received the
2008 Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award at the Americana Music
Association's 7th annual awards show in Nashville. The honor
"recognizes and celebrates artists who have ignited discussion and
challenged the status quo through their music and actions."

www.joanbaez.com

The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars
to encourage economic growth, education excellence, and cultural
enrichment for all Ohioans. CAPA also appreciates the support of the
Robert Bartels, Virginia Hall Beale, and Barbara Clement Memorial
Funds of The Columbus Foundation, assisting donors and others in
strengthening our community for the benefit of all of its citizens,
and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, supporting the city's artists
and arts organizations since 1973.

Owner/operator of downtown Columbus' magnificent historic theatres
(Ohio Theatre, Palace Theatre, Southern Theatre) and manager of the
Riffe Center Theatre Complex (Columbus) and the Shubert Theater (New
Haven, CT),CAPA is an award-winning presenter of national and
international performing arts and entertainment. For more
information, visit www.capa.com.

CAPA presents AN EVENING WITH JOAN BAEZ
Monday, March 9, 8 pm
Southern Theatre (21 E. Main St.)

Singer, musician, social activist, and goodwill ambassador Joan Baez
has had a profound and durable influence on American and
international music for 50 years. She celebrates that anniversary
with a 2008 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana
Album for her 24th studio album, Day After Tomorrow, and a tour stop
at Columbus' Southern Theatre. Tickets are $52.50, $47.50, and $42.50
at the Ohio Theatre Ticket Office (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster
outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone,
please call (800) 745-3000 or (614) 469-0939. The Southern Theatre
Ticket Office will open two hours prior to the performance. Students
between the ages of 13-19 may purchase $5 High Five tickets while
available. www.capa.com

.

Campus to celebrate 50 years of John Searle

Campus to celebrate 50 years of John Searle

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_11757256

By Matt Krupnick
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 02/21/2009

At 76, not much has slowed for UC Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle.

"I'm in fine shape," he said in a recent phone interview, as he took
a break from skiing at Squaw Valley. "I've lost a couple of seconds
on my giant slalom, I'll admit."

Searle, a key figure in the Free Speech Movement, has zipped around
his share of obstacles in 50 years on the UC Berkeley faculty. On
Monday, the philosophy department will honor his half-century with a
reception featuring stories about his career.

Although professors are often feted on college campuses, rarely does
it happen for a septuagenarian who continues to teach courses and
write books and who is not ready to retire. Last semester, Searle
taught two undergraduate classes with a total of 250 students, and he
plans to finish three books this year.

Searle's enthusiasm for working with undergraduate students is rare
at large research universities such as UC Berkeley.

"There's a certain vitality to the campus, and particularly to the
undergraduates," he said. "You can get good graduate students
anywhere. But there's a sense that you make a greater difference at
the undergraduate level."

His courses have essentially become a rite of passage, said Jay
Wallace, the philosophy department chairman.

"His classes are always oversubscribed," Wallace said. "He's probably
the most famous philosopher in the world. Many students feel that
it's something you have to do before you leave Berkeley: take a class
from John Searle."

Searle's work, including 14 major books, covers a wide variety of
subjects including the philosophy of speech, artificial intelligence,
rationality and social reality.

One reason Searle is such a draw could be his role in the Free Speech
Movement of the 1960s. He was the first tenured professor to join the
movement, and he became a driving force alongside Mario Savio, who
was one of his students.

Aside from a brief period of satisfaction brought on by the movement,
Searle does not have fond memories of the 1960s and 1970s. Even the
Free Speech Movement changed for the worse and became violent, he said.

"People like to sentimentalize that period, but it was just awful," he said.

He eventually worked against the movement once it became clear it was
trying to politicize the university, he said. The change of heart
didn't win him friends among former supporters, but he has no regrets.

"It was much easier to run the revolution than it was to run the
counterrevolution," Searle said. "A lot of people hated me. But if
you're not willing to do things people are violently opposed to,
you're a coward.

"I'm always amazed at how conformist professors are."
--

Matt Krupnick covers higher education. Reach him at 925-943-8246 or
mkrupnick@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Honoring educator What: Reception honoring John Searle's 50 years at
UC Berkeley Where: Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley campus
When: 2 to 4 p.m. Monday

.

Remembering Lennon and Ono’s “Bed-Ins”

[2 items]

Remembering Lennon and Ono's "Bed-Ins"

http://www.americansongwriter.com/2009/02/remembering-lennon-and-ono%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cbed-ins%E2%80%9D/

Posted by Christine Smith
February 17th, 2009

This year marks the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's
"bed-ins." Putting their psychedelic spin on the form of nonviolent
protest known as "sit-ins," the pair spent a week in bed at an
Amsterdam hotel in March 1969, giving a repeat performance a few
months later in Montreal. To commemorate these events, Yoko has
posted a request on imaginepeace.com, requesting that any fans
staging tribute reenactments send in documentation of their versions
for publication on the website.

Though the main object of the 1969 protests was the Vietnam war,
Lennon and Ono bed-ins called for an end to all war. Each day, the
couple invited members of the press to visit their hotel suite during
the hours of 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. to discuss world peace with them. As
the culmination of the second bed-in, John and Yoko invited such
personalities as Tommy Smothers and Timothy Leary to record the song
"Give Peace a Chance" in their hotel room. Dismissed by some as a
mere publicity stunt, the concept nevertheless continues to influence
pop culture, appearing in song lyrics, music videos, and even comedy
sketches. Other notable artists have held their own bed-ins during
the last couple of decades, including lead singer of Green Day Billie
Joe Armstrong and his wife.

--------

Discover Montreal this Spring and Give Peace a Chance

http://www.classicrockforever.com/see-me-feed-me-buy-me/feature-seefeedbuy/discover-montreal-this-spring-and-give-peace-a-chance/

This year marks the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's
Bed-In staged in Montréal in May 26 to June 2, 1969 at The Fairmont
Queen Elizabeth Hotel, which promoted a message of peace.

To commemorate the event, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
(www.mmfa.qc.ca), in collaboration with Yoko Ono, has curated an
exhibition called IMAGINE: JOHN & YOKO's PACIFIST ANTHEM which will
run from April 2 to June 21, 2009. The exhibition will be free.

The exhibition will follow the wide-ranging artistic and musical
dialog that took place in the name of peace conducted by the pop icon
and the conceptual artist with ties to the Fluxus group.

The bed-in instantly grabbed worldwide media interest. John and Yoko
spoke to more than 150 journalists each day; and in the U.S. alone,
350 radio stations carried reports on the world's best-known
peaceniks, who wanted to get their message out to all those around
the world already protesting against the war in Vietnam.

The highlight of this unique event was John Lennon's composition of
Give Peace a Chance on June 1st. He wrote the song on the spur of the
moment and converted the suite into a recording studio under the
direction of André Perry. Some 50 people contributed to the
recording of the song, which was immediately broadcast worldwide.
Celebrities included Tommy Smothers, Dr Timothy and Petula Clark.

Through the presentation of various documents, works of arts,
records, soundreals and photographs, the exhibition will raise
awareness of the historical and political context of 1969 which
formed the backdrop to the Bed-In and will revive the thinking of
John Lennon and Yoko Ono and their urgent message for peace.

WHERE TO STAY

To mark the 40th anniversary, The Fairmont Queen Elizabeth hotel
invites guests to relive the legend and experience their own bed-in
through the IMAGINE PACKAGE. The package includes one night
accommodation; one CD featuring Give Peace a Chance; breakfast in bed
for two or buffet breakfast in Le Montréalais restaurant, and a copy
of the lyrics of Give Peace a Chance. This package is available from
March 1 to June 21, 2009, subject to availability. Rates start from
$199 per night, based on double occupancy, in a Fairmont room or from
$599 per night, based on double occupancy, in the actual John Lennon
and Yoko Ono Suite (#1742) where the bed-in took place.

For more information, visit: www.fairmont.com/queenelizabeth. To
make a reservation in the Lennon Suite, call the hotel directly at
514-861-3511.

For visitors seeking a more economical alternative, twenty-plus
hotels in Montréal are offering A SECOND NIGHT AT HALF PRICE package
with rates starting at $104. This sweet deal runs from January 1
until May 31, 2009.

For more informationand to book a room,
visit: www.tourisme-montreal.org/Offers/Winter; or call 1-877-BONJOUR.

.

End of the road for trailblazing hippy

End of the road for trailblazing hippy

http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/content/camden/hamhigh/news/story.aspx?brand=NorthLondon24&category=Newshamhigh&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=newshamhigh&itemid=WeED18%20Feb%202009%2014%3A41%3A32%3A930

editorial@hamhigh.co.uk
19 February 2009
by Tan Parsons

A WRITER, spiritualist and trailblazing hippy from West Hampstead who
spent his life promoting peace and love has died.

Fraser Clark, best remembered as founder of London's Megatripolis
nightclub, finally succumbed to his battle with liver cancer at the age of 66.

Megatripolis, which began in the mid 1990s, was an underground
nightclub in Charing Cross Road that sought to fuse rave culture with
New Age ideology.

On the top floor there were lectures and classical music, on the
middle floor there was relaxing ambient music, while on the bottom
floor there was techno house music.

He believed rave and dance music could teach people how to live in an
overcrowded world because it involved lots of people moving in a
small space in a co-ordinated way.

The club was founded with his former partner Sionaidh Craigen, with
whom he would sit around a tiny stereo listening to aspiring dance
artists desperate to play at the venue.

"He was a ray of sunshine," said Ms Craigen. "He had a great sense of
humour and was always planning practical jokes. He was a very
noticeable character - he was 6ft 2ins tall and had long blond hair
and a broad Glaswegian accent.

"He was a great enabler - if someone wanted to do something he would
always try to help them to do it."

Mr Clark, of Woodchurch Road, was born in Glasgow and attended the
city's university, graduating with an MA in psychology.

During the 1960s he followed the hippy trail, travelling the world
from India to the US and South America. From these travels were born
two novels, Shazam and New World Trips. His spiritual pilgrimage also
led him to enjoy friendships with psychedelic writers Terence McKenna
and Timothy Leary.

In the late 1980s he founded the independent magazine Encyclopaedia
Psychedelica with his friend James Hamilton.

Mr Hamilton said: "Fraser was like an urban shaman. We were really
the first people to chronicle the advent of rave culture. He was
quick-witted, sharp-minded and had a perceptive intellect. He was a
great traveller and he believed that young people were the best
critics of culture."

Another close friend, Alex Gunningham, met him in 1977 at a gig at
the Roundhouse where Mr Clark was dressed in flamboyant clothes and
surrounded by an adoring group of women.

"Fraser was a real futurist," Mr Cunningham said. "He was a wonderful
man and everyone who knew him loved him. His death is a great loss to
the planet.

"He was also a very good writer. He wrote some amazing magazine
articles as well as radio plays and novels."

At the time of his death, Mr Clark was working on a rave opera,
Megatripolis: The Future Perfect State.

Ever fond of coining phrases, one of his favourite concepts was
"pronoia", the sensation that the world is conspiring to help you -
something he believed in fervently. He was a pacifist to the extent
that he would not even watch violent films or thrillers and he once
drove a bus on an electioneering campaign for the Hampstead-based
Rainbow Alliance in Derby. He was also a distinctive and regular dog
walker on the Heath.

Mr Clark's memorial service was held on February 11 at St Luke's
Church in Kiddepore Avenue, presided over by Christian and Buddhist
ministers. He was later buried in Hampstead Cemetery in a pagan ceremony.

On his gravestone is inscribed the phrase: "Dying - it's not the end
of the world."

He is survived by his two brothers and his son.

.

Fame and Frame: A Collection of Stories and Photos

Fame and Frame: A Collection of Stories and Photos of my Career

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pat-york/emfame-and-frameem-a-coll_b_165366.html

February 18, 2009
by Pat York

A brilliant actor and writer friend of mine once told me he would go
anywhere and do anything to sell three books. I feel the same way, so
this is my first attempt at a blog. hoping it will attract readers to
Fame and Frame, my new book of photographs published by teNeues in
English, French and German

Why Fame and Frame?

I started my career at Vogue Magazine in New York and then joined
Glamour magazine as their travel editor. In this capacity I went on a
trip with David Bailey, the quintessential 60's photographer, to
Japan, the Ivory Coast, Spain, Portugal and Paris. While in Japan
David took me to a Nikkon factory where I bought a camera and two
lenses. Every evening he gave me lessons and I was hooked. As well as
the words to describe these countries I had a visual journey to
accompany my story. When I returned to New York I showed my work to
Alexander Lieberman, the Art Director for Conde Nast and Miki Denhof,
the art director of Glamour magazine. They liked what they saw and
told me from now on they would not send me out with a photographer.

This book is a partial visual diary of my life since becoming a
photographer in the middle 60's. (The 90's is the only decade not
represented. Principally, during that era, I concentrated on working
with nudes and anatomy).

My first assignment was to photograph Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. The
story was to illustrate the point that the young were more interested
in politics than ever before because of the men in politics. I spent
two days with Bobby. He was so kind, polite and helpful in every way
to a young photographer. I worked with him in his Senate office, and
then he suggested that we should take a walk outside and that is
where the image in this book was taken. At one point he said to me: "
I understand you photographed my brother, Teddy, last week. I said:
Yes. He said: "Did you like him"? Yes, I replied. "But did you like
him more than you like me?" At the end of the second day he ordered a
car to take me to the airport and we were standing on the steps of
the Senate when a dog ran out into the middle of the road. Bobby
followed him holding up his hands to stop the traffic and escorted
the dog across the road to safety. I learned a lesson that day to
never pack my cameras away. By doing so I missed a wonderful series of shots.

My job as a travel editor gave me the opportunity to fly to every
part of the world. A friend of mine was Peggy Hitchcock, whose
brother, Billy, had a beautiful estate in Millbrook. After Timothy
Leary and Richard Alpert were forced to leave Harvard and then Mexico
they were given a house in Millbrook. I had never taken drugs in my
life but I asked my angel of an editor-in-chief, Cathleen Casey, if I
could take the ultimate trip - going on a new type of journey by
taking LSD. She thought it was a great idea and I prepared for the
experience by going to Millbrook for a few weekends in advance.

Timothy Leary was my director on the trip. For the first moments I
told Leary that nothing was happening but then I looked at my arms
and legs and jewels were dancing out of every pore. The experience
was so positive for me. A beautiful room in the house had been
prepared for the occasion - a fire was glowing, Vivaldi's music was
playing and there were flowers everywhere. The next phase was my
being part of all of the above - the energy of the flowers, music and
fire were flowing through me and even inanimate objects like the
table and the furniture also shared this life. The session lasted
over fourteen hours and I went through so many different stages. In
one of those I had layer after layer of my persona removed until I
became like a Giacometti sculpture stripped to the core. Another part
of the trip was being a cell washed up on a wave and then passing
through many different evolutionary phases - for a while I was stuck
in the reptilian era but I and all around me radiated beauty except
for Timothy Leary. If I looked at him he was always deformed. This
phase continued until I felt being conceived, being an embryo and
then reborn. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.
I was fortunate but I have heard of others suffering horrendous
experiences so I am not recommending LSD. A couple of years ago when
I was being exhibited at Art Basel, Switzerland by my Gallery -
Gmurzynska -- I met Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the
drug. I spent three fascinating hours at his home, near the French
border, talking and photographing him. There is so much more to tell
abut this encounter. He told me that while he was the founder of LSD,
Leary was the disobedient son.

The image in the book of Timothy Leary was among those taken in the
60's but the most important one of all resulted from the assignment I
was given by Glamour to fly to Europe to photograph Racquel Welch in
Spain (the image is in the book), Albert Finney in London (also in
the book) and the new hot young actor who had just come out in his
first two movies - Michael York.

This was a fateful meeting as Michael is now my husband of forty
years. Our attraction was immediate and a romantic and fate filled
year followed until our marriage a year later. We met in the spring
and that fall went to India where Michael played a rock star in the
James Ivory (also in the book) Ismael Merchant film "The Guru". In
that most exotic of countries. Michael proposed to me on Juhu Beach.
A couple of weeks later I was dying. I had never been sick in my life
and was given by a London specialist pills to prevent becoming sick
in India. I discovered I had a fatal allergy to sulfur. I survived
and that is another story but the devotion and love of Michael and
care and support of Indian doctors and friends will always be with
me. This turned out to be a positive experience as I discovered
homeopathic remedies and have shunned allopathic medicine as often as
possible although I believe the two modalities should work in synergy
and that there are heroes in both fields.

Moving on to the 70's. In this decade I have chosen to describe a
photograph of Michael and his bear co-star hugging him and it seems
the animal is giving him advice about his screenplay. This was taken
in St. Croix on the set of "The Island of Dr. Moreau". The two of
them would swim during the lunch hour with the huge creature always
on a leash. One afternoon I was walking by and suddenly saw his
co-star run over without his leash and hug Michael. Some people are
convinced this is a trickery Adobe Photoshop, but It is not.

Another 70's photograph of Leonard Bernstein and Maximillian Schell
was taken in Austria at the Salzburg music festival. We knew Leonard
and l loved his brilliance and ebullient affection. I miss him both
as a friend and musician. Also in that decade I photographed Yusuf
(Cat Stevens). He was gentle and so accommodating. I wonder if, as a
Muslim, he has given up smoking.

Two more out of many photographs of the 70's are Jack Nicholson and
Tennessee Williams. The photograph of Jack was taken as he was
leaving this idyllic cliff-hanging property situated in the village
of La-Garde-Freinet in the South of France owned by the director,
Tony Richardson. We had been invited for a couple of days to join the
other guests - Buck Henry, Angelica Huston, David Hockney (also in
the book) and John Gielgud. It was a fascinating group of people who
interacted on different levels. I caught Jack as he was walking up
the steps to his car. The peacock on the roof personified the
otherworldly quality of time and place. Jack, the most contemporary
of men, was as at home here at this escapist's paradise as in the
grittiest of his film milieus.

The photograph of Tennessee was taken on the way to Washington, DC.
He is hugging his play, Outcry, which was in a constant state of
revision, sitting on his suitcase with his typewriter by his side. We
were all waiting for the reviews on the night it opened at the
Kennedy Center on the way to Broadway. When the papers arrived with a
rave review from Richard Coe, Tennessee burst into tears saying:
"This gives me the courage to continue writing'". Every night
Tennessee and I had dinner alone as Michael did not want to eat
before a performance. One night before the Opening on Broadway, he
clinked his sake glass against mine, saying: "Pat, while there's
doubt, there's hope".

This image of John Cage was taken in the 1980's in New York in his
home and studio that he shared with Merce Cunningham. He told me that
the traffic outside sounded like his music. He was so hospitable and
cooked me a macrobiotic lunch - later he sent me macrobiotic recipes
- he was convinced when he died he would be in the healthiest state
of his life. We laughed a great deal, talked about his music and
shared stories of our lives and generally had a great deal of fun. At
the time I was photographing him he was preparing a new piece for a
festival in Switzerland called 'Fourteen'. He told me, among many
other anecdotes his advice for young musicians: look over the whole
history of music and find out which part interests you the most and
then pay attention to it in detail.

I have been working on the Art World series for the last few years
and some of the artists I have photographed are in this book. I began
working professionally when Pop Art was flourishing and there was a
creative frenzy in the air. Andy Warhol became a friend and I
photographed him on many different occasions. The cover of my book is
Andy holding his polaroid camera taken at the Volpi Palace in Venice.

Since that long ago decade I have been able in the last few years to
portray other artists in their studios and homes. More recently
things came full circle when my subject was the ebullient and
brilliant James Rosenquist -- one of the founders of the Pop Art
Movement. We flew to Tampa and James picked us up and drove us to his
home and studios. We stayed in his guest-house for two eventful and
enjoyable days and nights.

Later still I visited Jasper Johns in his Sharon, Connecticut,
studio. He was in the forefront of so many artistic movements -- pop,
minimal and conceptual. He has always been a true hero of mine --
meeting and photographing him was a huge privilege. I left him with
regret wanting so much to spend more time with him. He was very
generous with his expressive reactions before the camera and his
hospitality. He has beautiful manners and is wonderful looking. After
the session was over he invited me to tea and I had the opportunity
to view part of his splendid private collection.

I was a houseguest of Robert Rauschenberg in his idyllic compound in
Captiva, Florida. This was nine months before his death. I had met
him initially at his brilliant Combines exhibition at LACMA and then
at a dinner hosted by Sam Keller at Art Basel, Miami. He also was a
generous host -- dinner was a caviar pizza and conversation until 2
am. Although he had suffered a stroke his mind was sharp and full of
humor. He insisted on standing up for me when I photographed him the
following morning in his studio.

Here are the names of just a few of the subjects in Fame and Frame,
not mentioned above and photographed at the end of the 90's and the
first few years of this new century and some, even earlier -- Kiki
Smith, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, Ed
Ruscha, Mark Bradford, Lawrence Weiner and many others as well as a
few collectors such as the great philanthropists Edye and Eli Broad
and the art dealer, Leo Castelli. Also there are photographs of
subjects in the movie, theater and music worlds -- Tom Stoppard,
Federico Fellini, Franco Zeffirelli, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg,
Anouk Aimee, Liza Minnelli, Albert Finney, Jane Fonda and more.

There are so many anecdotes I could relate to all the above artists,
actors, musicians, directors and collectors but, as a beginner, I'm
not sure how much you can put in a blog.

The promotion of the book continues --two weeks ago the
UCR/California Museum of Photography in Riverside opened an
exhibition of Andy Warhol's polaroids with a couple of my images of
Andy holding his polaroid camera and there I had a signing where I am
delighted to say all the books were sold within an hour.

On the 26th of May I am giving a lecture and book signing at the
Corcoran Gallery and Museum in Washington DC, followed by a reception.

On the 7th of June the same type of event will take place at the
Huntington Library and Museum in San Marino, California.

In the middle of March I go to Bath in England, where Michael is
filming for 7 or 8 weeks. I am already setting up appointments to
publicize the book in London. France is only an hour away and I would
also like to do signings in Paris as the book features several icons
of French cultural life.

NOW I REALLY MUST STOP.

.

Music Review: Phil Ochs

[3 articles]

Music Review: Phil Ochs - Rehearsals For Retirement

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2009/02/20/092406.php

Written by David Bowling
Published February 20, 2009

The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago marked the beginning of
Phil Ochs personal deterioration. Despite his biting songs of protest
and scathing attacks on the establishment, he always considered
himself a patriot and retained hope that a better America would
eventually emerge. That hope began to evaporate in the aftermath of
the convention.

His musical reaction would be to release a bitter, dark, and deeply
personal album. Rehearsals For Retirement also moved him ever closer
to a rock 'n' roll sound and while he never completely crosses over
it helps to salvage the mostly depressing nature of this release.

Given his future, the album cover is chilling. It portrays a
tombstone with his name on it and while it was not meant to be about
his own death, the connection is obvious. He only produced one more
album of original material and would be dead within seven years. "My
life has been a death to me" are lyrics from the song "My Life,"
which is the last track on side one of the original vinyl release and
they are like a door closing which can never be re-opened.

"Pretty Smart On My Part," which leads off the album show the musical
direction that Ochs was traveling and is the highlight of the
release. His creative juices remain intact as he sings from the point
of view of a right-wing activist who plans to kill the president
among other things. The lyrics would become a part of his ongoing FBI
file. The song would have a rockish feel in spite of the sparse
arrangement. The bluntness of "I Kill Therefore I Am" is also made
palatable by the fusion of folk lyrics and rock music.

Things begin to deteriorate on the second side of the album. "The
World Began In Eden and Ended In Los Angeles" and "Doesn't Lenny Live
Here Anymore?" are a combined nine minutes of heartbreak, despair,
lack of hope, and depression. Except for "Where Were You In Chicago?"
the famous Ochs humor is mostly lacking and it is sorely missed as it
made his unyielding message accessible and palatable both to his
listeners and to himself.

Rehearsals For Retirement find Ochs poetry and ability to present a
message intact. It was his loss of faith that makes the album a
difficult listen. It remains an interesting re-action by Ochs as he
rants against the society and events beyond his control in the late
sixties. It is an album not for the weak at heart.

--------

Music Review: Phil Ochs - Pleasures Of The Harbor

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2009/02/17/080021.php

Written by David Bowling
Published February 17, 2009

In March of 1966 Phil Ochs released his In Concert album. It has
become a classic folk and protest recording. At the time it made him
a leading voice of the anti-establishment movement in the United
States. It was also his most commercially successful release as it
reached the Billboard National charts at number 150. All of this
added up to the Electra label dropping him from their roster of artists.

He quickly signed with A&M and in late October of 1967 released
Pleasures Of The Harbor. This was a different sounding Phil Ochs as
he strayed from a traditional folk presentation by adding strings and
piano while incorporating elements of jazz and classical music. It
was not the commercial breakout that he hoped for at the time but it
was as an interesting fusion of musical styles on his part and today
remains one of his most listenable efforts.

"Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends" would become one of his
signature songs. Apathy, murder, and parody are all present but they
are combined with a musical styling that runs counterpoint to the
message. "The Party" has a similar intent as it criticizes the upper
class but the song is played as if in a lounge and Ochs vocal is dead on.

"The Crucifixion" remains one of the most ambitious compositions of
his career. It traces assassination from Christ to Kennedy. There is
a beauty to the lyrics and music. If you want to hear a stripped down
and superior version of the song just check our There and Now: Live
In Vancouver where Ochs just accompanies himself on an acoustic guitar.

Several of the other songs are well constructed and contain superior
lyrics, but suffer from overproduction. "Pleasures Of The Harbor" is
a gentle song of searching by sailors who traveled from port to port.
"Flower Lady" is about being invisible to people as they pass by.

Pleasures Of The Harbor is the most modern sounding album that Phil
Ochs would produce. It also contains some of his most thoughtful and
beautiful lyrics and, in many ways, is more personal than political.
It is not the place to introduce yourself to his music but it is a
nice stop along his musical journey of life.

--------

Music Review: Phil Ochs - Phil Ochs In Concert

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2009/02/16/143212.php

Written by David Bowling
Published February 16, 2009

In Concert was the first album by Phil Ochs that I remember
purchasing as a teenager. Little did I realize at the time that a
number of tracks had been re-created in the studio due to the
defective taping of the concerts that were supposed to be used for
this release. Just how many tracks were recorded in the studio
remains open to question decades later. Nevertheless the album has a
live feel to it and his comments between songs are almost worth the
price of admission on their own. "John Wayne Plays Lyndon Johnson.
And Lyndon Johnson Plays God. I Play Bobby Dylan. A young Bobby
Dylan." And so it goes.

Despite the problems and questions, in many ways In Concert remains
his defining album. His passion and commitment to the protest
movement are self evident. Combined with his acoustic guitar
virtuosity and soaring vocals, it all adds up to one of the best folk
albums of the 1960's.

Bob Dylan's influence can be felt on some of the tracks. "Ringing Of
Revolution" is a call to the faithful and remains an anthem of the
protest movement. "(The Marines Have Landed On The Shores Of) Santa
Domingo" finds Ochs branching out into the narrative form of song.

Most of the tracks find him doing what he does best. "Bracero" is his
criticism of the wages and working conditions of immigrants. It can
only be imagined what he would think about this issue today. "Love
Me, I'm A Liberal" is another of his amusing but scathing attack
songs. "Canons Of Christianity" criticizes the hypocrisy of the
church. "There But For Fortune," which was a hit for Joan Baez, is a
song about comparisons and fate.

The oddest and most poignant composition on the album is "Changes,"
which is a straight love song and is a rare occasion of Ochs showing
a side of him removed from his political agenda. Given his body of
work it remains a gentle look into his personal life.

The final track on the original album, "When I'm Gone," could have
been used on his tombstone. It is a call for activism and a chilling
look into his personal future.

Given the state of the world today, Phil Ochs In Concert is worth a
listen as it deals with topics that are still relevant. It not only
remains one of the best statements of protest to emerge from the
sixties but shows an artist trying to make a difference while
creating some good music along the way which remains a rare combination.

.

Alan Colmes Highlights Bill Ayers Exclusive

Alan Colmes Highlights Bill Ayers Exclusive

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,499324,00.html

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," February 23, 2009. This
copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM AYERS, FORMER WEATHER UNDERGROUND LEADER: I don't regret
anything I did to oppose the war. Anything I did to oppose the war.
Don't regret.

ALAN COLMES, HOST OF "THE ALAN COLMES SHOW": You wouldn't regret
setting bomb at a police station or setting a bomb at the Pentagon or
the capital?

AYERS: You know I don't look back on those things and regret them,
but I'm willing to rethink it. And here's the way in which I'm
willing to rethink it. Let's have ­ you host this. We'll have a big auditorium.

COLMES: Sure.

AYERS: And we'll bring into the auditorium, you, because you're old
enough to have known, we'll bring you in, we'll bring me in, we'll
bring John Kerry, Bob Kerry, John McCain, McNamara.

COLMES: You'll get them all to show up?

AYERS: And we'll all show up, and then we'll all say what we did, and
we'll take responsibility for it, and in that context when you weigh
what I did against what Kissinger did, that's where we could have an
honest conversation.

COLMES: Is Kissinger a terrorist?

AYERS: He conducted a war in terror in Vietnam without a doubt.

COLMES: You're certainly known notorious in some circles for your
antiwar work years ago and here Obama just announced 17,000 troops
into Afghanistan. Does that upset you?

AYERS: It's a mistake. It's a colossal mistake, and you know, we've
seen this happen before, Alan. We've seen a hopeful presidency,
Lyndon Johnson's presidency, burn up in the furnace of war. I fear
that this brilliant young man, this hopeful new administration could
easily burn their prospects of a great presidency in the war in
Afghanistan or elsewhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: That was Bill Ayers talking with Alan Colmes
about his role in the 1970s antiwar movement in which he participated
in the bombings of, the U.S. capital, the Pentagon, New York City
police headquarters.

And here to tell us more about his exclusive interview with Mr.
Ayers, is my friend, former co-host ­ do you miss me?

COLMES: You are?

(LAUGHTER)

• Video: Watch Sean's interview with Alan Colmes

HANNITY: How are you ­ you know people say did you really give Alan that watch?

COLMES: Yes.

HANNITY: You don't even wear it.

COLMES: Well, on special occasions.

(CROSSTALK)

COLMES: This should qualify, shouldn't it? Thanks for having me back.
I appreciate it.

HANNITY: Listen, it's great ­ and by the way, congrats ­ Alan is
working on a lot of great things. And congratulations.

COLMES: In is one of them. I mean I'm able to bring you Bill Ayers. I
couldn't have done that when I was your co-host probably. But you know ­ yes.

HANNITY: Let me ­ first of all, what were your initial impressions?
Because you and I argued about this a lot.

COLMES: I told him he's one of the nicest terrorists I've ever met.
He really is a very likeable guy. Well, he ­ we did the whole thing
about, you know, these are obviously clips. We have an arc to the
interview where I started off by saying, first of all, thanks for
palling around with me, I guess I'll never be president, and he said
no, actually, that works pretty well because Obama did become president.

HANNITY: Right.

COLMES: And we talked about the 17,000 troops for example. It's clear
he is not an advocate of Obama's policies.

HANNITY: All right.

COLMES: The attempt to tie him to what Obama believes, and he's far
to the left of Barack Obama.

HANNITY: I'm more interested in he's still unrepentant, Alan. I don't
regret ­ you went into the issue and his justification, nobody was
killed, but he bombed the Pentagon and the capital.

COLMES: We've been through all that. Yes.

HANNITY: But here's the point. He still denies ­ there were people
that were injured at the New York City police headquarter building,
there were ­ his fellow terrorists were killed and people could have died.

COLMES: People did not die in the events he says in which he was
personally involved. And it's interesting to talk to him because when
you talk to him ­ we got into this in the interview as well. We'll
play the whole thing at some point on the channel, but he ­ there is
a ­ I know this sounds crazy to you.

HANNITY: Yes.

COLMES: But there is a moral code to how he went about doing what he
did. And when he says we didn't do enough to end the war, he doesn't
mean we didn't set enough bombs. What he means is none of the antiwar
activists during Vietnam ended the war because the war continued in
spite of what they did.

HANNITY: Wait, you said he doesn't mean we didn't set enough bombs.

COLMES: That's not what he was saying.

HANNITY: His quote is ­ I don't regret setting bombs.

COLMES: No.

HANNITY: I don't.

COLMES: What he said ­ he did. He said I don't regret anything I did
in an attempt to end the war, but he denies he did anything that
caused anybody physical harm, that they bombed property, and we're
very careful not to bomb or hurt people.

HANNITY: All right. Let's show a little bit more...

COLMES: I'm not defending what he did. I'm telling you, though, what
his story is.

HANNITY: I want people to be clear. You are not defending his actions.

COLMES: I am...

HANNITY: You don't agree with his actions. You've said that before.

