The SIXTIES: May 2009

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Mellow Fellow: Donovan

Mellow Fellow

Donovan brings his hurdy-gurdy sounds to the Central Coast.

http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/archives/2009/2009-May-28/donovan-brings-his-hurdygurdy-sounds-to-the-central-coast/1/@@index

By Adam Joseph
5/28/09

Hippie folk sensation Donovan was the pied piper of the flower
children, and his hits like "Season of the Witch" and "Sunshine
Superman" continue to be potent reminders for baby boomers of those
acid-fueled Sunday afternoons in the park.

Donovan kicks off his "Ritual Groove Tour" named after his
forthcoming album at the Golden State Theatre, 8pm on Friday with a
solo acoustic set followed by an electric set with his band. Keeping
with the counterculture sensibility, he ensures the show will be "a
fragrant evening of music, poetry, colour and aroma."

The Scottish musician began to gain notoriety around the United
Kingdon in 1965 when he was 18 with hits like "Catch The Wind.'' He
was featured in D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back
about Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England. In one scene, the mop-headed
pixie plays a sweet rendition of his ballad, "To Sing For You," only
to be trumped by Dylan's mindbending version of "It's All Over Now,
Baby Blue." Game, set and match.

As was the fashion at the time, the British media in England had
dubbed Donovan,"The U.K.'s answer to Bob Dylan" and he was at the
forefront of the folk scene, performing with Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

Donovan continued to expand his musical style: straddling the folkie
feel of early Dylan and the experimental psychedelia of the Beatles' Revolver.

He fuses acoustic guitar with the pleasant tootles of a clarinet on
"Jennifer Juniper;" on "Hurdy Gurdy Man," he adds a distinct vibrato
to his voice against the backdrop of sitar shrieks.

As a British artist in the '60s, it was only natural that Donovan and
The Beatles would cross creative paths: He contributed lyrics to The
Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," and Paul McCartney sang background
vocals on "Mellow Yellow."

"The ['60s] changed the cultural landscape through ideas and songs
about inner discovery, spiritualism, mediation, yoga, ecology and
feminism. I shared this mission with Dylan and The Beatles, among
others," Donovan told uncut magazine.

After dropping out of the scene for nearly 30 years, Donovan's career
has been revived over the past decade. He's toured worldwide,
released studio albums and, in 2005, his autobiography, The Hurdy
Gurdy Man. The New York Times called the memoir, "… a very strange
book (what else?) that revisits the fertile, trippy '60s… "

Donovan continues to be one of our direct links to the peace-and-love
generation.
--

DONOVAN performs 8pm Friday, at Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado
St. 372-3800. $29/$59/$79.

Canada's 'Prince of Pot' Vows to Defeat U.S. War on Drugs

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,522918,00.html

Friday, May 29, 2009

VANCOUVER, British Columbia Psychedelic rock booms through The
Toker's Bowl. Young and some not-so-young people smoke pot through a
variety of devices in the store's Vapour Lounge. And owner Marc Emery
stands in the middle of it all, proclaiming his goal of defeating the
U.S. war on drugs.

Known as the Prince of Pot, Emery has sold millions of marijuana
seeds around the world by mail over the past decade. In doing so, he
has drawn the attention of U.S. drug officials, who want him
extradited to Seattle. Emery has agreed to plead guilty in Seattle to
one count of marijuana distribution in exchange for dismissal of all
other counts, and the U.S. District Attorney is pressing for a
sentence of five to eight years in a U.S. prison.

The case is the latest twist in Emery's two-decade-long fight against
the prohibition of marijuana in North America. To his supporters, he
is a brave crusader for the use and sale of a drug with both
recreational and medicinal value. To drug officials, he is a criminal
and the biggest purveyor of marijuana from Canada into the United States.

Emery sits "right smack in the middle" of the North American debate
over marijuana prohibition, said Allen St. Pierre of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in Washington, D.C. St.
Pierre predicted that Emery's trial would "kick-start it all again."

But drug officials say they are simply going after one of the world's
top 50 drug traffickers. U.S. authorities claim Emery's seeds have
grown $2.2 billion worth of pot.

"We've been very clear it had nothing to do with Mr. Emery's
political stand," said Emily Langlie of the U.S. District Attorney's
Office in Seattle.

Emery himself, a two-time candidate for mayor of Vancouver who has
never shied away from publicity, seems almost gleeful about the legal
saga. He calls it the greatest platform he could have in his crusade,
and his Facebook page notes that these days he hums the chorus from
Canadian musician Baron Longfellow's "I'm Going to Need a Miracle
Tonight". He predicted he will be in a U.S. jail by August, and will
then ask supporters to push for his transfer to a Canadian jail.

"I do have millions of supporters in the U.S. and Canada," he said,
unburdened by false modesty. "It's my job as leader of the cannabis
culture to thwart the United States government."

Emery, 51, was a teen when he started selling banned pro-marijuana
literature in Vancouver. He did the same in London, Ontario,
including on the steps of a police station, hoping to be arrested and
have his day in court. Returning to Vancouver in 1994, he set out to
start a "hemp revolution business," and opened a store called Hemp
B.C. in the firebombed shell of a Communist bookshop in what is now
known as Pot Block.

He sold marijuana seeds and used the money to fund his campaign
against pot prohibition.

"It rapidly expedited cash flow. No one else in North America was
doing it," he said.

Emery took in up to $2.6 million in seed sales per year. He claims to
have sold more than four million seeds, three-quarters of those to
customers in the U.S.

He says he has been arrested 21 times and jailed 17 times. In 2004,
he was convicted in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for passing a joint, and
spent three months behind bars.

In Vancouver, however, he says police have for years chosen to ignore
his business. He claims federal Canadian officials have even
suggested people contact him to buy seeds for medical marijuana.
Furthermore, Emery says, he has paid almost $500,000 in Canadian
income tax since 1999. He says his seed sales funded half the
activities of the pro-marijuana movement in Canada between 1995 and
2005, and up to 10 percent of the U.S. movement.

The marijuana debate is still wending its way through communities and
courts in the United States. Federal law prohibits the possession of
marijuana, even for medicinal purposes. However, the states have
different laws and penalties.

In Canada, cultivation is illegal except for medical use, and a
campaign to legalize it is under way nationwide.

However, Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes a tough stance and wants
mandatory minimum jail sentences for dealers and growers. And Emery
is having trouble getting the City of Vancouver to re-licence his
stores, which include The Toker's Bowl, a cafe, a convenience store
and the studios for Pot TV. Vancouver is suffering a string of
killings over cocaine from Mexico, sometimes bartered for homegrown marijuana.

Emery's latest brush with the law began on July 29, 2005, when
Canadian and American drug enforcement officers nabbed him along with
two employees of Emery Seeds Michelle Rainey and Gregory Keith Williams.

Emery was arrested in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, and was returned to
Canada's West Coast by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
Police raided Emery's Vancouver store, which doubles as the
headquarters for the British Columbia Marijuana Party he leads.

It was the culmination of an 18-month investigation by American
authorities. The DEA said at the time that Emery's business and his
Cannabis Culture magazine generated $5 million a year to bolster his
trafficking efforts.

"He's a drug trafficker, plain and simple," said the DEA's Rodney
Benson in 2006. "Marc Emery is a significant threat to the United States."

The two employees have since pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in
Seattle to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, law enforcement
officials say. They have entered into a plea agreement and will be
sentenced on July 17. They faced 10 years to life in prison, but
prosecutors agreed to recommend two years' probation, Emery said.

According to a DEA statement, Rainey said in her plea that she sent
seeds and growing instructions to customers at Emery's instruction.
She said 75 percent of the customers were in the U.S.

Williams said he handled the phone orders and the wire transfer
information, and also sold seeds directly to store customers. On
numerous occasions in 2004, Williams sold seeds to an undercover
agent, the DEA release said.

Jason Gratl of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said Rainey and
Williams were arrested to leverage Emery into surrender, and the
charges against him could have disguised an ulterior motive.

"It appears the proceedings were initiated to quell certain quarters
of the marijuana movement on both sides of the border," Gratl said.

Emery said he was willing to die in a U.S. jail for his cause.

"Dying as a victim of the state's cruelty would really help a person
like me. The way you die is very important," he said. "Martin Luther
King was killed and that's very important to his legacy."

His wife, Jodie, a former provincial Green Party candidate, snorted at this.

"I hate when he talks like that," she interjected. "I think it would
be better if he continued the work he does."

Emery smiled, unrepentant.

"I had a very good reason for selling those seeds," he said. "I
wanted to defeat the U.S. war on drugs."

International Times Archive

http://www.internationaltimes.it/

Too Big To Fail [SF Mime Troupe]

[2 articles]

SF Mime Troupe Returns: "Too Big to Fail"

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=6978

by E. "Doc" Smith‚
May. 29‚ 2009

There is nothing quite like kicking off your summer in Dolores Park
with the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe. I don't think
I'll ever forget the hilarious "Obscuristan" of 2007. The SFMT
returns and celebrates its 50th Anniversary season with a song and
dance satire of monumental proportions, TOO BIG TO FAIL. Wilma Bonet
directs Velina Brown (Veronique of the Mounties, Red State), BW
Gonzalez (Seeing Double), Ed Holmes (Seeing Double, Making a
Killing), Lisa Hori-Garcia (GodFellas, Red State), Adrian Mejia (Red
State), and Michael Gene Sullivan (GodFellas, Making a Killing) in
this odyssey through the twists and turns of banking bureaucracy and
international finance. Written by Michael Gene Sullivan and Ellen
Callas, and featuring a live band under the direction of Pat Moran
(music and lyrics), TOO BIG TO FAIL plays July 4 through September 27
(press opening: July 4 at Dolores Park in San Francisco) throughout
the Bay Area in San Francisco, the North Bay, East Bay, South Bay and
Peninsula, and the Central Valley.

Housing is down, credit is down, dividends are down, and like any
Ponzi scheme, a constant flow of cash is essential, but where will it
come from? Is it simply enough to let Filiji pay his small debt, or
have the Wall Street big-wigs stumbled upon the latest, greatest
investment bubble to exploit goats? How will Filiji save himself
and his collateral, the beloved Bamuso? Can America be shifted to a
goat economy? How did all of the greed get started, and more
importantly, how the hell can we turn it off?

The New York Post called the Mime Troupe "America's oldest and finest
street theater," with the The Boston Globe concurring, "You're never
only watching a political theater piece, but rather a double barreled
re-invention of politics and theater at once." To make this work
accessible to the broadest audience possible, the Mime Troupe
performs as a regional touring company, presenting their work at a
price everyone can afford: free.

Thanks again to the SFMT for supplying virtually all of the
information provided above. All shows are indeed free and open to the
public (unless otherwise noted). For a complete schedule and more
information, the public may call 415.285.1717 or visit www.sfmt.org.

TONY AWARD-WINNING SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE
CELEBRATES 50TH SEASON WITH RECESSION-PROOF SATIRE
"TOO BIG TO FAIL"
The Epic of Gilgamesh . . . The Odyssey . . . Jason and the Argonauts
. . . Filiji and his goat.

SAN FRANCISCO:
Saturday, July 4, Dolores Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show - OPENING DAY
Sunday, July 5, Dolores Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Saturday, July 11, Golden Gate Park, Peacock Meadow, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Sunday, July 12, Glen Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Saturday, August 15, Washington Square Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Sunday, August 16, Yerba Buena Gardens, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Saturday, September 5, Dolores Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Sunday, September 6, Dolores Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show
Monday, September 7, Dolores Park, 1:30 music, 2pm show

--------

TOO BIG TO FAIL Performed 7/4-9/27 By San Francisco Mime Troupe

http://broadwayworld.com/article/TOO_BIG_TO_FAIL_Performed_74927_By_San_Francisco_Mime_Troupe_20090527

May 27, 2009

The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe celebrates its 50th
Anniversary season with a song and dance satire of monumental
proportions, TOO BIG TO FAIL. Wilma Bonet directs Velina Brown
(Veronique of the Mounties, Red State), BW Gonzalez (Seeing Double),
Ed Holmes (Seeing Double, Making a Killing), Lisa Hori-Garcia
(GodFellas, Red State), Adrian Mejia (Red State), and Michael Gene
Sullivan (GodFellas, Making a Killing) in this odyssey through the
twists and turns of banking bureaucracy and international finance.
Written by Michael Gene Sullivan and Ellen Callas, and featuring a
live band under the direction of Pat Moran (music and lyrics), TOO
BIG TO FAIL plays July 4 through September 27 (press opening: July 4
at Dolores Park in San Francisco) throughout the Bay Area in San
Francisco, the North Bay, East Bay, South Bay and Peninsula, and the
Central Valley. All shows are free and open to the public (unless
otherwise noted). For a complete schedule and more information, the
public may call 415.285.1717 or visit www.sfmt.org.