COLMES: No, but I want to put it in proper perspective. And that's
what he said.

HANNITY: But you don't agree with anything that he did.

COLMES: Well, I'm not ­ I'm a nonviolent person. I wouldn't have ­ I
would never set bombs or something I would never approve of. I would
denounce that.

HANNITY: Does that make me, you know, more of my views.

COLMES: Apparently, it didn't work, did it?

HANNITY: All right. Well, let me ­ let's go to SOT two here. You
asked him a quote that I had brought up often in the debate.

COLMES: Yes. Right.

HANNITY: You know, kill all the rich people, break up their cars and
apartments, and kill your parents, and here's his flimsy answer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLMES: When you said at one point your philosophy was kill all the
rich people, break up their cars and apartments, bring the revolution
home, kill your parents, that's where it's at, was that a metaphor?

AYERS: Of course. It was a joke and it was an extreme statement by a
20-year-old, and it was kidding, and of course, it was taken even
that way at the time. If you read "Fugitive Days" you'll see, not a
manifesto, and not a history and not a ­ even an autobiography. What
you'll see is a memoir, a literary memoir, I hope, of somebody ­ a
kid like me finding himself in a place like this. But it's not a
defense, but it does try to capture some of that irreverent kind of
off-the-track lunacy.

COLMES: You never meant kill the parents. Kill the rich people.

AYERS: Absolutely not.

COLMES: People are going to take it that way.

AYERS: I don't think so.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: You know, where am I missing the joke about killing your
parents, killing rich people.

COLMES: Well, when he was young and irresponsible, he said things
that were young and irresponsible.

HANNITY: But he said it was a joke.

COLMES: He said it was a joke, he was speaking metaphorically. It was
­ he didn't mean literally go kill your parents. He had a close
relationship with his own parents, you know, for whom he worked as
caretakers the last years of their lives.

HANNITY: We're friends. You used to be.

COLMES: It wasn't about killing his parents.

HANNITY: You used to be a standup comic. Do you find anything funny
in that statement?

COLMES: No, there's nothing funny about it. But again, you've got to
go back to the time. You got to go back to the ­ what was happening
during Vietnam. You can't take those kinds of things literally. You
don't think he truly meant.

HANNITY: No...

COLMES: ... go kill your parents.

HANNITY: I'm listening to your interview and he says it was a joke. I
don't think there's anything funny about killing your parents or killing.

COLMES: I think he was talking in metaphor. He was a 20-year-old. Did
you ever say anything when you were stupid when you were 20 years
old? He said it was stupid.

HANNITY: Not kill my parents. Not kill the rich people.

COLMES: He also said we got into the ­ you know, that book "Prairie
Fire" which was his manifesto.

HANNITY: Well, I got that.

COLMES: OK, you want to play it?

HANNITY: This is the one that he actually dedicated a page...

COLMES: And we got into that.

HANNITY: We actually ­ you remember I picked this up and one night
you said to me where did you get that?

COLMES: I brought it to him. I was going to have him sign it for you
but I figured you'd put it on eBay.

HANNITY: All right. All right. But ­ he dedicates the book to Sirhan
Sirhan. Those who may not know...

COLMES: Among others. Yes.

HANNITY: Among others, that's true.

COLMES: Yes.

HANNITY: Who was responsible for the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLMES: You dedicate this to a number of people including Sirhan Sirhan.

AYERS: Well, that's not exactly right. But if you take a look at it.

COLMES: Well, it does say ­ yes, you'll see, well, it's got some
notes in it, but you'll see Sirhan Sirhan.

AYERS: Yes.

COLMES: ... in the dedication page right there.

AYERS: To all prisoners in the U.S., and if I were writing it today,
I'd have two million names on it.

COLMES: Right.

AYERS: And that is because at that time I felt very strongly that the
prisons were being used as a terrible instrument of social control,
and today it's worse. 2.1 million of our fellow citizens are in
prison. That's a huge waste of talent, money, energy, humanity. We
should close them.

COLMES: Are you saying there are no people who deserve to be in prison?

AYERS: It's not a question of deserving to be in prison. What we need
to do is focus on drug rehabilitation, treatment, psychological
counseling, all kinds of things as alternatives to prison. Half of
the people in prison are in prison for nonviolent crimes. The drug
war has been a colossal mistake.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: How did you feel about that answer?

COLMES: But I want to be clear. He went on to say that was stupid. We
don't see that on the clip. He said ­ I said after that, but Sirhan
Sirhan? He said yes, that was stupid.

HANNITY: But let me ask you this. You're a fan of Robert Kennedy because I...

COLMES: Yes, of course. But again, it's a ­ he was a stupid 20-
year-old kid who did some ­ he wasn't stupid overall, but he did some
stupid things which he acknowledged in this interview, including
dedicating that book to Sirhan Sirhan.

HANNITY: You sound like you're making excuses for him.

COLMES: No, I'm putting in context what he said. You didn't see the
part where he said, it was stupid that I did that.

HANNITY: All right, well, listen, thanks for bringing ­ I view him,
Alan, as an unrepentant terrorist who think ­ who as a professor
thinks he's come up with these clever and intellectual arguments that
aren't so clever. And I think what he did was evil and he ought to repent.

COLMES: Well, I know what you think because I sat next to you for a few years.

HANNITY: Yes, I know. Thanks for coming. Congratulations.

COLMES: You look good like you don't have a (INAUDIBLE) to deal with
on a nightly basis.

HANNITY: You abandoned me. What are you talking...

COLMES: You poor ­ I feel bad. Thanks for having me back.

HANNITY: Congratulations.

COLMES: Thanks very much.

HANNITY: Really appreciate it. Thanks, Alan.

.

Made in U.S.A [Jean-Luc Godard]

Made in U.S.A

http://www.citypaper.com/film/review.asp?rid=14494

2/25/2009
By Bret McCabe

The stylized tics of pulpy mid-century American genre flicks seeped
into the cinematic language of Jean-Luc Godard from the very
beginning. So it's with a blithe dash of anarchic whimsy that the
French filmmaker's ostensible attempt to make an American crime flick
feels more like a weedy bloom of absurdist French theater. The
little-seen 1966 Made in U.S.A.--which didn't get an American
distribution when originally released, only hitting American theaters
now in a restored 35-mm print thanks to Rialto Pictures--is based on
a novel from sci-fi and crime workhorse Donald E. Westlake (penned
under his Richard Stark pseudonym, the same nom de plume that churned
out 1962's The Hunter, which inspired John Boorman's 1967 Point
Blank). It's dedicated to "Nick" (Nicholas Ray) and "Sam" (Samuel
Fuller), has characters named Richard Widmark, David Goodis, Donald
Siegel, and Inspector Aldrich (as in, presumably, Robert), and takes
place in Atlantic City. A femme fatale is harangued by shadowy men in
suits. A gun seen in the first act will more than likely go off by
the third. And police detectives have square chins and expressionless
mugs. Crime movie fans know these conventions.

That this Atlantic City, France, looks a great deal like a Parisian
exurb is the first in an endless stream of flourishes that twists
this crime caper into a surreal world. Paula Nelson (Anna Karina,
credited, as is the entire cast and crew, by her initials) wakes up
in an Atlantic City hotel room and knows she's being tailed by two
men, Richard Widmark (László Szabó) and Donald Siegel (Jean-Pierre
Léaud). She's come to find out if her lover, Richard ________ (every
time his name is mentioned in the movie, a burst of
soundtrack/background noise blocks it out; he's voiced by Godard
himself on a series of increasingly politically radical taped
recordings) was murdered.

That's about as straightforward as the movie gets. Dialog
occasionally dwindles into self-reflexive linguistic discussions.
Cinematographer Raoul Coutard's camera frames people as if in print
advertisements and circles an entire room just because it can. And,
apropos of nothing, Marianne Faithfull shows up in a bar to sing the
Rolling Stones' "As Tears Go By" a cappella. By the time characters
named Richard Nixon and Robert MacNamara pop up, all semblance of a
crime picture have been jettisoned for something far more daft.

Whether or not it completely works isn't that important. The movie
begins with Paula waking up and ends with her falling asleep; in
between is a bizarre dream world, one French artist's love/hate
response to the cultural hegemony America exported via its wars, pop
culture, and entertainments in the 1960s.

.

Event aims to improve understanding of Malcolm X

[2 items]

FMO event aims to improve understanding of Malcolm X

http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com/media/storage/paper853/news/2009/02/23/Campus/Fmo-Event.Aims.To.Improve.Understanding.Of.Malcolm.X-3642858.shtml

Nathalie Tadena
Issue date: 2/23/09

For Weinberg sophomore Janissia Orgill, class discussions about
influential black leaders often ignore one of her role models ­- Malcolm X.

Orgill and nearly 65 students gathered at the Black House to
celebrate the civil rights leader's life and work on Saturday for
"The Legacy of Malcolm X," an all-day event that included panel
discussions, poetry readings and a showing of Spike Lee's movie "Malcolm X."

"Malcolm X may never be fully appreciated until he becomes a standard
in curriculum," said Orgill, the main coordinator of the event.
"Behind Malcolm X comes a complex ideology that hasn't been touched."

Orgill is the first chair of the Political Action Committee, a new
committee created by For Members Only this year as an outlet for
black students to become more politically vocal.

She said the event, which was also co-sponsored by the
Muslim-cultural Students Association and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority,
Inc., helped "unite two communities that should have been united a
long time ago."

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was best known for his leadership
during the black nationalism movement in the 1960s and his
controversial remarks about race relations. Little became a member of
the Nation of Islam but later left to become a Sunni Muslim.

Usman Mian, McSA's external relations vice president, said Malcolm X
is significant to both the minority and Muslim communities.

"He is a transnational and global leader and meant so much for so
many different people," the Weinberg senior said. "He gets the same
respect from Americans here as he does from Muslims overseas - they
all look to him as a global freedom fighter."

During panel discussions, students and professors shared how their
personal and religious views were impacted by Malcolm X and also
spoke of the negative and violent perceptions often associated with
the leader.

"Comparatively, there's not enough discussion about Malcolm X and not
in the right way per se," said Lisa Calvente, professor of
African-American studies and a participant in one of the panel
discussions. "It is our responsibility as faculty to make visible
things in history and politics that are otherwise invisible and focus
on the ideas as to why and how they become invisible."

Members of the Political Action Committee had considered holding the
event on the anniversary of Malcolm X's birthday but chose to
celebrate it on Feb. 21, the anniversary of his assassination, which
fell during Black History Month.

"It might be easier for people to accept the event if it was a part
of Black History Month," Orgill said. "But we also wanted to add the
impact of the fact that he was assassinated on this day and he was
not just a leader, but also a political figure who died for his
political beliefs."

Organizers said they hoped the discussions fueled a deeper
understanding of Malcolm X's work and that the celebration becomes an
annual event in the future.

"It's always great to have discussions on a topic that so many people
are passionate about," Orgill said. "The day was less about holding a
vigil for him but about using the day he was assassinated as a reason
to propel each other toward greater social responsibilities."
--

ntadena@u.northwestern.edu

--------

World Marks Anniversary of Assassination of Malcolm X

http://www.periodico26.cu/english/history/jan2009/malcomx022109.html

Havana, Feb 21, (RHC).- The world is marking another anniversary of
the assassination of Malcolm X - a revolutionary fighter for the
rights of African-Americans and promoter of radical social change. On
February 21, 1965 - 44 years ago - Malcolm X was gunned down while
giving a speech in New York City.

Converting to the Muslim religion while serving time in prison,
Malcolm X became a prominent minister in the Nation of Islam and a
strong advocate for revolutionary change. In 1964, he announced that
he would organize a Black nationalist organization that would try to
"heighten the political consciousness" of African-Americans.

On February 21, 1965, in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X
began to speak to a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American
Unity when a disturbance broke out in the crowd. As Malcolm and his
bodyguards moved to quiet the disturbance, a man rushed forward and
shot Malcolm X in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. Two other men
charged the stage and fired handguns, hitting him 16 times. Angry
onlookers caught and beat one of the assassins as the others fled the
ballroom. Malcolm X was pronounced dead shortly after he arrived at
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

The number of mourners who came to the public viewing in Harlem's
Unity Funeral Home from February 23rd through February 26th was
estimated to be in the tens of thousands. The funeral of Malcolm X
was held on February 27, 1965 in Harlem. The church was filled to
capacity and loudspeakers were set up outside so the overflow crowd
could listen and a local television station broadcast the funeral live.

In the late 1960s, as Black activists became more radical, Malcolm X
and his teachings were part of the foundation on which they built
their movements. The Black Power movement, the Black Arts
Movement,and the widespread adoption of the slogan "Black is
Beautiful" can all trace their roots to Malcolm X.

.

Denmark’s hippie haven faces shutdown

[2 articles]

Denmark's hippie haven faces shutdown

http://features.csmonitor.com/backstory/2009/02/17/denmarks-hippie-haven-faces-shutdown/

Also, at:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/AroundTheWorld/story?id=6923955&page=1

Christiania has flown its own flag for decades now, but the Danish
government and real estate interests say, Enough!

By Patti McCracken
February 17, 2009

COPENHAGEN, Denmark

The whole thing started with a hole in a fence around an abandoned
military barracks in central Copenhagen.

Parents in the neighborhood tugged at the hole to widen it. Soon it
was big enough for their little kids to scramble through to play in
the grassy open spaces within.

Not long after, squatters cut a large patch out of the fence and
commandeered the whole barracks for their own use. They named the
area "Christiania," stuck out a flag, and declared themselves free
from the rule of Danish law. Nearly four decades later, the flag is
still flying.

This derelict army depot's run as a makeshift playground was short.
But it has had a long and often troubled run as a refuge for
Copenhagen's fringe society. And now the Danish government, which has
been listing right in recent years, has given up on clemency for the
collective. It appears determined to finally dissolve the
self-governing community of nearly 1,000 in what it calls "normalization."

But Christiania took a preemptive strike late last year and filed a
couple of lawsuits, which are now being heard by Denmark's Eastern
High Court. Decisions are expected at the end of this month.

The first suit cites as precedent a 1973 agreement that briefly
allowed the commune to exist as a "social experiment." The second is,
in essence, a class-action suit filed by the residents, claiming a
right to live on the site without eviction, because they have now
possessed it into the third generation.

In October, police evicted residents from a house on the rim of the
commune, setting off a six-hour showdown.

Christianites lobbed beer bottles and Molotov cocktails at police,
and were answered with sprays of tear gas. Danes caution that if the
court rules against Christiania in either case, more widespread
rioting is a given.

The situation is more farce than tragedy, but Denmark is once again
the stage for a pondering first posed 400 years ago by Hamlet: To be
or not to be.

For Danes, the question is a fiery one, igniting on one side deeply
held principles about freedom, nonconformity, and tolerance. A great
number of Danes look to Christiania as the alter ego of the nation,
and its right to exist is robustly defended. "In Denmark, everything
is occupied and controlled. There's not much space left in the
cities, but Christiania is a kind of asylum. People feel more freer
there than in the rest of the society," says Rene Elley Karpantschof,
a sociologist at the University of Copenhagen. But those opposed are
fed up with the deeply rooted drug use, the land occupation, and the
snubbing of laws. "It has been made a haven for criminals from
neighboring countries, like Sweden or Norway," says Jesper Nielsen, a
cultural historian at Denmark's National Museum. "So you could say
they accept a criminal form of control within Christiania, but they
resist control from without."

Christiania, which takes its name from the Christhavn district in
which it sits, began as a protest against the lack of affordable
housing. The far left grandly championed the squatters. "Christiania
is the land of settlers. It is so far the biggest opportunity to
build up a society from scratch," wrote well-known counterculture
activist and journalist Jacob Ludvigsen as the squatters set up.
Dilapidated army barracks were transformed into houses, and
warehouses were outfitted with printing presses. Kindergartens were
created, more houses built, stores and clinics opened, and a local
post office was opened. No one paid utilities, rent, or taxes. Money
was doled out equally, and smoking hash was as common as blinking.
The "Freetown of Christiania" designed its own postage stamp, its own
constitution, and its own flag. It had its own currency. It was known
for its freewheeling lifestyle and funky, brightly painted houses.

Eventually, Christiania agreed to pay for utilities and a nominal tax
per house. But the area, centrally located and with a pristine
waterfront, has long been eyed by developers.

"When I first came here, I was Red. I was for a revolution," says
Hjordis Oppedal, an artist who moved to Christiania in 1976 and
maintains a studio there. "At first I didn't like the drug users
here, the addicts. But I realized all people have rights and I
learned to keep an open mind." Yet the hard drug use spiraled out of
control, and an underworld of dealers swooped in to tap the growing
market. What began as an anticapitalist utopia became a battleground
of drug lords fighting for real estate. Police began regular raids on
the drug-laden kiosks along Pusher Street, the commune's main street.

Concerned that history was about to be swept away, the National
Museum snatched up one of the infamous kiosks and put it on permanent
display. Residents say the days of hard drugs are over, but they keep
a lid on exposure and strictly forbid photos and videos. As one young
Christianite mother, holding the hand of her blond toddler, explained
recently, "There are drugs here, and we don't want the police coming
around." The stalls remain, but police still sweep through. "Many
people are ready to fight for Christiania," says Dr. Karpantschof.
"If the state wants to continue to try to destroy it bit by bit,
there will be a whole lot of unrest."

But the flag of tolerance doesn't wave freely. Living space is at a
premium inside the commune, so it is officially closed to new
residents. Tolerance is relative and random within the Freetown of
Christiania. Musician and artist Denis Agerblad was invited to take
over the downstairs of a house for use as a studio. But soon he found
he had to contend with three teenage squatters.

"It just happened one day that we had people pushing on the other
side of the door, trying to get in," says Mr. Agerblad. "They were
actually drilling and eventually got in. As far as I know, they're
still living there." Parents in Christiana "will do anything" to get
living space there for their grown children, he adds.

Christiania was born under a hopeful light at a time when Denmark was
darkened by social problems. The commune held out the ideal that
there was the possibility of another possibility. But its revolution
is complete. Today's Denmark is among the wealthiest, safest, most
liberal, most socially articulate of nations. Two recent surveys have
ranked Danes as the happiest people in the world (one by
Stockholm-based World Values Survey, another by University of
Leicester in England). The nation's evolution leaves the Freetown of
Christiania chained to the past. A museum piece.

-------

Police crackdown pushes drug deals into public eye

http://www.cphpost.dk/news/crime/44811-police-crackdown-pushes-drug-deals-into-public-eye.html

Wednesday, 18 February 2009

With the closing of Christiania's open-air drug market, dealers have
moved out into the city, and often into plain sight

Drug dealing in Copenhagen has become much more visible since
Copenhagen police closed down the open-air drug market at Christiania
in 2004, according to police.

Since the market – known primarily for selling hashish and other
cannabis products – was closed, police have made a concerted effort
stamp out drug dealing entirely in the squatter colony. They now
maintain a regular presence on the former 'Pusher Street' and
frequently conduct searches and make arrests.

But instead of ending the drug trade, dealers have been spread
throughout the city and now openly make deals in busy areas such as
Israel Plads Square in the downtown area, Lituaens Plads Square in
the Vesterbro district and Jægersborggade Street in the Nørrebro district.

'It's true that drug dealing has become more visible and in turn more
unpleasant for residents who can now see the sales taking place,'
said Copenhagen Police Chief Hanne Bech Hansen.

Many also believe the Christiania raids have also changed hash's
image from a part of Christiania's hippie culture to being at the
centre of recent gang violence.

'The gang war is about securing the income that result from the hash
sales,' said Michael Hviid Jacobsen, a sociologist at Aalborg
Unniversity. 'Many of the immigrant gangs are a direct result of the
decision to clean up Pusher Street because it opened the possibility
of getting into the hash market.'

Hansen said that while some drug dealers sprouted up in the wake of
the Christiania raids, the gang war has several causes.

'It's a complicated conflict that's partly about drugs but also about
power, women and revenge.'

.

Lessons from 1969

Lessons from 1969

http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2009/02/18/Opinion/Emerson.Brooking.Lessons.From.1969-3635066.shtml

Nearly 40 years ago, a small band of students stormed College Hall -
and left us a legacy

2/18/09
Emerson Brooking

Forty years ago next week, a determined group of students filed into
College Hall with sleeping bags under their arms and no intention of
leaving. These students' actions sparked a six-day demonstration that
would grow to involve nearly 1,000 people, encapsulating the
counterculture movement of the late 1960s and marking arguably the
most successful student protest in our University's history.

Today, the generational frustrations and struggles of the Vietnam era
have faded. Nationally our demographic recently played a critical
role in elevating a new administration - and a fresh perspective - to
the White House. On campus, Penn students enjoy a cordial
relationship with University administrators. Beyond occasional
episodes like the divestment effort, few issues have garnered the
passion to throw students and administrators into serious contention.

While much has changed in the intervening years, the significance of
the College Hall sit-in has only grown. Particularly because our
generation has chosen to affect change through elections and
committees instead of rallies and sit-ins, it's important to
understand where we used to be - and how far we've come.

My father was an active participant in the takeover of College Hall.
As he remembers it, students were divided in their reasons for
staging the protest but united in their desire to stay. Some were
objecting to Penn's involvement in biological-weapons research, while
others were condemning the broader Vietnam War. Everyone was outraged
by the University's aggressive policy of westward expansion, through
which blocks of low-income housing were scooped up, effectively
kicking residents to the curb.

Those who joined the protest did so at much greater risk than a
disciplinary slap on the wrist or a hit to their GPA. They risked the
loss of their student deferments, the lifeline of any male college
student. Without it, eligible males would be drafted almost
immediately into the Vietnam War - a conflict that had already killed
tens of thousands of American servicemen. According to my father,
"This fact makes the action we took in College Hall a lot more
remarkable. We had a lot to lose if we were expelled from the
University, including our lives."

Protestors also faced the very real possibility of injury or arrest.
A racially charged 1968 demonstration at Columbia University had
ended with tragedy as 150 students were injured and more than 700
were arrested. My father remembers the fear and anxiety shared among
the College Hall protestors when word arrived that Frank Rizzo,
Philadelphia's infamously violent chief of police, had assembled a
team of storm troopers to "bust heads" and clear the building.

Nevertheless, as the days passed, more and more people pushed their
way into College Hall to join the protestors. At its height, the
sit-in encompassed nearly 1,000 participants, including Penn, Temple
and Drexel students, and a number of West Philadelphia community
leaders. For the first time since the disagreements began, Penn
administrators agreed to meetings with the protestors' elected representatives.

Finally, six days after the first students had laid claim to College
Hall, the students and administrators reached a settlement. The
University acceded to nearly every one of the protestors' demands,
including a committee to exercise veto power over all future
expansion efforts, a $10 million grant toward the construction of
alternate housing for displaced West Philadelphia residents and a
stipulation prohibiting scientific research of a destructive nature.
All told, the protest was a success.

The College Hall incident marks an unreal chapter from a radically
different era. Today, there is no draft or Vietnam War. Penn no
longer menaces West Philadelphia with the threat of sudden eviction,
and the counterculture of the 1960s has been supplanted by the belief
that working through the system - not against it - is the best way to
effect lasting change. After all, it's worth remembering that today's
infrastructure of student committees and administrative liaisons
exerts an impressive impact on the course of University decision-making.

However, it's worth remembering that one of the most important policy
shifts in Penn's history was brought about not by an endless stream
of meetings or petitions, but by sleeping bags. While such drastic
action has gradually fallen out of use, it's important to recognize
that the College Hall sit-in accomplished more in six days than
decorous procedure often does in years.
--

Emerson Brooking is a College sophomore from Turnerville, Ga.
Southern Comfort appears on alternating Wednesdays. His email address
is brooking@dailypennsylvanian.com.

.

From Riot Hyatt to Andaz West Hollywood on Sunset Strip

From Riot Hyatt to Andaz West Hollywood on Sunset Strip

http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-tr-andaz22-2009feb22

The newly remodeled luxury hotel embraces its rock star past while
boasting updated, sophisticated touches.

By Beverly Beyette
February 17, 2009

Four floors below me, a double-deck red tour bus paused, the driver
almost certainly regaling passengers with tales of wild times at this
hotel when it was the Hyatt Continental or, popularly, the Riot Hotel.

Sipping my coffee and taking in the Sunset Strip scene from the
floor-to-ceiling windows of my room, I focused suddenly on some small
orange lettering on one glass panel: "Come on baby, light my fire.
Try to set the night on fire." The Doors, 1967.

This storied 257-room hotel -- until recently known as the Hyatt West
Hollywood -- reopened Jan. 8 as Andaz West Hollywood after a
$48-million makeover. Andaz doesn't hide its headline-making '60s and
'70s rock 'n' roll heritage under a blanket of respectability; it flaunts it.

The balconies -- from which, lore has it, Rolling Stone Keith
Richards and the Who's Keith Moon once hurled TVs -- are gone, but
that has more to do with changing tastes than some fear that a guest
might push a flat-screen over a railing.

"The balconies really weren't being used," said Hal Goldstein, a
partner in Janson Goldstein, the New York architectural and design
firm that reimagined the hotel into Andaz, from a Hindi word for
"personal service." "We made every one of those rooms into junior
suites" by enclosing them.

It works well, creating a feeling of spaciousness and a cozy,
well-lighted area for reading, eating, soaking in city views or
watching a small wall-mounted flat-screen.

I booked a Saturday night stay using the hotel's website, which
offered the best rate -- $265.50 for a king room with AAA discount.
At the entrance I was greeted by my "host," Dean, who showed me to a
chair in the lounge (a.k.a. the lobby) and offered me a complimentary
glass of wine. He then produced a nifty little hand-held computer
that not only contained my booking information but also allowed him
to swipe my credit card and code my room keys. "Our front desk," Dean
said. I was upgraded to a city-view room, presumably because of my
Hyatt Gold Passport membership.

My room was large, sleek and well-arranged, with recessed lighting
over the bed and a generous, well-lighted desk. The walls and
carpeting were gray, and the only decoration was a fanciful white-cut
graphic of a flower on one wall because, in these rooms, the views
are the pictures. The platform bed had a comfortable pillow top and
the requisite white duvet.

The good: linens by Frette, complimentary snacks and nonalcoholic
beverages from the minibar, 24-hour room service. (My morning coffee
-- $7.66, including tax and tip -- arrived on the dot, in a four-cup
carafe and with a French porcelain cup and saucer.) There were two
flat-screen TVs, Wi-Fi and an iPod clock radio. The bad: no coffee
maker, no safe, no robes.

The building dates from 1963, and the bathrooms -- small, with a
single sink -- betray its age. My stall shower was partly enclosed
with a fixed glass half-door that did a so-so job of keeping water
off the floor. I did love the Red Flower soap, a little ball that
looked like a crab apple on a white dish. But another hook or towel
rack would have been useful.

Downstairs, the lounge (lobby), with its black leather sofas and
bejeweled and feathered pillows, invites guests to linger. Here and
throughout the hotel there are Hollywood-themed books for guests to
read. The idea: This is more living room than a lobby. One wall is a
huge, colorful photograph under glass, sort of psychedelic and open
to interpretation. A carpet of pink, berry and gold defines the
lounge space and contrasts with the dark oak floor.

The old bar-restaurant area, which was dark and red, has been
replaced by an inviting light-filled bar with views of the passing
parade on Sunset. A wall of polished stainless steel tiles behind the
bar reflects the light. The adjacent restaurant, RH (as in Riot Hotel
or Riot Hyatt), is four spaces, really, all flowing together: the
main room, kitchen, an area with two large marble communal tables and
-- my favorite -- the Wine Gallery, where an entire wall is a wine
rack holding up to 400 bottles of California wines. This space has
three desirable tables, tucked away behind a gauzy curtain.

RH is OK, not haute cuisine, and on a Saturday night it was fully
booked, young and noisy. The emphasis is on organic and locally
produced food, and guests customize their meals by choosing from a
market list of mains ($18 to $23), sides, condiments and sauces. It's
like in a dining car on a train, with little dots on the menu to
pencil in. I had a nicely cooked hanger steak with chile-lime
chutney, baby spinach and some gluey mashed potatoes.

The Andaz, at Sunset and King's Road, is across from the House of
Blues and next door to the Comedy Store. It's an easy walk to the
shops and cafes at Sunset Plaza. You can't miss the building, which
is fronted by an 11-foot-tall sculpture, titled "The Departure," by
former Angeleno Jacob Hashimoto. It's composed of 700 hand-painted
pieces strung on little steel cables.

The Strip is noisy, but the hotel's new sound-reducing windows do a
good job, as does a heavy curtain that can be drawn to divide the
former balcony area from the bedroom. The most noise I heard was from
slamming doors. New plush carpets in the hallways also absorb sound,
but are not ideal for zooming around on a motorcycle, as one rocker
is alleged to have done back in the day.

The rooftop pool on the 14th floor has amazing views -- the city and
the Strip on one side, the Hollywood Hills on the other. It's been
spruced up with big round pots of succulents, a Bose sound system and
new furniture, including four canopied daybeds for two. At mezzanine
level, there's a 24-hour (unstaffed) fitness center.

Goldstein stayed in a mock-up room at the Andaz on 30 visits to Los
Angeles during the renovation, wanting to feel a connection to the
property and the neighborhood. In the Hollywood Hills, he saw "a real
sophistication," while the Sunset Strip vibe was "really sexy." Andaz
is a bit of each.
--

Andaz West Hollywood
8401 W. Sunset Blvd.
(323) 656-1234
www.westhollywood.andaz.com
Brochure rates begin at $295.

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Shop laws hit hippie 'dope tourists'

Shop laws hit hippie 'dope tourists'

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25083376-5013605,00.html

February 21, 2009

Counterculture tourists hoping to catch a whiff of Flower Power still
make their way to the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, where the
spirits of Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead rock on in stores
offering T-shirts, posters and pot-smoking paraphernalia.

While other businesses in the cradle of hippie culture are folding,
so-called "head shops'' dealing in rolling papers and hand-blown
glass water pipes have proliferated on Haight Street - so much so
that a San Francisco politician has proposed a law to prevent any
more from opening in the neighbourhood.

Ross Mirkarimi, a member of the city Board of Supervisors who
represents the Haight, has asked his colleagues to adopt a three-year
moratorium on new joints that sell smoking equipment.
With at least a dozen such shops already operating in a six-block
area, Haight Street has too many places where tourists can go to feed
their heads, and too few where locals can buy groceries or rent DVDs,
Mirkarimi said.

"The Haight has always been seen as a bit of a mecca. It's been
iconic since the Summer of Love,'' he said.

"Generationally, each new era discovers the Haight. That's fine, but
we still have to manage it.''

Mirkarimi, who at 47 was a little young for the 1967 Summer of Love,
has no problem with pot per se; he supports the dispensing of medical
marijuana and the decriminalisation of weed. And he does not want to
run all head shops out of the neighbourhood.

But he said an overdose of them has led to drug sales, loitering,
littering and other problems that cannot be glossed over with 1960s nostalgia.

Some San Franciscans find the proposal mind-blowing.

Under the headline What's He Smoking, a local blogger mused that the
supervisor's intervention might "kill Haight-Ashbury's flavour - yes,
that sweet, sweet flavour.''

The blogger observed that it "seems a little outlandish that he'd
want to ban head shops in the place that practically invented them.''

William Birdwood, 59, an artist who was selling copies of a locally
produced literary journal on Haight Street one recent morning, said
incense, psychedelic art and glass bongs evoke a spirit of protest
that should be preserved.

Curbing stores that sell them "is un-American, to say the least,'' he said.

"I think there are too few head shops in the city,'' he said. ``I
like hippies. We need more. And head shops help to generate hippies.''

San Francisco residents historically have embraced zoning
restrictions as a way to preserve neighbourhood character. Big store
chains are discouraged from doing business here.

The head shop moratorium could be considered by the Board of
Supervisors in March.

Marwan Zeidan, 41, owns Ashbury Tobacco Centre, one of three head
shops on a single block of Haight Street. Zeidan, who opened his
store in 1994, recalled neighbours objecting when he started up.

They wanted him to promise not to sell hand-held pipes that could be
used for smoking crack or scales that could be used for weighing illegal drugs.

Yet Zeidan endorsed Mirkarimi's proposed moratorium. Between all the
competition and the slumping economy, sales at his shop are down 25
to 30 per cent, he said. Plus, Zeidan said some of his competitors
display pipes in their windows.

"It does not look really good for the neighbourhood,'' he said.

"Not every parent is OK with their kids being exposed to water pipes.''

.