Told in the tradition of the West African Griots, this modern day
epic follows Filiji, a man in love with his family, his village, and
most of all, his goat, Bamuso. What more could a man need to be
happy? How about two goats? Three? A flock? Turned down for a loan by
the village micro bank, Filiji, now the self-proclaimed Goat Lord of
Kanabeedomo, borrows from a new lender in town, a small subsidiary of
a much bigger bank in a distant, mystical land called Wall Street.
When the economy takes a sudden turn for the worse, the bank gets
desperate and calls in Filiji's loan. Housing is down, credit is
down, dividends are down, and like any Ponzi scheme, a constant flow
of cash is essential, but where will it come from? Is it simply
enough to let Filiji pay his small debt, or have the Wall Street
big-wigs stumbled upon the latest, greatest investment bubble to
exploit - goats? How will Filiji save himself and his collateral, the
beloved Bamuso? Can America be shifted to a goat economy? How did all
of the greed get started, and more importantly, how the hell can we
turn it off?

Founded in 1959, the San Francisco Mime Troupe creates and produces
socially relevant theater; their work is political satire and
anything but silent. Winner of three OBIE awards and a Tony Award for
Excellence in Regional Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, about
which The New York Times stated, "Anyone concerned about the state of
global politics -- and about the state of political humor -- should
listen to the Mime Troupe's message," creates plays that make sense
out of the headlines, close-up stories that make audiences feel the
impact of political events on their personal lives. The New York Post
called the Mime Troupe "America's oldest and finest street theater,"
with the The Boston Globe concurring, "You're never only watching a
political theater piece, but rather a double barreled re-invention of
politics and theater at once." To make this work accessible to the
broadest audience possible, the Mime Troupe performs as a regional
touring company, presenting their work at a price everyone can afford: free.

TICKETS:
All shows are free and open to the public (unless otherwise noted).
For more information, the public may call 415.285.1717 or visit www.sfmt.org

Review of Black Panther Robert Hillary King's book

A Review of The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King

http://www.blackcommentator.com/326/326_kir_from_bottom_of_heap_printer_friendly.html

By Larry Pinkney
May 28, 2009

As your writer finished reading the chilling, fascinating, and
powerfully informative (recently released) book by Robert Hillary
King (aka Robert King Wilkerson) titled, From The Bottom Of The Heap:
The Autobiography Of Black Panther Robert Hillary King (PM Press), I
found myself incensed yet again at the U.S. judicial and prison
systems responsible for framing, sentencing, and imprisoning a man
for over three decades in prison for a crime that he did not commit.
Robert King Wilkerson's story touches the core of, and goes beyond,
that of having been a prisoner and fellow Black Panther Party member.
It is the story of government and judicial abuse. It is also the
story of human dignity and resilience, of determination, and
ultimately of the highest form of love for humanity.

Robert King Wilkerson, though finally set "free" from the infamous
Angola prison in Louisiana, after thirty one years of wrongful
imprisonment (twenty nine of which were consecutively in solitary
confinement), remains today steadfast as a part of the group of three
U.S. political prisoners known collectively as the 'Angola 3.' He
continues to unrelentingly strive for the rights of the other two
still-imprisoned members of the Angola 3, and on behalf of the many
other political prisoners inside the United States, and around the world.

The book however, is so much more than merely an important indictment
of the U.S. system of injustice. It is an informative saga of
struggle written with a straight forward, beautiful rawness and
honesty that beckons and gently wraps itself around the reader. The
brutal and unspeakable horrors and injustices of the U.S. judicial
and prison systems are pitted against one man's humanity---and this
man's humanity triumphs. His human triumph translates into our own.

This book should be read and reread. It is a book that we ourselves
should turn to repeatedly for encouragement, and it should be put
forth as an example to our youth be they Black, Brown, White, Red, or Yellow.

As Marion Brown former member of the Black Panther Party and
Co-Founder of the A3 (Angola 3) Support Committee aptly wrote
concerning the resilience of Robert King Wilkerson: "From the moment
of his release, he has worked tirelessly to spread the word about the
innocence and the continued plight of his two remaining comrades,
both held in solitary confinement for thirty-six years. Upon his
release King was quoted as saying, 'I may be free from Angola, but
Angola will never be free of me!'"

Get this book, read it, and carry on in the struggle!

In these times when the black emperor of the U.S. Empire muses about
and proposes instituting "preventive detention" of people in this
nation against whom there is insufficient evidence to charge and/or
detain (reference article titled, Facts and Myths About Obama's
Preventive Detention Proposal by Glenn Greenwald, dated May 22, 2009
at "Salon.com;" and an article titled, Obama Is Said To Consider
Preventive Detention Plan by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, May 20, 2009, The
New York Times), it is critical to understand what imprisonment
really means. Will we now allow the empire to blatantly imprison the
innocent?! Think about it. Think about the opportunity for legalized
and massive government and judicial abuse that this Obama proposal is
really all about.

Struggle for systemic change.

Onward then my sisters and brothers!!! Onward…..

Better Back When [Bud Shrake / Austin]

Better Back When

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=3064

Brad Tyer
May 29, 2009

Bud Shrake wrote, in the December 27, 1974, issue of this magazine,
about "The Screwing Up of Austin." Prefacing the story 35 years later
for Land of the Permanent Wave: An Edwin "Bud" Shrake Reader, he
described the syndrome that led himas it has led so many othersto write it.

"No matter what year you moved to Austin, you just missed it.
Somebody will tell you this was a really great place to live until
shortly before you arrived. This was my pass at telling how much
better it used to be. ... And by the way, it did used to be better."

In the piece, Shrake and buddy Willie Nelson hatch a plan to cap the
population at 250,000a number the town had yet to top in 1974. No
kidding Austin was better then.

As Shrake saw, at least in retrospect, the serial impulse to wax
nostalgic about Austin is more than a syndromeit's almost a civic
prerogative. Austinites have always considered themselves the state's
coolest cats, and that assessment requires an immediate past in which
things were ostensibly cooler still, lest some underindoctrinated
newcomer take a close look around and call bullshit on the rampant
self-congratulation.

I was from Houston, and I disdained Austinitessmug self-satisfied
m@%h#!f*$#erseven more than I loathed Dallasites, who were supposed
to be some sort of rival to Houston, about which pissing match who
could possibly care? Dallas was invisible to anyone I knew in
Houston, no threat to anything. Smug m@%h#!f*$#ers patting themselves
on the back about the good life in Austin, thoughthat was annoying.

Still, when I left Texas for the latest last time, I told myself and
others that if I ever came back, I'd be coming back to Austin. And
sure enough. Because the smug m@%h#!f*$#ers were right.

But Austinas even the greenest newcomers can seeain't what it used
to be. Austin was cooler then. Way back when, when Shrake and his
running buddies ruled the roost. That was already clear by 1974, when
Shrake bemoaned the passing of the glory days, and it was made clear
again when Shrake died on May 8. All the old stories came out for a
fresh polish.

It's a familiar parade of anecdotes: Shrake's early days at the Fort
Worth Press fraternizing with friend and competitor Gary Cartwright
(who ended up at Texas Monthly); his salad days as an elbow-rubbing
star sports columnist in Dallas; his carte blanche excesses during
New Journalism's heyday at Sports Illustrated; and his favored-nation
status at Willie Morris' Harper's.

Shrake's buddies constituted a who's who of A-Team bohemians (Dennis
Hopper, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer) and the best, brightest and
drunkest that Austin had to offer (Darrell Royal, Willie Nelson,
Billy Lee Brammer, Jerry Jeff Walker, Larry L. King). The latter
crowd, plus a revolving cast of simpaticos including sportswriter Dan
Jenkins and wide receiver-turned-novelist Peter Gent, self-styled a
clique called Mad Dog Inc., which set up camp in an office over
Austin's redneck rock epicenter, the long- and loudly lamented
Armadillo World Headquarters, and began providing "indefinable
services to mankind," which seems to have amounted mostly to
popularizing the legends developing in their own minds.

Austin's Mad Dog mythology even spawned its own bibliography: Jay
Dunston Milner's Confessions of a Maddog: A Romp through the
High-Flying Texas Music and Literary Era of the Fifties to the
Seventies; Steven L. Davis' Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers in
the Sixties and Beyond; and Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck
Rock. All are required reading if you want to know how much cooler
Austin was 50, 40, even just 30 years ago.

Shrake was at the center of it all, tall, good looking, and possessed
of a hard-partying stamina that's only partly explained by a
decade-plus cocaine habit. The story goes that even legendary
self-abuser Hunter S. Thompson couldn't hang with the Austin crowd,
passing out after a mere 40 hours running with the Mad Dogs during
one oft-retold visit.

But there's nothing more boring than other people's drug stories, and
Shrake cleaned up decades ago (except for, as he didn't hesitate to
admit, the weed). For almost 20 years, Shrake might have been
best-known in Austin as the First Guy, ever-present companion to his
late-life soulmate, Gov. Ann Richards.

It was about the time he took up with Richards, in 1992, that he hit
his lottery-caliber jackpot, co-penning with the titular Austin golf
coach Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, inevitably identified as the
best-selling sports book of all time.

Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, like the Mad Dog mythology, is
composed of anecdotes and aphorisms. By the time it set Shrake free,
he'd already written seven novels, seven filmed screenplays
(including the Willie Nelson-Kris Kristofferson vehicle Songwriter),
and two as-told-to celebrity biographies (of Willie and Oklahoma
Sooners coach Barry Switzer).

Readers who really revere Shrake aren't golfers or even necessarily
football fans, but aficionados of Blessed McGill (1968), Strange
Peaches (1972), and the historical fiction of The Borderland (2000)
and Custer's Brother's Horse (2007).

The fiction, apparently, is what Shrake truly cared about as well.
How else to explain why a man with Shrake's journalistic and
screenwriting résumé, with social skills sufficient to guarantee
dinner-party invitations through the end times, and with a little Zen
golf book that made him financially secure, why that guy took his
windfall and used it to sit at a desk typing for large chunks of the
rest of his life? He didn't drink or smoke or even go out much
anymore. He was reportedly 100 pages into a new novel when he died.
He wrote fictionwhether a major house published it, whether it sold
or not. The man who makes that choicewhatever else he may have
beenis first and foremost a real writer.

You can tell that best not from the inevitable when-we-were-young
remembrances, or from the star-studded funeral procession, but from
reading Shrake's fiction, now largely kept in print by John M. Hardy
Publishing, a small press in Houston.

Strange Peaches is my favorite, for its mean, coolly deliberate and
murderous (as Norman Mailer once praised the prose of Shrake's fellow
Texan, Terry Southern) explication of Dallas' moneyed milieu in the
days prior to the Kennedy assassination. In the book, a Texas native
quits a successful TV show on which he plays a gin-yew-wine
six-shooting cowboy and returns home, long-haired and strung out on
Dexedrine, to make a documentary about the true state of Texas. The
plot and dialog ("'God dawg, pussy has ruint his brain,' Billy Bob
Teagarden said ...") are artifacts of their time, but it was an
important time, and nobody knew its contours as well as Shrake. Larry
McMurtry considered the writer of Strange Peaches "far superior to
his drinking buddies," and Shrake himself considered his best novels
underrated. In the last substantive interview of his life, Shrake
told Observer contributor Brant Bingamon, "Peaches and [Blessed]
McGill are definitely overlooked, and yet I seem to find myself being
asked about them constantly by discerning people." They may not
escape the Texas wing of the canon, but both books are firmly ensconced there.

I didn't know Bud Shrake. I exchanged a few e-mails trying
unsuccessfully to get him to write something, anything, for us. He
was gracious, but he wasn't particularly interested. He was already
sick with the lung cancer that finally killed him, and he had other
work to attend.

When he spoke at the book-release party for Land of the Permanent
Wave at Texas State's Alkek Library, in April last year, I went with
friends to watch. I bought a copy of the book and stood in line.
Shrake signed it:

These memories of
old Austin as seen
in the Observer
Best
Bud Shrake

It's a relic now, marking a bygone era and a writer at the end of his
run. But it's nice to have itand so much elseto remember him by.

Mark Dowie on I.F. Stone

Book Review

Mark Dowie on I.F. Stone

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090528_mark_dowie_on_if_stone/

May 29, 2009
By Mark Dowie

American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone
By D. D. Guttenplan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pages

Every writer, of whatever genre, recalls one or two momentous
encounters with a professional hero or mentor that either shaped
their career, or gave them courage to continue. My most memorable
such experience occurred in 1986 in Amsterdam, where a small group of
leftish European and North American journalists gathered for dinner
after a conference. As the evening unwound, I.F. Stone, known to
almost everyone as "Izzy," whose eyesight was failing, asked if I
would walk him back to his hotel. How could I decline that request?

Through the narrow streets and over the canals of Amsterdam we walked
in silence, Izzy no doubt pondering Socrates, whose biography he was
completing; I, more nervous than a kid on his first date, trying to
think of a conversation starter.

The week before I had left for Europe, a right-wing database called
Western Goals had made a file on me available to its corporate
clients. A detective friend, able to hack into just about any data
anywhere, found and gave me the file. Among other things, it
described me as a "radical." I was upset about that, fearing that
such a characterization might limit, even ruin, my budding career.

"That's a badge of honor," Izzy growled. "You should wear it with
pride." What followed was a short dissertation on Edmund Burke, a
conservative philosopher who, among other memorable things, said that
"for every thousand people examining the branches of the tree of
evil, you'll find one examining the roots."

"That's radical," said Izzy. "The Latin for root is radix … same
derivative as radical. That's what we do, isn't it? We examine the
roots of things … so we're radicals. Let them call you what you are,
and get on with your work."

I have since that moment been comfortable calling myself a radical.
So imagine my delight, as a fading investigative reporter, upon being
asked to review a book about I.F. Stone, who, despite a controversial
life and career, was clearly one of the most influential
investigative reporters of our time … a book entitled "American
Radical." I will do my best to be objective, although I can already
hear Izzy advising me to eschew the charade of objectivity, a worthy
idea that in a world of war, injustice and mendacious government, is
simply impossible to attain.

D.D. Guttenplan's vivid and introspective biography contains far more
delightful vignettes and unexpected intersections with true left
luminaries and other global celebrities of the era. "American
Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone" recounts, in amusing
detail, the long and productive life of a shy but clearly brilliant
Jewish boy from rural New Jersey who began his writing career as a
cub reporter, worked harder than most of his peers, penned heated
polemics under various pseudonyms and eventually changed his total
identity to I.F. Stone, the name under which, for two critical
postwar decades, he wrote and published his legendary I.F. Stone's
Weekly newsletter, which became a teething ring for a whole
generation of aspiring left-wing journalists, myself among them.

The book arrives at an appropriate moment in history as the current
and apostate left reheat their debate over the worthiness, skills,
accomplishments and patriotism of this complex, still mysterious
figure in American media. Was Izzy Stone a journalist, or a
propagandist? Was he a communist or an anti-Menshevik socialist, a
spy, or merely a curious reporter willing to talk to anyone who could
offer some insight into Soviet policy and the world of espionage? And
who paid for those lunches?

Born in Philadelphia in 1907 (same year as my father) to
working-class Russian immigrants, a shy and diminutive Isidor fell
head over heels in love with the written word, dropped out of the
University of Pennsylvania, declared himself a reporter and began
working for small-town, blue-collar New Jersey newspapers, eventually
making his way to Philadelphia, then to the New York Post, at the
time a champion of New Deal liberalism, then to The Nation, a
staunchly pro-Soviet journal of opinion, and finally to the nation's
capital, where, under the mantra "all governments lie," he set about
to expose the chronic mendacity of Washington. Along the way he met
and married Esther Roisman and had three children. Esther became his
assistant on The Weekly. As he went about the work of expository
journalism, he seasoned, and as so many aging journalists do, began
to ponder the historical significance of his work and the origins of
his deepest beliefs. He ended his career as an amateur classicist,
writing "The Trial of Socrates," a poignant rumination on the fate of
a heretic.

Guttenplan's 500-page biography is thorough to a fault, covering not
only the endless stream of controversies that surrounded Stone's own
life and work, but also the intertwined social and political
confusions that rocked an America The Weekly tried to make sense of.
The book grapples with every issue that confronted serious
journalists of the timecivil rights, federalism, McCarthyism, wars
in Korea and Vietnam, sexual freedom and the American left's gradual
transformation from stodgy, pro-Soviet communism through democratic
socialism to a vibrant new left libertarianism to which neither Stone
nor his generation of leftists really never took. Any biographer
would be remiss if he didn't weigh in heavily on the question of
Stone's loyalty to his country and his alleged role as a Soviet spy.
And Guttenplan does so, at some length, in drab detail.

I suppose it's harder for my generation to get too worked up over
that tiresome parlor game, although it is still played ad nauseam by
some of my contemporaries, notably Paul Berman and Ron Radosh. And
most of us are less likely than Izzy's contemporaries to care whether
Sacco, Venzetti, Hiss or the Scottsboro Boys were really guilty as
charged, although perhaps we should care more than we do. Even if,
under code-name Blin, Stone did occasionally meet and share names and
phone numbers with KGB agent Oleg Kalugin, who was, remember, posing
as a press attaché, he hardly possessed or could transmit information
damaging to national security, his sole source of documentation being
the Congressional Record and other available government documentsall
public records which any spook could have read without the assistance
of an American reporter.

And as someone who, before Glasnost, frequently dined and exchanged
sources with Tass correspondents, I really can't understand what all
the fuss is about. That was simply part of our worksharing
information with fellow reporters. So what if it was with people who,
as it turned out, weren't really press attaches? It still wasn't
spying. Nor was it in Stone's case, if there is a case at all. Those
innocent lunches, most of them at Harvey's (J. Edgar Hoover's
favorite restaurant, where Hoover was once seated next to Joe
McCarthy in plain sight of Stone and Kalugin), should never have been
considered treasonous, given the fact that Stone's motivations and
the Russians' were, at the time, both anti-fascist, as was the
expressed foreign policy of the U.S. government. A more reasonable
conclusion would be that Izzy Stone was merely tweaking power.
Otherwise he would have met Kalugin in a parking garage.

I had to wonder, as I read this book, what Izzy would have thought of
it and, even more so, what he would be up to were he alive today.
He'd be blogging, of course, hourly not weekly. And he would
certainly be arguing back against his biographersand his
hagiographers. But what would he make of Barack Obama and the crisis
that capitalism faces? Surely he would be as glad and surprised as
most of us that an African-American had reached the White House, but
I imagine he would be after the president for allowing Wall Street to
maintain such close ties to the Treasury, and he would be pushing the
administration to accelerate troop withdrawal from Iraq, legislate a
single-payer health care system, appoint some fellow radicals to the
Supreme Court and, of course, he would still be looking for lies …
and finding them.

Would that he were still alive and kicking.
--

Mark Dowie, a founder of Mother Jones magazine, is an award-winning
journalist and author of several books, including "Losing Ground:
American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century,"
"American Foundations: An Investigative History" and the
just-published "Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict
Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples" (MIT Press).

Book Review: 'The Red Squad' by E.M. Broner

BOOK REVIEW

'The Red Squad' by E.M. Broner

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-book29-2009may29,0,3418343.story

The author brings wit and humor to the story of a group of friends in
post-2001 America looking back on their activist ways in the 1960s.

By Amy Wallen
May 29, 2009

Does history repeat itself, or would it be better described as a tape
loop on which we play our solo? In "The Red Squad" by E.M. Broner,
Anka Pappas receives an envelope of surveillance records of her
antiwar activities during the Vietnam War. Suddenly we rewind to the
late 1960s, but with the present day spliced in.

Anka experiences a series of flashbacks to the days when she and her
ABD (all but dissertation) colleagues at a Detroit university shared
an office that they called the Bullpen. In addition to working on
their dissertations, they taught and worked for the underground,
which transported conscientious objectors across the Canadian border.
They celebrated dissertation completion, the music of the Haight and
Motown, all the while laughing at their egregious students.

Anka had one particular student that Broner uses as court jester --
during the flashbacks we read how the Bullpenners often requested a
"Mr. Berger story."

She indulged them with this student's errors in his composition
class, such as the first line of his story, "It was a warm, genital
evening." Broner's humor and cynicism when comparing Berger to our
most recent two-term president and his malapropisms are a delight and
a good break from the heaviness of the theme, which is "the forever
war -- the one that doesn't end."

The Bullpenners' bond tightened both through shared support and
strained relationships. Broner also presents us with the many social
issues of race, culture, aging and generational differences in "The
Red Squad's" Bullpenners. Anka pines for Kevin, a Jesuit who wants to
break his vows and who seems more interested in the wife of another
colleague. Jack Bernstein, whose bumper sticker reads "Israel Is
Real," goes to live on a kibbutz and wants Anka to join him. Ron
Ivory, an African American already awarded tenure and thus eligible
for a private office, has his desk shoved up against theirs due to
lack of space. Another, Noble O'Dwyer, is arrested, then disappears
while out on bail. One by one they all leave the Bullpen, whether by
attrition through the university, or questionable behavior or their
own choice -- but all these characters reappear at the story's end
when one Bullpenner is identified as a fugitive Weatherman and the
rest reunite for his support.

Broner weaves these flashbacks with Anka's present-day life as a
professor at a different university but with the same activist
energy: She protests another misguided war -- the one in Iraq.

When Anka gets arrested for protesting with the Student Black Caucus,
she meets in jail the Gray Brigade, gray-haired, osteoporosis-ridden
women with sensible shoes who provide a litany of protests they've
participated in throughout their lifetimes -- starting in the 1950s
with the Korean War and moving on to the Vietnam War, atrocities in
Central America and the Cold War and on into our current day.

In writing of the college students Anka first taught from long ago,
Broner describes how they are idealists and antiwar as well as right
thinkers working for the conservative media. They include an
overzealous African American student who takes one of Anka's class
assignments very seriously (much to his own detriment) and a Vietnam
vet poet who goes by the monikers Fearless Phil and then Fearful Phil
as he learns to let down his guard.

Anka's students in the present day, however, are apathetic and don't
have to worry about the draft. When she tells her current students a
tale about her past life, about how one of the Bullpenners was
arrested and eventually fired because he'd gone to meet with a
student in his home where someone was smoking marijuana, the
unsympathetic response was, "They should have met publicly at a Starbucks."

Broner's snapshot-style in "The Red Squad" superbly ties together the
liberals and the conservatives, the passionate and apathetic, across
all genres of society in both the past and the present -- history as
prequel, sequel, rerun. As the author writes: "We go on with our
shared lives." Her novel delivers the message that we may all be
Fearful or Fearless Phil at times, feeling as if we are crazy
watching the endless war story rewound and replayed, but we still
have hope: Our own lives possess a separate rhythm, and we always
have creative authority over them.

Court Says Christiania Residents Have No Right to It

Danish Court Says Christiania Residents Have No Right to It

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/587/denmark_christiania_suffers_legal_setback

5/29/09

A Danish court has ruled that the residents of Copenhagen's
Christiania neighborhood have no right to use the property they have
called home since 1971. The ruling opens the way for the government
to regain control of the hippie enclave.

Nearly 40 years ago, Copenhagen counterculture activists invaded a
disused former naval base and created the self-governing community of
Christiania in the heart of the city. More than 900 residents lived
an anarchic, self-governing existence, complete with the famous
Pusher Street, where cannabis merchants openly sold their wares.

But in 2004, the Danish government moved to reassert control over
Christiania with an eye to redeveloping the property. It has also
forced the shutdown of Pusher Street, resulting in clashes with
police. But residents didn't respond only with rocks; they filed a
lawsuit in 2006 seeking to block the government from reasserting control.

On Tuesday, the Danish Eastern High Court dismissed the lawsuit. But
residents had expected that ruling, Christiania spokesman Thomas
Ertman told the Associated Press. "I believe that we will appeal the
case" to Denmark's highest court, the Supreme Court, he said.

"No Danes are above the law, neither are the residents of
Christiania," said Peter Christensen, a senior member of the ruling
Liberal Party. "I am very satisfied that the ruling came out this way."

Rain showers fans with Beatles hits

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/260657/

BY MICHELLE PARKS
May 28, 2009

FAYETTEVILLE - So that's what it could have been like to see The Beatles.