Hippies and holy men

Hippies and holy men

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090221/TRAVEL/382295072/-1/NEWS

Tahira Yaqoob
Last Updated: February 21. 2009

Why go

The rest of us are just discovering what adventurers and hippies have
known for years: Nepal and its capital Kathmandu have a fantastic
allure and a medieval charm unlike anywhere else. From its chaotic
squares with fruit and vegetable hawkers touting their wares from
rickety barrows and rickshaw drivers hurtling toward you, to its
winding, cobbled backstreets, the place is a jumble of ancient
monuments, towering palaces, Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines
dating back to the 12th century. Wend your way through the more
tranquil back alleys and you will be just as likely to stumble across
an impressive holy statue squatting beside a washing line full of
laundry as you would be in clearly marked tourist spots.

For years most travellers have merely passed through Kathmandu on
their way to Everest base camp in search of higher-altitude
adventures. But nestled in the heart of the Himalayas and standing at
1,400m high, the city, often dubbed an open-air museum with its
myriad of cultural attractions, has a lure of its own. Much of the
capital's architecture is in the Newari style, named after the
indigenous Newars and epitomised by intricate wooden carvings and
ornate statues.

While Nepal is one of the world's poorest countries, its people are
among the friendliest on the planet. As an added blessing, the
capital's potholed roads have so far been spared chains such as
Starbucks or McDonalds (although rumour has it the first McDonald's
is to open shortly).

Nepal's political strife has been a deterrent in the past to some
visitors. Foreign offices until recently warned against travelling
there amid threats of terrorism after a series of explosions in the
capital, but the country has a new-found sense of optimism and peace
after the monarchy, which had ruled for most of its history, was
overthrown and replaced with a new Maoist-dominated democratic
government in August last year.

What to do

Entering Durbar Square is an initiation into Kathmandu's anarchic
pull. Dodge the market sellers and cyclists and you can safely look
in awe at the Hanuman Dhoka, the palace which gave the site its name
(durbar means palace) and where kings of old lived after being
crowned and solemnised in the square.

You could easily spend hours admiring the 16th to 19th-century
pagoda-like temples that compete for space in the arena, branded a
Unesco world heritage site. They include the magnificent Taleju
temple guarded by stone lions and the colourful Kalbhairav statue
dedicated to the Hindu god of destruction. At one end of the square
is the Temple of Kumari, a three-storey shrine to a living goddess
that is decorated with beautifully carved windows around a sedate
courtyard. The Royal Kumari is plucked from among the town's
inhabitants as a toddler and lives there like a princess until she
hits puberty. Even her feet are not allowed to touch the ground until
she reverts to being a mere mortal. Linger in the courtyard and you
may be granted a glance out of a window from the (rather bored-looking) Kumari.

Freak St, a favourite of hippies in the 70s, leads to the tourist
area of Thamel with its street sellers and internet cafes but explore
further on foot and you will come across hundreds of chaityas, or
Buddhist shrines, and stupas, Buddhist monuments. The most famous is
Boudhanath Stupa 6km away the city centre, one of the largest of its
kind in the world and an epicentre of Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal,
earning it the nickname Little Tibet. Tourists mingle with
worshippers clicking prayer beads as they circle the 36m-high shrine
that looms over their daily rituals.

Take an hour-long taxi ride outside the city centre and arrive at
Bhaktapur, another world heritage site. It is a charming 9th-century
city with rickety, wooden-shuttered houses and quaint, cobbled lanes.
The rustic Cafe Nyatapola at its heart gives a welcome respite from
haggling for pashmina shawls and traditional thangka paintings
depicting scenes from the life of Buddha. The former Newari kingdom
Another quick trip is Patan, 5km from the city centre, which boasts
another 1,200 Buddhist monuments, many in its own Durbar Square. They
include the jaw-dropping 18m-tall Mahabuddha temple, or Temple of
1,000 Buddhas (although, paradoxically it actually contains 3,000).

And if you still cannot resist taking a peek at the world's highest
peak, you can take a dawn flight in a helicopter or a Jetstream 41
aircraft across the Himalayas.

Where to stay

Budget

While it's possible to stay in Kathmandu for as little as US$14
(Dh50) a night, it's worth splashing out a little extra to guarantee
a comfortable stay with electricity and hot running water. Hotel
Courtyard is an oasis of calm in the hustle and bustle of Thamel.
Clean and spacious with ensuite rooms, it offers guests a free
pick-up from the airport a 20-minute drive away and has a restaurant,
bar and internet access as well as free baggage storage for trekkers
and an on-call doctor. The city's main attractions are a short walk
away. Doubles cost from US$52 (Dh190) per night.

Hotel Courtyard, 67/27 Z Street, Thamel (www.hotelcourtyard.com ; 00
977 1470 0476).

Mid-range

The Kantipur Temple House, a traditional Nepalese guesthouse complete
with Newari-style architecture, is in the heart of Thamel and a
stone's throw from Durbar Square. It boats 48 rooms, a patio and
gardens and a rooftop terrace with panoramic views of Kathmandu
Valley. Smokers beware though ­ they'll ask you to stub out before
entering this spiritual retreat. From $71 (Dh260) for a double room.

Kantipur Temple House, Chusyabahal (www.kantipurtemplehouse.com ; 00
977 1425 0131).

Luxury

Your dirham goes a lot further in Nepal, netting you a luxury hotel
for the mid-range prices you might pay elsewhere. It's worth a
blowout at the Hyatt Regency Kathmandu, a sumptuous retreat in the
style of a traditional Newari palace. From the candlelit pathway and
striking hand-carved wooden architecture to the lobby musicians
strumming haunting melodies on their sitars, this is a cut above the rest.

The hotel boasts 37 acres of manicured lawns and lies in the shadow
of Boudhanath Stupa, visible from many of the rooms. The lobby is a
sight in itself with nine replicas of chaityas dating back to the
11th century. With three restaurants, a jazz club, huge (if somewhat
icy) swimming pool and a hammam-style spa, you'll need a good reason
to tear yourself away. Double rooms cost from $161 (Dh591), including
taxes, per night.

Hyatt Regency Kathmandu, Taragoan, Boudha (www.hyatt.com ; 00 977 1449 1234).

Where to eat

Breakfast

Starting the day in the Hyatt Regency's cafe is a mouth-watering
affair, with long buffet tables groaning under the mounds of fresh
fruit, pastries, cheeses and savoury delights. Chefs are on hand to
take orders ranging from omelettes to a full fry-up, although you
might be tempted to tickle the tastebuds with an Indian breakfast
curry such as a dal dosa (flatbread served with spiced lentils) –
even if it is before 10am. Dining here will set you back about $9
(Dh32) per person.

Lunch

Garden of Dreams lives up to its name. Modelled on an English country
garden complete with landscaped lawns, it is tucked away in a quiet
enclave away from the chaos of Thamel. Its cafe sits in the grounds
of the Kaiser Mahal, a former palace built in 1895 that now houses
the Ministry of Education.

You can sit on a veranda gazing down on its decorative pavilions and
colonnades with a coffee and a slice of cake or indulge in the
eatery's thali, a Nepalese platter of lentil and mixed vegetable
curries, rice and pickles.

Dinner

You could go for the gut-busting 22-course menu $37 (Dh136) at
Krishnarpan, a Kathmandu institution offering traditional Nepalese
fare with low seating and atmospheric lighting. Or you could be
sensible and opt for the more restrained six-course affair $25 (Dh90)
including delicious dishes such as fresh pumpkin soup, lentils with
herbs, pan-roasted oyster mushrooms with cream and stir-fried mini gourd.

Dwarika's Hotel, where the restaurant is based, is worth a visit in
itself as the owners have salvaged thousands of wood carvings and
incorporated them into the building. They also proudly display
photographs of their illustrious visitors such as Prince Charles.

How to get there

Etihad Airways (www.etihadairways.com; 800 2277) flies from Abu Dhabi
to Tribhuvan airport in Kathmandu four times per week. Return flights
from $596 (Dh2,190) including taxes.

Recommended reading

Rasmilla Shakya's From Goddess to Mortal tells a real-life account of
a kumari who was enthroned from 1984 to 1991. A History of Nepal by
John Whelpton gives a fascinating insight into the country's
turbulent history over the last 250 years and sets into context the
political upheaval and changes in livelihood experienced by its people.
--

tyaqoob@thenational.ae

.

Hippie paradise in Nimbin, Australia

Hippie paradise in Nimbin, Australia

http://www.travelbite.co.uk/feature/blog/travel-blog-hippie-paradise-in-nimbin-australia-$1266663.htm

by Richard Aylen
Saturday, 21 Feb 2009

Richard Aylen is swapping the daily routine of an 8-5 London
lifestyle for a 24-7 cross continent trip taking in Africa,
south-east Asia and Australasia. From Cape Town to the Cook Islands
via Chiang Mai and Christchurch, his trip will take him from the
capital of the UK and deep into backpacker territory. This is his tenth blog:

The hippie movement was started in the 1960s with communities all
over the world aspiring to the ideals of peace and love. While
Stonehenge was the focal point for British hippies Australian hippies
flocked to a small town called Nimbin - near to the coastal hotspot
of Byron Bay.

People flocked to the area during the 1970s in search of a different
lifestyle where they could be free and live by their own ideals. In
1973, the Aquarius Festival was held in the town with thousands of
like minded people gathering to share views and protest against the
perceived injustices in the world.

Many stayed behind to live in communes and enjoy the free lifestyle,
leaving Nimbin as the hippie capital of Australia, which it remains today.

For as little as $30 (£15) visitors can take numerous coach tours
from Byron Bay to Nimbin. Jim's tour - which is known as the 'tour
with the tunes' - leaves at 10:00 giving plenty of time to explore
Nimbin and the surrounding area. A Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix duet
of Sumnmertime from Woodstock blared out through the bus music system
as South African driver Ivan winded his way through the country roads
on the journey to Australia's hippie Mecca.

With a new song relating to every landmark along the way, the bus was
both informed and entertained.

After stopping in a traditional country pub for a drink, the tour bus
sped along to Nimbin this time with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre making an
appearance on the sound waves. By lunchtime the bus had pulled up in
the centre of Nimbin with a chance to explore the shops painted in
the brightest of colours.

With not a McDonald's in sight we were free to go after a stern
warning on the dangers of hash cake consumption!

Fairies playing woodland pipes and dancing between trees, snow capped
mountains and messages of freedom could be seen painted to every shop
lining the main street. Adverts for the MardiGrass festival (an event
that wants cannabis to be legalised) were painted on several shop
fronts making the main street unlike any other.

The Nimbin museum details the rich history of the area which used to
be covered by tropical rainforest. Although best known for its
association with alternative culture, Nimbin is also important to the
area's Aboriginal population. Along with the Aboriginal interests,
the museum depicts the area's association with hippies and tells the
story of how a small town became a centre for Australian counter
culture. Several cafes and eateries provide sandwich lunches and
snacks while the souvenir shops offer all kinds of products from
lighters to whoopee cushions!

After lunch the bus made its way to an area called the Channon for a
visit to a hippie market place with the Beach Boys' version of
California Dreamin' ringing through the air, the bus snaked through
the windy roads. The market in Channon, which is not a stop on every
tour, (when it is not staged the bus stops at the home of a hippie
for an insight into alternative living) was the highlight of the day.
Fresh, organic smells wafted through the air from the coffee, fruit
and doughnut stalls while a local folk music band strummed on their guitars.

Lemons freshly squeezed and topped with ice cold water provided the
perfect refreshment and energy for the walk around the market stalls.
Hand-crafted bangles and ear rings painted in bright colours were
available from the numerous jewellery stalls all selling their own
unique styles and designs. Meanwhile, picture frames constructed out
of driftwood were on display next to mirrors which according to the
excitable vendor were said to catch fairies. Awe struck children
surrounded the candle making stall which allowed customers to get
creative with a vast array of brightly coloured buckets of hot wax.
Sculpted by the stall owners, the candles quickly became dolphins or
dogs before they had time to dry out.

After a coffee it was time to get back on the bus and head back to Byron Bay.

Golden Brown by the Stranglers flowed from the speakers as the bus
made its way back to Byron. One more stop was scheduled on the way
home with a trip to the stunning Minyon falls. Although too dry to
see any falling water, the drop was spectacular enough. Looking out
over the wooded forest it was the perfect place to refresh with a
watermelon and some local macadamia nuts.

Lemon myrtle trees, macadamia plantations and coffee farms swept past
providing a fragrant odour to the sounds of Australian folk music.
Arriving at Byron at just after six o'clock the 'tour with the tunes'
was silent and the land of hippies and fairies was left behind as the
real world beckoned.

.

Nirvana Express

Nirvana Express

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Stern-t.html

By JANE and MICHAEL STERN
Published: February 19, 2009

"Hippies were the fireworks of freedom," an Istanbul journalist
declares at the beginning of "Magic Bus," Rory MacLean's retracing of
the eastward path traveled by enlightenment-hungry pilgrims in the
1960s and '70s. With a spiritual craving kindled by a pantheon of
idiosyncratic gurus that included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, these so-called
Intrepids had little money but plenty of time ­ and a yen to sip tea
and smoke dope with the locals. Their goal wasn't to observe other
cultures but to absorb them and be transformed.

That Istanbul journalist credits hippies with nothing less than the
rebirth of humanity, but Mac­Lean's travelogue conveys a measure of
cynicism about the consequences of their intrusion. In many places,
the antimaterialist hippies' arrival stimulated a crass tourist trade
and an attendant defilement of native culture. Another Turkish
acquaintance refers to their path as the "hash-and-hepatitis trail,"
and MacLean even suggests that their hedonistic ways might have been
partly responsible for the rise of Islamic militancy, strengthening
traditionalists' anti-Western resolve.

Good or bad, were they really so significant? MacLean thinks so. He
lectures a group of young travelers that the beats and hippies
"brought minority rights, ecology and alternative medicine into the
mainstream" and "for a few short years tied together the world."
Whether such grandiose claims are true or just an expression of the
baby-boomers' self-­importance, there's no denying that the stoned
rovers were present at the beginning of a cataclysmic period in
history, whose legacy "Magic Bus" describes in exquisite detail, most
of it sorrowful.

As he travels from the Bosporus to the notorious trance-dance beach
at Goa, MacLean goes from areas of commercial desecration to brutal
police states and ghastly combat zones. The decimation of Kabul
reminds him of Dresden or Hiroshima after World War II. Tehran, "an
urban disease fed by anger, despair and pollution," is a "sprawling
cemetery to tolerance." A fight between Nepalese troops and Maoist
rebels leaves 15 dead and several secondary-school students shot.
"Bullets have not been removed from their bodies," The Katmandu Times
reports, "due to lack of money."

Traveling along this horrendous path, ironic considering its
erstwhile symbolism as the road to Shangri-La, MacLean balances
apocalyptic bereavement with engaging cameos of individuals who
manage to persevere. Carla Grissmann, the "Grandmother Intrepid"
whose wanderlust "predates the Beatles and Beats," is met at the
sandy ruin that is Kabul's once-grand museum. She's trying to piece
together shards of precious pottery gleefully sledgehammered by a
delegation led by the Taliban's minister of culture, who deemed the
world's greatest collection of Central Asian artifacts un-Islamic. "I
weep for the Kabul I knew and loved," she says. Ahmed, a British
comedian whose parents emigrated from Pakistan to the Midlands in the
1960s, delivers an invidious set of terrorism jokes when MacLean
meets him on a railway platform in Rawalpindi. "Hey," he asks,
holding his hands under his stomach, miming a bulky explosive belt,
"does my bomb look big in this?"

MacLean also crosses paths with an original flower child called
Penny, who rode the magic bus with Ken Kesey, survived Woodstock,
traversed the Asia trail when she was young and has now returned for
a last swim in the Himalayan lake where she found serenity 40 years earlier.

The most memorable character, and the man MacLean jokes that he wants
to adopt as his guru, is Rama Tiwari, an enormously charming
bookseller and publisher "who touched ­ and enlightened ­ more
Intrepids than any other Indian." Rama succinctly summarizes the
hippies' big mistake: "They didn't see we can only live in happiness
if we conquer the restless dream that paradise is in a world other
than our own."
--

Jane and Michael Stern are the authors of "Roadfood."
--

MAGIC BUS
On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India
By Rory MacLean
280 pp. Ig Publishing. Paper, $14.95

Related:

First Chapter: 'Magic Bus' (February 22, 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/chapters/chapter-magic-bus.html

.

Black history doesn't start or end with a few Black heroes

Black history doesn't start or end with a few Black heroes

http://media.www.lugazette.com/media/storage/paper816/news/2009/02/18/Opinion/Danis.Word-3636125.shtml

Danielle Skinner
Issue date: 2/18/09

Year after year during Black History Month, I see the same historical
figures being honored. We talk about how Martin Luther King Jr. led a
movement, Malcolm X spoke up against White supremacy, Jackie Robinson
showed that Blacks could hit home runs just as well as Whites,
Harriet Tubman led slaves to freedom, and George Washington Carver
invented significant uses for the peanut. I believe that all these
people were and still are great historical figures, but other people
had dreams, other people fought against oppression, and many Blacks
were abolitionists, athletes and scientists. I would like to use this
piece to introduce you to less well known figures that should be
considered heroes.

Before Dr. Martin Luther King's time, there was a woman by the name
of Ella Baker. Baker was a civil and human rights leader in the
1930s. She formed the Young Negroes' Cooperative League, in which she
helped Blacks achieve economic power. Baker worked alongside the
civil rights leaders we acknowledge today, such as King, Thurgood
Marshall, and W.E.B. Dubois.

A man by the name of W. W. Law also fought for the rights of Blacks.
Like King, he led sit-ins, peaceful protests and boycotts. He was a
leader of the NAACP and he forced city leaders in Georgia to
desegregate facilities.

Stokely Carmichael was an advocate for Black Nationalism just like
Malcolm. Carmichael protested against segregation by riding on
integrated buses with other "freedom riders." He later became an
honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. Like Malcolm, he
encouraged Blacks to form their own businesses, organizations, and to
strengthen their own communities.

Assata Shakur is a Black revolutionary. She was a writer, poet, and a
member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Her
"radical ideologies" and views made her a target for police officers.
She was shot twice and charged with killing a police officer. She
escaped from prison and has been living in Cuba since 1986. Like
Malcolm, she stood for Black Nationalism--by any means necessary.

While Harriet Tubman led slaves to freedom using the Underground
Railroad, William Still was the founder of it. He helped as many as
60 slaves a month escape to freedom. He kept books and records on
each slave and later published the "Underground Railroad Records."
Without him,the Underground Railroad would not have existed.

Leonard Grimes was an abolitionist and an early organizer of the
Underground Railroad. Grimes was born free and owned a coach
business. He used his business to secretly transport slaves to the North.

Jackie Robinson was a talented athlete, but Nathaniel Clifton was a
talented multi-athlete. He was the first Black man to play
pro-basketball, and during the off-season he played for the Chicago
American Giants in the Negro Baseball League. On top of his
basketball and baseball careers, Clifton served three years in the
army during World War Two.

John W. "Budd" Fowler was the first Black professional baseball
player. The difference between Fowler and Robinson is Fowler was the
first Black professional baseball player before color lines were
drawn among baseball leagues. Fowler could play any position in baseball,

George Washington Carver was a great scientist, but so was Benjamin
Banneker. He was an astronomy scientist and made predictions of
future solar eclipses. He also wrote almanacs that were published
throughout the 1790s. Even though his father and grandfather were
slaves, he did not let his race stop him from his quest for knowledge.

Garrett Morgan is responsible for inventing the three-way automatic
traffic signal and the gas mask. Morgan not only started his own
business enterprises, he also published a weekly newspaper for the
Black community.

All these people are significant to our past. Without them we would
not have come this far. The Black community should acknowledge and
try to learn more about all historical figures that made a
difference. Instead of remembering what history books tell us, why
not discover our own history? Because it is Black History Month, we
should honor all of our firsts, our leaders, inventors, and
scientists. Black history did not begin with Dr. Martin Luther King's
dream, and it does not end with Barrack Obama becoming president.

.

In an Age of Protest, A Changing Georgetown Found Its Niche

In an Age of Protest, A Changing Georgetown Found Its Niche

http://www.thehoya.com/node/17936

By Marissa Amendolia
Feb 19 2009

They say that we have entered an era of change, with a new
administration gracing the halls of the White House and bringing hope
to much of the youth of America. These winds of change ­ often
brought about by a fresh generation of innovative thinkers ­ wake up
the country and incite revolution by unapologetically pointing
directly at our society's problems. The walls and grounds of
Georgetown University have seen a number of these movements, but the
campus' most extraordinary memories were made during late 1960s and
early 1970s.

It was a time of activism ­ both peaceful protests and violent riots
­ of drugs and rock 'n' roll, of freedom and, ultimately, of change.
Although the majority of the student body still embodied the "Joe
Hoya" stereotype of the time, Georgetown had its contingency of
students that didn't quite fit the bill of blue blazers and tasseled
loafers. These students represented the spirit of the age, bringing
both enthusiasm for social reform with protests and riots, as well as
the idea of a new sort of lifestyle with music in the dorms and class
on the lawn.

The Changing Face of Georgetown

"The ideological gap widening between administrators and those that
they administrate is based not so much on a specific issue (the war
is passé, involvement in politics gauche after Americans chose Nixon
voluntarily) but on a new awareness of what student power really
means. … The students are to be served and consulted rather than
subjugated and cajoled. They are taking on an increasingly
significant role in everything from academic control to faculty tenure."
­ C.I. "Campus Violence: Part of Student Life." (The Hoya. Thursday,
Feb. 27, 1969, Page 11)

"The whole country was beginning to change," says Professor Clifford
Chieffo. "It took the more extreme kids, but our kids were highly
organized and political for the underdogs. They weren't just random
hippies who wanted to smoke dope." Chieffo's perspective of the scene
at Georgetown during this time is a unique one: Although he was a
professor at the time, he joined the faculty in 1967 at the ripe age
of 29 to restructure and develop the four-person Fine Arts Department.

It was this new arts department that acted as a center for this new
wave of students, he explained. Of the six students who made up the
Georgetown chapter of Students for a Democratic Society ­ the
nationwide radical student organization that was responsible for
shutting down Columbia University in a 1968 protest ­ three of them
were majoring in art.

"There was this all-around freedom challenging the status quo,"
Chieffo says. "It was just like, not exactly free love, but there was
a lot of Grateful Dead people ­ male and female. A lot of miniskirts
and sandals. And of course they would all end up in the art department."

But more than this small group of new thinkers, the student body as a
whole was evolving. The lead headline of the opening issue of The
Hoya for the 1970-1971 school year read in bold typeface: "Class of
'74 Most Diversified Ever." Women were first allowed to directly
matriculate into the College in the 1969-1971 school year, making
Georgetown fully coeducational. In the years that followed, the
number of women admitted into the university quickly grew. In the
class of '74, of the 1,122 total freshman, 33 were black and 315 were
women, compared to the 313 women in the class of '73 and 215 in the
class of '72. "In a way, '74 has already contributed to change on the
Hilltop, though they have hardly had a chance to unpack their bags,"
the article states. "The makeup of the freshman classes has changed
tremendously, indeed, almost dramatically, over the past five years."

This diversity was not always celebrated as it was on the cover of
The Hoya, Chieffo remembers. The influx of women shifted professors'
expectations and grading scales, and the classroom was no longer a
place for only male students. "There was a lot of resistance," he
says, "because the old boys' system ­ 'the gentleman's C' ­ was now
dropping down to a D."

In addition to affecting the academic curve, the growing presence of
women on campus changed the overall atmosphere and tone. When
dormitories became coed, male students were forced to keep their
behavior in check. Chieffo remembers boys breaking into the girls'
restrooms and other minor incidents that were testaments to the
changing environment. "There was almost, I would say, uniform angst
and opposition from a lot of the faculty and a lot of the students ­
almost all of the guy students," Chieffo says. "It was almost like an
overgrown high school prep school, so they were just all doing their
guy things from their prep school days, and they were all not nearly
as diverse."

As the student body changed, so too did the faculty. "There was a
huge ­ all across the country ­ explosion of universities hiring more
and more people, expanding, and Georgetown was a part of that,"
Chieffo said. "A lot of new faculty members came in when I came in."
Nine of 10 school deans, all seven vice presidents, and the president
of the university all filled their positions between 1961 and 1971.

This new set of professors and administrators reassessed and
re-designed the core curriculum; Chieffo explains that this was when
classics courses were no longer required for all students. "There was
a lot of negotiating going on in the faculty," he says. "So there was
definitely change and new blood on campus."

This sentiment was reflected in the article "Liberal Education
Tradition Is Dead" that was printed in the May 8, 1969 issue of The
Hoya: "With the passing of the traditional form of the university, we
face the question: What should the university, more importantly, what
should Georgetown be and what should we as students be?"

In 1965, The Georgetown Free University, a program founded by a group
of professors who wanted to teach outside of their department,
attempted to answer that question. They sought to offer new and
innovative courses free of charge such as Communes, Violence in
America, African Music, Libertarian Ideas, Evolution and Meditation.
Teachers in The Free University program could be anyone from a
Georgetown professor to an underclassman to a member of the D.C.
community. The Free University served as a forum for new and old
ideas, brought people of diverse backgrounds together and encouraged
a more intimate and personal relationship between teachers and students.

The classroom was no longer only a place for lectures and exams ­ it
was a place for free thinkers, creativity and unanswerable questions.

Signs of Protests, Sounds of Hope

"Here was a childhood dream come true; roller skating down the widest
street in town, camping out on the crosswalks, mass jaywalking in
front of the Justice Department. People played Frisbee, laughed,
drank wine and ate popsicles. The policemen said please and thank
you. Everyone was smiling. They came to speak out against a war."
­ Mike Winship "Protest Rally Demands 'Out Now': Good Weather,
Peaceful Music." (The Georgetown Voice. Tuesday, April 27, 1971, Page 3)

D.C. was on fire during this time period ­ sometimes literally.
Protesters from across the country stretched their rights to free
speech as they marched and demonstrated ­ they openly voiced their
opinions on the Vietnam War, on race relations and on civil rights.
Although still somewhat tucked away in the gentrified Northwest
quadrant, Georgetown didn't escape the tumultuous setting of D.C.
while activism was in its prime.

Like inauguration weekend (but perhaps less organized), the May Day
Protests of 1971 saw Georgetown students housing an influx of
visitors who wanted to be in the middle of the action. "People were
coming in from all parts of the country and Father McSorley was the
great 'peacenick' ­ 'Thou shall not kill' and all that," Chieffo
says. "So he and a bunch of us got accommodations in Healy, in the
hallways. They could put their bedrolls down there and all over the
gym and so forth to come down for this big rally."

The weekend before the protest, students gathered, both in the halls
of Georgetown and on the lawn of the National Mall. Peter, Paul and
Mary, Pete Seeger and "Country" Joe McDonald performed, their music
interspersed with powerful speakers. Overall, the atmosphere was
festive ­ the protesters celebrated the fact that they were there and
having their voices heard.

"It was a contest between ennui and Woodstock Washington," reported
The Georgetown Voice. The article, headlined "Protest Rally Demands
'Out Now': Good Weather, Peaceful Music," appeared in the April 27,
1971 issue of The Voice, the weekend before the main events of the
May Day Protest. This was characteristic of the reporting of The
Voice, which was founded in 1969 to report on the various cases of
activism that The Hoya only limitedly and conservatively covered.
"The marchers believed their presence was protest enough, and
ultimately what they wanted was entertainment," stated the article.
"Exhilarated by the sunshine and the size of their protest, Woodstock
finally won out."

But what started as a group of students playing music and painting
signs in the halls quickly took a turn. Chieffo remembers standing at
the foot of the statue of John Carroll on Healy Circle with Fr.
Fitzgerald, S.J. as the police chased a horde of students from
Pennsylvania Avenue to M Street to the main gates of campus. They
wore scarves over their faces to protect themselves from the tear
gas. Chieffo explains, "You see photos of the kids with bandannas
tied around their legs ­ so you would take the bandanna off, pour
water on it and put it on your face, and you could use it for the
anti-tear gas. Everyone had one; it was part of the costume."

"We were standing there going, 'Can the cops come onto our campus and
chase the kids?'" Chieffo says. "[Fitzgerald] goes, 'I don't think
so.' We closed the gates, literally, and we stood there and said,
'You cannot come here, it is private property.'"

The students were able to enter campus through the sides of the gates
as Chieffo and Fitzgerald stopped the police at the gates. The police
on motorcycles began to throw the tear gas over the gates as students
rushed into Healy Hall. Chieffo recalls that the whole operation on
Georgetown's side was all quite organized; auxiliary workers helped
the students with water to repel the effects of the teargas.

In its Nov. 2, 1971 issue, The Voice surveyed Georgetown students
about the actions of the police during the May protests. "The tear
gas affected everyone," Jon Platt (SFS '72) said in the survey. "I
was in New South at the time ­ waking up at 6:30 in the morning,
gagging from tear gas. The action was mostly against Georgetown
students who weren't trying to do anything except go to their tests.
That's their right."

Not all activism ended in such chaos. About six months after an
interracial alliance of Columbia University SDS and Student Afro
Society activists successfully shut down its campus, the Georgetown
set became determined to stage a similar revolt.

"I remember that we ­ the adults involved ­ were amused because it
was so late in coming and they didn't have enough kids to take over
White-Gravenor," says Chieffo. "I mean it was sad in a way ­ they were trying."

However, a lack of manpower forced the small group to switch gears.
They then focused their attention on Annex II, the building that once
stood where Alumni Square is now. Annex II held a number of
classrooms for various departments, but it was also the home of
Chieffo's newly established art department.

At midnight one Sunday evening, Chieffo got a call from his students:
They told him they wanted to take over Annex II. "Just don't break
the door. I'll come down and let you in," he told them.
"So, I let them in and immediately they started barricading, piling
up the wooden desks against the windows and doors, and chaining up
the doors," says Chieffo. "I'm standing there going, 'Uh,
everything's blocked, everything's chained, and you're in an old
wooden building. One cigarette and you guys are toast.'"

It didn't take long for them to get his point. They ripped down their
barricades and opted for a small rope around the door ­ enough to
disrupt most of the classes that were set to be held on Monday
morning, but still responsible. Art classes, however, went on as
scheduled. "I had spray-painted a peace sign and 'Soul Brother' on
all the art rooms and said, 'Don't touch my stuff,'" says Chieffo.
"They were the art majors so they said, 'No, we'll still have art classes.'"

"Now that I look back on it, they had an entrepreneurial nature,"
says Chieffo. "Even as artists at Georgetown, they still wanted to
organize and they wanted to plan and so on."

And plan they did: The students had organized an external force to
bring them food "for the long stay," so to speak. But by Monday
morning, when university officials hadn't made any significant effort
to regain control of the building, they got bored. After a couple of
days, they begin to vacate the building ­ but not before the East
Coast contingent of Hell's Angels pulled up to the front gates and
decided that this was their type of scene. "Typical, real Hell's
Angels from the '60s, not the ZZ Top kind, but the really big guys,"
Chieffo says.

The leader of the gang was known as "Sonny's Girl" ­ she proudly
displayed her relationship with Sonny Barger, the infamous head of
Hell's Angels, in the form of a tattoo on her right bicep. The group
immediately took over where SDS left off, making bunk beds out of
easels and enjoying the free stay.

"Anything could happen with this group," says Chieffo. He went right
to Sonny's Girl and told her that the university was getting antsy
and wanted to call the police. "They said, 'Oh okay, we'll leave
tomorrow.' So they all left, just like that, perfectly nice. They got
on their choppers and everybody left. Nothing was broken, but I know
they were like, about to have a barbeque in the middle of the room."

Just as Hell's Angels tiptoed the line of what Georgetown would put
up with but then disappeared the next day, the age of revolution
dissolved in a matter of time. Eventually, the cries for change
softened and the new social norms became more widely accepted ­ both
at Georgetown and beyond. Now, we learn about this history in the
same classrooms that saw it happen. But some stories aren't told in
today's classrooms ­ the stories of Allen Ginsberg getting high in a
student's townhouse, of a student falling out of Gaston Hall and
sleeping on the ledge outside of the president's office for three
days, of another student living under Key Bridge for a semester to
empathize with the homeless, of the clock hands being stolen and sent
to the pope. Even though these aren't found in textbooks, they still
must be remembered ­ they are the spices that add flavor to
Georgetown's unique history.

.

Harvard Beats Yale' an all-star for boomers

Harvard Beats Yale' an all-star for boomers

http://www.freep.com/article/20090219/ENT01/902190397/1036/+Harvard+Beats+Yale++is+an+all-star+event+for+boomers+

Documentary recalls legendary '68 game

BY JOHN MONAGHAN • FREE PRESS SPECIAL WRITER
February 19, 2009

"Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" (**) relives the storied 1968 matchup
between the two Ivy League schools. Interviews with key players are
interspersed with game footage and baby boomer context. One player,
for instance, was fresh from Vietnam when he hit the gridiron, while
another was a card-carrying member of the leftist Students for a
Democratic Society. It wasn't student activism but decades of school
rivalry that fueled the drama as Yale dominated up until the final 42
seconds of the game.