Rain, a Beatles tribute band, on Tuesday performed the first of eight
shows, which continue through Sunday, at the Walton Arts Center.

Much more than a concert, and much more than a tribute band, these
guys took the audience on a multidimensional trip back in time. And
it was one of the most entertaining shows to grace the arts center's
stage in its 17-year history.

The show took the audience through the Beatles' career - starting
with their first U.S. performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
The members of Rain approached their incredible impression - with
vocals, instruments, looks and mannerisms - with great attention to
detail. But they didn't let that focus restrict their vocals or
instrumentation.

There was a bit of a courtship between the band - David Leon as John
Lennon, Joey Curatolo as Paul McCartney, Tom Teeley as George
Harrison and Joe Bologna as Ringo Starr - and the audience. (Mark
Lewis, the manager, played keyboards and percussion subtly on stage).
By the end of the night, they were in love with each other.

The crowd bought in to the suspended belief of these guys, and the
band proved the lasting power of The Beatles' music. In this two-hour
show, it was fascinating to see their music and looks mature and
evolve. It was interesting to see the distribution of lead and backup
vocals and instrumentation on various songs.

A multimedia presentation made use of screens at the back and sides
of the stage. In between five scene and costume changes, the screens
showed footage of Beatles concerts, but with Rain members inserted as
the band.

By using a live camera projection, images of the arts center crowd
were mixed in with those of actual Beatles concerts, with fans
crying, fainting and screaming.

A fascinating video with psychedelic graphics accompanied "Eleanor
Rigby," one of the better of the night's some 30 songs.

When choosing from the prolific band's songs, a few would be
must-haves: "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "A Hard Day's Night,"
"Imagine," "Strawberry Fields Forever." They did those, but also
presented a range of tunes: "Hello Goodbye," "I Am the Walrus" and
"Norwegian Wood." Three of them played lovely acoustic guitars on
"Mother Nature's Son."

Many in the crowd weren't alive when The Beatles made their last
concert tour in 1966, before Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and Abbey Road were recorded. Still, they were all fans.

The crowd softly sang along to "Yesterday," which Curatolo performed
perfectly with an acoustic guitar. They clapped along to "Day
Tripper." The band's harmony came through clear on "Twist and Shout."

"A Day in the Life," with Leon on vocals and keyboard, had an eerie
feeling. The music got loud and chaotic, then simple and calm again
as a white spotlight shined on him.

Teeley sang great vocals on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," then
switched to an electric guitar midway and rocked out. They wound
things down with "Come Together," "Give Peace a Chance" and "The End."

During the encore, a crowd of people in suits, shorts, tie-dyed
shirts and cowboy hats and with piercings, dreadlocks and gray hair
stood together, swaying and singing along to "Imagine" and "Let It Be."

Once Curatolo uttered "Hey Jude," the crowd took off with the rest of
the first line, in what turned in to an extended singalong.

The show brought to life the emotional, thought-provoking
storytelling songs of a revered band that always spoke to its time -
songs that still ring true. And it left some wondering what the
original Fab Four would have to say today.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Former Black Panther: There Are Political Prisoners in America

Former Black Panther: "There Are Political Prisoners in America as Well"

http://www.alternet.org/rights/140242/former_black_panther:_%22there_are_political_prisoners_in_america_as_well%22/

By Emily Wilson
May 26, 2009.

What an Irish hunger striker and a former Black Panther can teach us
about prisoner resistance.
--

Prisons are, or can be, places to raise political consciousness, says
Dennis O'Hearn, the author of Nothing But an Unfinished Song, a
biography of Bobby Sands, the 27-year-old who died leading a hunger
strike in Long Kesh, a prison in Northern Ireland. A new movie about
Sands' final days, Hunger, recently won an award for first-time
filmakers at the Cannes Film Festival.

Sands, who was serving a 14-year sentence for possessing firearms,
demanded the right to be treated as a political prisoner, says
O'Hearn, who appeared at an event about political prisoners in San
Francisco with Andrej Grubacic, a professor of sociology at the
University of San Francisco and the co-author of Wobblies &
Zapatistas: Conversations On Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History,
and Robert Hillary King, one of the Angola 3. King spent more than 30
years in prison before his conviction was overturned in 2001, and he
has written a new autobiography about his experiences, From the
Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King.

King says he, like Sands, became an activist in response to the
oppression in prison.

"Prison is another way to perpetuate slavery," King says. "They're
connected. A lot of people think legality and morality are the same
thing, but they're not. Prisons are immoral."

While in Angola, a Louisiana prison built on a former slave
plantation, King joined the Black Panther Party, with the other two
members that make up the Angola 3, Herbert Wallace and Albert
Woodfox. King says they felt morally obligated to do something about
the conditions in Angola, considered in the 70s the worst prison in
the country.

"There were 72 of us in a space made for 40," King says. "There were
rats, roaches and horrible food. There was a system of sexual slavery
that was accepted. Just because you're in prison doesn't mean you're
not a human being."

King says because he, Wallace and Woodfox tried to organize other
prisoners, they were seen as threats to the administration and framed
- he for the murder of a fellow inmate, and Wallace and Woodfox for
the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They were kept in their 6 by
9 cells for 23 hours a day.

In spite being separated, King says they talked to one another from
cell to cell and kept trying to educate themselves and others. He
says their efforts led to changes in how prisoners were fed.
Officials had been sliding the food under the door or leaving it
outside in the hallway. King said this was dehumanizing and through
hunger strikes got the prison officials to cut a hole in the bars to
slide plates through. Also, King says, once they became politically
conscious, they resisted the guards' standard anal searches. They
filed a writ and the court ruled in their favor that these searches
were unjustified.

"There are many parallels between Bobby Sands and Robert," O'Hearn
said. "The strip searches and the inhumane conditions."

Like King, Sands and his fellow prisoners communicated with one
another even though they were locked in separate cells. O'Hearn says
they told stories, sang songs and learned the Irish language orally.

"It's so important the joy of the struggle, not just the hardship of
struggle," O'Hearn said.

Grubacic, an anarchist from the Balkans, says he is interested in how
people organize themselves in prison. From his co-author on Wobblies
and Zapatistas, Staughton Lynd, Grubacic learned about the Lucasville
5, a group that took over a prison in Youngstown, Ohio, for 11 days.
The group was made up of black militants and members of the Aryan
Brotherhood, who spray painted slogans such as "Convict race" on the
walls of the prison.

"Some of the most beautiful examples of American democracy are not
found in and around the White House, but in Lucasville," Grubacic
says. "Convicts developed a system of democracy to fight for a
different world."

The discussion focused on political prisoners was part of a week of
events discussing various revolutions throughout the world in 1968
and the legacy of those movements. O'Hearn, who along with the
biography of Sands, wrote the introduction to Grubacic's book, said
prison activists were part of the shift in perspective in the 60s.

"The old idea was wait till you overthrow the state and take power,"
he said. "But in the 60's social activists felt the important thing
was to create kind of state they wanted."

Ramsey Kanaan founded PM Press, the publisher of King's book, From
the Bottom of the Heap. He says King's experiences as a Black Panther
are an important part of the struggles of the 60s.

"Talking about '68 is kind of a metaphor," he says. "Sixty-eight was
part of a river that didn't appear out of nowhere and didn't
disappear into nowhere. Prisoner struggles are part of that stream."

Kanaan points out that the prison population in the U.S. has more
than tripled since the 60s.

Rose Braz, director of Critical Resistance, which advocates for
prison reform, says prison is a way for the state to crack down on dissent.

"I think the reality is the U.S. has used prisons as a catchall
response to social and economic problems," she says.

The way to change that is not just to talk to people with different
points of view, but to listen as well, says Grubacic. Grubacic says
he and others from the university in Belgrade, who opposed the former
president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, went to talk with
factory workers in the south who supported Milosevic.

"We exchanged ideas, we exchanged skills and experience," he says.
"Listening is a political tool. This is the way to build a movement."

Robert Hillary King: "There are political prisoners in America as well."

Robert Hillary King went into Louisiana's Angola Prison in 1970,
accused of armed robbery. He was sentenced to 35 years, and after
escaping, eight more years were added on to his sentence. For most of
his time at Angola, considered one of the worst prisons in the
nation, he was in a 9 by 6 cell for 23 hours a day. While he was
there, he, along with Herbert Wallace and Albert Woodfox, created a
prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Known as the Angola 3, the
men were all given life sentences: King for allegedly killing another
inmate, while Woodfox and Wallace were accused of killing a prison
guard. Woodfox had a hearing at the beginning of March to decide
whether to uphold a federal judge's ruling overturning his
conviction. The court may take between four weeks and six months to
release a ruling.

King was exonerated in 2001. After being displaced by Hurricane
Katrina, he now lives in Austin, TX, where he continues to work for
Wallace and Woodfox's release and travels widely to speak about
prison conditions. He recently came out with a book about his
experiences, From the Bottom of the Heap. Alternet's Emily Wilson
caught up with him when he was in San Francisco speaking on a panel
about political prisoners.

Emily Wilson: How did you get a life sentence at Angola?

Robert Hillary King: They were locking up all the so-called black
militants and in 1974, on the tier I lived on which was called B
Tier, an inmate was killed in self-defense by another inmate and they
indicted 11 people. It was a blanket indictment. A couple of weeks
later it was down to two people and I was one of them. Without any
corroborating evidence I was found guilty. They accepted the
inconsistent testimony of an individual who made up his testimony,
was given a gun, and issued a transfer to minimum status within the
prison. They got him to say I participated. They also got another
individual to say I participated, but his testimony was impeached
within the first trial.

Both of them went home and subsequently returned to prison and they
contacted me to say they wanted to set the record straight, and they
had lied. The one who had impeached, the warden had prepared his
testimony for him and, the other person just took advantage by
implicating me because the warden wanted him to implicate me, and I
was found guilty and given a life sentence.

EW: Why did you first join the Black Panther Party?

RHK: The Black Panther Party articulated things for me I really
couldn't at the time. I began to feel alienated from the system. I
had taken it for granted like everybody else that there were civil
rights in this country and I was protected by these rights and I was
naively believing that despite the fact that I had witnessed racism
and discrimination all of my life. I still had hope and belief and
belief in the ideas of the system.

After coming into contact with the Black Panther Party and some of
their ideology and not having been able to articulate some of what
they were saying but feeling it, I felt kinship and it was easy to
adopt some of their ideology, which I felt was pretty humanistic.

I was in prison when I first heard about it. I was in the New Orleans
Parish, and I had just been given a 35-year sentence. I heard about
them, but it wasn't until I escaped and was recaptured that I came
into contact with the Black Panther Party. I had heard about them,
but I did not know they were in New Orleans. Some of them were
arrested in a so called shootout and they came in and they placed a
couple of them in the tier I was being kept on, so I began to find
out more and more about the Black Panther Party. Of course there were
people saying the same thing long before the Black Panthers, but I
really didn't hear it. You know, the protests, the Freedom Riders,
people trying to acquire the right to vote, civil rights, all of
these things eventually connected, but I was not able to connect the
dots until I heard the Black Panther Party, so I was attracted.

EW: How could you organize and create a community in prison?

RHK: Herman and Albert were responsible for that; I give them all the
credit along with some others in the Black Panther Party. They
started political education classes and started passively protesting
the work conditions, which were 17 hours a day. They tried to hold
political discussion and political education classes that would
instill hope in the prisoners. It was a passive protest. You know,
work stoppage and food stoppage. Not eating any food or not serving
food in the kitchen so that they could get the attention of the
administration.

Herman and Albert were the ones who initiated going on the yard and
holding political discussion with other inmates. When I came on,
Herman and Albert were in the cells and we continued to teach
political education classes from the cells and to educate ourselves
and people on the tier.

We would talk from cell to cell or write thing up and make fliers. We
had access to people who were in minimum custody so we would get on
the good side of them and get them to bring fliers down the walk. We
were not only able to communicate between ourselves on the tiers, but
we were able to reach out to people in surrounding areas as well.

EW: What are some of the things you accomplished?

RHK: We were able to do some things like change the practice of how
they fed us. We engaged in not eating; we staged a hunger strike. We
had tried to negotiate with prison officials stating that the way
they fed us was dehumanizing and unsanitary and we felt it should be
upgraded, but we were told this was the way they did it and this was
prison. We understood that but being political conscious and
aware, we began to see things and recognize that just because we
were in prison did not mean we were not human beings, so we took a
different approach to how we were treated. We decided to go on a
hunger strike and it took 18 months, but eventually they stopped
feeding us in that manner.

What they were doing was throwing it under the door or sliding it
under the door, and sometimes they would leave it outside the door.
Flies and rats and roaches and everything else ran through it. They
began to cut food slots in the bars for us, and actually now all over
prison they cut food slots.

Another thing they were doing was engaging in dehumanizing body
cavity searches that served no criminological purpose. We decided to
change this practice, so we decided not to submit. In other words, we
wouldn't refuse a shake down. I would raise my hand, raise my feet,
open my mouth and so forth, that is OK. But I was in the cell 23, 24
hours a day sometimes, and we did not come into contact with anybody,
and we had to go through an anal search just out after being
handcuffed. It was illogical. So we decided if they wanted a body
cavity search, they had to force us.

But a writ was filed and the 19th District Court ruled in our favor
that a routine anal search was unjustified and that was stopped. And
as a result of people struggling and the Black Panther Party coming
into the prison, there was a federal oversight of the prison for like
25 years. It was relinquished only about 1998 or 2000 by a federal
jury. The prison was considered in 1972 one of the worst prisons in
the nation.

We made some changes, but the idea was not to beautify or make
prisons more livable. The ultimate goal was to get Herman and Albert
and myself out of prison. The bar has always been raised to that degree.

EW: You say in your book prison is a continuation of slavery. Why do
you say that?

RHK: I don't think the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. It just made
a transition from one form to another. It was considered legal to own
slaves but even thought it was legal to own slaves it wasn't till
people began to see the moral repugnance of owning slaves, that
things changed, till there was a moral outrage. I see the difference
between legality and morality. Some people think if something is
legal, it's moral, but that's not so. A lot of people can be legally
guilty but morally innocent. People can be legally innocent of a
crime and legally innocent and can go to their death.

With this mindset, legality seems to take precedence over morality. I
began to make an assessment of the 13th amendment and the wording of
it and it just seems to be poppycock. You know, "Slavery and
involuntarily servitude shall not exist on these shores" and people
say "Well, the 13th amendment abolished slavery." Well, no, not so.
You have to read the rest. It says unless of course, if you have been
duly convicted of a crime.

EW: How did you keep going locked up for 23 hours a day? Were you
confident you would get out some day?

RHK: I hoped that I would get out. Also I felt that I could die in
prison. It went beyond hope. I did some things to activate my
release. I got into the law and I kept my own case alive, and
subsequently Herman and Albert's. They were closing doors within the
legal system, and even though I felt the legal system was
hypocritical, I also knew there could be some legal loopholes, and so
along with Herman and Albert we kept hammering at it. We looked at
our cases, I read Albert's transcript and my own transcript, and we
got some people on board who had heard about the case as a result of
Albert getting a new trial. Some activists got others involved, and
it took a while, but Albert should be getting out of prison at some
point because all the evidence against him has been undermined. And
whatever happens in Albert's case should happen in Herman's as well
because they are linked.

EW: What is it you are doing now for prison reform?

RHK: I've been to five different continents and over a dozen
countries talking about the Angola 3 case and trying to make a
connection that prison America is really slavery. There are political
prisoners in America as well. I was in prison for 31 years for a
crime I didn't commit, 29 in solitary. I think it's incumbent on me
to try to do my best to try and expose the things I saw and
witnessed. I kind of see the connection of not just Herman and Albert
and our struggle, but I believe the struggle of people generally and
the struggle of African people. I think there's a connection. and the
connection runs deep. In my book and in my lifestyle, I'm trying to
show the connection runs much deeper than the eye can see. I hope
people will get to see the system and how it really operates.
--

Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City
College of San Francisco.

Montreal bed-in for peace was 40 years ago

[3 items]

John Lennon and Yoko Ono Montreal bed-in for peace was 40 years ago

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5hlp17B8hJeBsq7MOtKy30vDGAshg

By Nelson Wyatt
5/26/09

MONTREAL The hotel room where John Lennon and Yoko Ono created a
watershed moment for the peace movement at the height of the Vietnam
War is a little smaller now.

Part of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel suite, which has a gold plaque on
the door noting its history, went to the installation of a panoramic
elevator on the floor.

But that hasn't dimmed the aura of the place where the ex-Beatle and
Ono staged their bed-in for peace between May 26 and June 2, 1969,
and recorded the iconic antiwar anthem "Give Peace a Chance" the day
before they left.

"The furniture has changed because of course it's 40 years ago and we
do renovate every five to 10 years," hotel spokeswoman Joanne
Papineau said as she gave a tour of room 1742 on Tuesday.

Pictures of Lennon and Ono during the bed-in dot the walls. Sunlight
floods in from the large window in the sitting room where Lennon
positioned the couple's mattress and held court with throngs of people in 1969.

Papineau leafs through a security log book from the visit, which
notes the couple's room service orders - a mix of British and
Japanese food - and a request for an extra large comb plus a cage for
a white mouse.

"They were throwing (flower) petals into the air a few times a day so
we had to keep vacuuming the floor," she said with a chuckle.

"There were 200 'fellow Beatles' who were running around in the lobby
so you see it was a bit of a circus and guests were not always so happy."

The Queen E, as the landmark hotel is nicknamed, didn't boast about
holding the event at the time.

"It created a lot of problems with guests," Papineau said. "They
didn't talk about it for a while but guests wanted to see where it happened."

There was a spike in interest after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks in the United States when Lennon's message of peace was given
increased resonance.

Now, many fans of Lennon and the Beatles want to book the room.
Others reserve it for romantic getaways.

"Guests love it," Papineau said of the room. "A lot of them feel a
presence. They say there's a special vibration."

Now the hotel - which has since been renamed the Fairmont Queen
Elizabeth - is offering an "Imagine" anniversary package for guests.

That gets customers a CD featuring "Give Peace a Chance" and a copy
of the song's lyrics, as well as breakfast in bed for two. A night's
stay in the room runs $599.

There's also a hotel window display, replicas of the couple's pyjamas
for sale and a Yoko tribute cocktail. People can also sign a peace
book that will be given to Ono.

The bed-in is also being marked with the "Imagine: The Peace Ballad
of John & Yoko" exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as well
as with 17-second peace messages from Ono broadcast on some city
subway trains three times a day.

Ellis Steinberg got a chance to speak to Ono recently when she made
her daily random phone call to the museum exhibit. He had just asked
a museum guard when she usually calls when the phone rang.

"I was excited as I've ever been," he said. "She's, like, 'Hi.' It
sounded exactly like I would have expected her to sound, just like
all the times I've seen her on TV."

The two exchanged pleasantries - "We asked each other how we were
doing. I was good, she was good" - and Steinberg thanked her for
spreading her message of peace.

"She said, 'Oh, you know, we try. It's the least we can do.'

"We spoke for a little bit and she was telling me how the Queen
Elizabeth wasn't their first choice. It was their third or fourth choice."

Ono didn't want to talk about reports of drug use by her and Lennon
at the time of the bed-in - "She kind of ignored the question" - so
Steinberg asked if he could come to New York and play chess with her sometime.

"She laughed and politely declined."

--------

John Lennon and Yoko Ono uncovered

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/5389587/John-Lennon-and-Yoko-Ono-uncovered.html

Forty years ago, John Lennon and Yoko Ono grabbed the world's
attention with their Bed In for Peace at Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel.

26 May 2009

The iconic couple, who had only been married a few months, staged the
eight-day event to protest America's involvement in the Vietnam war.

Photo-journalist Gerry Deiter was assigned by Life Magazine to
document the "happening" in the hotel suite, and stayed for the
duration of the event capturing hundreds of images of the couple
singing, composing, visiting with friends and talking to the media.

Lennon and Ono spoke to some 150 journalists during the press
conferences they held daily from their bed. Lennon wrote the song
Give Peace a Chance during the "bed-in" and recorded it in the hotel
suite. More than fifty friends, fans, writers, actors, artists and
musicians participated in the recording.

Deiter chose not to release his memorable and intimate photographs to
the public until after Lennon's unexpected and tragic death in December, 1980.

The newly released images now form part of an exhibition, Give Peace
A Chance: John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bed-In For Peace, showing at The
Beatles Story in Liverpool

--------

Also, see:

A Globe Books exclusive

It was 40 years ago today...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/it-was-40-years-ago-today/article1153877/

Jerry Levitan showed the moxie of a seasoned journalist when, at age
14, he found John Lennon in a Toronto hotel room and got the Beatles
legend to agree to a taped interview. Levitan has now released a book
about the adventure, complete with a DVD containing the entire interview.

[Continued at URL above.]

Relix Returns from the Dead

http://www.foliomag.com/2009/relix-returns-dead

Investment group, former employees acquire music magazine on brink of folding.

By Dylan Stableford
05/03/2009

Relix magazine was launched in 1974 as a handmade fanzine for Deadheads.

Now, it's returning from the dead.

Three months after its publisher, Zenbu Media, put Relixas well as a
pair of metal magazines, Metal Edge and Metal Maniacson temporary
hiatus, a group of investors led by Peter Shapiroa former New York
nightclub owner and concert producer well-known in the so-called jam
band sceneand a core group of the magazine's employees have acquired
Relix and a pair of related Web sites from Zenbu founder Steve Bernstein.

"I thought there was a good chance we were done," Josh Baron, Relix's
editor, told FOLIO:.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. (Zenbu is said to be
in discussions to sell its metal magazines; the planned launch of a
new country music magazine appears to have been scrapped.)

Relix, with a frequency of eight-times per year, carries a
circulation of 102,000. The Web sites, Relix.com and Jambands.com,
carry even more.

"We're not going to miss an issue," said senior vice president Rachel
Seiden, Baron's fiancée and a former Condé Nast executive who
migrated to Zenbu two years ago. "I couldn't fathom Relix going
anywhere. It's like the New Yorkerthese are institutions."

For the magazine's fans, the relaunch comes at a heady time. The
92-page June issue, redesigned by Andy Turnbull, features the rock
band Phishreturning from its own hiatuson the cover. And ad pages,
at least for this particular issue, are actually up over last year.

"This is a scene that's healthy," said Shapiro, who owned a minority
stake in Zenbu before he bought Relix and remains Bernstein's
business partner on a number of other projects, including the Green
Apple Music Festival. "Live music isn't going anywhere. And with
record stores closing, more and more musicians are selling music
directly to their fansthe magazine is a mechanism to reach them."

Such ads "lend themselves to Relix more than Rolling Stone," Shapiro
said, adding: "We don't have six ads from Detroit in every issue."

The economy has not been kind to general interest music magazinesor
niche ones, for that matter. Blender, No Depression, Harp, Resonance,
CCM, Mass Appeal and King have all folded their print titles within
the past two yearswhile others appear to be on life support.

'More Rolling Stone than Rolling Stone'

Shapirowho once owned Wetlands, a famed New York rock club and
produced the Jammy Awards, the jam-band equivalent of the
Grammyssays he wants to create the "vibe of Rolling Stone in
1974"both in terms of editorial coverage and, perhaps more
importantly, "corporate" culture. (He pointed out that his first day
in the office included a live performance by the Dears.)

Relix will remain in Zenbu's Manhattan offices, subsidizing it by
renting the space vacated by Metal Edge and Metal Maniacs to small,
like-minded entertainment companies, including Bob Weir's manager.

Shapiro will serve as publisher of the newly-formed Relix Media
Group, Seiden as associate publisher. Baron will remain in the top editor slot.

The rest of the executive team will include Dean Budnick, senior vice
president of digital; Mike Greenhaus, vice president and executive
editor; chief financial officer Dale Hirschman; and sales and
marketing VP Cole Boyle.

All are veterans of the magazineand all are taking salary cuts,
roughly 15 percent, to relaunch Relix.

"If we didn't see a real business value, we would've walked away,"
said Baron. "This isn't a case of putting a Band-Aid on a magazine.
We think we can increase ad revenue, circulation, marketshare. What
we had been doing for the last eight yearswe weren't done yet."

The Silence of MoveOn [by Tom Hayden]

The Silence of MoveOn

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/hayden

By Tom Hayden
May 26, 2009

The most powerful grassroots organization of the peace movement,
MoveOn, remains silent as the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan simmer or escalate.

When he met with Obama in February, Jason Ruben, executive director
of MoveOn, told the president it was "the moment to go big," then
indicated that MoveOn would not oppose the $94 billion war
supplemental request, nor the 21,000 additional troops to
Afghanistan, nor the increased civilian casualties from the mounting
number of Predator attacks.