Famous names show up here, most anecdotally. "Doonesbury" creator
Garry Trudeau used to parody Yale players in his early strips. Meryl
Streep was part of the scene. George W. Bush was part of the rowdy
throng that pulled down a goalpost at the end of the game. And
according to Tommy Lee Jones, a tackle for Harvard, roommate Al Gore
was a very funny guy obsessed with playing "Dixie" on his push-button phone.

Even with these observations, the new documentary from Kevin Rafferty
("Atomic Café") feels kind of slight. Jones is so soberly
introspective in recalling the game that you wonder whether he's
putting us all on. One former player, far more unaffected, reminds us
later that it was just a football game.

7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday (also March 13-15) at the
Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward,
Detroit. 313-833-4686 or www.dia.org/dft. $7.50; $6.50 students, seniors.

...

Contact freelance writer JOHN MONAGHAN at madjohn@earthlink.net.

.

A Feminist at Fifty

A Feminist at Fifty

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/8093-a-feminist-at-fifty.html

Written by Jayne Lyn Stahl
Friday, 20 February 2009

I wasn't born a feminist. Life made me one.

Don't get me wrong, I love men. I just wish we would see the likes of
Nietzsche, Kafka, and Darwin in skirts. So far, this has yet to happen.

There's always Susan Sontag, of course, Anais Nin, and Virginia
Woolf, but there aren't nearly as many women in the annals of world
literature as there are men. And, for that matter, how many Helen
Thomas's, Molly Ivins, and Maureen Dowds have the mainstream media allowed?

In 2007, Modern Library, a division of Random House, released the
results of their board's selection of the 100 best novels, and fewer
than 10% of them were written by women.

Can it be that the females of the species are genetically less
predisposed to higher order thinking? The Kabbalah would certainly
have one think so, but so might Bill Maher. But, all I can think
about is why. Is it just that the big bad corporate media won't allow
us to penetrate that glass ceiling? Glass does break, after all. Or,
do women have some personal responsibility for our conspicuous
absence on registers that include seismic innovators from Galileo to Einstein?

When the women's movement was at its zenith, in the 1970's, I was out
protesting the war in Vietnam, joining groups like Students for a
Democratic Society, and participating in antiwar sit-ins, at
SUNY/Buffalo, with friends and professors like J.M. Coetzee. I
considered myself a humanist not a feminist, and thought feminism
reductive as it didn't address the exploitation, and unfair burdens,
placed on men.

No doubt, guys have their issues to deal with, too. Look at how many
rich and powerful men who got scammed by Madoff have taken their
lives in the past few months alone. Men still suffer under the weight
of gender expectations that they be breadwinners, and providers, even
though women now make up 49% of the workforce.

Men are still not allowed to admit that they feel depressed, to cry,
or say they need someone to talk to. Still, despite the obvious
pitfalls, like having to live up to a stereotype of "manhood," there
are many more advantages to being born of the male persuasion.

After adding a few gray hairs, and a few more years, I see the world
differently at fifty (more or less) than at 20. After all the
technological inroads, scientific advances, the legalization of
choice, we are still lightyears behind where we should be when it
comes to gender equity. Women are still not taken as seriously, in
the arts and sciences, as their male counterparts. And, while I may
not identify myself as a "woman writer," others do, as if they were
grading on a curve.

Ever think about what would happen if Friedrich Nietzsche had been
born Frederika, or Bob Dylan had been born Barbara instead of Bob?
Most likely, instead of "building monuments," Barbara would have been
taking down notes.

Surprisingly little has changed over the past thirty-odd years. Women
who choose to devote their lives to their writing are still made to
feel like freaks. While this is clearly less the case now than in the
days of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, women poets
suffer depression, and die by their own hand, at rates astonishingly
higher than their male counterparts.

We're still made to feel as if we must choose between a life devoted
to our creative work, or a life devoted to our man. Men don't have to
make that kind of choice. James Joyce, author of what is widely
considered the greatest novel in the English language, had a partner
who may not have understood every word he wrote, but who understood
that his work was his reason for living. He didn't feel that it was
necessary to subordinate his physical desires to his creative urges.

Often it is seen as conjugal heresy to evolve at a rate higher than
one's spouse.

Again, I'm not speaking about career women here, but women artists,
when I say that women still don't have the same options as men of
having a full life, and still face making wrenching choices.

It would be great if we could make the argument that men are
oppressing us but, in truth, it's our value systems, and what we
strive for, that keep us down. That said, I came up on the tail end
of the Beat Generation, knew Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and I
can only name one woman who was considered a member of that movement,
Diane di Prima. In light of the obscurantist view of women in
literature, still prevalent today even in selectively progressive
cities like San Francisco, one can understand why Sylvia Plath, and
not her husband, Ted Hughes, was the one who ended up with her head
in the oven.

You may have caught Nikki Giovanni interviewed recently on Bill
Moyers Journal. She was brilliant, and I couldn't help but be struck
by her allusion to Snow White, and the "Some Day My Prince Will Come"
song. I thought back on all the princes who've come and gone in my
life; those I've loved more, those I've loved less.

I couldn't help but recall how many restless nights I spent looking
up at the ceiling, and prevailing upon higher powers to help me find
my astral twin; time that could have been far better spent writing
for cripe's sake.

Close your eyes and think about this: how many guys lay around in
their Victoria Secret lingerie crying their eyes out because they
have no one to spend New Year's Eve with? Nope, guys are better
compartmentalizers-----they're better at going to work, and focusing,
in the midst of marital catastrophe, or a third world war.

Frankly, I think guys get the short end of the stick precisely
because they're socialized into thinking they're less "manly" if they
show a little emotion. Guys need to be able to express their feelings
more, and women need to stop visualizing themselves as incomplete without men.

Women have to learn to reinvent themselves the way men do. Somehow,
we feel less than fulfilled if we aren't at the nucleus of a nuclear
family. Our focus is on outward creation---giving birth to that which
is corporal not cerebral.

Human beings are evolving physiologically at a pace far greater than
their intellectual, and emotional, pace. If things keeps up this way,
this can only mean a technologically evolved species that can't
figure out how to tie its shoes.

I wasn't born a feminist. Life made me one. I only wish it made me
richer for it.

.

Relix & Jambands.com were bought, saved

Relix & Jambands.com were bought, saved

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/02/relix_jambandsc.html

February 22, 2009

Relix Magazine was launched by Les Kippel in 1974, stemming from the
underground network of Grateful Dead concert-goers who taped and
traded live recordings. The newsletter was originally distributed
under the name Dead Relix and featured hand-drawn black and white
concept artwork covers created by artist Gary Kroman. Averaging 20
pages per issue, the articles focused on taping tips and Grateful Dead news.

Even as early as the second issue, non-Dead editorial found its way
into Dead Relix's pages and, with the addition of an editor, the
young magazine expanded its scope to cover the music of the San
Francisco Bay Area psychedelic scene. By 1978, Dead Relix contained
reviews, essays, short features and artwork, and had dropped the
"Dead" from its title. In a world that was moving away from hippy
culture, Relix managed to remain relevant, by expanding its scope of
coverage beyond "Bay Area psychedelic rock" to cover genres as
diverse as reggae and heavy metal, with varying degrees of success. [Wiki]

To quote an anonymous source, someone "bought RELIX and Jambands.com
and saved both from going under." The investor "didn't buy any of the
other Zenbu entities though."

.

Giving New Life to Old Clothes

Giving New Life to Old Clothes

http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=18&id=26542

Greenpoint Resident Designs Line of 'Upcycled' Sweaters

by Sarah Tobol (Sarah.Tobol@brooklyneagle.net)
02-20-2009

GREENPOINT ­ Do you have a sweater sitting in the back of your closet
that you can't bear to get rid of, but it's too small or out of
style? Kat O'Sullivan has a solution for you: cut it up and make a
new sweater.

O'Sullivan visits thrift stores ­ she has a route of about eight, all
on Long Island ­ and buys old sweaters. After washing them,
O'Sullivan sews pieces from several recycled sweaters together to
make new clothes. She crafts patchwork sweaters, sweater dresses and
hand warmers.

Her designs are bright, colorful, whimsical and one-of-a-kind. Most
of the sweaters have hoods and some have zippers. "They have so much
more character because you get pieces that have stories it's like
saving orphan clothes."

It's also "environmentally friendly to re-use clothes," she said.
"It's a nice little way to recycle."

In her own life as well, O'Sullivan is conscious of the environment.
"I try to consume a lot less, and bring bags to the grocery store,"
she said. "I don't buy anything new ­ furniture or clothes." She also
hitchhikes when she travels, which she does frequently. O'Sullivan
has been to Ireland, Ecuador, India, the Philippines and many other
places. She toured with the Grateful Dead, accompanying them on 200
shows. In a couple of weeks she will go to Mongolia, where she will
hitchhike around the country.

"I kind of throw myself in and let the waves tumble me," she says of
her travels.

But it was touring with the Dead where O'Sullivan started selling her
clothes, making patchwork dresses. Over the years since then she has
continued sewing clothes but started making her patchwork sweaters
only three years ago.

She calls her line of recycled sweaters "upcycled" clothes, which is
a term for the process of taking waste items and turning them into
items of greater value.

These days, when she's not traveling, O'Sullivan sews out of her
Greenpoint home. She has lived in many places before ­ even in her
"crazy school bus," which is completely furnished ­ but will now be
in Brooklyn for the long haul. "I was living in Manhattan," she said.
"Coming to Brooklyn was such an exhale."

She sells her sweaters exclusively online now; on the handmade online
marketplace Etsy and through her own web site, www.katwise.com. But
O'Sullivan used to sell her sweaters out of her bus in Manhattan's
East Village, which she called "awesome," until the police shut her down.

"It's really fun to bring things back to life and then send them out
to the world," she said. "I'm triumphant that I've given something new life."

.

Folk Icon Paxton Casts A Long Shadow

Folk Icon Paxton Casts A Long Shadow

http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=eddf674e-5e99-46d4-b487-d5d94c3f9fe7

Lifetime Grammy award a surprise to 'small-town yokel from Oklahoma'
[]

2/22/2009

Tom Paxton, an icon of the 1960s folk music movement, is riffing in a
coffeehouse. Perfect!

Of course, it's a suburban Starbucks near Paxton's townhouse -
nothing like the small cafe in New York's Greenwich Village where he
landed his first singing job nearly 50 years ago after crash-landing
in the creative center of the American folk scene.

"It was happening right as I got there," Paxton says of the folk
revival that was under way when he moved to the Village from New
Jersey's Fort Dix, where he'd been posted with the Army. "On
weekends, you couldn't move on the sidewalk, and all the coffeehouses
would be crammed. It was the tail end of the Beat generation, and the
Gaslight (Cafe) actually featured some of the Beat poets; the folk
singers were kind of interspersed between them. But that didn't last
long. Pretty soon, it was folk singers, period. It was exciting to be
part of that."

Paxton never really moved on: The "small-town yokel from Oklahoma"
has been almost singularly focused on folk music for his adult life.
For his efforts - for five decades of writing, recording, performing,
straw-stirring, self-editing, influencing, hamming, mentoring,
teaching and rewriting - Paxton, 71, received a Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award Feb. 8 in Los Angeles as part of the Recording
Academy's Grammy Week festivities.

The award, which honors artistic contributions to the field of
recording, placed Paxton in pretty fine company. Previous Lifetime
Achievement Award recipients include some of the most famous of all
folkies: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

"One of the things with Tom Paxton is that while he might not be as
much of a household name as some of the people we've honored, his
music has been really influential," says Bill Freimuth, vice
president of awards for the Recording Academy, which gives out the
Grammys. "He's very much considered a mentor to many, many musicians;
he's been an inspiration to so many other folks who've continued the
tradition of making great music.

"And Tom always stuck to his heart, sometimes perhaps at the cost of
his wallet. He did not go the commercial route. People really respect
that about Tom."

Paxton's take? "The English have a word for it: gobsmacked. It's
recognition I never thought I'd get. You think of the Grammys as
billion-selling artists. I've never had a hit record myself; other
people have had hits with some of my songs, but I haven't. Not even
close. I'm stunned."

Paxton's catalog is filled with both satirical songs and serious
songs, almost all with choruses constructed for sing-alongs. They're
songs about adult relationships, children's songs and pointedly topical songs.

Lots of those, including "The Ballad of Spiro Agnew" and "I Don't
Want a Bunny Wunny," about Jimmy Carter and the "killer" rabbit that
the president said attacked his fishing boat in 1979. (That one still
gets requested in concert, though Paxton is down to about 40 dates
per year. Loves the interchange; hates the travel.)

There was also "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler," about the
controversial 1979 federal bailout, and the recent update/sequel,
"I'm Changing My Name to Fannie Mae." Also: "The Bravest," a poignant
song about the heroic efforts of the 9/11 firefighters.

Other artists have recorded plenty of Paxton's songs, most frequently
the regretful lover's farewell, "The Last Thing on My Mind," which
has been recorded by something like 200 artists, from Baez and Judy
Collins to Neil Diamond and Charley Pride.

Paxton still writes several times each week at home in Alexandria,
Va., where there's a framed manuscript of "This Land Is Your Land" -
in Woody Guthrie's own handwriting! - on a table. (It was an
anniversary gift from Midge, Paxton's wife of 45 years. They have two
daughters, Kate and Jennifer.)

So how many Tom Paxton songs might there be?

"It's a meaningless statistic," he protests. "I could say a couple
thousand. But it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how
many songs you'll admit to having written. That could be 500."

Paxton became a folk artist because, he says, "I couldn't not."

Explain, please.

"I was always a sensitive child and young man, and I was very
passionate about the things I was passionate about. One of those
things was music in general and folk music in particular. There was
something about folk music that spoke to me very personally, even
when the songs were nothing about a life I knew. They seemed to be a
window into a broader soul. They made me feel connected somehow."

.

The science of selling out

The science of selling out

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7901003.stm

20 February 2009

By Stephen Dowling
BBC News Magazine
[]

Iggy Pop's endorsement of car insurance has prompted accusations of
selling out. But does anyone really care any more?

As the flailing, wild-eyed frontman of US garage-rock band The
Stooges, Iggy Pop helped pioneer punk long before the Sex Pistols.

His solo career is approaching its fifth decade. Live, he's earned a
reputation as one of rock's most exciting performers, with a frame
that's not so much athletic as freakish.

So why is one of rock's most iconic rebels now selling car insurance
on TV? Will we ever be able to listen to his music in the same way
again? Or are we now inured to the fact that at some point our
cultural heroes are going to turn round and exhort us to buy, buy, buy?

As the new face of insurers Swiftcover, Pop writhes and gyrates like
a toddler after too much red cordial, declaring that what he's really
selling isn't car insurance but "time", a confusion that will no
doubt be cleared up when he cashes the cheque.

Some of Pop's more faithful fans have not taken well to this. An army
of possibly now ex-supporters have vented their spleen on music
message boards and blogs. Posters featuring his ads have been defaced
with the words "sell-out", the ultimate insult.

Compromising integrity

"Selling out" is a phrase that has come to haunt many a politician,
public figure or entertainer. It's the perfect description to tar
those seen to compromise their integrity in favour of money, power or
mainstream acceptance.

John Lydon, the occasional frontman of punk pioneers The Sex Pistols,
caused many an old punk to splutter at the television when he
appeared plugging Country Life butter last year. Comedian Denis Leary
- who had become a cult star in the US with a rant-driven stream of
black comedy - annoyed some of his fans with his endorsement of
Holsten Pils lager. And Sting has still not recovered from agreeing
to front a smug promo for Jaguar.

But is this just a generational thing? Would fans of Pete Doherty
take such exception seeing him selling cough medicine or train
tickets? If Amy Winehouse was unveiled as the new face of a coffee
brand, would the sales of her next album plummet?

Acerbic American comedian Bill Hicks summed up a hardcore view that
chimed with an anti-consumerist niche in the 80s: "If you do an
advert then you are off the artistic register forever."

Hicks died of cancer, aged 32, before even having the chance to
tarnish this zero-tolerance stance by endorsing financial services,
but that philosophy hasn't died with him.

In the entertainment world, "sell-out" has also crystallised around
an independent, anti-major label stance of bands born out of the punk
and new wave scene of the late 1970s.

In the 1980s, amid the culture of conspicuous consumption, indie
musicians regarded any overt attempts to be successful as
compromising rigid ideals about artistic integrity. These included
avoiding being signed to a mainstream label and refusing to take part
in activities seen as crass and overly commercial, like making
expensive videos.

What makes us accuse our heroes of selling out? Why do we feel they
have abused our support?

For writer Zoe Williams, the Iggy Pop ads are not a concern because,
crucially, she is not a fan - his insurance endorsement isn't
interfering with any memories she has of buying Raw Power or going to
see him in concert. This is part of the mix - we have to some kind of
relationship with the artist in question in order to be disappointed
or betrayed.

But, she says: "If Morrissey was on an ad, that would appal me. It's
not that he's as pure as the driven snow, but there's a kind of
integrity. He's a commercial refusenik." And, crucially, she's a fan.

Journalist and author Andrew Mueller says we bring our own personal
feelings to the art we love, and react badly to it being treated lightly.

"I think consumers object to their favourite songs being used in ads
less out of any sense that the artistic integrity of the work is
being tarnished, more out of a sense of ownership.

"We love songs because they remind us of someone/something, and it's
annoying when we find ourselves having no choice but to associate
them with bathroom freshener."

Those accused of "selling out" are sometimes also called "whores".
Williams says: "Calling someone a prostitute is incredibly offensive
because we feel sex is sacred. I think art is similar."

Williams was unhappy at the Mac and PC ads in 2007 starring Peep Show
comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb - arguing that comedians
earn our trust with their routines and humour. "Comedy is intimate;
it turns on qualities we share, not those we can only admire," she wrote then.

To Williams, Webb and Mitchell have sold out because she identifies
almost too readily with them. "It's a bunch of middle-class people
with exactly my education and opportunities. And they probably didn't
get paid that much for it."

American academic Michael Berube tackled the subject in an essay
called Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Selling Out.

He came to the subject with something more than just an academic
interest - in the 80s he was a fan of hardcore US bands such as
Husker Du, who were accused of selling out when they signed to a
mid-size record label. Many of their fans refused to listen to
subsequent records.

With music, he says, "this is art that has always been mixed with
commerce". But like many counter-cultures, the music scene that
created artists like Pop began with an uncommercial edge that only
gradually filtered into the mainstream. "They had no idea this was
ever going to be incredibly successful."

Mr Berube may live in Pennsylvania but thanks to the internet he has
seen the ads, and says they cause a serious "ick reaction".

The ads, Mr Berube says, feature cognitive dissonance - where
something attempts to balance contradictory ideas. "Here's Iggy Pop,
shirtless, haggard, and he's concerned about putting his papers down too."

He adds: "The line about 'selling time' - it's a guilty conscience.
And at the end he yells 'Get a life' with the anarchist symbol.
Anyone who knows that symbol sees how jarring that is."

He laughs. "If I ran into Iggy Pop at an intersection, I would hope
he had car insurance, though."

Modern audiences may immune to the shock though. "I wonder if people
now don't just expect it to be business as usual," Mr Berube suggests.

Marketing analyst Craig Smith agrees. "There are so many more
commercial aspects to what any given celebrity does these days.
They're promoted and marketed and advertised to an inch of their
lives. I don't think people now are surprised to see their heroes
appear in an ad."

Artists develop, mature, their edges get softened, and they wake up
one day fretting that they haven't saved enough for their retirement.
All the while, their fans often hang on to an idealistic memory.

But if an ad agency suddenly wants to attach their one-time rebel
yell to car insurance, or holidays to Australia, should we judge them?

As the recession bites and sales of music plummet, Pop's decision may
not look so out of place. And the term sell out may lose some of its sting.

.

Malcolm X, Barack Obama and Oginga Odinga

Malcolm X, Barack Obama and Oginga Odinga

http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/malcolm-x-barack-obama-and-oginga-odinga/

by Norman (Otis) Richmond
February 22, 2009

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was assassinated 44 years ago,
on Feb. 21, 1965, because of his attempt to internationalize the
African American struggle for self-determination.

Malcolm would have been 84 years old on May 19, 2009. Africans in New
York City have made a pilgrimage to Malcolm's gravesite every year
since Feb. 21, 1966. While it is unlikely that U.S. President Barack
Obama will acknowledge Malcolm's joining the ancestors, people from
Cape Town to Nova Scotia and Brazil to Brixton definitely will.

Unlike other U.S. presidents, President Obama knows who Malcolm was
and what he stands for. Like many males with African roots, President
Obama was moved by Malcolm's life story. A cursory reading of his
autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," will prove this point.

President Obama is truly an African American; parts of his roots are
with the Luo people in East Africa. The Luo are an ethnic group in
Kenya, Eastern Uganda and Northern Tanzania. The Luo are the third
largest ethnic group (13 percent) in Kenya, after the Kikuyu (20
percent) and the Luhya (17 percent). The Luo and the Kikuyu inherited
the bulk of political power in the first years following Kenya's
independence in 1963.

When Malcolm visited Africa in 1964, he visited Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania. It was during that trip that he met with Kenyan President
Jomo Kenyatta, Ugandan President Dr. Milton Obote, and President
Julius K. Nyerere and Muhammad Babu of Tanzania. Babu, Malcolm and
Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) held a meeting during this period in
New York City. Malcolm talked about meeting President Kenyatta.
Malcolm, however, was also aware of Kenya's Oginga Odinga.

When Malcolm was killed in 1965, Kenyatta was still in power and
Odinga and Kenyatta were still comrades. Jaramogi Ajuma Oginga Odinga
(1911-Jan. 20, 1994) was a Luo chief who became a prominent figure in
Kenya's struggle for independence.

He later served as Kenya's first vice president and a member of the
Kenya African National Union (KANU) and thereafter as opposition
leader. Odinga's son, Raila Odinga, is the current prime minister,
and another son, Oburu Odinga, is assistant minister for finance in
the 2008 Grand Coalition government. Odinga was vice president of
Kenya in 1964-66 but, in 1969, he was placed under house arrest due
to his opposition to the KANU government.

Odinga had an impact on human rights groups in the United States.
While he was in the U.S., the State Department took him on a tour of
America. The last stop was Atlanta, self-described as "The City Too
Busy to Hate." Odinga was housed at one of Atlanta's two non-segregated hotels.

When the activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) heard about Odinga's visit, they decided to "pull his coat"
and provide him with information that would be neglected by the State
Department. They visited Odinga's hotel room and shared stories and
songs of the human-rights movement to acquaint this African visitor
with how the United States treated her African population.

He responded, "Uhuru," the Swahili word for "freedom." Following
their visit to Odinga, the SNCC delegation went to the Toddle House
restaurant near the hotel. They sat in to protest the restaurant's
"whites only" policy, and 17 were arrested.

"Immediately after these events, Knoxville's Matthew Jones, a SNCC
worker, wrote a song, 'Oginga Odinga of Kenya,' telling this story.
Odinga described the racial situation in America as 'very pitiful.'
Soon the Toddle House restaurants chose to desegregate," recalled
Jones in an interview.

"Oginga Odinga of Kenya" became one of Malcolm's favorite songs.
Malcolm and the legendary human rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer of the
Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party shared the platform at a church
in Harlem. The Freedom Singers of SNCC performed various songs,
including "Oginga Odinga of Kenya."

One of the reasons over 90 percent of the African population in the
United States gave their support to President Obama and not Sen.
Hillary Clinton was his opposition to the war in Iraq. Africans in
American have always been in the vanguard of opposing imperialist
wars. The great Nevis-born African Caribbean leader Cyril Briggs, who
helped found the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919, was fired from
his job at the New York Amsterdam News for speaking against World War I.

Contrary to popular belief, it was Malcolm, not Martin Luther King,
who first opposed the war in Vietnam. Malcolm was the first African
American leader of national prominence in the 1960s to condemn the
war. He was later joined by organizations like the Revolutionary
Action Movement (RAM) and the SNCC, the Black Panther Party, the
League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Republic of New Africa.

This was in the tradition of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet,
Martin R. Delaney, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus
Garvey, Cyril Briggs, Claudia Jones, Ella Baker and Paul Robeson.

Malcolm continued this anti-imperialist tradition. He continued to
link the struggles of African people worldwide. King always
maintained, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
He came out against the Vietnam War with his famous April 4, 1967,
speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

What direction will President Obama take on international affairs?
Will or will he not send troops to Afghanistan? What stand will he
take on the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)? Which tradition will he
follow? Will he take an anti-imperialist stance like Malcolm and
Odinga or will he follow in the footsteps of his fellow American
presidents? Time will tell.
--

Norman Richmond can be contacted at norman@ckln.fm
--

Becoming aware of Africa

This is an excerpt from "No Easy Victories: African Liberation and
American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000," edited by William
Minter, Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb Jr., who was field secretary for
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi from
1962 to 1967. The book is available from
http://www.noeasyvictories.org and
http://www.africaworldpressbooks.com. Charles Cobb Jr. writes:

It was in '63 that we really started to become aware of Africa, as I
remember. Oginga Odinga, who was at that time the vice president of
Kenya, was touring the United States, and one of the places he
visited was Atlanta, Georgia.

A whole bunch of us went to see him, just because he was an African
leader. There was no political assessment of Kenya, or any of that.
He was a black guy who was a vice president of a country, and we had
just never seen that. He was staying at some posh hotel in downtown
Atlanta, and he saw us. We had this talk, and shook his hand; it was
a big thing.

Afterwards we decided to go have coffee at a restaurant next door to
the hotel, and we were all refused service. We were kind of high on
meeting this black leader, and so naturally we refused to leave the
restaurant, and we all got arrested. Oginga Odinga became a known
name in the organization. There were songs written about him. Because
of this incident, discussion started.

Oginga Odinga

I went down to the Peach Tree Manor
To see Oginga Odinga
The police said " Well, what's the matter?"
To see Oginga Odinga.

Oginga Odinga, Oginga Odinga
Oginga Odinga of Kenya
Oginga Odinga, Oginga Odinga
Oginga Odinga of Kenya.

Uhuru, uhuru
Freedom now, freedom now
The folks in Mississippi
Will knock you on your rump
And if you holler FREEDOM
They'll throw you in the swamp.

.

The day the music died: Malcolm X’ assassination, Feb. 21, 1965

The day the music died

http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/the-day-the-music-died/

Malcolm X' assassination, Feb. 21, 1965

by Roland Sheppard
February 21, 2009

On the afternoon of Feb. 21, 1965, I went to the Audubon Ballroom to
hear Malcolm X speak. I also went to sell the newspaper, The
Militant, a radical newspaper that printed the truth about Malcolm X,
published his speeches and publicly defended him.

When I got to the ballroom, things were radically different - there
were no cops. Normally, Malcolm's meetings in Harlem were crawling
with cops. As I was selling papers, Malcolm X approached the Audubon
Ballroom. I offered to sell him the latest issue, but he told me,
"Not today, Roland. I am alone and in a hurry."

A while later as I entered the meeting room, again I did not see any
cops. I went in to sit down where I normally sat along with the rest
of the press in the front and the left side of the room. On the way
to my seat, Gene Roberts, who later surfaced as a police agent member
of the Black Panther Party, told me that I could not seat at my
regular place, but that on that day I had to sit in the front row on
the right side of the hall, facing the stage.

As I sat down, I glanced over to where I normally sat and saw a large
Black man with a navy blue-gray trench coat. When the meeting
started, all was quiet as the crowd listened to Benjamin X
introducing Malcolm X.

When Malcolm approached the podium, he gave the normal Muslim
greeting for peace. At that point a disturbance occurred in the room.
Two men were standing about halfway back in the room and to the right
of Malcolm on stage. One was shouting, "Get your hand out of my pocket!"

Malcolm was trying to calm things down, when the men - one later
identified as Talmadge Hayer - started running down the right aisle
shouting and firing a pistol at Malcolm and ran out the exit doors by
the stage, to the right of Malcolm X.

Suddenly I heard gunshots fired from all over the place, and I
instinctively hit the floor. When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X
standing up and glaring down at one of his assassins. At that point,
from the corner of my eye, nearby to my left, I saw a flash from a
gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about 10 feet.

In that instant, as Malcolm died before my eyes, I suddenly realized
how big he was and I realized that he was a giant in stature and in
the world. This vision of Malcolm X, being assassinated, has haunted
me till this day.

The fatal blast, which I later found out to be from a shotgun, came
from the area where I had seen the large Black man with a navy
blue-gray trench coat! When I left the hall, Malcolm's bodyguards
told me that they had caught two of the assassins, one who was shot -
Talmadge Hayer - and one whom the police took away.

A few weeks later, when I was questioned in the Harlem police
station, I was shown a series of photos of people whom I recognized
as members of the Nation of Islam or Malcolm's organization. I also
saw a picture of the large Black man with a navy blue-gray trench
coat that I had seen at the Audubon Ballroom.

I was thinking of how to respond to the cops and how to say that I
did not recognize the photos of Malcolm's friends and supporters and
the members of the Nation of Islam. I then told the cops that I had
to go to the rest room.

When I got to the men's room door, I saw the same large Black man
coming out of the men's room that I had seen in the Audubon Ballroom
and in the photos that had just been shown to me. Then he walked by
me, past the desks of the secretarial pool, and went to his office
inside the police station!

At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm
X or were part of the assassination plot. I became very nervous
thinking about what I was going to say to the cops when I got back
and how I was going to get out of the station alive.

I then came up with, "I cannot recognize anyone, for all Black people
look the same." The cops nodded in agreement and we were allowed to
leave the police station.

Malcolm X was one of my heroes. He was the most honest mass leader
that I have ever known or seen. He was a great orator and his
speeches seemed like a conversation between himself and the audience.

His speeches were like music to my ears and have inspired me for the
rest of my life in the fight for social justice. He was so human in
his orations. I still remember him when made the "Harlem Hate Gang
Scare" speech at the Militant Labor Forum on May 29, 1964, and other
speeches in which he chuckled a "heh heh" when he was about to make a
special comment.

At that forum, he said: "It's impossible for a chicken to produce a
duck egg … The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an
Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic
system, this political system, this social system, this system
period. It is impossible for it, as it now stands, to produce freedom
right now for the Black man in this country - it is impossible. And
if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, (heh heh) I'm certain you
would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken (heh heh)."

Both he and Martin Luther King had come to similar positions about
capitalism and the Vietnam War at the time of their death. That is
why this government assassinated them. No one has followed in their footsteps.

From the point of view of this government, the world leader in
political assassinations, the two assassinations worked. For to this
day, no mass leader has had the courage to pick up where they left
off. They were able to silence the art, science and truth of these
two great orators. To me, Feb. 21 is "the day the music died." It was
the saddest day of my life.

For an in depth explanation of the government's assassinations of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, read my article, "The
Assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr."
http://web.me.com/rolandgarret/Site/The_Assassinations_%20of_Malcolm_X_and_Martin_Luther_King_Jr..html
--

Roland Sheppard is a writer and activist and former BA of the
Painters Union in San Francisco. Email him at
rolandsheppard@gmail.com and visit his website,
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret.

.

Modern Posters Auction

Modern Posters

http://www.news-antique.com/?id=786265&keys=auction-modern-rock-vintage

The first auction of its kind, Posters Please will be offering a
collection of over 400 original, rare posters from the 20th century.

2009-02-17

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

NEW YORK – On Thursday, March 12th, Posters Please­the world's
leading dealer of authentic vintage posters­will be offering over 400
lots of rare, original posters from the 20th century. This will be
the first sale of its kind ever, opening up a previously untapped
market to the auction community.

Aimed at first-time buyers, with many reserves as low as $100, this
sale offers the unique opportunity to begin collecting works of art
that will only increase in value.

With sections dedicated to politics, music, fashion, entertainment,
travel, and sports, this sale follows the trajectory of pop culture
from the 1950s through the 1980s. Bring back what once hung on the
walls of your (or your parents') dorm room. From Levy's to Levis, Fu
Manchu to Nixon, Nina Simone to Paul Simon, the Stenberg Brothers to
the Marx Brothers, Mao to Tao, no sale has ever been filled with this
many iconic images or notable personalities.

Highlights include a complete set of the famous San Francisco Rock
posters, the first printing of Ricky Jay's 'Cards As Weapons' poster
and book, the ghoulish advertisements of Edward Gorey, Gunther
Kieser's concert images, a half-naked Elvis, the Beatles, Andy
Warhol, Herman Miller, the cult images of Yokoo, and both the
political and the erotic posters of Tomi Ungerer, of Schoolhouse Rock fame.