What was MoveOn's explanation for abandoning the peace movement in a
meeting with a president the peace movement was key to electing?
According to Ruben and MoveOn, it was the preference of its millions
of members, as ascertained by house meetings and polls.

The evidence, however, is otherwise. Last December 17, 48.3 percent
of MoveOn members listed "end the war in Iraq" as a 2009 goal, after
healthcare (64.9 percent), economic recovery and job creation (62.1
percent) and building a green economy/stopping climate change (49.6
percent--only 1.5 percent above Iraq.) This was at a moment when most
Americans believed the Iraq War was ending. Afghanistan and Pakistan
were not listed among top goals which members could vote on.

Then on May 22 MoveOn surveyed its members once again, listing ten
possible campaigns for the organization. "Keep up the pressure to the
end the war in Iraq" was listed ninth among the options.

Again, Afghanistan and Pakistan were not on the MoveOn list of options.

Nor was Guantánamo nor the administration's torture policies.
("Investigate the Bush Administration" was the first option.)

MoveOn is supposed to be an Internet version of participatory
democracy, but the organization's decision-making structure
apparently assures that the membership is voiceless on the question
of these long wars.

What if they included an option like "demanding a diplomatic
settlement and opposing a quagmire in Afghanistan and Pakistan"? Or
"shifting from a priority on military spending to civilian spending
on food, medicine and schools?"

This is no small matter. MoveOn has collected a privately held list
of 5 million names, most of them strong peace advocates. The
organization's membership contributed an unprecedented $180 million
for the federal election cycle in 2004-2006. Those resources, now
squelched or sequestered, mean that the most vital organization in
the American peace movement is missing in action.

What to do? There is no point raving and ranting against MoveOn. The
only path is in organizing a dialogue with the membership, over the
Internet, and having faith that their voices will turn the
organization to oppose these escalating occupations. The same
approach is necessary towards other vital organs of the peace
movement including rank-and-file Democrat activists and the
post-election Obama organization (Organizing for America) through a
persistent, bottom-up campaign to renew the peace movement as a
powerful force in civil society.

This is not a simple matter of an organizational oligarchy
manipulating its membership, although the avoidance by MoveOn's
leadership is a troubling sign. There is genuine confusion over
Afghanistan and Pakistan among the rank and file. The economic crisis
has averted attention away from the battlefront. Many who voted for
Obama understandably will give him the benefit of the doubt, for now.

Silence sends a message. The de facto MoveOn support for the $94
billion war supplemental reverberates up the ladder of power. Feeling
no pressure, Congressional leadership has abdicated its critical
oversight function over the expanding wars, not even allowing members
to vote for a December report on possible exit strategies. In the
end, a gutsy sixty voted against HR 2346 on May 14, but many defected
to vote for the war spending, including Neil Abercrombie, Jerry
Nadler, David Obey, Xavier Becerra, Lois Capps, Maurice Hinchey,
Jesse Jackson, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Patrick Kennedy, Charles Rangel,
Lucille Roybal-Allard, Loretta Sanchez, Rosa De Lauro, Bennie
Thompson, Jerry McNerney, Robert Wexler and Henry Waxman. (Bill
Delahunt, Linda Sanchez and Pete Stark were not recorded.)

If there were significant pressures from networks like MoveOn in
their Congressional districts, the opposition vote might have approached 85.

Appropriations chair David Obey in essence granted Obama a one-year
pass to show results in Afghanistan. If the war appears to be a
quagmire by then, he claimed, the Democrats will become more
critical. Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the same message; according
to the Washington Examiner, May 6: "There won't be any more war
supplementals, so my message to my members is, this is it." Pelosi's
words were carefully parsed, saying that the White House would not be
allowed another supplemental form of appropriation, which is
different from an actual pledge to oppose war funding.

This one-year pass means that the grassroots peace movement has a few
months to light a fire and reawaken pressure from below on the
Congress and president. In the meantime, here are some predictions
for the coming year:

• Iraq: Will Obama keep his pledge to withdraw combat forces from
Iraq on a sixteen-month timetable, and all forces by 2011? At this
point, the pace is slowing, and the deadline being somewhat extended,
under pressure from US commanders on the ground. Sunnis are
threatening to resume their insurgency if the al-Maliki regime fails
to incorporate them into the political and security structures. The
president insists however, that he is only making adjustments to a
timetable that is on track. Prognosis: Precarious.

• Afghanistan: Will the Obama troop escalation deepen the quagmire or
become a successful surge against the Taliban by next year? Another
21,000 troops and advisers are on their way to the battlefield.
Civilian casualties are mounting, causing the besieged Karzai
government to complain. Preventive detention of Afghans will only
expand. US deaths, now over 600, are sure to increase this summer.
Taliban may hold out and redeploy in order to stretch US forces thin.
Prognosis: Escalation into quagmire.

• Pakistan: US policies have driven Al Qaeda from Afghanistan into
Pakistan's tribal areas, where the United States is attacking with
Predators and turning Pakistan's US-funded armed forces towards
counterinsurgency. Public opinion is being inflamed against the US
intervention. Prognosis: An expanding American war in Pakistan with
greater threats to American security.

• Iran: With or without US complicity, Israel may attack Iran early
next year, with unforeseeable consequences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prognosis: Crisis will intensify.

• Global: The United States will fail to attract more combat troops
to fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Europe or elsewhere,
causing pressure to increase for a non-military negotiated solution.
Prognosis: Obama still popular, US still isolated.

• Budget priorities: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan will deeply
threaten the administration's ability to succeed on the domestic
front with stimulus spending, healthcare, education and alternative
energy. Prognosis: false hope for "guns and butter" all over again.
--

About Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton
Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending
the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom
Hayden Reader (2008).

Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters

[3 articles]

Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html

By Jack Cashill
May 24, 2009

While waiting for America's publishers to find their nerve, I had put
my research into the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams
From My Father on the back shelf. But then I heard Chris Matthews.

The Hardball host was weighing in on the subject of Sarah Palin's new
book deal. "Sarah Palin - now don't laugh - is writing a book,"
sneered Matthews. "Not just reading a book, writing a book."

"Actually in the word of the publisher she's "collaborating" on a
book," Matthews continued. "What an embarrassment! It's one of these
'I told you,' books that jocks do. You know she's already declared, I
mean, why they do it like this? 'She can't write, we got a
collaborator for her.'"

I dedicate what follows to Matthews and those willfully blind souls
like him. It is a work in progress, a collective one at that, aided
and abetted by nearly a score of volunteer co-conspirators from
Hawaii to Ohio to Israel to Australia. The thesis is simple enough:
Barack Obama needed substantial help to write his 1995 memoir, Dreams
From My Father. Moreover, unlike Sarah Palin, Obama chose to
conceal the identity of his collaborator and not without good reason.
To admit that he needed a collaborator would have undercut his
campaign for president and to reveal the name of that collaborator
would have ended it.

My involvement in this occasionally harrowing literary adventure
began in July 2008, entirely innocently. A friend sent me some short
excerpts from Dreams and asked if they were as radical as they
sounded. I bought the book, located the excerpts, and reported back
that, in context, the excerpts were not particularly troubling.

But I did notice something else. The book was much too well written.
I had seen enough of Obama's interviews to know that he did not speak
with anywhere near the verbal sophistication on display in Dreams.

About six weeks later, for entirely unrelated reasons, I picked up a
copy of Bill Ayers 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. Ayers, I discovered,
writes very well and very much like "Obama."

In mid-September, after considerable digging, I wrote a few
speculative articles for American Thinker and other online journals
and discovered that I was not alone in my suspicions.

Looking for some scientific verification, I consulted Patrick Juola
of Duquesne, a leading authority in the field of literary
forensics. Juola, however, advised me against relying on computer
analysis on a subject this sensitive. "The accuracy just isn't
there," he told me. He encouraged me instead "to do what you're
already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work." I
took his advice.

The first question I had to resolve was whether the 33 year-old
Barack Obama was capable of writing what Time Magazine has called
"the best-written memoir ever produced by an American
politician." The answer is almost assuredly "no."

In his bestselling study of success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
painstakingly lays out what he calls the "ten-thousand-hour
rule." Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin to the effect that
"ten thousand hours of practice [in any subject] is required to
achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class
expert" and cites example after example to make his case.

Obama appears to have lopped about 9900 hours off that standard. In
Dreams, he speaks of writing only the occasional journal entry and
some "very bad poetry." He does not sell himself short on the
poetry. From his undergraduate poem, "Underground":

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .

If possible, Obama's early prose showed less promise than his
poetry. Although the Obama camp has been notoriously shy about
releasing proof of Obama's assumed genius-SAT scores, LSAT scores,
transcripts, theses-I was able to unearth three essays in print that
predate Dreams.

In March 1983, Obama wrote an 1800-word article, "Breaking the War
Mentality," for Columbia University's weekly news magazine,
Sundial. Five years later, he wrote an essay titled "Why Organize,"
which was reprinted in a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community
Organizing in Illinois.

In the Sundial article there are an appalling five sentences in which
the subject noun does not agree with the verb. In some sentences,
like the following, the punctuation and word selection are as random
as the grammar: "The belief that moribund institutions, rather than
individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive."

Although "Why Organize" seems to be better edited, in neither of
these two clunky essays does Obama turn a single phrase that is
clever, concise, or even vaguely memorable. In 1990, he wrote an
unsigned student case comment for the Harvard Law Review. The prose
here, although reasonably well edited, is even more dull and leaden.

It was not Obama's style but his election as the first black
president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990-more of a popularity than
a literary contest-that netted him a roughly $125,000 advance for a
proposed book. According to a 2006 article by liberal publisher
Peter Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract when Obama could
not deliver, despite a sojourn to Bali to help him write.

It was about this time that Bill Ayers entered the picture. "I met
[Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s." he would later tell Salon. "And
everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For
the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants
to be mayor of Chicago."

Obama needed help, and Ayers had the means, the motive, and the
ability to provide it. Unlike Obama, he has a well-established paper
trail. He co-authored the 1974 tract, "Prairie Fire: The Politics
of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, in which book, by the way, he
misspells Frantz Fanon's first name as "Franz" just as Obama does in
Dreams, and nearly twenty books thereafter as writer and editor.

Ayers, we know, provided an informal editing service for like-minded
friends in the neighborhood. Aspiring radical Rashid Khalidi attests
to this in the acknowledgements in his 2004 book, Resurrecting
Empire. "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his
family's dining room table to do some writing for the project."
Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed
the help. Having no political ambitions, Khalidi was willing to
acknowledge it.

Dreams was published in June 1995. That same year, Ayers was busy
fueling the ambitions of his young protégé, first with an appointment
to the chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant and later with
a fundraiser in his Chicago home. Ayers admits that his "imagination
ran out of steam." He thought he was launching a mayor that he could
exploit, even control, not a president, who would move quickly beyond
his grasp.

After Dreams was published in 1995, Obama's typewriter fell silent
once again. He contributed not one signed word to any law journal or
other publication of note until his unexceptional and conspicuously
ghosted 2006 book, Audacity of Hope. Obama was not a writer. As his
lame inaugural address proved, he still isn't.

It is possible that Obama actually met Ayers in New York in the early
1980s. In his brief New York sojourn, he often seems to be
channeling the thoughts and experiences of the world weary Ayers who
lived in New York the same years as Obama. "Like a tourist, I watched
the range of human possibility on display," writes Obama in Dreams,
"trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw,
looking for some opening through which I could re-enter."

Re-enter? This seems more the reflection of a soon to be ex-fugitive
than that of a Columbia undergrad. It is in New York too that Obama
feels himself living "behind enemy lines," the exact phrase that
Ayers uses to describe his life in the underground.

The opening scene of Dreams takes place in the early 1980s in and
around Obama's New York City apartment with its "slanting"
floors. As the scene unfolds, Obama is making breakfast "with coffee
on the stove and two eggs in the skillet." In Fugitive Days, Ayers
inhabits an apartment with "sloping floors." He too cooks a lot --
his books are rich with often sensual food imagery -- and uses a
"skillet," a southern regionalism.

Obama tells the reader that the buzzer downstairs did not work and
that visitors had to call from a pay phone at the corner gas
station. There, "A black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through
the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."