Notable artists featured in the sale are Celestino Piatti, Seymour
Chwast, Ivan Chermayeff, Paul Davis, Raymond Savignac, David Byrd,
René Magritte, Alexander Calder, Erte, Joe Eula, Jean-Michel Folon,
Milton Glaser, Richard Lindner, Michael Prechtl, Charles Kiffer, Rick
Griffen, Wes Wilson, Bernard Villemot, Herbert Leupin, Pierre
Fix-Masseau, Weimer Pursell, Tomoko Miho, Peter Teubner, Henri
Matisse, William Klein, Al Hirschfeild, Keith Haring, and Pablo Picasso.

Accompanying this schmorgasboard of artistic talent are such
(in)famous subjects as Allen Ginsberg, Watergate, Houdini, Alvin
Ailey, Marcel Marceau, Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton,
the Folies Bergere, Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Bette
Midler, Barbra Streisand, the Supremes, Bob Dylan, The Rolling
Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Who, The Grateful Dead, The
Lovin' Spoonful, Simon & Garfunkel, Lauren Bacall, Cuba, the New
Yorker, the Giants, Babe Ruth, Laurel & Hardy, Josephine Baker, Bobby
Short, Maurice Chevalier, Mahalia Jackson, and Dizzy Gillespie.

It's time to go All the Way with LBJ, to vote Fu Manchu for Mayor, to
express your awe for the poetry of Yevtushenko, to demand Safe Energy
Now, to embrace Big Nudes, to have a Flask of W.C. Fields, to say
Hooray for Captain Spaulding, to use Cards as Weapons, to tune in to
Masterpiece Theatre, to dance at the Mod Ball, to listen to Jazz, to
see War in Concert, to climb aboard the Yellow Submarine, to Step Out
in Levi's Jeans, to wear Chanel No. 5, to feast at the Herman Miller
Picnic, to read the New Yorker, to take all 65 Bridges to New York,
to witness The Fight, to Join the Free and Fat Society, and to take
part in the Electric Circus.

All that and more on March 12, 5:30 pm, at the International Poster Center.

Particulars: The auction begins at 5:30 pm on Thursday, March 12th.
The posters will be on view from February 27 to March 11, M-F, 9-5;
Sat/Sun, 11-6.

The International Poster Center
601 W. 26th St., 13th Floor
New York, NY 10028

Tel: 212-787-4000
Fax: 212-604-9175
Email: info@postersplease.com

Free catalogue available upon request; view online at
http://www.postersplease.com

.

Legends Perform Ginsberg Tribute

Legends Perform Ginsberg Tribute

http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=18352

Patti Smith and Philip Glass Honor the Late Beat Poet at Campbell

By Amy Silverstein / Staff Writer
Published Thursday, February 19, 2009

Most college students might assume that "hipster" is a recently
coined term, but the late poet Allen Ginsberg wrote about
"angelheaded hipsters" in "Howl," his famous 1955 poem that
celebrates the rebellious Beat movement. Ginsberg's poetry ­ along
with literature by other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac ­ was an
important influence on American songwriters in the '60s and '70s,
such as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, who in turn still influence
today's sub-cultures and (wannabe) non-conformists.

It's been 12 years since Ginsberg's death, but legendary
singer-songwriter and poet Patti Smith continues to tour the world to
perform tribute to Ginsberg; her most recent stop brought her to
Campbell Hall last Saturday evening. Accompanying Smith was pianist
and film composer Philip Glass, who initially seemed like he needed a nap.

In between sets, Smith told intimate, sweet anecdotes about her
friendships with Glass, Ginsberg, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and her late
husband, Fred Smith. Glass, meanwhile, would lean over the piano and
rub his face with exhaustion. I didn't blame him. Poetry readings,
especially if the poetry is by an intense writer like Ginsberg, are
an exhausting experience for the performers and for the audience.

Smith took a break from Ginsberg to recite some of her own poetry,
which seemed like a waste of her iconic singing voice. Smith, after
all, is the so-called godmother of punk rock, and she spent the '70s
belting out sassy, powerful anthems.

But the second part of the show, in which Smith made the most use of
her singing voice, was actually the dullest part, thanks to the
slow-paced set list and the tedious playing by guitarist Lenny Kaye
and mandolin player Jay Dee Daugherty.

Glass made a welcome return to the stage for the third part of the
show to perform "Etude No. 2," "Etude No. 10" and another song that
he may have composed for a South African musical, though it was hard
to be certain, because he mumbled a lot into the microphone.

It turned out that Glass was apparently not exhausted so much as just
shy and endearingly awkward. While Ginsberg's poetry once shocked
audiences with its vulgarity and obscene language, Glass creates
controversy with his instruments. Glass' minimalist composition
style, which features endless loops of arpeggiated minor chords
marred with intentional mistakes, has many detractors.

These Glass-haters are perhaps brainwashed by the overwrought violin
crescendos prevalent in work by cheesier composers. But the live
performance explained Glass' strong, hypnotic appeal. His performance
of "Etude No. 2" was soothing and elegant, while "Etude No. 10" would
have fit in nicely at a tribal sacrifice or a cult ritual. He ended
his solo set abruptly by pounding one last chord, and he was
subsequently greeted with enthusiastic applause.

Smith and Glass then reunited to perform Ginsberg's "On Cremation of
Chögyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara." Glass and Smith first performed the
poem together over a decade ago at Ginsberg's memorial service, which
may explain why this spoken-song electrified the theater in a way
that none of the previous recitations could.

Just as with her singing, Smith spoke from her gut, and she even
managed to speak with a wavering vibrato at times, breathing life
into the words. Poetry recitation is an art form in its own right,
and unlike lesser readers, Smith never resorts to yelling to get the
point across.

Her performance of "Footnote to Howl," was especially charged due to
her reading skills and to the rhythmic intensity of the prose itself
("The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is
holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!").

But none of the Ginsberg readings could be accurately described as
entertaining. Each set demanded intense concentration from the
listener. But Smith rewarded listeners for all their hard work when
she finally sang "Because the Night," the catchy hit single from 1978
that she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen.

The tribute otherwise felt like a big brain exercise, and I was
relieved once the lights finally dimmed on the stage. But I also left
Campbell Hall with a newfound interest in Allen Ginsberg's poetry,
which was the main point of the concert anyway.

.

Acid Trips and Frozen Heads at San Francisco’s Trippiest Party

Acid Trips and Frozen Heads at San Francisco's Trippiest Party

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-18/acid-trips-and-frozen-heads-at-san-franciscorsquos-trippiest-party/

by Kate Coleman
2/18/2009

At a wild celebration reuniting friends and family of the late LSD
guru Timothy Leary, status anxiety, Bill Ayers, and near-miss
decapitations were the pink elephants in the room.

Timothy Leary died in 1996, but to his devotees, he's been circling
around out there, just waiting to tune back in.

That moment arrived at a reunion party for Leary last week in San
Francisco's 111 Minna Gallery. For the 300 or so party guests, Leary
remains a magnet. The gathering looked like a tie-dyed retrospective
of family members, freaks, former acid kingpins, vintage-clad rockers
and alternative-press types like Zap Comix publisher Ron Turner and
Dr. Hip, aka Gene Schoenfeld.

While there, I cornered a tall, rangy, pony-tailed man, Michael
Randall, whose leather cowboy hat and weathered looks lent him a
certain outlaw charisma. "I am a founder of the BEL and am considered
the leader," he said, referring to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,
the LSD consortium of Laguna Beach surfers who founded their
"spiritual charity" with Leary as inspirer. After Leary was fired
from Harvard and, in 1970, sentenced to 10 years in prison for
possession of a small amount of hashish, BEL footed the bill for his
jailbreak, an audacious escape down a drainpipe just four months into
his sentence. The story behind the sensational news at the time was
first related to me by Leary's ex-wife, Rosemary, in interviews in
2001, a year before her death.

As Rosemary told it, four members of the Weather Underground, the
revolutionary group that bombed the Capitol building in '71, provided
fake passports and airplane tickets to both her and Leary following
the escape. The pair fled to Algeria, and found sanctuary in the
compound of the International Wing of the Black Panthers. Panther
leader Eldridge Cleaver, himself a fugitive from justice, soon grew
exasperated with Leary, an irrepressible socialite, for hanging out
in town with Eurotrash. Cleaver placed both Learys under "house
arrest," an early sign of trouble in the brief marriage between the
two strands of the counterculture­the revolutionaries and the
drug-taking hippies.

The jailbreak cost BEL $40,000 total, with $25,000 going to the
Weathermen alone, said Randall. This included $15,000 sent to the
Learys by courier for their expenses after fleeing, and later $10,000
more to give to Cleaver, who promptly released them. Leary was
captured more than a year later in Afghanistan, his marriage to
Rosemary in shambles, and extradited back to federal prison, where he
began snitching on Rosemary, BEL, his attorney, and the Weathermen.

Randall also confirmed that Weather Underground member Bernardine
Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayres­the very same "terrorist" used to
smear Barack Obama during the campaign­drove one of two getaway cars
in relay, spiriting Leary to Seattle and then, with Rosemary joining
him, to Chicago.

"I was pissed at Tim, but I loved him," Randall said of Leary's
snitching. Years later at a gathering, he says he confronted Leary:
"I said, 'Why did you do it? You betrayed everything we and you ever
stood for.'" Leary argued, "''No one ever served a day in jail
because of me.'" But Randall believed Rosemary was victimized.

Others felt differently. When The Smoking Gun website published his
grand jury transcripts in 1999, three years after Leary's death, no
less than Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, and Leary's goddaughter Winona
Ryder (her mother and father, old friends of Leary's, were at the
reunion), were among the loyalists who insisted Leary's snitching in
the face of 99 years on various charges was understandable.

But Rosemary, who was a fugitive living underground in a hardscrabble
life for 24 long years, was angry, believing she couldn't surface
without being pressured to corroborate Leary's testimony. "I am not a
snitch," she said during the interview we had the year before she
died. She still faced charges of possession of hash and jumping bail.
When Leary's daughter, Susan, committed suicide in 1990, Rosemary
called her ex in sympathy. Later, after charges were dropped, she
resurfaced. In the end, she too forgave him, taking care of a dying Leary.

In life and in death, Leary was a phenomenon: Harvard professor,
psychologist at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, and seducer of youth­or
at least their inheritances, like the 2,400-acre Millbrook estate of
the Hitchcock twins, whose 64-room mansion was requisitioned in the
mid-'60s for weekend acid trips Leary put on for the hip and the
famous. His guests were the elite class, like Henry and Clare Booth
Luce, and the arty, like artist Saul Steinberg, director Otto
Preminger, Charlie Mingus, and counterculture heroes Allen Ginsberg,
Paul Krassner, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. These parties
flourished until crusading Dutchess County prosecutor, none other
than G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate burglar-in-chief, raided Millbrook
and arrested Leary and Rosemary, ending the fun.

Leary's personality was perfectly suited to such gatherings. Last
week's party, according to Denis Berry, a trustee of Leary's archives
who hosted the event, was in part to publicize the collection for
sale­letters, speeches, videos, tapes, memorabilia, even a plaster
cast of Leary's face­and in part to unite various family factions and
friends, some still quarreling over the man and his legacy. The event
featured the premiere of The Terrestrials, a documentary of the
effect of Leary on UC Santa Cruz students as they digitized his tapes
and videos.

In one of his last incarnations, Leary, free at last, and married to
his fifth and final wife, Barbara, sister of actress Tanya Roberts,
became a fixture on the Tinseltown dinner circuit­a sellout to some,
like his son Jack.

At the reunion, Jack, now 59 and white-haired, told me his
estrangement from Tim was "complicated," but denied it was the wild
Millbrook scene that prompted his leaving home at the age of 17. It
was the snitching he hated. He appeared condescending about his
father's need for attention. "Tim never wanted to be a guru," he told
me. "He wanted to be a rock star, a Mick Jagger, but he couldn't play
the guitar." He mocked his father as a socialite: "He and his wife
would come home after an evening out and spend hours obsessing over
their social standing­whether they got seated at the right table or not."

Still, later that night, hugging many old friends of his father,
including Randall and famed LSD chemist Nick Sand (who still to this
day takes acid once a month, and was recovering from a heart attack a
scant two weeks previously), introducing for the first time his
children to Susan's, and posing for pictures with his sisters' two
daughters, Jack seemed happy to be back in the Leary fold, and to
meet his stepbrother, Zach Leary, Barbara's son, whom Leary legally
adopted. Zach chose to live with Leary. "I think Tim was better
later," Jack mused­a better father to Zach, and grandfather to his
sisters' three children. (Susan's son was absent.)

Leary's last six months after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer
was a coda to his life. He announced he'd freeze himself with a
cryonics firm. It fit with his futurist notions. But unable to afford
the cost of 50 years of refrigeration, he opted for the cut-rate
freezing of his head only. Both Berry and Joey Cavello, Leary's video
guy who recorded everything Leary in his later years, including his
demise, said the freezing idea was too much, even for Leary. When the
cryonics team came with hospital bed, basins and equipment (saws to
cut off his head in the minutes after he died), Leary sent them
packing, telling Cavello he didn't want to wake up to face humorless
guys in white coats with clipboards­and it was gruesome.

Berry says he privately thought the cryonics and subsequent Leary
plans to have his ashes go into space along with Star Trek author
Gene Roddenberry's were manifestations of Leary's submerged fears of death.

But that's not how Joichi Ito, a Japanese businessman Leary first met
in the 1980s, sees it. Ito was accompanied at the party by four men
in identical black suits who looked wildly out of place in the
hippie-garbed crowd. But Ito has long been a counterculturist in his
native Japan (currently he resides in Dubai) He's been a DJ, club
owner, rave importer, Internet geek, and Leary admirer, as he put it
to me. Ito, another Leary godchild, told of flying in when he heard
his dear friend was about to die. "I saw him the night before he
died. Tony Scott, the director, was there. Leary was smoking cigars
and snorting cocaine," he laughed. "So I thought, he's fine, and I
left. He died the next day. I had to fly right back for the memorial."

In the end, the reunion didn't settle the question of whether Leary
was a snitch or a visionary. But after all the stories I heard that
evening, it was clear to me that even in death, Leary was good company.
--

Kate Coleman is a freelance journalist residing in Berkeley.

.

At NJREP, a germ of a compelling play

[2 items]

At NJREP, a germ of a compelling play

http://www.app.com/article/20090219/ENT/902190437/1031

By TOM CHESEK • CORRESPONDENT
February 19, 2009

It's a device you've seen before if you've attended more than a
handful of plays in your time. The carefully ordered existence of a
somewhat eccentric family is thrown out of whack by the arrival of an
outsider ­ a dinner guest who stays long enough to shake the
foundations of everything these folks hold dear.

In "Sick," the play by Zayd Dohrn now onstage at New Jersey Repertory
Company in Long Branch, the premise is taken to an extreme, as the
already claustrophobic stage of the NJ Rep playhouse is transformed
into the rent-controlled brownstone of the Krebs family. It's a
sterile place of plastic slipcovers, buzzing air purifiers and
disinfected surfaces, reigned over by white-clad, mask-wearing
matriarch Maxine (Liz Zazzi) as a fortress against the dubious
environment of post-9/11 Manhattan.

Maxine and her two highly allergic, home-schooled teenagers Sarah
(Meredith Napolitano) and Davy (Kevin Sebastian) are "prisoners in
the brownstone of our good fortune," cooped up in this setting where
the introduction of ideas apparently is as tightly controlled as the
spread of microbes.

The family's sole liaison with the outside world is college-professor
dad Sidney (Jim Shankman), a rather ineffectual sort who's described
by Maxine in one of her more withering moments as being "like Woody
Allen, except not funny." When Dad returns sweaty and reeking from
the gym with young grad student and surprise dinner guest Jim (Rusty
Ross), this already wacky house is turned completely upside down ­
except not funny.

Not too "zany"

The talented NJ Rep regular Zazzi often sets the mood for any show
she's involved in ­ and here the mood is far from the "zany comedy"
described in the show's advance advertising. While Maxine gets off
her share of extremely acerbic zingers at Sidney's expense, they do
little to softpedal her disdain for the man she regards as little
more than an alien organism that invades the household each evening.

Hers is a deadly serious turn, a woman who thinks nothing of
belittling her spouse in front of company or slapping objects out of
people's hands ­ all while being motivated by an unflinching love and
sacrifice on behalf of her children.

Not that Sidney doesn't deserve a good share of that abuse, either. A
blowhard egotist who's had to cede the center of attention in his own
home, he rather stupidly pursues an impulsive "experiment" that leads
to some fairly horrific results ­ and he is forced to spend the
remainder of the play sitting in what amounts to a penalty box.

Under the direction of Benjamin E. Klein, Zazzi commands the tight
little stage with the absolute authority of the "neat freak" writ
large; her speeches on the fall of the Twin Towers and the
vulnerability of her son are chillingly convincing, and Shankman
makes for an effective foil ­ at least in the play's first half.

Name-dropping

This is the sort of script in which the characters (hailing, as in
way too many other instances, from the realm of academia) tend to
name-drop poets in an attempt to impress, we're guessing, other
characters in other plays. As the "gentleman caller" named Jim ­ a
lift from "The Glass Menagerie" ­ Ross is stuck with a character that
never quite transcends its contrivance as a plot-moving device,
ultimately more of an observer than a real catalyst of the action.

The pace really flags when the stage is left to the younger players
for long interludes, with the character of Sarah a particularly
problematic element. We're asked to take it on faith that the
19-year-old is both a brilliant poetic prodigy and a fragile if
people-savvy dreamer, a creative freebird who yearns to fly her
sterile cage. Under Napolitano's largely expressionless performance,
she seems neither brilliant nor even particularly sick.

The play's strangest and most thought-provoking character is easily
Davy, the frail young man seen almost entirely behind an oxygen tank
and breathing mask. The sheltered teen quizzes Jim at length about
porn, acknowledges his distance from the mainstream of society and
keeps us off balance regarding his motives and possible agenda.

Presented as a "rolling world premiere" by the national New Play
Network consortium, "Sick" is a not altogether healthy play that
nonetheless scores points on the parallels between the spread of
infectious "dirt" and the "dirt" of moral turpitude. Playwright
Dohrn, the son of famed 1960s radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine
Dohrn, invites us into the world of an unorthodox family unit, to
munch on a little food for thought.

--------

Illness, Illusion and Dark Comedy in Long Branch

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22theatnj.html

By NAOMI SIEGEL
Published: February 20, 2009

Memories of my Aunt Roy's apartment in the Bronx flashed through my
mind when I saw the stage setting of "Sick," Zayd Dohrn's prickly new
play receiving a stellar production at New Jersey Repertory Company
in Long Branch. Plastic sheeting adorns both sofa and club chair, and
the bare floors scream out for cover.

But while Aunt Roy kept her furniture under wraps and her carpets
rolled up under the bed because she still wasn't sure, 15 years after
buying them, that they were keepers, Maxine, the control-freak,
über-mother of this loony contemporary household, has another agenda.
Committed to protecting her two home-schooled teenage children from
the contaminants and allergens in the outside "cesspool" of a world,
she has created a cocoonlike environment in their antiseptic New York
City brownstone that would make the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention proud. Plastic sheeting also covers the windows; air
purifiers and filters hum softly in the corners; and a bucket filled
with clean water sits at the ready to wash off any dirt accidentally
brought in from outside. Everyone's dressed in white scrubs, and face
masks are de rigueur.

Mr. Dohrn ­ he is the son of Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, the
former Weather Underground members, and spent his early childhood on
the run with them ­ was living in Beijing during the height of the
SARS epidemic when he wrote this rather heavy-handed dark comedy.
"Sick" suggests another play in which a suffocating mother in
extremis creates a prison for her children, "The Glass Menagerie," by
Tennessee Williams. Maxine, played here with an excess of histrionics
by Liz Zazzi, brings to mind the overbearing Amanda Wingfield.
Maxine's two children, Sarah and Davy, are stand-ins (though of the
opposite sex) for Tom, the aspiring writer and duty-bound son in
"Menagerie," and Laura, his crippled, emotionally challenged sister.

All hell breaks loose when a gentleman caller named Jim (even the
name is the same) arrives at the house for a post-tennis schmooze
with his grad school mentor, Sidney (who is also Maxine's husband and
the father of Sarah and Davy, and is played with warmth and a
boundless integrity by Jim Shankman). Meredith Napolitano is lovely
as Sarah, the steadfast, brilliant young poet yearning to accept the
college scholarship she has just received after surreptitiously
applying. Kevin Sebastian captures perfectly the fragility and pathos
of Davy, who is prone to anaphylactic shock and whose gruesome
response to Sid's desperate effort to debunk the allergy "myth" that
paralyzes the household ends Act I in a bloody fury.

As Jim, Rusty Ross becomes the interlocutor, bringing some solace to
various members of the family, and to Sarah in particular, by his
mere presence and calming vocal exchanges. Mr. Ross is wonderful in
this role; in one beautifully realized scene, he and Ms. Napolitano
have a discussion about the role of an abnormal childhood in
predicting genius that segues into a burgeoning mutual infatuation.

Benjamin Endsley Klein has directed ably, yet no amount of effort on
his part or on that of the fine cast can keep Mr. Dohrn's work from
seeming melodramatic and rather transparent. With the Krebs family
gyrating between appearing genuinely ill and simply in the thrall of
a rather screwy mother, it's hard to feel much sympathy. Like Davy's
magic tricks, this family's angst strikes one as more illusion than reality.

"Sick," at New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway, Long Branch,
through March 15. Information: (732) 229-3166 or njrep.org.

.

Weather Report

David Dorfman Dance

http://www.westword.com/events/david-dorfman-dance-1022691/

Date/Time:Sat., February 28, 7:30pm
Price: $28-$52

Weather Report

The times they are a-changin' at the Newman Center.

by Susan Froyd

Choreographer/dancer David Dorfman of David Dorfman Dance says his
figurative, representational style moves in and out of favor, and
right now, riding a wave of Obama-inspired national hope, it seems to
be making a comeback, along with the '60s-based ideas of community
participation and taking action toward change.

The time, he thinks, couldn't be more perfect for underground, his
dance inspired by ´60s radical group the Weather Underground, which
counted such names as Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers
among its ranks. Dorfman's interest in the group began after the
chance viewing of a 2002 documentary on the movement that left him
fascinated. "It made an impression on me," he says. "I found it
riveting and moving, and I've watched it more than a dozen times
since." Part of that feeling was a kind of nostalgia, he admits, but
it also struck a note, bringing back memories of himself at thirteen,
living on the outskirts of Chicago when the 1968 Democratic
Convention exploded downtown. "I was too young to go down there and
be a part of the riots, but I was formed in some way by this idea of
protesting against what you felt was unjust." And though those
protesters, including the Weathermen and others, didn't always make
the right choices, Dorfman notes, their "audacity" is still
inspiring. "Let's not let history make itself; let's make history. We
may do it the wrong way, but let's at least look at history and try
to take responsibility for making a better world."

Underground, which includes a contingent of local dancers from the
community in addition to Dorfman and ensemble (the Denver auditions
had the largest turnout of any he's held), will play out on stage in
Gates Concert Hall at the Newman Center, 2344 East Iliff Avenue. For
tickets, $28 to $52 (a steal in this intimate, well-made hall), go to
www.du.edu/newmancenter or call 303-357-ARTS.

.

Country Joe brings Woody Guthrie to Sierra Nevada's Big Room

Country Joe brings Woody Guthrie to Sierra Nevada's Big Room

http://www.chicoer.com/entertainment/ci_11733025

By JAIME O'NEILL - The Buzz
Posted: 02/19/2009

CHICO -- Country Joe and the Fish were, at the very least, a
significant footnote to the history of the 1960s.

If you lived in the Bay Area, they were more than a footnote. Country
Joe and his band were part of the soundtrack to the anti-war movement
from the mid-60s on, and the Fish Cheer was almost certain to be
heard at most any rally organized to protest the draft, the napalming
of civilian populations, defoliation and the Vietnam War in general.

More than any other Bay Area band -- more than the Dead, the
Airplane, or other aggregations who went on to greater fame and
fortune -- Country Joe and the Fish gave of their time and their
talents in service to causes they believed in. They played in
People's Park, and they played on flatbed trucks to entertain
thousands who marched in protest against U.S. foreign policy in the
1960s and '70s.

But it wasn't just anti-war politics that made Country Joe and the
Fish worth hearing. Their first album in 1967 -- Electric Music for
the Mind and Body -- was an early landmark in the history of the
genre that would come to be called acid-rock. Country Joe and his
band played music worth listening to on its own merits, and the
activism was a bonus for those who shared their views.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Country Joe McDonald would,
at a later stage of his life, turn his talents and attention to Woody
Guthrie, a seminal figure in the history of music put to the service
of social and political change. Country Joe brings his Woody Guthrie
tribute to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.'s Big Room on Monday night.

Speaking by phone from his home in Berkeley, Country Joe talked about
how he came to put this show together.

"I grew up with Woody Guthrie's music as a kid," he said. "My dad was
a dustbowl refugee from Oklahoma so none of Woody's stuff was foreign
from the first time I heard it. Back in 2001, the Smithsonian asked
me to take part in a John Steinbeck exhibit they were bringing to
Salinas. That motivated me to put this show together. It's not just
songs, but it's a lot of bits and pieces of Woody's life, from some
little-known erotic poetry he wrote, to stories about cookies Malvina
Reynolds brought to him when he was in the hospital during his last days."

The Wikipedia entry on Country Joe and the Fish says that the name
"Country Joe" was a reference to Joseph Stalin. When asked about
that, McDonald said, "It was originally going to be Country Mao and
the Fish, and then it changed to Country Joe. It was meant to be a
joke name; it wasn't planned or anything, but it stuck."

On the subject of the labor unions Woody Guthrie supported in his
music and his life, Joe said: "Unions are on the decline, and so many
people are out of jobs. There's nothing new about union busting. Even
with Obama, we are still living in conservative times, but America
remains a great place, and Woody Guthrie embodies that love of this
country. He was a champion of the poor and oppressed, but he was a
thoroughly American guy."

Billy Bragg, representing yet another generation of socially
conscious musicians, has praised Country Joe's homage to the Dustbowl
troubadour: "Like no one of his generation, Country Joe McDonald
carries on the mission of Woody Guthrie."

Who: Country Joe.
What: "Tribute to Woody Guthrie."
When: Doors 6 p.m., show 7:30 p.m. Feb. 23.
Where: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.'s Big Room.
Tickets: $25, 345-2739.

.

Children of the Revolution

Children of the Revolution

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/252289.html

Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith join frontline activists in Athens to
discuss the worst civil unrest in Europe for decades

2/21/2009

A heavy chain binds the iron gates of the philosophy faculty of the
university of Athens, the city where the notions of philosophy and of
university were invented in the shadow of the Acropolis. But this
does not mean that the building is empty, or that there is not
effervescent discourse in progress; quite the reverse, the place is
teeming with people and ideas. It has been - as have thousands of
colleges, schools, city halls, offices and every other kind of
building across Greece - occupied. Put under occupation by, in this
case, the students. So that the walls, inside and out, like every
wall in Athens, are lined with the slogans of the insurrection which
propelled the most tumultuous and prolonged riots in a European city
since 1968, after the killing by police of a 15-year-old, Alexis
Grigoropoulos, as he chatted with friends on a street corner on 6
December 2008.

Many of the axioms are reminiscent of 1968, blending humor and
mischief: "Merry Crisis and a happy New Fear" and "Kill the cop
inside you". Others are merely enraged: "Fascist state, you are deaf
- the gallows await you!" Others are relevant to the moment:
"Billions for the banks, bullets for the children." And one dismisses
that era of revolt by their parents: "May '68 is dead. Fight Now!"

Inside what is properly known as the Faculty of Philosophy,
Psychology, Pedagogy, Music and Mathematics, students discuss the
origins of the uprising, and its causes. They talk first about the
"precarity" of their lives, and the fact that in Greece a quarter of
those aged between 17 and 25 are unemployed. One student, Alexis,
explains how for two years they have been occupying campuses all over
Greece in protest against the government giving formal university
status to private colleges (many of which have franchising agreements
with British universities). Another student, Chariklia, says, "Half
of all women who leave high school are out of work. What is the
future for them and what does that say to the school kids who came on
to the streets with us?" They talk about short-term contracts,
"outsourcing", work without security or representation, of the
impossibility of finding a good job unless connected in a client
system of patronage and who-you-know. Then the conversation becomes
more general. "Society has the face of freedom and choice," says
Angeliki. "But that is all it is, a facade. This bad job or that bad
job, this rubbish on television or that rubbish on television, this
product or that product. We are rebelling against that false choice."
Time after time, students and activists pleaded with us not to make
cliched references to Ancient Greece, but then a girl named Yianna
said: "Don't forget that in Greek myth, chaos was not disorder, it
was a vacant space awaiting occupation. Chaos was the space into
which the silver egg was laid which hatched Eros." We laughed,
because now that cliched reference is unavoidable, and a hint of the
complexity and intelligence behind the chaos of December's uprising,
and the aftermath it has unleashed, is out in the open.

Much has been written about the ferocity of the attacks on shops, the
destruction of property and its cost to the Greek economy and image
(Athens has been less affected by criminal violence than any other
capital in Europe). And more will be written in retrospect as it
becomes clear that the uprising is not against anything that is
uniquely Greek, but against postmodern society and a system of
globalised capitalism. There were riots in support of the Greeks
outside the country's embassies as far away as Brazil, and as rioting
now spreads to Bulgaria, Latvia, Iceland and Russia, the Greek
uprising has been called "the first credit-crunch riot". They are
certainly the first riots against the "cult of greed" about which we
hear so much these days. But, it emerges, they are also about much
more than that.

In Greece, the insurgents have been given a collective name, the
koukouloforoi - the hooded ones, because they hide their faces with
balaclavas, gas masks, crash helmets and Palestinian keffiyehs to
conceal their identity, but also as protection against the regular
soakings with tear gas. But what if the violence of the koukouloforoi
is not "mindless", as Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis put it, but
mindful What if their contempt for society, politicians and
consumerism has a lexicon that is not just revolutionary dogma? And,
as the authorities in Bulgaria, Iceland and Latvia failed to ask
before the riots came their way, and Britain has so far failed to
ask: what if it happens here?

Alexis Grigoropoulos was shot dead at the corner of Messolongiou and
Tzavela streets, but the signs above the shrine to the dead boy now
call both thoroughfares Alexis Grigoropoulos Street. Football
scarves, candles and flowers are laid at the spot, at which people
linger in silence. There are thousands of messages and tributes. To
quote a few of them is to articulate the mood: "Let beauty bloom from
your blood"; "You hold your head up just enough to see the sky"; "And
we go on, but we won't go slow, we'll put up such a fight. Keep your
head high, kiss your fist, and touch the sky. It is not too late."

The corner is in an alleyway of a quarter of Athens called Exarchia,
described by visiting reporters as a "ghetto" of "self-styled
anarchists". As a neighbourhood, Exarchia is more complicated than
that. It resembles the Lower East Side of Manhattan: a vortex of
alternative culture, lifestyle and politics, but with more political
edge, peppered by fancy bars and bistros, so that elegant,
non-rioting couples might venture out for a daring date by crossing
the triangular square - in which youths huddle around fires and where
riot police patrol their quarry - in search of some nice gastro bar.

At the western edge of Exarchia is the polytechnic, where thousands
flocked after Grigoropoulos was killed. Only fine art and
architecture are taught on this campus now, students lurk in the
shadows of recent history beneath graffiti reading "Kill the cops".
It's a place that only weeks ago was an urban battlefield of burning
cars and torched property. The smell of charred masonry still lingers
in the air. In the district's heart is the square around which the
little streets are lined with bars, cafes and squats. Streets like
Themistokleous, which climbs past sexy lingerie boutiques, cellar
tavernas, a shop named Dark Cell Records and a bustling
Saturday-morning fruit market to a place called Nosotros, from the
balcony of which flies a red and black flag. It is the meeting place
for some of those whose creed formed an iconic expression, if not a
kernel, of the December uprising - anarchism.

Nosotros is a place of meetings, film screenings, endless political
discourse and quite a few beers, where migrant workers can get free
evening classes in the Greek language. It is here that Niko, a youth
who works in a bookshop, draws the starting line for several nights
of conversation: "When they killed Alexis, everyone felt it could
have been any of us, so we made it all of us. The riots, then the
uprising, went from there."

One slogan still painted across the shops ravaged in central Athens
during December says simply: "Buy until you die" - it is accompanied
by the circled A of the anarchists. Niko has no problem discussing
his reasons for smashing shop windows: "It was almost funny to see
the faces of the people whose 'right to shop' we had deprived them
of, like we had insulted their religion - which we had, I suppose."

"Besides," volunteers another man, joining the conversation,
"smashing things up is not what matters. Above all, this revolt was
an assertion of dignity and a statement of presence. Of all the
slogans, our most important was, 'We are here.'"

The second man, a carpenter, turns out to be a historic figure in the
Greek anarchist movement. He comes from the town of Agrinio, which
has a tradition of anarchism. Nikos Ioannou argues that while
previous rebellions had been against a military junta (from
1967-1974), "There are similarities between then and now. The means
of control have changed, and people enjoy a perception of freedom,
but we would argue that the colonels were less powerful than a
shopping mall, and in this way, Greece has turned another page in its
history with this insurrection. Greece is a society in which
individual rights were never established. This uprising has given
people who were never part of our movement a new understanding of
what it means to be who they are."

The conversation continues deep into the night. We discuss the
different traditions of and differences within anarchism, and a man
called Tassos, branding himself an anarcho-syndicalist, describes his
attempts to spread the energy of the uprising into his construction
workers' union. We also discuss the United Kingdom and why, according
to Valia, a photographer, "You are not able to create the kind of
uprising in your country that we have created here because the
methods of control in your country are far more sophisticated and
accomplished. And your people are more subservient."

When we suggest to Ioannou that the anarchists lit the touch paper in
December, he replies: "Maybe, but the main ingredient was the school
kids. Greek youth saw themselves in the face of this boy, and that is
why school kids were the flour in the dough of the insurrection." Not
only that, but the school children, of whom Alexis Grigoropoulos was
one, tend to be those most eager to give the insurgency political
shape, although they had no previous political experience. One of
those involved is Stefanos, aged 15, who has joined a demonstration
to try and secure the release of those arrested during December. He
notes the fact that they are to be charged under anti-terrorist
legislation and says that: "Smashing things up may be a way to relax,
but it isn't going to change the future. I never expected to be
involved in anything like that, and if they hadn't shot a boy my age
I probably wouldn't be. But now that I have been I want it to make a
difference, not to end there."

The demonstration is attacked by the police, leaving our group
trapped between a baton charge and a wall of tear gas, nasty stuff
imported from Israel after Greek supplies ran out in December. That
night, militants from the Black Block - a wing of the anarchist
movement which counts large numbers of teenagers in its ranks - is
arraigned outside an immigrant advice center that they have occupied
in order to defend migrants in their own way. The Black Block is to
be found, usually masked, at the core of violent international
demonstrations against G8 summits in Genoa and Prague. It does not
usually talk to the media and in Athens tends not to hang around for
a chat in Nosotros either.

The group is facing down columns of riot police who broke up their
demo earlier that day and seem to be of a mind to seize back the
migrant center. It doesn't happen, this street battle is no pushover
for the police.

"When we last met up with those ones wearing blue," says one of them,
"down in Pireus, we had their shields and helmets flying all over the
place." The police have hardened their tactics of late, but they know
that one more stray bullet, one more dead teenager, and Greece will
have an all-out insurrection on its hands, with the Black Block -
whose numbers in Greece far exceed those anywhere else except perhaps
Italy - willing to fight it.

The speaker at the demonstration, a young woman we shall call M, who
joins me across the road, knows England well and makes a salient
point about Greece by reference to the UK. "We are at one extreme
edge of Europe, but not really part of Europe, and you are at the
opposite edge, but also not part of Europe. Here, an uprising,
there... nothing. Though the violence is the same in your country, in
fact it's much worse. But you commit it against each other; knife
crime, drunken fights and gangs. Here, we challenge the state and the
banks, not each other. This is to do with consumption," she
continues. "In 1975, Greece was promised the benefits of capitalism,
but never really got to sample them like you did. We never had the
delusion of wealth for the masses, of mass consumerism, which is now
causing your crisis, but which neutralizes you in a way. Your
violence is about consumption: alcohol, drugs, television and
clubbing. But we're not drunk or stoned, and we have just been
tear-gassed on a demonstration, not in a nightclub. This is not a
gang fight, it is a fight against the state.

"What we have had in Greece is a civil war that never goes away. I am
young, from a left-wing family, and some of us who come from left
families, educated but constantly persecuted, have grown up with
political warfare, the police in our homes, the struggle in our
lives. My family has suffered a political murder in every generation
since the Nazi occupation."

There is long, bitter and deep history behind this Greek uprising.
Like other countries under Nazi occupation, a heroic resistance was
fought in Greece, largely organized by communists. But in war's wake,
Greece became a pawn in the nascent Cold War. The resistance, which
had fought alongside the British against Hitler, found themselves
persecuted by a British-backed government. Britain, and later
America, then took the side of the Royalists and the far right which
had collaborated with the Nazis in a bloody civil war which defeated
the left in 1949. A precarious attempt at a reform of authoritarian
rule began with the election of George Papandreou's centrist party in
1965, but was crushed by the "colonels' coup" of 1967 - steered by the CIA.

In that history, one moment resounds loudly in the events of last
December, a call to the streets as a legacy in itself: the student
occupation of Athens's polytechnic in November 1973, and its
subsequent, brutal repression by the junta. The number killed when
the colonels ordered tanks into the polytechnic campus, crashing
through its gates, has never been ascertained, but no one disputes
the fact that the highest casualties were among the 150,000
non-student civilians who had converged on the streets outside the
occupied building in support of the occupation. The junta's victory
was brief, however, and the polytechnic occupation - which was itself
the culmination of six years' democratic opposition to the regime -
was seen as the catalyst of its eventual downfall.

One of the most famous images of the days leading up to the 1973
occupation was the face, beaten to pulp, of Makis Balaouras. He is
nowadays either to be found in the dusty offices of the weekly paper
Epochi, with pictures of the Beatles and Che Guevara on walls
otherwise lined with box files, or marching on the streets with his
19-year-old daughter, including one demonstration on which we were
separated from him after a phalanx of riot police drenched all of us
with tear gas.

His history with the police has left its mark. Balaouras looks
wearier than his 56 years and talks - with a striking mix of gravity
and good nature - about a "passing of the relay baton" between the
uprising of 1973 and last December's riots, "from one generation to
another. The legacy of dissatisfaction is passed on in Greece by
special circumstances. The crucial moment was after the war, when in
other countries those who had fought the Nazis were hailed as heroes,
while here the generation that liberated Greece was executed, exiled
and imprisoned, and those who had collaborated with the Nazis were
rewarded. This experience plays a role in what we see happening now.

"When it came to 1973," he continues, "we wanted to get everyone,
more than the students, involved. For that, I was arrested many
times, beaten, tortured and, after the occupation, jailed in solitary
confinement for three months. A friend of mine called Moustakis was
tortured so badly they had turned him into a vegetable by the time he died."

Balaouras pauses and then adds: "And all the while, your hippies were
coming to the beaches as if Greece was a playground [that would be
people like Leonard Cohen and the character played by Meryl Streep in
Mamma Mia!], even though one of our demands was that they stay away!
But these have been grandiose battles that we have fought here, the
struggle in Greece has a magnitude to it, a tradition of resistance
spawned of that magnitude, which we see resurrected today."

But not all veterans of 1973 are sympathetic to the December
uprising. One leading member of the polytechnic occupation was
Dimitris Hadzisokratis, who now leads a left-wing parliamentary group
wary of the current insurgency, as are the powerful Communist Party,
whose views his alliance shares. He meets us in his office in
parliament, to contrast then with now. "What happened last December
was an explosion, not a revolt," says Hadzisokratis, "which means
something else. The situations are entirely different, we were
rebelling against a dictatorship, they are rebelling against a
democracy. We had a set of demands and goals. Yes, there were
ultra-leftists and anarchists involved, but they were doing something
else, and that's all I see in this explosion. Who are they fighting,
exactly? It is amorphous, it has no aim and, as such, it will reach
an impasse and will be judged as pointless."

Those steering the current uprising, many of whom are decisively not
anarchists, take offended issue with Hadzisokratis's notion that the
December uprising was without demands. Panos Garganas, who edits
Workers' Solidarity, the paper of the radical leftwing Socialist
Workers Party (SEK), retorts: "There were clear demands. Disarming
the police and calls for the government to resign were very
prominent." Garganas founded the party while an exile from the junta
in London, and is now a lecturer in civil engineering at the
polytechnic itself.

"This was not," he says, "something that came out of nowhere. Greek
history was volatile and unstable from the 1930s until the 1970s, and
now the experience of the 30 years since the events of 1973 has been
building towards a head. Athens is one of the few places where Bill
Clinton faced hostile demonstrations. The worldwide outrage against
the war in Iraq in 2003 never abated in Greece, the demonstrations
went on and on. Over the past two years, the student movement has
staged continuous occupations against government plans to put private
colleges on a par with the state universities, against a
constitutional provision. Most parliamentarians favored this
privatization, but the students defeated the measure with their own
actions. And this confidence is emboldened by the government being
caught in a string of scandals - corruption so brazen it's like
they're eating boxes of chocolates without even bothering to take off
the wrapping paper. "

Like any party of the far left, Garganas's SEK operates, as one of
its members in the university's economics faculty, Manolis Spathis,
puts it: "As a small cogwheel trying to get bigger cogwheels moving."

"Our task now," says Garganas, "is to move this new-found confidence
into areas which characterize the latest phase of capitalism - issues
such as the defence of migrant workers and rights in the workplace."

This involves offering support to a range of extraordinary and often
unexpected and continuing offsprings of the December uprising - wave
upon wave of sit-ins and occupations of city halls, vacant spaces,
offices and factories.

Most unexpected of all was the occupation of a call center operated
by the Altec telecoms group by employees threatened with redundancy
without compensation. Altec was part of the recent break-up into the
private sector of Greece's formerly state-run telecommunications system.

"There was a complete lack of political culture in the place," says
Giorgos Sotiropoulos, who worked as part of the technical support
team. "A call center is as alienated as you can get. It's insidious.
You're pitched against your co-worker by the fact that the supervisor
is counting how many sales you make in how many calls and minutes. So
it really mattered that it was a call centre we occupied, because the
kind of enemy this insurrection in Greece is fighting is typified by
this work. The enemy is amorphous, it is virtual, and that makes
fighting it far more challenging than fighting a junta of colonels.
Our enemy is a society which offers procedural freedom, and perceived
freedom, but no physical, substantive freedom. But this situation is
not irreversible, and we demonstrate this by finding a way of being
free through uprising.

"It was a huge decision," continues Sotiropoulos, "and an incredible
experience for most people, ladies with children, people who had
never thought they would get involved in such a thing. A whole new
vocabulary, a whole new feeling of collaboration that none of us had
ever known. We just stayed there for five days, hung banners from the
windows, and at night women would come and bring us food and
pastries. In this movement, you testify by your actions. It is an
eruption of the real thing against virtuality."

After tortuous negotiations, the occupiers finally won an agreement
for redundancy payments and jobs for some people who wanted to stay
on. "Without the uprising, this would never have happened," says
Sotiropoulos. "It was in the air and got people thinking in a totally
different way."

Sotiropoulos and his friends gather for another demonstration on a
cold Wednesday night, the uprising again moving into quarters beyond
the polytechnic walls, this time in outrage against an attack on a
cleaning lady called Konstantina Kuneva, and thereby against two
features of society: outsourcing and the subsequent abuse of migrant
labour. Kuneva, who is from Bulgaria, works for a company called
Oikomet, which won an outsourced contract to clean the Athens metro.
Kuneva was also an organiser of the Household and Domestic Cleaners
Union and began campaigning for union recognition at Oikomet, better
conditions and pay on a par with what it was before privatisation. On
23 December, she was abducted and forced to drink sulphuric acid. She
has gone on to become the unexpected emblem of the Greek uprising,
several thousand taking to the streets for the march, attacked and
split into two groups by riot police, the rear half drenched in tear
gas, and the inevitable riot duly beginning.

One feature of these occasions is the destruction of CCTV cameras,
which are not simply put out of action by the balaclava-clad activist
climbing the pole like a lumberjack up a tree but, as icons of the
enemy, trashed in the spirit of some Aztec sacrifice. The youth
hammering away until he (or she) prizes out its white "heart" to hold
aloft to the applauding crowd. Another fusillade of face-flaying,
lung-wrenching tear gas follows, restaurant windows are smashed.
Finally, Sotiropoulos turns to us and says: "What's the point of
this? Time to find the subway, clear our lungs and get a beer."

Another cloud of thick smoke clears, this time caused by the fans'
flares and smoke bombs at the Olympic football stadium as AEK Athens
take to the field. You can see the flag behind the goal - that of the
Lebanese Hezbollah militia. Unlikely in a British ground, it has been
hoisted there by one of a group of AEK fans called Original 21, after
the gate number of their section at the team's old stadium, who are
overtly and militantly political.

Around Alexis Grigoropoulos's "shrine" in Exarchia, the letters AEK
are painted everywhere, with a circle round the A. Yards from the
site of the shooting is the Original 21 fan clubhouse - the slogan
"Fuck Modern Football" and a skull wearing AEK colours painted on the
hoardings. Utterly strange to the world of English football, these
AEK fans are part of an international alliance with "twin" crews
supporting Livorno in Italy, Marseille in France and St Pauli Hamburg
in Germany, with whom they rally to help fight fans of teams with a
fascist identity and for anti-globalisation demonstrations in loose
co-ordination with the Black Block. Around the Grigoropoulos shrine
are also slogans painted by the Livorno Autonomous Brigades who, with
the Original 21crew, were to the fore in December's uprising and
street fighting with the police, at which they are markedly adept.

At the match, they are easy to spot, with their Palestinian keffiyehs
and heavy-metal Exarchia T-shirts. A lad called Vassilis explains how
at both football and during riots, "youth confronts the frontline
weapon of the state, its foot soldiers in the police. But we want to
fight the system itself, not just its soldiers, that's why we do the
political stuff." Another fan, Dinos, explains that the ethos is that
of "being 'ultra' in all areas of our life, supporting the team with
the same passion as we attack authority and the system that did what
was done to Konstantina Kuneva".

You were on those demonstrations too, for the cleaning lady?

"Yes, of course, and with our comrades from Livorno at Genoa against
the G8 when they killed another young boy. We spent all last December
on the streets. After they killed Alexis, the police didn't dare
enter the stadium, so we attacked them outside."

Into this melee comes another element, a group calling itself
Revolutionary Struggle, which last week assaulted a police station
with automatic weapons, shot and injured a police officer in Exarchia
on 5 January and ambushed a riot police bus with machine guns 10 days
later. The group is a descendant of the now disbanded November 17th
movement, named after the day the polytechnic was stormed by the
junta, akin to the Italian Red Brigades or German Baader-Meinhof
group, which issues long theoretical attacks on the anarchists and
other left groups for not conjoining its armed struggle, and which is
bitterly counter-attacked by the anarchists as "elitist" in return.
This week, the new Sect of Revolutionaries emerged, attacked a police
station with grenades and left a maiden proclamation in the form of a
computer disc on Grigoropoulos's grave, listing journalists, media
celebrities, leading capitalists and state functionaries among its targets

Far from this fray, Professor Constantinos Tsoukalas, the elder
statesman of Greek political philosophy, watches all this from his
lofty apartment, lined with venerable books, which he especially
likes for "its asymmetry" and view of the Acropolis. He see "the
uprising as a symptom of the end of political hope and the beginning
of something else. One of the nefarious consequences of the end of
the Cold War and the emptiness of the global market that was supposed
to put an end to ideology but, in crisis, has instead created this
moment of great ideological tension.

"I mean look at the spectacle of these politicians: this Greek
government and every other government - though perhaps Obama is an
exception - lurching from day to day without a clue what to do apart
from babble. Not only does the Greek government have no plan, it does
not even pretend to have a plan. What they are demonstrating -
Karamanlis, Berlusconi, Blair, Brown, Sarkozy - is that there is no
longer any reason to go into politics apart from power in and of
itself, the money that power brings and the further money that having
been in power brings. They degenerate the game with greater and
greater visibility, and the more they degenerate it, the more
degenerate the people who go into politics. Which leads to moral
indignation, despair and anger."

That in turn, continues Tsoukalas, becomes either "various forms of
depression, as in your country, or to a statement of presence - a
loud NO! as happened here, and a maelstrom".

A maelstrom which has been spreading across Europe ever since a
banner bearing the command Rebel!, translated into several languages,
was hung from the ramparts of the Acropolis itself.

.

Jane Fonda's antiwar years with the FTA

A SECOND LOOK

Jane Fonda's antiwar years with the FTA

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-secondlook22-2009feb22,0,617588.story

A documentary, long ignored, follows stars who took a political
variety show to American troops in 1971.

By Dennis Lim
February 22, 2009

A time capsule of the anti-Vietnam War movement, "FTA" is also a
vivid flashback to a world-famous movie star's stint as a political
radical. At the peak of her celebrity, which coincided with the
dawning of her political consciousness, Jane Fonda abdicated her
Hollywood throne and remade herself as the face of the anti-establishment.

With government agents and the news media watching her every move,
she led a vaudeville troupe on a tour of U.S. military bases in 1971
-- a trip chronicled in this fascinating documentary, largely unseen
since its brief, abortive release and finally available on DVD this week.

In the disc's only extra, a 20-minute interview, Fonda recounts how
the project came about. She and Donald Sutherland, her costar in
1971's "Klute" (which won her an Oscar), were approached by Howard
Levy, a doctor who had become an antiwar cause célèbre for refusing
to train Green Beret medics. He proposed that they put on a
corrective to Bob Hope's gung-ho USO shows, giving voice not just to
the growing peace movement but to antiwar sentiment within the ranks
of the military.

The FTA troupe staged its first shows in the U.S., with Fonda and
Sutherland (who had just played the irreverent Hawkeye in Robert
Altman's "MASH") headlining a company that included Peter Boyle and
Howard Hesseman. (The all-purpose acronym is short for "Free the
Army" and a more profane variation.)

When it came time to embark on the two-week Pacific Rim tour, Fonda
assembled a more politically correct lineup that stressed racial and
gender parity -- equal numbers of black and white, and male and
female, performers, including singer Holly Near and comedian Paul Mooney.

Fonda, Sutherland and company stopped off in Hawaii, the Philippines,
Okinawa and Japan (where they were initially refused entry). Denied
permission to perform on U.S. bases, they set up shop in nearby
coffeehouses and other venues, although military officials apparently
tried to minimize attendance by publicizing incorrect show times.

All told, the troupe played 21 shows, which were attended by some
64,000 servicemen and women. Many of the male GIs, as Fonda ruefully
concedes in the interview, must have been anticipating the Space Age
sex kitten from "Barbarella" and not the righteous radical who took
the stage in jeans, no makeup and a raised fist.

The show mixes protest songs with broad and bawdy skits, taking
potshots at military chauvinism and top-brass privilege. But what it
lacks in finesse, it makes up for with a raucous energy. Directed by
Francine Parker (who died in 2007), the documentary alternates
between the song-and-dance routines and behind-the-scenes footage of
soldiers talking candidly to the troupe members about their
frustration and anger at the ongoing war and the American presence in
the region.

As fate would have it, "FTA" opened the same week in July 1972 that
news broke of Fonda's trip to Hanoi, where she made radio broadcasts
for the North Vietnamese regime and was photographed sitting on an
anti-aircraft gun. Within a week, the distributor (youth-flick
specialist American-International Pictures) had pulled the movie from theaters.

Fonda's career went into partial eclipse, and she remains to this day
a favorite target of the right, but she recovered to win a second
Oscar for the 1978 war-veteran drama "Coming Home." For years she
quietly has distanced herself from her radical past, which might
explain why "FTA," which she co-produced, has been out of circulation
for more than three decades.

Its recent reemergence points to a change of heart and owes much to
the efforts of filmmaker David Zeiger, who used footage from "FTA" in
"Sir! No Sir!," a 2005 documentary about antiwar resistance within
the military.

This week's DVD release was preceded by screenings at the American
Cinematheque in Los Angeles and the IFC Center in New York, where
Fonda appeared as part of a fundraiser for Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The film also screens on the Sundance Channel this week.

Two other artifacts of Fonda's radical period have been issued on DVD
in recent years.

"Steelyard Blues" (1973), a slapstick counterculture comedy that also
costarred Sutherland, was released by Warner Home Video. And Jean-Luc
Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's scathing "Tout Va Bien" (1972), with
Fonda as an American journalist caught up in a wildcat strike at a
sausage factory in France, is available from the Criterion Collection.

.

Vietnam vets protest Jane Fonda's Broadway showing

[2 articles]

Vietnam vets protest Jane Fonda's Broadway showing

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--people-fonda0221feb21,0,4875157.story

By VERENA DOBNIK | Associated Press Writer
February 21, 2009

NEW YORK - Jane Fonda still can't shake that nasty image _ as "Hanoi
Jane" from the Vietnam War.

On Saturday, the 71-year-old actress was back on Broadway while
Vietnam veterans picketed the theater _ reminding passers-by that she
had once visited their Viet Cong enemy in Hanoi.

"Jane Fonda is a traitor," said Dan Maloney of the Gathering of
Eagles, which bills itself as a national, nonpartisan veterans group.
"She got on Hanoi radio and called every U.S. serviceman a war criminal."

About a dozen protesters stood behind police barricades in front of
the Eugene O'Neill Theater, where Fonda stars in "33 Variations." She
plays a musicologist in the Moises Kaufman play about reconciliation,
set against the woman's obsession with Beethoven's 33 variations on a waltz.

Outside, reconciliation was far from the demonstrators' minds.

"She's a waste!" declared Arthur Faiella, a 66-year-old Vietnam
veteran who said Fonda had "no idea what it's like to fight for your
life, outnumbered 4-to-1 by the enemy."

She was tagged with the sobriquet "Hanoi Jane" in 1972 after visiting
the North Vietnamese capital, where she made radio broadcasts
critical of U.S. policy and sat on an anti-aircraft gun laughing and
clapping, as she describes in her autobiography, "My Life So Far."

Though she still defends her anti-war activism, Fonda has
acknowledged that the incident was "a betrayal" of American forces.
"That two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until the day I die,"
she wrote.

Now in previews, "33 Variations" opens on March 9, marking Fonda's
return to Broadway after 46 years.

--------

Vietnam vets rally against Jane Fonda where she makes return to Broadway

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/arts/2009/02/21/2009-02-21_vietnam_vets_rally_against_jane_fonda_wh.html

BY Veronika Belenkaya
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, February 21st 2009

It's been 37 years since Jane Fonda straddled a Viet Cong
anti-aircraft gun - but the controversy followed her to Broadway Saturday.

A group of Vietnam veterans gathered outside the Eugene O'Neill
Theatre, where the woman they call "Hanoi Jane" is appearing in "33
Variations."

"Jane Fonda is a Communist traitor," the 20 vets shouted just before
the 2 p.m. performance, waving six large U.S. flags and peppering
their chants with ugly expletives.

"We want the American public to know we haven't forgotten what she
did," said retired cop Will Sekzer, 64, of Sunnyside, Queens, who
fought in Vietnam for two years.

Their anger didn't stop theatergoers from rushing into the matinee
with tickets that cost between $67 and $227.

"I'd want to see it even more," one fan from New Jersey said.

"I think it's silly. It was over 30 years ago. It's over," said John
Hobbs, of Rego Park, Queens. "She wasn't actually wrong."

Fonda was nicknamed Hanoi Jane for her anti-war protests and her 1972
trip to North Vietnam, where she broadcast anti-American propaganda
over Radio Hanoi.

The 71-year-old actress publicly apologized for her actions years
ago, but Sekzer and his buddies didn't buy it.

"[The Vietnamese communists] weren't able to continue fighting, but
thanks to the support of anti-war people and Jane Fonda personally,
they did," said Sekzer.

Fonda could not be reached for comment before the show.
--

vbelenkaya@nydailynews.com

.

Book looks at cultural, political impact of Vietnam War Era

English professor's book looks at cultural, political impact of
Vietnam War Era

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20090219/NEWS01/90218033

February 19, 2009

With the Vietnam War as its focal point, the era of the 1960s was a
constellation of chaotic and violent political, social and cultural
events with reverberations still felt more than 30 years later.

That's the contention of University of Southern Mississippi English
professor Dr. Maureen Ryan, whose new book "The Other Side of Grief:
The Home Front and the Aftermath in American Narratives of the
Vietnam War" (University of Massachusetts Press) explores how
cultural narratives capture the lingering influence of the Vietnam
War and the late 1960s.

A book signing will be held from 5:30 - 7 p.m. today Feb. 19 at Main
Street Books, 210 N. Main St. in downtown Hattiesburg.

Much has been written about the war itself ­ the battles, the
strategy, and the actions of the political and military decision
makers. Ryan's work adds to that collection by drawing from a variety
of sources that include films, novels and memoirs in its examination
of that era through the prism of the women, veterans, POWs and
Vietnamese refugees it affected.

"I argue that fully now, about 40 years after this experience ­ and
now two-three wars later ­ the Vietnam War and all of the social
turmoil and the advances of that time, with the war as the central
event, still affects us," she said.

"You would think people would want to forget about it, because we
lost the war, and because it caused so many deaths and so much strife
but it keeps coming back and coming back."

Ryan said the Vietnam era impacted male and female, veterans and
pacifists, hawks and doves, young and old and rich and poor. It bore
down on our psyche with its assassinations of political leaders,
including Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as well as the
resignation of a president over a scandal that cemented for many
their distrust of government.

In one chapter, the thoughts and words of the women Ryan examines in
her new book could not be more diverse than the weather ­ from the
radical working as an insurgent through the anti-war movement to the
housewife who only wanted her husband to make it back alive. Other
chapters include the work and reflections of returning veterans,
including John McCain; POWs; antiwar activists; and Vietnamese refugees.

"A common expression of those who lived during that was "'you had to
be there.' My point is that in resonating, palpable ways, we were all
there," she said. "We were all touched by that whole chaotic era with
the war as its center.

"You can't talk about the aftermath of the war without acknowledging
the unpopularity and failure of the war, the advances and turmoil of
the civil rights movement, the changes on college campuses and the
open attitudes about sexuality, along with a new distrust of the
American government. All of those things transformed our society."

But that era also had many success stories, Ryan said, including
civil rights legislation that likely allowed an African-American to
become president and an anti-war movement that while considered
democratic, spawned the women's movement in the mid 1970s as a result
of the rejection of the male dominance of the former.

"If not for that (formation of the women's rights movement) I might
not have gone to college or graduate school and written this book," Ryan said.

Themes of the war era were especially evident in the recent
presidential election, Ryan said, which pitted arguably the most
famous Vietnam prisoner of war in Sen. John McCain against then
senator and now President Barack Obama, who talked of moving beyond
the cultural divisiveness of the 1960s.

"You had a post-1960s generation candidate versus someone who was an
embodiment of that time," Ryan said. "Nationally and politically, it
was evidence of how the legacy of that war continues to be powerful
in American society. "

A former dean of the Southern Miss Honors College, Ryan joined the
university's faculty in 1983. She has also served as director of
undergraduate and graduate studies for the Southern Miss Department
of English; as assistant dean of the former Southern Miss College of
Liberal Arts, now the College of Arts and Letters; and as associate provost.

Her other publications include "Innocence and Estrangement in the
Fiction of Jean Stafford" (Louisiana State University Press, 1987);
articles on modern and contemporary American women writers, including
Marilynne Robinson, Lillian Hellman, and Bobbie Ann Mason; and
articles on American women writers and Vietnam, the Vietnam novels of
Robert Olen Butler, aftermath novels by Vietnam veterans, Vietnam POW
wives in American Literature, Vietnamese refugees in southern
fiction, and the Vietnam antiwar movement in contemporary American literature.

In 2004, she was named the Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni
Professor in the Humanities, one of the university's highest faculty honors.

"Dr. Ryan's 'The Other Side of Grief' brilliantly explores the
effects of the Vietnam War across an astonishing range of narratives,
tracing the impact of the war on the home front from its immediate
aftermath through the present moment," said Dr. Michael Mays,
chairman of the Southern Miss Department of English. "In its scope
and insight, it's a genuinely remarkable book."

English professor Dr. Philip Kolin also praised Ryan's new book as an
important work on the impact of the Viet Nam War on American culture.

"It's a major contribution to our understanding of the War and the
ways it was interpreted and represented, and symbolizes the
distinguished scholarship for which the Department of English has
been known," Kolin said. "It further adds to Dr. Ryan's well-deserved
reputation as a devoted teacher and colleague."

.

Terrorism policy in the United States

Terrorism policy in the United States

http://www.advancetitan.com/?se=Opinion&s=7466

by Anthony Berg of the Advance Titan
Thursday, February 19, 2009

The word terrorism evokes fear by its namesake and suspicion by its
reputation. Its definition is grossly misunderstood.

Terrorism can be defined as "asymmetrical warfare from the position
of the inferior power that uses violence or the threat of violence
upon citizens of a nation to force the dominant power structure to change."

Terrorism is a tactic and therefore value neutral.

Though meant as a statement of neutrality, the mention of the word
"terrorism" in any modern discourse immediately draws upon
media-driven fear and Islamic overtones.

Terrorist organizations range far from only violent Islamic groups,
including over 42 foreign terrorist organizations and the
surveillance of "suspected" groups in the United States.

The use of terrorist tactics as a basis for detainment and
observation has put many peaceful groups under suspicion and behind bars.

Recently I had a friend request his FBI file, only to find that his
participation in the group Food not Bombs had him labeled as a
suspected terrorist. He is not alone. In December of 2005, the New
York Times reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
has been unearthing documents from the FBI to file civil lawsuits for
the improper observation of groups like PETA, Greenpeace, and the
Catholic Workers group. The Catholic Workers group was detailed as
having communist ideology because it fights against poverty and for
social causes.

Food not Bombs is a group that provides food at anti-war rallies and
sends proceeds to poverty-stricken war-torn areas around the world.
This is their mission and yet somehow the FBI estimates that groups
such as this have committed over 1000 criminal acts and over 100
million dollars worth of damages between 1995 and 2005.

To prevent these damages, the FBI not only observes but also detains
members of such groups on inflated charges.

Many participants in the Republican National Convention protests of
2008 were arrested "preemptively," including members of Food not
Bombs. The protests continued with the detainment and arresting of
hundreds of individuals in group arrest situations­whether or not
violence was committed. Amy Goodman and her entire film crew of
certified reporters from Democracy Now were denied their rights,
beaten and arrested without charges. The ordeal is detailed all on Youtube.

Those arrested and held were held on charges of conspiracy to riot
(not actually rioting) or conspiracy to commit criminal damage to
property (not actually damaging property) both or which can have "in
the furtherance of terrorism" added for extra penalties. The
penalties, under the 2002 Minnesota version of the PATRIOT act, could
carry from 7.5 to 12.5 years in prison since the act calls for a 50
percent increase in maximum penalty when terrorist charges are filed.

The charges are unnecessarily excessive, as it would cost the state
more to prosecute protestors than to render them constitutionally
protected in their protest. Excessive spending is justified in the
milieu of fear that surrounds someone branded a terrorist. The danger
is that terrorist and protestor are dangerously close synonyms in
legal discourse. This is not new.

In the '60s and '70s, the FBI Counterintelligence Program
(COINTELPRO) program kept surveillance on most all civil rights
groups and leaders, anti-Vietnam war groups, workers unions and
parties, and individuals deemed suspicious. COINTELPRO worked to
undermine groups by burglarizing, sending anonymous letters to
spouses in order to break marriages, getting individuals fired by
pressuring employers, planting news and editorials doctored by the
FBI in U.S. newspapers, and planting fake members in groups to
encourage violent acts (and sometimes carry them out).

With a history of trampling the First and Second Amendments,
fear-driven detainment of political dissidents, and no quarter for
the peaceful, the conquest of terrorism in the United States has been
one of restricting liberties in favor of a reactionary political landscape.

Dissidents should remember that while they are having a fun time
protesting, the state definitely takes notice; and until the protests
succeed, there are many resources to help the detained­chief among
them the ACLU.

Protestors are not terrorists, but some terrorists may be protestors,
the use of violence is the difference, but the shadow of a
possibility of conspiracy seems enough for Uncle Sam.

.

Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/yaffe180209.html

by Helen Yaffe
18.02.09

'I didn't know Che had any economic ideas' has been a frequent reply
I've received when telling people about the topic of my research and
my book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. It reflects the
caricature of Guevara as a romantic guerrilla fighter with idealist
notions of how human beings are motivated and how social change is
brought about. The consequence is to overlook his contribution to
Cuba's economic development and socialist political economy debates
and hence to lose any lessons that can be drawn from his endeavours.

It censors the complexity of economic decisions and debates within
the Cuban Revolution, as if the revolutionaries who seized power on 1
January 1959 were chaotic adventurers whose economic policies were
based on a naïve ideological agenda and not reflecting concrete
conditions and constraints in the process of development. For
example, Cuba's incorporation into the socialist bloc's trade
relations, its continued dependence on sugar as a principal export
and the importation of 'backward' technology from the socialist
countries are viewed as political preferences -- with little
recognition made of the limits placed on Cuba's development path by
the imposition of the US blockade or the denial of credit from the
Western countries. It also plays into the interpretation that sees
Fidel Castro as synonymous with the Revolution, so that all policies
were generated by this one omnipresent individual according to his
whims, psychological traits and struggle for domination.