Fugitive Days opens at a pay phone. (Unless specified otherwise, all
Ayers' references will be to Fugitive Days and Obama's to Dreams).
Ayers spent much of his underground years waiting at pay phones. He
writes about pay phones with the loving detail art critics reserve
for Picassos. The vivid image of the Doberman almost assuredly comes
from his experience. Obama had no reason to use that pay phone, if
it even existed.

Obama shared his apartment with a roommate, who would scream "with
impressive rage" at "white people" whose dogs pooped on their
sidewalks. Adds Obama, ""We'd laugh at the faces of both master and
beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed."

Both Ayers and Obama speak of "rage" the way that Eskimos do of snow
-- in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify
it, here as "impressive rage," elsewhere in Dreams as "suppressed
rage" or "coil of rage," and in Fugitive Days as "justifiable rage,"
"uncontrollable rage," "blind rage," "and, of course, "Days of Rage."

Another note of interest is that all of the distinctive words in the
sentence above -- "master," "beast," "grim," "unapologetic," and
"deed," as well as the phrase "hunkered down" -- appear in Fugitive Days.

In the opening pages, Obama makes an exception to his unlikely New
York "solitude" for an elderly neighbor, a "stooped" gentleman who
wore a "fedora." In Fugitive Days, it was Ayers' grandfather who is
"stooped" and a helpful stranger who wears a "fedora."

One day, Obama's roommate finds his neighbor dead, "crumpled up on
the third-floor landing, his eyes wide open, his limbs stiff and
curled up like a baby's." Ayers tells of watching his mother die,
"eyes half open, curled up and panting." In both cases, the eyes are
"open" and the body is "curled up."

On the neighbor's mantelpiece, Obama reports seeing "the faded
portrait of a woman with heavy eyebrows and a gentle smile." There
are seven references to "eyebrows" in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy
ones, wispy ones, and six in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring
ones, arched ones, black ones.

Who writes about eyebrows? In the lengthy excerpts that I have
gathered from a half dozen other contemporary political memoirs --
150,000 words in all -- there is no mention of "eyebrows" at
all. Nor is there anyone or anything "stooped," "curled,"
"crumpled," "hunkered down," or wearing a "fedora."

At the climax of the opening sequence, Obama receives a phone
call. It comes from an African aunt. "Listen, Barry, your father is
dead," she tells him. Obama has a hard time understanding. "Can you
hear me?" she repeats. "I say, your father is dead." The line is cut,
and the conversation ends abruptly.

The opening sequence of Fugitive Days climaxes in nearly identical
fashion. This phone call comes from Ayers' future wife, Bernardine
Dohrn. "Diana is dead," says Dohrn of Ayers' lover Diana Oughton,
killed in a bomb blast. Ayers has a hard time understanding. "Diana
is dead," she "repeats slowly." Ayers drops the line, and the
conversation ends abruptly.

At the conclusion of Dreams' opening scene, a stunned Obama "sat down
on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in
the plaster, trying to measure my loss." This passage features
Obama's signature rhetorical flourish, the triple parallel without a
joining conjunction. There are scores of such examples throughout
Dreams, perhaps hundreds:

"...the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the
tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds."

"Her face powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair bolstered,
she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office
before anyone else."

"...his eyes were closed, his head leaning against the back of his
chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving stone."

As it happens, Ayers' signature rhetorical flourish, likely cribbed
from Joseph Conrad, is the triple parallel without a joining
conjunction. There are scores of such examples throughout Fugitive
Days, perhaps hundreds:

"He inhabited an anarchic solitude-disconnected, smart,obsessive."

"We swarmed over and around that car, smashing windows, slashing
tires, trashing lights and fenders-it seemed the only conceivable thing to do."

"...trees are shattered, doors ripped from their hinges, shorelines
rearranged."

More intriguing still, Obama seems to borrow the one girlfriend in
the oddly sexless Dreams from Ayers' experience. "There was a woman
in New York that I loved," he tells his half-sister years after the
fact. "She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes."

The woman of Obama's memory evokes images of Diana Oughton. As her
FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two
women shared similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they
seemed to have grown up on the very same estate.

"The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of
his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his
grandfather." According to a Time Magazine article written soon after
her death, Oughton "brought Bill Ayers and other radicals" to the
family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. The main house on the Oughton
estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton's father's
grandfather.

The carriage house, in which Oughton lived as a child, now serves as
a public library. It may have already seemed like one when Ayers
visited, an impression that finds its way into Obama's memory of a
library "filled with old books and pictures of the famous people [the
grandfather] had known-presidents, diplomats, industrialists."

"It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us," Obama writes of
his visit to his girlfriend's country home, "and we paddled a canoe
across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected
along the shore." As can be seen from aerial photos even today, the
Oughton estate also has a small lake and is surrounded by woods.

Curiously, Obama tells the story of this past love while cutting "two
green peppers." In his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers
specifically links "green peppers" with "saltpeter" and other
substances that scare young men with the threat of impotence. Go figure.

Ayers lived a considerably more adventurous life than Obama,
beginning with his youthful days as a merchant seaman in the North
Atlantic. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular
experience," Ayers writes. Yet much of the nautical language that
flows through Fugitive Days flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.

Although there are only the briefest of literal sea experiences in
Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work:
fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first
mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons,
ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling,
fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.

My own memoir on race, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control. It
makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to any of the
above words save "current" and "tides." Yet I have spent a good chunk
of every summer of my life at the ocean and many a day on a boat.

Ayers equates the flow of water with that of language. "The debates
swam above and around and through us," he writes. "The confrontation
in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the
teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room,
hall to hall, bouncing off boulders."

In Dreams, Obama makes the very same equation. "I heard all our
voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling
over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream," he
writes, "my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in
memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to
that single course, a single story."

For the one and only time in his career, Obama writes in the language
of postmodernism, a language the academic Ayers has mastered. Ayers
describes Fugitive Days as "a memory book," one that deliberately
blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. In
Dreams, Obama admits, some characters are composites. Some appear out
of precise chronology. Names have been changed.

Ayers seems consumed with lies, lying and what he calls "our
constructed reality." The Obama of Dreams says much the same and in
much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was
telling them was a lie," he writes, "something I'd constructed from
the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."

That they both speak of "narratives," "traps," "contradictions,"
"intimacies," and "journeys" is not exceptional. That is standard
postmodern patois. What is exceptional is their shared use of
advanced postmodern slang -- the "fictions" into which they and
others force their lives, the "grooves" into which they have fallen,
the "poses" they assume, and even the "stitched together" nature of
the lives they or their relatives lead.

More convincing still are those complex tropes in Dreams that appear,
only slightly altered, in Ayers' books. In his 1993 book, To Teach,
Ayers writes, "Education is for self-activating explorers of life,
for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for
citizens." "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal
subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for
obedient soldiers."

In Dreams, these thoughts find colloquial expression in the person of
"Frank," the real life poet, pornographer and Stalinist, Frank
Marshall Davis. "Understand something, boy," Frank tells the
college-bound Obama. "You're not going to college to get educated.
You're going there to get trained." Both authors make the point that
"training" strips the individual of his racial identity.

In To Teach, Ayers recounts the story of an ambitious teacher who
takes her students out to the streets of New York to learn about its
culture and history. These students ask to see the nearby Hudson
River. When they get to the river's edge, one student says, " Look,
the river is flowing up." A second student says, "No, it has to flow
south-down." Upon further research, the teacher discovers "that the
Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south,
and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."

In Dreams, written two years later, Obama takes an unlikely detour to
the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing
tide meets the south-flowing river. There, improbably, a young black
boy approaches this strange man and asks, "You know why sometimes the
river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" Obama
tells the boy it "had to do with the tides."

For the literary left, the fact that Ayers helped Obama would be a
less troubling revelation than that Obama needed help at all. They
have built a foundational myth around his genius, a genius that can
be located only in Dreams. The dark side of the Democrat genius
mythology, of course, is the Republican dunce mythology of which
Sarah Palin and George Bush are the most recent victims.

There is thus a logic to the left's willful blindness. Why the
literary right has accepted this charade continues to baffle me.
--

Video: The Washington Times asks Ayers about his "collaboration" with
Obama on "Dreams From My Father."
http://www.thefoxnation.com/politics/2009/05/19/bill-ayers-back-and-hurls-insult-reporter
--

Jack Cashill has written six books this decade, one of which,
"Hoodwinked," dealt with literary fraud. Cashill has also served as
"literary doctor" on several other books, two of which were best
sellers by household names. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from
Purdue University.

--------

The Washington Times Asks Bill Ayers if He Wrote Obama's First Book

http://washingtonindependent.com/43733/washington-times-asks-bill-ayers-if-he-wrote-obamas-first-book

By David Weigel
5/20/09

Kerry Picket of The Washington Times trekked to Baltimore to hear
former Weatherman Bill Ayers speak yesterday and sparked an exchange
that the paper is teasing on its op-ed page with a lot of huffing
about Ayers's terrorist past ("His radicalism and chosen profession
bring to mind Oscar Wilde's quip that, 'Everybody who is incapable of
learning has taken to teaching.'"). Curiously, the paper doesn't
mention what Picket actually asked Ayers about the conspiracy
theory that he ghost-wrote President Obama's first book, "Dreams From
My Father."

From the video, after Picket asks Ayers a few times about what the
president thinks of his new book:

WASHINGTON TIMES: I'm just curious whether or not your publisher has
sent a copy to President Obama.

AYERS: Have you gotten any feedback on your writings from the
president? (Laughter)

WASHINGTON TIMES: Considering you may have had a collaboration with
"Dreams of (sic) My Father."

AYERS: I never had a collaboration. No.

WASHINGTON TIMES: No?

AYERS: That's a myth.

The idea that Ayers wrote Obama's first memoir was popularized by
conservative author Jack Cashill on the conspiracy site
WorldNetDaily, one of the hubs of the discredited theory that Obama
was not born in Hawaii. Cashill's investigation is a funny read, full
of "proof" like Obama's use of a nautical metaphor and asides such
"in Obama, alas, Ayers may have found a much more lethal weapon to
use against the 'marauding monster' called America than any pipe bomb
he could have ever built." The most traction this has gotten in the
mainstream conservative press was an October blog post by National
Review contributer Andy McCarthy, in which he credited Cashill for
raising "significant questions about whether Obama is the rara avis
he's portrayed to be."

For The Washington Times, these are still "significant questions."

--------

Did Bill Ayers Help Obama Write "Dreams Of My Father"?

http://www.kxmc.com/News/Nation/379988.asp

May 24 2009

After hearing leftists mock Sarah Palin for daring to write a book
about her experiences running on a Presidential ticket, and using a
fully acknowledged collaborator to do it, Jack Cashill at the
American Thinker decided to take a closer look at Obama's book Dreams
of my Father. His conclusion? It's pretty clear that Bill Ayers
collaborated with Obama on it.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html

It's a long article that's worth reading in total, but here's a taste:

More convincing still are those complex tropes in Dreams that appear,
only slightly altered, in Ayers' books. ...

Personally, I don't really care if Obama did collaborate with Bill
Ayers on his book. Of course, given how toxic Ayers is politically
and how extensively Obama seems to have claimed Ayers' experiences as
his own, the reality of that much-hyped book doesn't reflect well on
Obama himself. But whatever.

My real problem is how often Obama is touted as this heady
intellectual, this cultured and philosophic man, when he so clearly
isn't. It is liberal dogma that liberals are intellectuals and
conservatives are ignorant rubes, but that seems to have more to do
with the insecurities of liberals than reality.

Activism 101

http://www.countercurrents.org/mickeyz260509.htm

By Mickey Z.
26 May, 2009

Okay, short attention span crowd: Grab your remote (or mouse) and get
ready to click, click, click…

"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a
fight? I don't wanna die without any scars." - Tyler Durden ( Fight Club )

Click…

William Burroughs once wrote about how we humanslike the bull in a
bullfighttend to focus on the elusive red cape instead of the
matador. Indeed, we are all-too-easily distracted from real targets
by an attractive image or illusion.

Of course, some bulls see right through the red cape, uh, bullshit
...and quite justifiably introduce the matador to the business end of
their horns. Before you mistake that for a lesson and/or inspiration,
don't forget that such bulls are promptly killed while the matador is
mourned as a brave hero.

Here's my question: If every bull in every bullfight were to gore
every matador, how long would it be before bullfights were a thing of the past?

Click…

Malcolm X sez:

"It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the
constant victim of brutal attacks."