The research carried out for this book involves interviews with 50 of
Guevara's colleagues during his work as President of the National
Bank of Cuba (1959-1960), head of the Department of Industrialisation
(1959-1961) and Minister of Industries (1961-1965). These
individuals were not passive or homogenous. They were as varied and
complicated as the rest of us. Their ideas, values and capacities
evolved with their experience of working at his side. From their
recollections springs a dynamic and rich history of grappling with
problems, searching for solutions and experimenting with policies,
structures and techniques. Guevara's own voice emerges through them
-- giving us an insight into the development of his own work and
ideas. It is also recorded in the internal meeting transcripts,
reports, speeches, articles and letters consulted during the research
for this book.

In late September 2008, George W Bush, perhaps the most neo-liberal,
anti-regulation, aggressively imperialist US president in history,
declared: 'The market is not functioning properly.' What did he
mean? The market is failing to secure the continued accumulation and
expansion of capital -- threatening a crisis of the entire capitalist
system and throwing into question the most basic premises of
bourgeois economics. For decades it has been hammered into us that
only the free market ensures efficiency, productivity and growth --
the profit motive via cutthroat competition, deregulation and
removing all constraints to 'rational economic man'. But what form
of rationality justifies the fact that 200 individuals have more
wealth than over 40% of the world's population? What logic leaves 12
million children under the age of five to die every year from
malnutrition, diarrhoea and easily preventable diseases? Is this a
rational way for humanity to organise production and distribution --
making hundreds of species extinct each day and leading the world
towards an ecological disaster?

If the market isn't functioning what alternatives are there? There
have been few such poignant moments in history to talk about the
economics of revolution. In rescuing Guevara's work as a member of
the Cuban government, this book hopes to place his economic ideas
firmly on the table for consideration in the search for alternatives.
--

Helen Yaffe, a Teaching Fellow in Latin American history at
University College London, is the author of Che Guevara: The
Economics of Revolution. She has an article in the March 2009 issue
of the journal Latin American Perspectives, a special issue
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. This
article first appeared as an entry in her blog on 12 December 2008
under a creative commons 2.5 license.

.

Anti-war `Trial' worth revisiting

Anti-war `Trial' worth revisiting

http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_11726441

By Jeff Favre
Posted: 02/17/2009

Famed novelist Gore Vidal and peace activist Ron Kovic spoke opening
night at the Actors' Gang revival of "The Trial of the Catonsville
Nine," an indication that this seminal 1971 play still holds
significance with those who protested the Vietnam War.

The conflicts in Iraq and Vietnam invite comparisons, so it's easy to
see why the Culver City theater company, which has produced in recent
years a few works about war and torture, would return to Catonsville.

Though big news in 1968, the action of nine Catholics burning draft
files in a Maryland town would be forgotten by nearly everyone if
participant Daniel Berrigan hadn't written a play based on the
protestors' trial.

Berrigan's heartfelt soapbox sermon runs too long for such a narrow
topic, but Jon Kellam's creative direction, a strong cast - save one
unsteady performance - and a few compelling monologues are more than
enough to make this a trial worth revisiting.

There's only one locale - a courtroom - and several of the 10
performers take turns portraying the prosecuting and defending
attorneys, as well as the defendants.

Daniel Berrigan (Andrew E. Wheeler), a priest, is the story's
narrator, and Adele Robbins is the Judge. The action is directed to
the audience, which serves as the jury.

Much of the text is taken from the actual trial. The defendants
admitted to burning nearly 400 draft files with homemade napalm. The
argument for their action is that stopping an immoral and possibly
illegal activity - such as the Vietnam War - through nonviolent means
is justified. Each draft file burned, they believe, may have saved a life.

Berrigan, his brother Philip (Scott Harris), who also is a priest,
and the seven others provide passionate pleas for peace, but much of
their time on the stand is spent explaining how America's involvement
in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and parts of Africa establish a
pattern of behavior that "forced" the Catonsville Nine to act in such
a bold manner.

The first act ends with Daniel's testimony, including a meditation he
wrote prior to the demonstration. The second act contains closing
arguments, a discussion between the defendants and the Judge,
followed by the verdict, which is read by someone seated in the audience.

The biggest problem with "Catonsville Nine" is its repetition. It's
easy to identify with the frustrated Judge, who asks several times
for defendants to stop with lengthy background details. Sermons and
speeches lose impact at a certain point.

But despite the need for some edits, the resoluteness of these
ordinary people remains compelling, made more so by intense,
authentic performances.

Wheeler anchors the ensemble. Until the climactic moments, he is
soft-spoken and calm, as though his fate pales compared to the
message. Also impressive is Harris, who portrays Philip as fiery and fearless.

The lone miscast actor is the usually dependable Robbins as the
Judge. On top of flubbing some lines, her timing and tone damaged the
play's few humorous lines.

Fortunately, Kellam maintains a quick pace and uses precise,
intricate blocking to create action in what is almost entirely a
static story, including a dramatic folding of the wall-size American
flag that hangs upstage.

Sybil Wickersheimer, whose set designs are almost always memorable,
scores another hit. A wood plank triangle, with a small platform at
the point for the Judge, establishes the three sides of the story and
echoes the balance of power in the U.S. government.

"The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," flaws and all, remains relevant,
and likely will as long as the United States is involved in the Iraq war.
--

THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE

>When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through March 21.
>Where: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City.
>Tickets: $20 to $25.
>Information: (310) 838-4264, www.theactorsgang.com.
--

Jeff Favre is a freelance entertainment writer based in North Hollywood.

.

You Say You Want a Revolution

You Say You Want a Revolution

http://inthesetimes.com/article/4251/you_say_you_want_a_revolution

A founding member of the Weather Underground looks back at an
organization unable to come to terms with its own violence.

February 18, 2009
By Howard Machtinger

As a former member of the Weather Underground, I feel compelled to
add my voice to the recently re-heated discussion of the group's legacy.

I co-wrote and signed the original document that announced the
formation of a radical tendency at the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) National Convention in the summer of 1969. We became
known as the Weathermen, drawing the title of our position paper from
the Dylan lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows," and transformed ourselves into the Weather Underground
(WU) over the course of the next year. Because of my involvement with
the WU, I became a fugitive in 1970; by 1978 I turned myself in to
government authorities.

I write now to paint a more accurate picture of the past for new
activists as they face decisions about future direction ­ especially
in moments of inevitable frustration.

A number of issues have been conflated that need to be disentangled
at the outset. These are questions about (a) what is terrorism, (b)
the appropriateness of any form of violence as a strategy, (c) how
(not) to work through differences in a comradely fashion, as fellow
participants in a common movement for social change, and finally (d)
movement building.

Let's begin with the most explosive issue.

What is terrorism?

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Right successfully linked
the actions of the WU to present-day terrorism.

Bill Ayers is mainly correct in denying that charge as a libel on the
antiwar movement as a whole, and on the WU in particular. From any
detached perspective, the Vietnam/American war-era antiwar movement
was basically nonviolent, if sometimes quite agitated.

As I understand it, terrorism refers to the killing of innocent
civilians for political reasons; therefore all forms of
nongovernmental violence do not qualify as terrorism. The WU, while
undoubtedly breaking from nonviolence, never advocated a strategy of
terror or called for or carried out any attacks on civilians.

It is disingenuous, however, to represent, as Ayers did in the New
York Times in December, that we in the WU were merely one wing of the
antiwar movement. [Editor's note: Read Ayers' recent In These Times
article looking back on the Vietnam era and the 2008 presidential
campaign here.] His interpretation obscures what at the time was a
big difference. Not only did we pride ourselves on having moved
beyond the reformism of the antiwar movement and consider ourselves
to be a revolutionary alternative, but few in the antiwar movement claimed us.

This is not the whole story. Ayers's tale glosses over some important
points, especially the actions of the 1970 Townhouse collective­a New
York-based political formation designed to carry on illegal
activities­whose failed efforts resulted in the deaths of three
members of the WU.

After we decided in late 1969 to create a national underground
organization that could carry on illegal­and sometimes violent
activities­beyond the reach of the criminal justice system,
collectives were set up in a few places that were centers of antiwar
or anti-racist activity. The collective in New York came to be called
the Townhouse Collective after a bomb that collective members were
assembling in a Manhattan townhouse exploded prematurely.

On its own initiative, this collective had planned to attack a
Non-Commissioned Officers' (NCO) dance at Ft. Dix with a
fragmentation bomb. Had this action been carried out, it would have
undoubtedly led to the deaths of not only officers, but also their
dates and other bystanders ­ by any definition, an act of terrorism.
Instead, the device went off accidentally and killed three WU members
of the Townhouse Collective.

This failed action set off an intense debate in the then newly formed
WU organization that culminated in the critique of the Townhouse
Collective's "military error" in a publicly released WU communiqué
entitled "New Morning." While critical of the "heavier the better"
mentality that promoted and celebrated political violence per se, the
document fell well short of providing a full and honest examination
and critique of Townhouse politics.

A chill in WU frenzy and attempts to reconnect with other activists
and tendencies paralleled this limited self-critique. Internal
discussions became less aggressive and accusatory; attempts were made
to work with, and sometimes to try to lead, or manipulate, the
aboveground mass movement.

While "New Morning" signaled the WU's commitment to taking greater
care after the accident to target property and not people, it did not
acknowledge the WU's own responsibility for the politics of the
Townhouse collective.

WU leaders­­then and since­­failed to reckon candidly and directly
with what it meant, politically and humanly, that core members of the
organization had planned to use fragmentation bombs to kill attendees
at a dance.

Prior to the Townhouse disaster, the WU had been obsessed with
critiquing bourgeois ambivalence or cowardice, which allegedly was
holding people back from armed resistance, with little notion or fear
that unrestrained militancy could become inhumane as well as
dangerous for the movement. At the Flint conference in December 1969,
Weather leaders evoked Charles Manson and attendees danced while
making the sign of the fork, a Manson symbol.

So while the WU did pull back from the precipice of a terrorist
strategy, it never forthrightly admitted to the tendency that had
grown and been nurtured within it.

After the WU dissolved in 1977-78 and most of its members turned
themselves in to state authorities, there remained a leftover
grouplet connected to members of the May 19 Communist Organization
(an aboveground group linked to the WU which functioned in the New
York area between 1978 and 1985) that was critical of any compromise
with the state. It was this small group that, in tandem with elements
of the Black Liberation Army, carried out the armed Brinks robbery in
1981, during which two police officers were killed.

Whatever its political pretensions, this valedictory act signaled a
final disconnect from the larger political movement and a further
descent into pointless revolutionary posturing.

Violence as strategy

Given that the WU managed to refrain from terrorism, did a strategy
involving the use of nonterrorist violence help to end the war
against Vietnam or lead to fundamental political and social change in
the late '60s or early '70s?

WU leaders, then and since, have justified their actions as a form of
"armed propaganda": blowing up symbolic targets to emphatically make
important political points and widen the spectrum of opposition, with
the extra benefit of legitimizing more moderate actions. But there is
little reason to believe that militant nonviolence, like that
advocated by pacifist and antiwar activist Dave Dellinger, would not
have done as well with a less severe downside.

We in the WU argued that militant nonviolence had been found wanting
in stopping the war; we felt something more was urgently needed.
However, there is no evidence that armed propaganda succeeded where
militant nonviolence fell short. The WU argument only makes sense if
its long-term aim was to set the stage for an armed overthrow of the
state ­ a wildly wrong reading of the times.

The WU was not the only group that engaged in armed actions. Between
1968 and 1970, there was a spate of "trashings," bombings and street
riots. Groups such as the Black Panthers, White Panthers, Black
Liberation Army and many armed "affinity groups" saw a turn to some
kind of armed action as both necessary and feasible. It distorts
history to frame the WU as the only group­or even the only white
group­advocating forms of armed resistance.

There were also those who argued for the legitimacy of armed
resistance­defending its use in national liberation struggles, for
instance­without trying to implement it as an appropriate strategy
for that historical moment in the United States. Armed resistance was
on the minds of many of the most dedicated activists. I am not
suggesting that armed action was a sound strategic choice, but rather
that it was in the realm of possibility for many activists in the
United States who desperately sought an end to racism, the U.S. war
on Southeast Asia and the entire U.S. imperial project.

What lay behind the WU trajectory, however, was not merely
frustration with the shortcomings of the "aboveground" movement, or
long-term strategic thinking. It was an attempt to prove
revolutionary mettle in the imagined spirit of the Vietnamese
resistance or the Black Panthers. There was an eagerness to
demonstrate in practice that white radicals could risk the same
commitments as these revolutionary icons. We would not sell out or be
co-opted. This was still the stance of many of the former WU members
featured in the 2002 documentary film The Weather Underground.

Despite some bravado, I myself was a cautious person looking to break
the shackles of bourgeois detachment. I felt real relief in seemingly
giving my all. But at the same time, I was terrified. Such
existential "acting out" does not ordinarily lead to political good
sense. The importance of demonstrating revolutionary credentials or
moral purity gets in the way of clear thinking about how to
strengthen the movement or take advantage of political opportunities.

Other longtime activists argued that our actions would isolate the
movement, obscure its message, and sabotage priorities: We dismissed
all of these criticisms as examples of white privilege, if not
cowardice. Counter-arguments served mainly to convince us of our own
revolutionary righteousness. Not even Chicago Black Panther leader
Fred Hampton's labeling us "Custeristic"­for the 1969 Days of Rage
demonstration, which he accurately saw as self-destructive­slowed us down.

Get with­or out of­the program

This brings us directly to the notorious arrogance of the Weather
people. During that first crazed year of willing "the underground"
into existence, we perceived other activists as loath to go the last
mile and risk their futures; we had no embarrassment in calling out
other activists for not being "with the program." We held a general
contempt for all parts of the movement who failed to heed our call.
This coincided with abusive internal criticism and self-criticism
sessions to purge bourgeois "individualism" and gird members for the struggle.

While many forms of deep personal transformation can take on an
unbecoming stridency, our over-the-top special pleading went beyond
adolescent obnoxiousness and played a significant role in imploding
the late '60s left.

For example, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (from which the
WU emerged) itself contained many deep internal
contradictions­regarding Marxism-Leninism, internal democracy and
sexism, to name a few divisive issues­that threatened its
organizational integrity. But surely the Weather tendency's strident
divisiveness played a catalytic role in the demise of SDS as a core
radical student organization.

Movement building

By allowing our frustration and revolutionary airs to trump our
political common sense, we disowned one of the '60s-era organizers'
greatest contributions to leftist politics­the revival of what has
been termed the "organizing tradition." This was the tradition,
focused on long-term change and bottom-up politics that animated the
Civil Rights, Black Freedom, Women's Liberation and antiwar movements.

This organizing tradition, which the WU abandoned, has a
developmental, long-haul perspective and an emphasis on building
relationships that endure. It respects collective leadership and
holds that the best movement leaders should have ongoing, accountable
relations with their bases­the grassroots. Its anti-bureaucratic
ethos and preference for connecting issues and organizing around
peoples' everyday lives create an expansive notion of democracy.

This conception of organizing goes beyond mobilizing, disdains
vanguardism, requires patience and emphasizes the centrality of
building new leadership. The organizing tradition was most fully
embodied in the practice of early Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) organizers, but also revivified in Women's
Liberation groups and even some SDS chapters.

Out of sheer impatience and an inflated sense of vanguardism, the WU
rejected this empowering tradition. Ironically, the WU understood the
painstaking work of grassroots organizing as a sign of white
privilege. This work required waiting too long while the world was in tumult.

The WU favored more dramatic action that ended up disconnecting the
purported leadership from any mass base, leaving it unaccountable
(except self-glorifyingly to a nebulous "people of the world") in its
self-defined trajectory. The WU rationalized its practice by
attacking any possible base as too privileged, too corrupted by
consumerism and imperialism.

Many WU cadre had been effective, energetic, even gifted
organizers­but by the late '60s such work seemed like too little, too
late. The war was raging, the people of the world were in an
uproar­where were we? From the WU perspective, white people were
self-indulgently tarrying and oppressed people were bearing the brunt
of imperial and racist power. We thought it was high time to up the ante.

One need not equate the relentless, pounding violence of the American
war on Vietnam or against the Black Freedom movement with the
small-time violent actions of the WU in order to be critical of the
direction we set. While we in the WU did not, by some grace, become
terrorists, we were wrong and destructive. We did lose our way. We
were not demons, but we did succumb to our own fantasy of revolutionary pride.

For me, the overall lesson is this: Despite the desperation of any
given political moment, we can only have a chance at success by
deeply understanding that our goal must be to build humane power. We
must remain alert to opportunities in current political realities,
rather than act out fantasies of revolutionary prowess in frustration.

Similar temptations toward what has been variously called "infantile"
leftism, "phallic" politics, or "petit-bourgeois" adventurism have
not disappeared ­ they reappear in new guises, but parade with the
same heedlessness and self-importance. The "fierce urgency of now" is
always with us, but the struggle to maintain one's humanity in
building a movement for social justice in an oppressive world has a
more profound urgency.
--

Howard Machtinger, a former member of Students For a Democratic
Society and a founding member of Weatherman (later Weather
Underground), is a retired teacher, but remains politically active
and still believes in the need for social and political
transformation--hopefully in the spirit of the "organizing tradition."

.

Bill Ayers has an idea for Palin

[2 items]

Bill Ayers has an idea for Palin

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/02/12/bill-ayers-has-an-idea-for-palin-2/

February 12, 2009
by Peter Hamby

(CNN) ­ Sarah Palin once accused Barack Obama of "palling around with
terrorists," a catchphrase intended to highlight Obama's connection
to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.

Now that the campaign rhetoric has subsided, Ayers has an idea for a
new show starring his Alaskan nemesis.

"I did send her a note after the election," he says of Palin in the
upcoming issue of the New York Times magazine. "I suggested that we
have a talk show together called 'Pallin' Around With Sarah and
Bill.' I haven't heard back."

Ayers assiduously avoided interviews and press attention during the
presidential race, but he insists the Obama campaign never told him
to keep quiet.

"They apparently didn't want to call me, and I certainly wouldn't
have initiated it," he says.

According to Ayers, Obama's election was "a strike against white
supremacy." But, he says, his victory doesn't change the fact that
"40 percent of black kids under 5 live in poverty."

He also says that while he considers himself a radical, he believes
Obama is "a moderate Democrat."

"If you look at his record, it's the record of a moderate, who indeed
does know how to make compromises," Ayers told the magazine.

--------

GSU cancels controversial speaker

http://www.wsav.com/sav/news/local/article/gsu_cancels_controversial_speaker/9622/

By Lyndell Nelson
Published: February 16, 2009

GSU announced that the March visit of professor and controversial
activist Bill Ayers is cancelled. This statement came out after many
students and alumni expressed their opposition through a facebook
group and posts to the school's student newspaper's website. GSU
administration insists that the cancellation is due to budgetary
reasons, not negative feedback for the speaker.

Vice President of Student Affairs Teresa Thompson said that if Ayers
had visited GSU, the cost to secure the venue would have "disrupted
university operations."
According to Betsy Nolen, Assistant Director of Communications, the
school would have had to spend nearly $13,000 in security expenditures.

Ayers is remembered for his involvement in Weather Underground, an
anti-Vietnam War group that bombed several locations in Washington
D.C. Although the F.B.I. labeled Weather Underground a "domestic
terrorist group," charges against Ayers were dropped due to
insufficient surveillance.

Ayers now serves as a professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago after earning a degree in early childhood education and a
doctorate in curriculum and teaching.

To read GSU student reactions, visit http://www.gadaily.com

.

The Twisted Self of Billy Ayers

The Twisted Self of Billy Ayers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-braudy/the-twisted-self-of-billy_b_165083.html

by Susan Braudy
February 9, 2009

Bill Ayers is a has-been terrorist, but in his confused life, he's
associated with many do-gooders like Senator Barack Obama.
For my book, Family Circle, the Boudins and the Aristocracy of the
Left, I pored for years over FBI documents, and Ayers' press releases
taking credit for bombing the Pentagon, the Capitol et al.
The reason the Ayers gang (weather underground)ceased bombing our
government buildings was that the FBI finally stopped publicly
attributing the horrific messes to them.
Today I march up a steep sidewalk to 520 West 123rd. St., a
non-descript five-story walk-up, the last place in Manhattan that
Bill Ayers called home in the late 1970's.
Back then, Ayers was leading at least two lives--one secret as a
fugitive bomber. His delusional mission: headlines about his bombings
and robberies and even murders of policemen would to inspire us to
destroy the "racist, warmongering" United States government.
Bill's also led a "normal" life as "Anthony Lee" a do-gooder at a PS
9 pre-school called B.J.'s kids on West 84th, attended by at least
one of his sons.
I stare at the tenement where Ayers lived on West 123rd Street and
wonder how the crazy terrorist evolved into a smug, double-talking
establishment political wheeler-dealer in Chicago.
Still crazy after all these years?
I'm betting William Ayers is thrilled to be making headlines
again--courtesty of John McCain.
After all, he's been proud of far more negative headlines.
Oy.
And Ayers (who by the way sports 17 tattoos) is a public relations
genius---outdoing even Angelina Jolie, who calls People magazine to
chat and land the cover.
Before bombing, say, a police station, or the U.S.Pentagon, or after
breaking Tim Leary out of prison, Ayers' minions mailed out press
releases ("communiqués") claiming credit.
But how could he pretend to himself that such terrorism would scare
Americans into giving up racism, war, sexism, and overturning the government.
Staring at the five-story tenement where Ayers lived the Spartan
life---a couch, beds, no tables, I am trying to see how Billy
Ayers,now 63, made such twisting,torturous,implausible transitions
from SDS student leader/womanizer to famous terrorist to husband and
father and famous establishment education professor and reformer.
Today he has upper-middle class Establishment stature in Chicago.
Bill's wife even received a MacArthur genius grant for her academic
study on children's court reform.
Oy.
How do they sleep at night?
Their rationalizations over the years run through my head. His wife
says Bill's sense of humor has helped them gloss over their crazed
past. Bill claims, "We convinced ourselves it was absolutely up to us
to stop the Vietnam war."
I believe Ayers is still confused. He's got a weaker sense of self than most.
His autobiography refers to work with his and his wife's allies the
police-murdering Black Liberation Army in one cryptic sentence---as "mischief".
I believe the psycho-secret is Ayers will do anything to be better
than---to be a star. He contorts himself to suit passing fashion.

I watched Billy for two hours giving a speech in a small room.
Sometimes he was a hero-- sometimes he apologized. Voice shaking, he
ended saying his proudest achievement was raising three sons.

Killer Hollywood careerists piously say the same.

When I approached Ayers afterward, he said instantly, "Can you get my
book reviewed in the Times?" I shrugged helplessly. So the married
father of three told me he had a date and vanished.
Okay--Bill Ayers is a charming sociopath, who doesn't know who he is.
In Chicago, he's a first citizen who sways crowds who haven't lived
through his crazy antics. (Barak Obama was about eight years old.)
He once exulted, "Guilty as hell,free as a bird, what a great
country, the U.S.A." Recently he joked that when he told his sons he
burned his draft card, they misunderstood and were shocked. "Why burn
your credit card?" they asked.

"Hey, I'm not that stupid," he answered.

He told the Times he might bomb again: he regrets he didn't bomb more.
Then, after 9/11, when suddenly the reality of terrorist bombing was
scaring everyone to death, he scrambled using double-talk worthy of
John McCain: "My book is in fact a condemnation of terrorism in all
its forms--individual, group and official."

My colleague John Castellucci, author of the excellent "The Big
Dance" about these crazies, asks, "Doesn't Bill Ayers get what a mess
he's made: first, his violence leads to the cold-blooded murder of
black Nyack policeman Waverly Brown and now he's being used as to
discredit our first black candidate for president?"

.

Ayers at RB gets mixed reviews

Ayers at RB gets mixed reviews

http://www.rblandmark.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=4631&TM=83181.91

Some parents outraged '60s radical invited

2/10/2009
By BOB SKOLNIK
Contributing Reporter

Last week, casually sitting on the edge of the stage of the
Riverside-Brookfield High School Little Theater, was a man who a few
months ago had emerged as a minor issue in 2008 presidential campaign.

Bill Ayers, who has long been one of the more controversial members
of his generation, sat in front of a crowd of about 130 students,
faculty and a few community members talking about the campaign, his
past and his views on current issues.

Some call Ayers, now a professor of education at University of
Illinois at Chicago, an unrepentant former terrorist.

Ayers still manages to seem youthful at age 64. He wore a T-shirt
featuring the Boondocks cartoon character; on his shirt was a button
featuring an image of the abolitionist John Brown. A fleece vest,
faded jeans and two small gold hoop earrings completed his appearance.

Invited to speak to students by faculty member Jan Goldberg, Ayers
wasn't welcomed with open arms by some parents, who expressed outrage
over his appearance.

"It is appalling that they would let someone like that speak to
young, impressionable, pretty open minds," said Jack Lazzara, a
parent who passed out copies of articles about Ayers after the event.

"This is an atrocity. It's unbelievable that something like this
would be done in a public school. He is a master at twisting the
English language to turn it to the way he wants it."

Lazzara, and some other parents, also were angry that they had not
been informed of Ayers's visit to RB. They were also upset that the
event was originally only going to be open to RB students, faculty
and staff; parents would not be allowed in.

Parents said that they did not become aware of Ayers visit until less
than 48 hours before he came to RB.

"They kept everything hush, hush," Lazzara said. "They were hiding
it, in my opinion."

Ayers's appearance was sponsored by the Forum Club, a club founded by
Goldberg, a veteran RB history and government teacher.

"The purpose is to discuss current events," Goldberg said. "I'll
discuss any current event that a student brings to me as long as it's
appropriate."

The public doesn't typically attend Forum Club events, Goldberg said.

"I didn't want to open it to the general public and the
administration didn't either, because it's a club and I wanted the
kids to ask the questions." Goldberg said.

The event was not heavily publicized at RB. On Monday, three days
before Ayers' appearance, government students, mostly seniors,
received a newspaper story about Ayers handed out in class. Students
were told that Ayers would be at RB after school on Thursday.

"We thought he would mostly appeal to older students," Goldberg said.

Goldberg said the event was included in the daily announcements at RB
on Wednesday.

By Wednesday, a few parents had learned of Ayers appearance from
their children. The Landmark, tipped off by a half dozen parents and
other community members, also learned of the Ayers's visit less than
48 hours before the event.

When the Landmark requested to cover Ayers's visit
Superintendent/Principal Jack Baldermann and Assistant Principal Tim
Scanlon said Ayers' appearance was not open to the press, parents or
the general public.

They said that club meetings are not normally open to the public and
said that they didn't want parents or the press to attend because
they were concerned that their presence would inhibit students from
asking questions and interacting freely with Ayers.

As late as Thursday morning a parent was told by Baldermann that she
would not be able to get in to see Ayers. School board member Jim
Marciniak, who said he only learned of Ayers's invitation on the day
of the appearance, called the school Thursday morning and urged
administrators to allow parents in.

The administration changed course and ultimately decided to allow
anyone in to see Ayers. The same parent who was told earlier in the
day that she couldn't come received a call from Baldermann inviting
her to attend.

Ayers, who co-founded the violent Weather Underground group in 1969,
didn't come with a prepared speech. Instead he took questions in
groups of five and weaved his answers together in long responses that
got his points across.

In response to a series of aggressive questions from Lazzara, Ayers
admitted that the group planted bombs in 12 government buildings.

"The idea was to bring the war home," said Ayers who said that the
violence of the Weathermen was minuscule compared to the violence the
United States government was committing in Vietnam. "We carried out a
series of bombings against government buildings. It was weird time
and it was a weird thing. We crossed lines of legality. We crossed
grounds of common sense. All that stuff happened 40 years ago."

While he encouraged RB students to be politically active, he advised
them against violence.

"I would not encourage you to break the law or damage property,"
Ayers said. "I am not a violent person."

Students in the audience were generally impressed, and some were surprised.

"I thought he was incredibly eloquent, said Wolfie Foulkes, an RB
sophomore. "He has a way of speaking to people that really gets his
point across. You can tell he's just kind of a normal person just
like any one of us and not the demon that the media has turned him into."

Tracy Nawara agreed.

"I thought he would be a lot more violent, I guess, because of what I
heard about the bombings and the group he was involved in," said
Nawara, a senior. "He was a lot sweeter than I thought he would be."

Others said that although they were impressed, they noticed that
Ayers sometimes did not directly answer tough questions put to him
about his past.

"Some of the questions he kind of avoided," said sophomore Elliot
Louthen. "He was answering them by talking about something else,
which I thought was a little frustrating."

Despite that frustration Louthen, who said that he heard about Ayers'
appearance from a friend as school was letting out on Thursday, was
glad that he stopped by to hear Ayers.

"I thought he was an interesting speaker whether you agreed with him
or not," Louthen said.

Goldberg said that she plans to invite a Republican guest to RB soon
to provide balance and another perspective. She mentioned Cook County
Commissioner Tony Peraica, former state representative Bill O'Connor
or Republican activist Chris Robling as possibilities.

But Lazzara said these mainstream figures would not be comparable to
Ayers. Lazzara said that RB had an obligation to invite a right wing
ideologue to the school to balance out Ayers.

"I want somebody who is as far right as this guy is left," Lazzara
said. "In fact I demand it."
--

Who is Bill Ayers?

Bill Ayers was one of the most well known radicals of the 1960s and
1970s and now has made a name for himself as a professor of education
at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

Ayers grew up in Glen Ellyn. His father, Thomas Ayers, was the chief
executive officer of Commonwealth Edison. While a student at the
University of Michigan, Ayers became a member of Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS,) a radical group. In 1969 Ayers was a
co-founder of the Weather Underground, a violent offshoot of SDS that
the FBI labeled a "domestic terrorist group."

The Weather Underground, commonly known as the Weathermen, placed
small bombs at the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other government
buildings. These bombs were typically set to go off at night and
usually resulted in only damage to property.

Three members of the Weather Underground, including Ayers' former
girlfriend, died in a New York City townhouse in 1970 when a bomb
they were believed to be working on exploded prematurely.

Ayers was indicted and charged with violating the federal riot act
relating to the Days of Rage protest and riot organized by the
Weathermen in Chicago in 1969, and he was also charged with
conspiracy charges relating to bombings.

But Ayers and his future wife, Bernadine Dohrn, had already gone
underground. They evaded capture for 10 years before turning
surrendering in 1980. In 1981, after Ayers had turned himself in, two
police officers and a security guard were killed when a couple of
former members of the Weather Underground were participated in the
armed robbery of a Brinks truck.

Charges against Ayers were ultimately dropped because of government
misconduct involving illegal wiretaps, break-ins and mail intercepts
by federal law enforcement authorities.

Later, Ayers went to graduate school and has taught at UIC for 22
years, where he is now a distinguished professor of education and
university scholar. His teaching and research emphasizes reaching out
to inner-city and at-risk youth.

Ayers and Barack Obama both lived in Hyde Park. When Obama first ran
for the state legislature in the mid 1990's Ayers's home was the site
of a fundraiser for Obama.

The two also served together on the board of the not-for-profit Woods
Fund of Chicago and served on separate boards of the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge, a school reform group. In 2001, Ayers donated
$200 to an Obama campaign fund.

At a presidential campaign debate in April 2008 Obama referred to
Ayers as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood".

In a new afterward to his 2001 book Fugitive Days, Ayers describes
Obama as a "family friend."

In a story about Ayers published in the Sept. 11, 2001 New York Times
quoted Ayers as saying "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we
didn't do enough."

The story was written before the attack on the World Trade Center,
but appeared on the day of the attack.

In his new afterward, published after the 2008 presidential election,
Ayers claims that he was misquoted by the New York Times. He writes
"I never said that I 'set bombs' nor that I wished there were "more bombs.'"

Three days after the Sept. 11 attacks Ayers said "My memoir is, from
start to finish, a condemnation of terrorism."

.

Psilocybin study shows promise in treating multiple psychological disorders

Psilocybin study shows promise in treating multiple psychological disorders

http://www.times-standard.com/othervoices/ci_11710419

Dave Stancliff/For the Times-Standard
Posted: 02/15/2009

There's a saying that goes, "If you can remember the Sixties, then
you weren't there."

The legendary drug excesses of the decade practically brought studies
on entheogen psilocybin -- a psychoactive substance found in
mushrooms -- to a complete halt.

That recently changed. The Johns Hopkins Psilocybin study published
in the 2006 journal Pschopharmacology (with a follow-up in 2008) has
been hailed by the world, scientific community, and press, as showing
potential for profound transformation and long-lasting positive
changes for properly prepared individuals.

The study took place at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and is
headed by Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D. It may spur a revival in the
study of altered states of consciousness, according to Rick Doblin,
founder and President of Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies (a non-profit organization devoted to advancing
the study of psychedelics).

He told the Baltimore City Paper, "With psychedelic psychotherapy
research at Harvard Medical School and spirituality/mysticism
research at Johns Hopkins and the University of Zurich, we've
re-entered the scientific mainstream."

Unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled when I experimented with marijuana in
the mid-sixties. I remember eating mushrooms once with a couple of
buddies. I enjoyed the colors which suddenly seemed brighter, and in
general had a good time.

One of my friends got so paranoid that he nearly "tripped out." He
was afraid of everything, and had trouble handling the sensory
experiences we grooved on. None of us thought of it as sacred
experience (most world cultures that use it do), and we never tried it again.

That's why I found this study so interesting. One of the things it
explored was mystic or holy experiences. Volunteers for the study
reported they felt a "sense of unity" after taking the hallucinogen.
Griffiths demonstrated that psilocybin can occasion
mystical/spiritual experiences like those described by mystics and
saints for centuries.

The study used carefully controlled conditions to minimize adverse
effects and ensure the safety of the volunteers while they were
"tripped out." The report discussed safety the way adequately
screened individuals were prepared and put in supportive situations.

Back in the Sixties when people tripped out on LSD, they often had an
experienced "guide" (one who had taken LSD numerous times) to talk
them through the trip. This study reminded me of that and in a
strange way made a connection between now and then.

We search for answers about who we are and where we stand in the universe.

Over the centuries, meditation, fasting, and prayer have been used to
answer these questions, along with the use of hallucinogenics. This
research is an extension of that search under controlled conditions.

What really hit me were some of the reported results. For example,
more than 60 percent of the participants reported substantial
increases in life satisfaction and positive behavior. No one was
worse off because of their participation, according to the report.

Researchers are looking for more volunteers with current or past
diagnosis of cancer, who have some anxiety, or are feel down about
their cancer, to participate in this study of self-exploration and
personal meaning using entheogen psilocybin.

If you would like to know more about this study, and consider
volunteering, call 410-550-5990 or e-mail cancer@bpru.org , and ask
for Mary, the study's coordinator.

More psychedelic research is taking place in the United States and
Europe, using LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA (Ecstasy) for
treatment of anxiety and depression, obsessive-compulsive order,
post-tramatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and addiction.

Attitudes are changing about the use of hallucinogenic drugs, but
only in controlled situations. See www.csp.org/psilocybin for links
to the report.

I can see how a process like this research is exploring, can be
helpful as part of an overall program to make a sick person feel
better. It's hard to argue with results. Still, I can't imagine a
program like this ever going mainstream, despite the expectations the
researchers have.

As It Stands, a self-described mystical experience with a drug is
still no replacement for a lifetime spent in the pursuit of knowledge.
--

Dave Stancliff is a columnist for the Times-Standard. He is a former
newspaper editor and publisher. Comments can be sent to
richstan1@suddenlink.net.

Ecstasy's long-term effects revealed

[See URL for mebedded links.]

Ecstasy's long-term effects revealed

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126954.500-ecstasys-legacy-so-far-so-good.html

11 February 2009
by Graham Lawton

THEY called it the second summer of love. Twenty years ago, young
people all over the world donned T-shirts emblazoned with smiley
faces and danced all night, fuelled by a molecule called MDMA. Most
of these clubbers have since given up ecstasy and are sliding into
middle age. The question is, has ecstasy given up on them?

Enough time has finally elapsed to start asking if ecstasy damages
health in the long term. According to the biggest review ever
undertaken, it causes slight memory difficulties and mild depression,
but these rarely translate into problems in the real world. While
smaller studies show that some individuals have bigger problems,
including weakened immunity and larger memory deficits, so far, for
most people, ecstasy seems to be nowhere near as harmful over time as
you may have been led to believe.

The review was carried out by the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse
of Drugs (ACMD), an independent body that advises the UK government
on drug policy. Its headline recommendation is that, based on its
harmfulness to individuals and society, MDMA should be downgraded
from a class A drug - on a par with heroin and cocaine - to class B,
alongside cannabis.

Read the full report
http://drugs.homeoffice.gov.uk/publication-search/acmd/mdma-report?view=Binary

Nobody is arguing that taking ecstasy is risk-free: its short-term
effects are fairly uncontroversial. MDMA is toxic, though not
powerfully so - an average person would need to take around 20 or 30
tablets to reach a lethal dose. And for a small fraction of people,
even small amounts of ecstasy can kill. For example, around half a
million people take ecstasy every year in England and Wales, and 30
die from the acute effects, mostly overheating or water intoxication.

What has been unclear, however, is whether ecstasy use causes
long-term health problems and if so, how much you would need to take
to be at risk.

In animal studies the drug has been shown to inflict lasting damage
to the brain's serotonin system, which is involved in mood and
cognition. Imaging studies have found signs of similar damage in
human users, but there are debates over whether this is caused by
ecstasy use and whether the damage has any real-life consequences.

The ACMD based their review largely on a study they commissioned from
Gabriel Rogers and Ruth Garside of the Peninsula Medical School in
Exeter, UK. They pulled together all the research from around the
world that attempted to assess the health of people who have taken
ecstasy, and reanalysed the data from the 110 studies that dealt with
long-term effects.

They found that compared with non-users, people who took even a small
amount of ecstasy at some point consistently performed worse on
psychometric tests, which measure mental performance, especially
memory, attention, and executive function, which includes
decision-making and planning.

The most pronounced effects are on memory, mainly verbal and working
memory. While the ability to plan is somewhat affected, other aspects
of executive function are not. Focused attention - the ability to
zoom in quickly on a new task - suffers too, though sustained
attention does not.

It is a similar story with depression. "There's a small but
measurable effect," says Rogers.

These effects appear not just in current users but also in ex-users
who haven't touched the drug for at least six months, suggesting that
the problems are long-lasting. Strangely, there seems to be no link
between the quantity taken and the severity of cognitive problems,
suggesting that even a few doses can lead to these deficits.

Superficially, this adds up to a pretty depressing outlook for the
e-generation, especially those who dabbled years ago but have since
quit. Not so, says Rogers. Subtle differences in lab tests do not
necessarily translate into real-life problems: "They're statistically
significant, but whether they are clinically significant is another matter."

Subtle differences on lab tests do not necessarily translate into
problems in real life

For example, there is little evidence that people are actually
affected by the memory and attention deficits picked up in the lab
tests. "They don't seem to be very big and it is not clear that they
have much effect on day-to-day functioning," he says.

Meanwhile, people who have taken ecstasy are, on average, still
within the normal bounds on standard depression tests. Although they
score worse than people who haven't taken ecstasy, the scores aren't
bad enough to warrant a diagnosis from a doctor. "There's no
indication that they are drifting out of normal functioning," says Rogers.

He also warns that his results need to be taken with a pinch of salt
because most studies are based on self-reports of ecstasy use, often
combined with other drugs and alcohol, from people who have
volunteered to take part. These confounding factors make it
impossible to determine whether you have a representative sample of
users, whether people's reported use correlates with how much they
actually took and what effects can be blamed on MDMA.

Psychopharmacologist Val Curran of University College London says
Roger's analysis "is about the best you can make of the overall
mishmash". She agrees with his conclusion that on average there seems
to be no evidence of any meaningful effects on daily life.

Others have a different take on it. Andrew Parrot of the University
of Swansea, UK, who has been studying the health of ecstasy users
since the mid-1990s says: "We see users who have taken bucket-loads
and they have very severe problems." These include memory deficits,
sleep disturbances, depression, weakened immunity and sexual
dysfunction, he says.

Based on his own studies, he believes that almost everyone who has
taken 20 tablets in total, or more, reports niggling problems in
daily life. "All fairly minor on their own, but you're ending up with
someone who is not as healthy as they ought to be," he says.

Rogers admits that because he took averages of such large numbers of
users, his analysis may have "ironed out" some of the effects Parrot describes.

Parrot also calls ecstasy a "gateway" drug. "Former users are often
heavy users of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. When you move off
ecstasy, you look for other drugs. Ecstasy use leads to other, more
problematic drugs."

Despite this, however, results from the first "prospective" studies
are more encouraging. These studies follow a group of people over
many years and watch the effects of ecstasy unfold over time.
Crucially, they are more reliable than "retrospective" studies
because they don't rely on people remembering what they did in the past.

In 2002 a group in the Netherlands recruited 188 young people who had
never taken ecstasy but were likely to in the future. When they
retested them on a battery of psychometric tests three years later,
58 said they had taken ecstasy at least once, giving the researchers
an opportunity to compare cognitive performance before and after ecstasy.

They found that on all the tests except for verbal memory, ecstasy
users performed just as well as before, and on a par with abstainers
(Archives of General Psychiatry, vol 64, p 728). The results chime
with Rogers's conclusions: because the effect was so small - a
difference of a quarter of a word on average from a list of 15 - the
real world implications are questionable. Brain imaging revealed no
changes to the serotonin system, although there were signs of damage
to white matter and blood vessels. The practical significance of this
is not yet known (Brain, DOI: 10.1093/brain/awn255).
On all the tests except those for verbal memory, ecstasy users
performed on a par with abstainers

Rogers cautions that it is too soon to give ecstasy the all-clear in
the long term, not least because some effects on health might simply
kick in even later. "It's possible that ecstasy has horrific
consequences later in life. Only time will tell."
--

The low-down on ecstasy

Ecstasy usually refers to a compound called MDMA or
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
MDMA was first synthesised by German firm Merck in the early 20th
century but only started to be used as a recreational drug in the 1980s.
There are around 450,000 regular users in the US; half a million
people take it each year in the UK. A seriously heavy user might take
up to 40,000 tablets in a lifetime.
Drug dealers originally wanted to call MDMA "empathy" because of the
powerful feelings of "loved up" warmth it induces. MDMA is also a
stimulant and a mild psychedelic.
Recent research suggests that most ecstasy pills on the market
contain MDMA as their only active ingredient. Toxic impurities are
often said to be common, but there is very little evidence that this
is the case.
Most of the ecstasy on the market is in pill form, with each pill
containing around 40 milligrams of MDMA. But very pure MDMA powder
accounts for around 30 per cent of drugs seized, which is worrying
because of the potential for taking very large doses.
A single ecstasy tablet used to cost £15. Now they cost just £2.30.

.

Celebrating the life and times of Cesar Chavez through music

Celebrating the life and times of Cesar Chavez through music

http://media.www.thespartandaily.com/media/storage/paper852/news/2009/02/09/News/Celebrating.The.Life.And.Times.Of.Cesar.Chavez.Through.Music-3619333.shtml

Julianne Shapiro
Issue date: 2/9/09

Acoustic guitars were the theme of Saturday night inside the Morris
Dailey Auditorium.

Agustin Lira and ALMA presented their musical program "Cesar Chavez -
His Life and Times" to an audience of more than 140 people. The
program was both a scholarship fundraiser and an awareness event.

Band member Lira said he joined the United Farm Workers, which was
directed by Cesar Chavez, in 1965 and worked with him to gain working
rights for farmers.

"It was a hell of an experience," he said.

The band played music in between readings from members Lira (acoustic
guitar and vocals) and Patricia Wells Solorzano (acoustic guitar and
vocals) about Chavez's life, ranging from his birth until his work
with the United Farm Workers.

"I thought that it would be a very good idea to give that short mini
picture to people so they could see that all of the forces that came
to play to make a person like Cesar," Lira said.

Band member Ravi Knypstra helped with backing vocals, but primarily
played the upright bass.

Some of the songs were in both Spanish and English so that audience
members of different backgrounds could understand the lyrics.

The performance lasted more than an hour and went smoothly, except
for some guitar tuning problems with Solorzano's guitar and hand
cramps from Lira.

"Well, did you hear the one about the … ," Solorzano joked during
Lira's hand cramps.

Knypstra stopped her from continuing the joke, and said it might not
be appropriate.

Members of the audience laughed.

The evening ended with a statement from former President Bill Clinton
about Chavez.

"He provided for us inspiration for the rest of our nation's history
and each of us as individuals," Solorzano read.

The band's last song was the folk protest tune "We Shall Overcome,"
and they encouraged the audience to sing alone with them.

The audience gave a standing ovation to the band and shouted, "Cesar
Chavez!" at the very end of the performance.

Cathy Orozco, a junior communication studies major, said she learned
a lot from the performance, which was an early birthday gift to her
brother who shares the same birthday as Chavez, March 31.

"I liked that it talked about Cesar Chavez's life so you had a
background," she said. "It was history - it wasn't just music."

Jessica Gabladon, a sophomore sociology major, said she liked the
band's singing.

"I loved how it was in both English and Spanish for people who didn't
understand," she said. "I loved their singing."

Lira said the fight for better working conditions is not over and did
not die with Chavez.

"Getting better wages for farm workers are very important because
without immigrants that come to this country, this economy would
collapse," he said.

Lira co-founded El Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers' Theater) with Luis
Valdez in 1965 during the Delano Grape Strike that was directed by
Chavez. Solorzano formed the group ALMA in 1979 with Lira, and
Knypstra joined the band in 1991.

The proceeds from the event will go to financial assistance to
students who have demonstrated a commitment to the Chicano/Latino
community and maintain a high grade point average, said Maribel
Martinez, program coordinator for Associated Students Cesar E. Chavez
Community Action Center.

The event was co-sponsored by the SJSU Associated Students Cesar E.
Chavez Community Action Center, the EVC to SJSU Transfer Program, the
Galarza Institute and the Chicano Latino Faculty and Staff Association.

.

Civil rights legend recognized for years of service

[2 articles]

Civil rights legend recognized for years of service

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2009/02.12/11-huerta.html

Dolores Huerta receives Humanitarian of the Year Award from Harvard Foundation

February 12, 2009
By Gervis A. Menzies Jr.
Harvard News Office

At times, the best way to truly honor those who have selflessly and
tirelessly served is with a simple "thank you." This past Monday
(Feb. 9), the Harvard Foundation thanked civil rights legend Dolores
Huerta for her years of service as a labor organizer and activist by
presenting her with the 2008 Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian of the Year
Award in front of a captivated audience at Quincy House. A co-founder
of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), Huerta is regarded as
one of the most powerful and influential labor movement leaders of our time.

The annual ceremony, in which the students and faculty of the Harvard
Foundation honor a widely recognized philanthropist and/or
humanitarian with the award, this year featured a tribute performance
by Mariachi Véritas de Harvard, remarks by leaders of cultural groups
on campus, and words by Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter.

Huerta, a native of California and the daughter of a farmworker and
union organizer, has fought for years to protect the labor rights of
farmworkers, co-founding UFW in 1962 with late civil rights activist
César Chávez. Huerta has not only been imprisoned for fighting for
workers' rights, but at the age of 58 she was also severely beaten
for leading a peaceful and lawful protest against the policies of
then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, who had derided the UFW
and its grape boycott.

Upon receiving the award, the humble Huerta was gracious; however,
she did not hesitate to redirect the event's focus by forcefully
reminding the audience of mostly students of their civil obligation
as U.S. citizens.

"The idea of America is not a place," Huerta said. "It's an idea of
freedom; it's an idea of liberty. It means that each of us [has] to
be patrons in our society. ... We've got to be prepared to fight,
which means we've got to be prepared to march, demonstrate ­ and yes,
go to jail once in a while. Like Dr. King did. Like César did. Like I
did. Like Gandhi did. Like Mandela did. We've got to be able to take
that other step.

"The end of your education has got to be in service to others. ...
The end of our education should never be just to make money," she
said. "The most important thing is to serve and give back to our communities."
--

gervis_menzies@harvard.edu

--------

Yes, She Did!

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=526467

Published On Wednesday, February 11, 2009
By MIGUEL GARCIA, ELIANA C. MURILLO, and RAÚL A. CARRILLO

On Monday afternoon in Quincy House, a large audience of Harvard
students and faculty was spellbound by a five-foot-tall, 79-year-old
mother of 11 children. Dolores Huerta, president of the Dolores
Huerta Foundation and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of
America­although delicate in appearance­exudes the calm passion and
power that distinguishes leaders of her incredible historical
stature. The daughter of a waitress and a coal miner, Señora Huerta's
lifelong fight for social justice is, as David G. Hernandez '09 puts
it, a "testament to the power each one of us possesses to make a
positive difference." Her acceptance of the Reverend Professor Peter
J. Gomes Humanitarian of the Year Award, given by the Harvard
Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, is a fitting
celebration of increased opportunity for Chicanos, Latinos, women,
and workers. It also commends the struggle for equal rights and a
better life for all, the struggle for the American dream.

The Humanitarian of the Year Award is presented by the students and
faculty of the Harvard Foundation to individuals who have
exceptionally contributed to the humanitarian cause and whose works
exemplify the mission of the foundation. No one fits that description
better than Dolores Huerta. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Mahatma Gandhi, Dolores Huerta and César Chávez mobilized a massive
nonviolent movement that empowered impoverished, abused, and
disenfranchised people to fight against injustice.

Huerta was instrumental in organizing the migrant farm workers of
California's fields and co-founded the UFW in 1962. Later that year
she pushed for legislation repealing the inhumane Bracero Program,
which legally exploited the labor of Mexican nationals. In 1965, she
directed the UFW's national grape boycott, which communicated the
worker's suffering to the consumers in order to end subhuman wages,
worker abuses, poor living conditions, and the use of toxic
pesticides, among other atrocities. Her efforts culminated in a
three-year collective bargaining between the UFW and the entire
California grape industry in 1970, a monumental and unprecedented triumph.

Since then, Huerta has not ceased to selflessly serve the
disadvantaged of America and the wider world. As she spoke at the
podium on Monday, clad in purple, a customary symbol of the grape
boycott, one could not help but admire her rare yet perfect
combination of joyful charisma, fearlessness, and selflessness. She
has been arrested 22 times for participating in non-violent civil
disobedience strikes, but she still wears a smile that shines with
hope, promise, and opportunity.

Opportunity is exactly what she has given to both migrant and
nonmigrant Latinos in the United States. The families and communities
of many Latinos at Harvard have been directly affected by the work of
Dolores Huerta. At Harvard, we call it a Latino community. At home we
may call it something different, but no matter what it is called
Dolores Huerta has always represented a community of hardworking
people. In her ongoing fight to improve living conditions and
treatment for laborers, Huerta represents the family who spent days
in the fields under the scorching sun with no place to use the
restroom or drink clean water. She represents the mother who labored
tirelessly to send her children to school and the child who saw the
pain and suffering of the family. She represents the generations who
fought hard so that one day their children and children's children
could be in a better position to help the world in their own right.

Her contribution to equal opportunity for women and Latinas in
particular deserves special recognition. Huerta enacted social change
at a time when female labor leaders were not treated with equality or
even respect. Her work with the UFW and more recently as a board
member of the Feminist Majority Foundation has empowered women of
color across the country. She has improved the lives of thousands of
women who may never have the chance to meet her­as many Harvard
Latinas did on Monday­but who owe her an insurmountable debt, a debt
that should be paid by a continued commitment to social justice and
human rights.

In her speech on Monday, Huerta echoed the importance of continuing
"La Causa": our work is not yet done. Workers are still being
mistreated and underpaid, and the voices of minorities and women are
still being marginalized. Fittingly, she ended her speech with two
rallying cries for solidarity. The first was a Zulu cry, "Wozani!"
("People together!"), often used in the struggle to end apartheid in
South Africa. The second was the traditional UFW chant: "¡Sí Se
Puede!" This cry was eventually translated into "Yes, We Can!", the
slogan of President Obama's 2008 campaign.

There is, indeed, much work left to be done. Thankfully, we all have
a model, a lucerito to follow, in the celebrated person of Dolores Huerta.
--

Raúl A. Carrillo '10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies
concentrator in Lowell House. He is president of the Harvard College
Latino Men's Collective. Miguel Garcia '12 lives in Greenough Hall.
He is an intern for the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race
Relations. Eliana C. Murillo '10 is a sociology concentrator in
Winthrop House. She is president of Latinas Unidas de Harvard.

.

History professor writes on SDS, '60s activism

History professor writes on SDS, '60s activism

http://media.www.utmpacer.com/media/storage/paper1175/news/2009/02/10/Life/History.Professor.Writes.On.Sds.60s.Activism-3620382.shtml

Walter Harris
Issue date: 2/10/09

The UTM bookstore recently welcomed Dr. David Barber, assistant
professor of History, for the release of his new book. "A Hard Rain
Fell" was discussed and read from this past Wednesday.

The author began with an introductory background into his reason for
writing about one of the movements of the 1960s. Barber revealed his
affiliation, concern, and explanation of the events that are
historically detailed with relation to The New Left and, in
particular, Students for a Democratic Society, better known as SDS.
This group had ties to the black freedom struggle during that time.

Barber explained his ties to SDS are from a first perspective since
he is a veteran of the organization while he attended Columbia
University and he explained how and why the organization had formed,
along with its motives and objectives in changing society's ideals.

"SDS was the largest, white, radical, student organization in all
U.S. history. It started in 1960 and it proceeded to a height of over
100,000 members at the end of 1968…in 1970 (the) SDS (was) dead. "
Barber inferred that the collapse was almost like what has happened
to the economy right now and "Prior to 1967 and 1968, the white new
left was swimmingly doing real well."

"The older hands in new left-hood historiography attribute the
failure of the new left to its following in the wake of the black
movement which was becoming too militant." Basically, historians
trace the failures of the movement to its aggressive nature and the
negative response it received from not only society, but other groups
as well, such as the Black Panthers.

The intentions of SDS in the late sixties had albeit good intentions,
but they were too militant for the American public. The state of the
nation was in turmoil and war with Vietnam set the tone of a very
harsh response for those that opposed not only the war, but with
inequalities against blacks and women.

"The aim was we would all create a world where all human beings could
live a decent life."

The intrinsic, shock value that Barber created from the excerpt
vividly describes a snapshot of an event from the Vietnam War. This
"R" rated scene conveyed to the audience at the UTM bookstore what
SDS and other protesters were against.

When asked of the symbolism of the title, Barber said "A Hard Rain
Fell" was his second choice. His first was "The Price of the
Liberation," which is a phrase from James Baldwin. James Baldwin is a
big influence for the author while he was writing his book.

Baldwin was a guide for Barber about the 1960s and he wanted to honor
him in the title. Barber said, "My publisher said that it would never
sell," so he used an anecdotal reply to veterans of that era and
under his own accord, from a Bob Dylan song, "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall."

During Barber's question and answer session, he was asked of what he
hoped to accomplish with the message he is sending out. He had this
to say, "Those people who would like to see change in the United
States, (this is the) most important characteristic that we can have.
This is something that we all struggle for…we have to be humble,
(we have to) be able to see the immensity of society and an effort to
make social change is more than one person can grasp, (or even any)
group can grasp."

Toward the end of the event, Barber paused in reflection, saying
that, "The aim was we would all create a world where all human beings
could live a decent life."

.

Forged Amidst the Violent '60s, Buddhist Commitment is Recognized

Forged Amidst the Violent '60s, Willis' Buddhist Commitment is Recognized

http://wesleyanargus.com/2009/02/10/forged-amidst-the-violent-60s-willis-buddhist-commitment-is-recognized/

By Barbara Fenig, Staff Writer
2/10/09

Professor of Religion and East Asian Studies Jan Willis is at the
forefront of history and has accomplished what most can only dream of
achieving. She marched with Martin Luther King Jr., held sit-in
protests during her undergraduate years at Cornell, lived in the
foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, taught at premier academic
institutions and has written some of the leading scholarship in her field.

This March, Willis' peers will celebrate her newest achievement, just
one of many, as 2009's "Outstanding Woman in Buddhism" in Bangkok,
Thailand. She was selected for this award by the Outstanding Women in
Buddhism Committee's panel of distinguished Buddhist scholars and
practitioners.

Willis wanted to be a teacher for as long as she can remember. She
was raised in Docena, Alabama, a town she deemed the most segregated
city in America. Remnants of the segregated south were still present
during Willis' childhood. Drinking fountains labeled "White" and
"Colored" permeated the town. In 10th grade, she marched alongside
Martin Luther King Jr. during the Birmingham campaign­she was
subsequently hosed by police and remembers being afraid of their vicious dogs.

"It was wonderful, triumphant days," Willis said. "We felt like we
might change things. This was the spring of 1963, that summer was the
march on Washington D.C."

Willis received scholarship offers to Cornell and Vassar. News spread
about her achievements, and, in response, a burning cross was placed
on her lawn. Willis, her mother and her older sister were home at the
time the hate crime occurred. Her father, a steelworker and deacon at
the local Baptist church, was away working a graveyard shift.

It was her involvement in the Civil Rights Campaign during high
school that inspired Willis to take greater action in college. Willis
was one of eight African American students during her first year at
Cornell, and the only female of this group. By her senior year, 260
African American students were enrolled in the university. She joined
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and founded the Black
Students Association (BSA).

Willis originally intended to major in physics, but her academic
focus shifted, and she graduated with a degree in Philosophy. The
Vietnam War sparked Willis' interest in Buddhism while she was an
undergraduate. During her junior year abroad, Willis traveled to
Banaras, India and studied at the Banaras Hindu University, where
seven monks instructed her on Buddhist philosophy.

"There was something so serene about the Tibetan Buddhists; amidst
the crowded crush in India, there was this calm oasis," Willis said.
"My quest had been, since leaving Docena, to answer the questions of,
'How do you deal with prejudice? How do you forgive people who harm
you?' That was my interest in the Vietnamese; that is what led me to Buddhism."

Willis returned to a climactic campus fraught with racial tension as
a result of the Guns-on-Campus incidents at Cornell. The racial
tension inspired the Black Student Association to acquire handguns.

"I came back, opened the door at the Black Student House, and there
were guns all over the floor," she said. "People all around were
arming themselves to get us."

After a cross was burned on the front lawn of a residence of twelve
African American students, on Parents' Weekend in April 1969, members
of the BSA seized control of Cornell's student union for 35 hours
during the Guns-On-Campus campaign.

The episode resulted in the creation of the Africana Studies Program
and African Studies and Research Center at the university, which was
stipulated by the BSA to end the building's occupation.

Upon graduating from Cornell in 1969, Willis journeyed from New York
to California to make the most important decision of her life:
whether to join the Black Panther Party or return to the Tibetan
Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Minutes from joining the Black Panther
Party, she chose not to walk into the California office headquarters.

Willis chose, instead, to follow the path to Buddhism; she spent one
year in Nepal before getting her doctorate in India and Buddhist
Studies from Columbia University. While at Columbia, Willis learned
Sanskrit and Pali, the language spoken in India during the time of the Buddha.
Credited as the first African American scholar-practitioner of
Tibetan Buddhism, Willis is celebrated for her contributions to the
study of Buddhist women. She has written about the plight of Buddhist
nuns and is an unremitting advocate for Tibetan Buddhist nuns'
rights. In 1995, Willis co-founded a nunnery in Ladakh, India, a
region hailed as a refuge for Tibetan Buddhists. The nunnery houses
26 Buddhist nuns from ages 42 to 83­in Ladakh, nuns are commonly
denied full ordination by the monastic authorities. Willis' Thiksey
nunnery in Ladakh provides solace for the practicing nuns. This year,
the nunnery will expand the convent to house 50 nuns.

In addition to her latest achievement as 2009's "Outstanding Woman in
Buddhism", Willis has also been honored in numerous publications. She
appeared in the "Spirituality in America" issue of Newsweek, and Time
magazine nominated her as one of six spiritual innovators of the new
millennium. In addition, from 1992-2006, Willis served as Wesleyan's
Walter A. Crowell University Professor of the Social Sciences. She
has taught at Wesleyan for 30 years.

"I'm loving it," Willis said. "I love it because of the students.
I've taught at a number of other places on short stance over the
years and I'm always so happy to get back here."

.

Reuniting Grateful Dead members, fans happy about tour - but not ticket prices

Reuniting Grateful Dead members, fans happy about tour - but not ticket prices

http://www.marinij.com/ci_11693923?source=most_emailed

Paul Liberatore
Posted: 02/12/2009

Bill Kreutzmann, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, is one happy man.
He has a new band, a power trio called BK3 that's making its San
Francisco debut tonight at the Independent, an intimate nightclub in
the Western Addition.

It's one of a half dozen shows for Kreutzmann with BK3, a group he's
formed with bassist Oteil Burbridge of the Allman Brothers Band and
guitarist Scott Murawski of the band Max Creek.

After that short tour, Kreutzmann goes straight into rehearsals with
his reunited Grateful Dead bandmates - Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Phil
Lesh - for a Dead tour that kicks off April 12 at the Greensboro
Coliseum in North Carolina and ends May 10 with a homecoming show at
Shoreline Amphitheater.

In addition to the new band and the new Dead tour, Kreutzmann has a
new girlfriend and what sounds to me like a new lease on life.

"My personal life has changed immensely for the better," he told me
from his home in Kauai, Hawaii. "I couldn't have dreamed of being this happy."

Too bad Deadheads aren't quite as joyful as he is these days. Many of
them are furious over the nearly $100 ticket price the Dead is
charging for the best reserved seats for its tour, the band's first
in five years.

The outraged tone was set by a profane YouTube tirade by a female fan
that has Deadhead chat sites and message boards buzzing over what is
being seen in some quarters as price gouging by the ultimate egalitarian band.

As it turns out, $100 is sounding like a good deal.

"I've heard of tickets going for $1,200," Kreutzmann said. "They've
been scalping tickets for horrendous amounts of money. And I really
hate that, by the way. That's one of my pet peeves.

"There are people out there who just care about making money," he
went on. "They don't care about the music or making the fans happy.
Just because someone will pay $1,200 for a ticket, in this economic
climate it's adding insult to injury. It's an uncool thing."

Plus it puts a lot of pressure on the Dead to live up to the elevated
expectations that come with ticket prices that high.

"I don't know if I can play that good," Kreutzmann laughed. "That's
like so much money. (Jerry) Garcia would be infuriated. He'd be like,
'No way, man. You can't charge that much.'"

In reality, ticket brokers are charging a lot more. After talking
with Kreutzmann, I went online and found tickets for the Shoreline
show going for more than $2,000 each. Tickets in the $500 to $900
range are commonplace.

"It's pretty awful," agreed Tim Jorstad, the Dead's San Rafael-based
business manager. "Some artists are just fine with scalping tickets,
charging a premium and keeping the money. We aren't. That money is
not going to the band, and it's not good for the fans."

Jorstad explained to me the rather complicated process of pricing
concert tickets while trying to maintain some control over the
brokers and scalpers.

"We thought long and hard about ticket prices," he said. "The band
was extremely sensitive about what they should be."

Jorstad had the band's booking agent survey ticket prices for some 50
bands touring last year, such as the Eagles, that are equal in star
power to the Dead. Many ticket prices for those bands were in the $150 range.

"I went back to the band with my research and we sat back and said,
'OK, we don't want to be $150, which is what a lot of those tickets
we surveyed were coming in at," he said. "We talked hours about this.
We probably give this particular topic more time than anything else.
In the end, our ticket pricing came in at 65 percent lower than that
collective group."

What they agreed to charge, on average, was $95 for premium seats
(plus $2.50 service charge), and $58 and $40 for second- and third-tier seats.

"We wanted to make sure we had something for everybody," Jorstad
said, reminding Deadheads that "since our last tour in 2004,
everything associated with touring has gone up in price - fuel,
trucking, busing, personnel.

"This may be the Dead's last tour, and maybe not," he added. "And
when you add into the mix the touring expenses and that this will be
a good, four-hour show, we felt it was good value for the ticket price.

He acknowledged that it isn't what the fans are accustomed to paying.
"They're used to $50 and $60 tickets," he said. "We don't like to
make people unhappy, obviously, but what we're charging isn't an
unreasonable price to pay. We've tried to be fair to the legacy of
the Grateful Dead, but we are a business entity, and we're trying to
give our band members a reasonable pay day as well."

According to Jorstad, the Dead had enough clout to get half the
available tickets for the tour and sell them themselves at face value
through Music Today's ticketing facility and the band's Dead.net.

In addition, the Dead set aside 1,500 of the best tickets for
Grateful Dead-related charities to sell to support their work.

Despite the carping from Deadheads, Jorstad insists that the band
still has its '60s bonafides.

"We didn't do what a lot of bands do. We didn't take corporate
sponsorship money," he said. "And there were millions of dollars on
the table for that."

The problem is that the Dead have no control over giant Ticketmaster
and the ticket brokers that dominate what is called the secondary
ticket market.

"Ticketmaster does what it wants. They have a secondary ticket Web
site, and that's the auction. That's the secondary market, and that's
where they scalp tickets for very high prices," Jorstad said.

"We shut that down as much as we could, but it was hard," Kreutzmann
said. "It makes me feel the audience is getting exploited, having to
come up with all this money."

It appears that the band is trying to give Deadheads their money's worth.

Augmented by lead guitarist Warren Haynes and keyboardist Jeff
Chimenti, the surviving membe