Click…

In the late 1960sthanks to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers
(UFW)deciding whether or not to buy grapes became a political act.
Three years after its establishment in 1962, the UFW struck against
grape growers around Delano , California ...a long, bitter, and
frustrating struggle that appeared impossible to resolve until Chavez
promoted the idea of a national boycott. Trusting in the average
person's ability to connect with those in need, Chavez and the UFW
brought their plightand a lesson in social justiceinto homes from
coast-to-coast and Americans responded.

"By 1970, the grape boycott was an unqualified success," writes Marc
Grossman of Stone Soup. "Bowing to pressure from the boycott, grape
growers at long last signed union contracts, granting workers human
dignity and a more livable wage."

Through hunger strikes, imprisonment, abject poverty for himself and
his large family, racist and corrupt judges, exposure to dangerous
pesticides, and even assassination plots, Chavez remained true to the
cause...even if meant, uh..."stretching" the non-violent methods he espoused:

Once in 1966, when Teamster goons began to rough up Chavez's
picketeers, a bit of labor solidarity solved the problem. William
Kircher, the AFL-CIO director of organization, called Paul Hall,
president of the International Seafarers Union.

"Within hours," writes David Goodwin in Cesar Chavez: Hope for the
People, "Hall sent a carload of the biggest sailors that had ever put
to sea to march with the strikers on the picket lines...There
followed afterward no further physical harassment."

Click…

To me, the following quote reads like a poem...so that's how I'll present it:

You've got to learn
that when you push people around,
some people push back.
As they should.
As they must.
And as they undoubtedly will.
There is justice in such symmetry.

- Ward Churchill

Click…

When early American revolutionaries chanted, "Give me liberty or give
me death" and complained of having but one life to give for their
country, they became the heroes of our history textbooks. But, thanks
to the power of the U.S. media and education industries, the Puerto
Rican nationalists who dedicated their lives to independence are
known as criminals, fanatics, and assassins.

On March 1, 1954 , in the gallery of the House of Representatives,
Congressman Charles A. Halleck rose to discuss with his colleagues
the issue of Puerto Rico . At that moment, Lolita Lebrón alongside
three fellow freedom fighters, having purchased a one-way train
ticket from New York (they expected to be killed) unfurled a Puerto
Rican flag and shouted "Free Puerto Rico!" before firing eight shots
at the roof. Her three male co-conspirators aimed their machine guns
at the legislators. Andrés Figueroa's gun jammed, but shots fired by
Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irving Flores injured five congressmen.

"I know that the shots I fired neither killed nor wounded anymore,"
Lebrón stated afterwards. With the attack being viewed through the
sensationalizing prism of American tabloid journalism, this did not
matter. She and her nationalist cohorts became prisoners of war for
the next twenty-five years.

Why prisoners of war? To answer that, we must recall that since July
25, 1898 , when the United States illegally invaded its tropical
neighbor under the auspices of the Spanish-American War, the island
has been maintained as a colony. In other words, the planet's oldest
colony is being held by its oldest representative democracywith U.S.
citizenship imposed without the consent or approval of the
indigenouspopulation in 1917. It is from this geopolitical paradox
that the Puerto Rican independence movement sprang forth.

This movement is based firmly on international law, which authorizes
"anti-colonial combatants" the right to armed struggle to throw off
the yoke of imperialism and gain independence. UN General Assembly
Resolution 33/24 of December 1978 recognizes "the legitimacy of the
struggle of people's for independence, territorial integrity,
national unity and liberation from colonial domination and foreign
occupation by all means available, particularly armed struggle."

Prison did not dampen Lebrón's revolutionary spirit as she attended
demonstrations and spoke out to help win the long battle to evict the
US Navy from the tiny Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2003.

Click…

Emma Goldman sez:

"No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law."

Click…

In her excellent 1995 book, Bridge of Courage , Jennifer Harbury
quotes a Guatemalan freedom fighter named Gabriel, responding to a
plea to embrace non-violent resistance: "In my country child
malnutrition is close to 85 percent," he explains. "Ten percent of
all children will be dead before the age of five, and this is only
the number actually reported to government agencies. Close to 70
percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no
industry in our countryyou need land to survive. Less than 3 percent
of our landowners own over 65 percent of our lands. In the last
fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political murders
and disappearances... Don't talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn't have
survived a week here. There was a peaceful movement for progress
here, once. They were crushed. We were crushed. For Gandhi's method
to work, there must be a government capable of shame. We lack that here."

Click…

Huey P. Newton sez:

"In the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity, the Black
Panther Party hereby offers ... an undetermined number of troops to
assist you in your fight against American imperialism. It is
appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at this
time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our
struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is U.S. imperialism,
which is the leader of international bourgeois domination. There is
no fascist or reactionary government in the world today that could
stand without the support of United States imperialism. Therefore our
problem is international, and we offer these troops in recognition of
the necessity for international alliance to deal with the problem …
Such alliance will advance the struggle toward the final act of
dealing with American imperialism. To end this oppression we must
liberate the developing nations … As one nation is liberated
elsewhere, it gives us a better chance to be free."

(Excerpted from an October 29, 1970 letter to the National Front for
Liberation and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam)

Click…

Arundhati Roy sez:

"People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon
their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America ."

Click…

In his book Endgame , Derrick Jensen tells of a discussion he had
with a longtime activist. "She told me of a campaign she participated
in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational
timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant
and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon ," Jensen writes. All too
predictably, the dedicated demonstrators assembled to protest the
toxic spraying were, "like clockwork," ignored by the helicopter
pilots. Both humans and landscape ended up thoroughly doused with
Agent Orangetime and time again. The protest campaign obviously had
no effect, so a different approach was taken. "A bunch of Vietnam
vets lived in those hills," the activist told Jensen, "and they sent
messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhauser, Boise
Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, 'We know the names of
your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses'

"You know what happened next?" she asked.

"I think I do," Jensen responded.

"Exactly," she said. "The spraying stopped."

Click…

MLK sez:

"When you're right, you can never be too radical."
--

Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, Mickey Z. can be
found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net

Writer probes the terrorist mindset

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25520036-16947,00.html

Natasha Robinson
May 22, 2009

WHEN author and journalist Stefan Aust began his career at a small
left-wing journal, he had little inkling that one of his colleagues,
Ulrike Meinhof, would become one of Germany's most notorious
home-grown terrorists.

The author of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, who is visiting the Sydney
Writers Festival this week, was in a unique position to record the
lives of the well-educated, middle-class men and women who formed a
radical German resistance group that carried out bank robberies,
bombings and kidnappings during the early 1970s.

Like Aust, individuals such as Andreas Baader, Meinhof, Gudrun
Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were the children of German parents who
had lived through World War II.

While their parents' generation harboured guilt or anguish over
Germany's Nazi past, Aust's generation was primed to resist even the
faintest hint of fascism or the misuse of state power.

As a youth movement protesting against the war in Vietnam gathered
momentum, those on the far Left incited a more radical resistance
movement, and the Red Army Faction was born, an organisation
described as a forerunner of international modern terrorism.

Aust first met Meinhof, who committed suicide in her jail cell in
1976, when both worked at the left-wing journal konkret during the
1960s. Aust said it was clear to him that the future resistance
leader was prone to radicalism.

"She was a very impressive person: good-looking, intelligent," he
said. "But she saw everything through political eyes, and she was a
depressive."

Aust believes Meinhof did not plan to fall in with the Red Army
Faction, which used arson, kidnap and murder to attempt to achieve
its radical political aims.

"I think it was not a plan; I think she was desperate," Aust said.
"She was desperate about her personal life, she was despondent about
her own influence as a journalist, she thought writing was not enough
to promote revolution and political change."

Aust, who edited German news magazine Der Spiegel for 14 years, had
60m worth of files lining his apartment during the writing of The
Baader-Meinhof Complex.

He said that probing the psychological make-up of the Red Army
Faction ringleaders was one of the most absorbing parts of writing the book.

"What I have learned about terrorism through writing my books is that
the real reasons why people are attracted to extreme movements are
beyond what they claim as being their political goals," Aust said.

Latin America Is For Lefties

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201115.html

By Marie Arana
Sunday, May 24, 2009

GRINGO
A Coming of Age in Latin America
By Chesa Boudin
Scribner. 224 pp. $25

For too long, Latin America has been a proving ground for U.S.
political passions. The right aspires to dominate it. The left sees
it as a means to justify ideological ends. When we're not ignoring it
altogether, we stage CIA coups there or sport Che T-shirts at
anti-free-market rallies. It hardly exists but for our points of view.

This is not a new phenomenon. Since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823,
we've made it clear that the United States would not tolerate outside
interference in Latin America. Teddy Roosevelt's "Big Stick"
corollary 81 years later upped the ante: It insisted on our
government's ability to intervene militarily if we perceived flagrant
wrongdoing by any Latin American nation. "América para los
americanos," as Latin Americans like to put it. The Americas -- for
North Americans. Even Simón Bolívar, back in Jefferson's day,
predicted that it was only a matter of time before the United States
assumed a hemispheric droit du seigneur that would plague his lands
in the name of liberty.

For those on the right, that license has meant coups, assassinations,
toxic crop sprayers. For U.S. business, it has meant a rich lode of
natural resources. For those on the left, Latin America is the slate
on which our every capitalist greed is written, the perfect thumping
board for angry radicals. If you are angry enough, you shoulder your
backpack and head south, fall in love with a terrorist guerrilla,
join the Weather Underground and bomb the Pentagon or the U.S.
Capitol, rob armored cars. Radicals of a more bookish bent pore over
Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America," a classic of the
extreme left, published in 1971 and delivered from Hugo Chavez's
hands into President Obama's just this past April.

In truth, anyone deeply interested in hemispheric affairs will have
read that book years ago. As incandescent as Galeano's anger can be,
as passionate as his prose, as revelatory as his account of 500 years
of foreign pillage and Latin American servitude, "Open Veins" is a
40-year-old call to arms.

Like Chavez's gift, the radical left seems to be caught in a time
warp. In few books is this more evident than Chesa Boudin's
mind-numbing rant, "Gringo." There is nothing passionate,
incandescent or even remotely revelatory here. Although Boudin has an
impressive pedigree as a member of the left (he's the son of Kathy
Boudin and David Gilbert, leaders of the notorious Weather
Underground) and has spent the past decade witnessing the myriad
injustices of Latin America, his book reveals a remarkable lack of
sophistication, both as an argument against free-market imperialism
and as a work of travel journalism.

He calls his book "Gringo" because, while traveling in Latin America,
the word "became a second name." And yet, for all the term's
awkwardness, it represents an otherness that wins him friends and
gets him out of scrapes with the authorities. Whether it's landing a
job translating for Hugo Chavez or dodging trouble in a remote
backwater, he eventually comes to value his "gringo wild card" and
embraces it for the protection it represents.

This is no traveler in need of protection. Despite his publisher's
claims that Boudin's book "echoes the sense of adventure of Che
Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries" and the political passion of Galeano's
"Memory of Fire," nothing too dangerous ever happens here. "Gringo"
is a workmanlike account of 10 trips to various Latin American
countries taken by a pleasant enough young man who knows what he
thinks before he sets foot out the door.

It begins when he's fresh out of high school. He leaves the "mom and
dad" -- prominent radical theorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers
-- who raised him while his own parents were in jail, and heads for
Guatemala, intent on going native. He rides the ramshackle buses of
Petén, along with the chickens. He endures a diet of endless
tortillas. He sleeps in a humble shack. He sees the Guatemalan jungle
being razed bit by bit by a heartless world. "Clearing the land like
this might help Guatemala export more beef to raise foreign currency
to service its debts," he writes, in a typically uninspired passage,
"but it also meant the destruction of ancient tropical forest."

We labor through this woefully un-Galeano-ish prose as Boudin makes
his way to Santiago. Enrolling as a student in the University of
Chile, he turns up his nose at luxury apartments he can well afford,
refusing to live like the gringos who "isolate themselves from the
ugly reality of poverty and inequality, and a neocolonial legacy."
Instead, he finds himself a room the size of a large walk-in closet,
where for $50 a month "rent was low enough for me to feel like I was
living in solidarity with the working class."

And so it goes. In Buenos Aires, it's the evil hand of
"neoliberalism" -- the rule of the free market -- that keeps the
lower classes in bondage. In Manaus, he beds a young mother of three,
sharing two rooms with more than a dozen of her relatives -- all
women and children. In Colombia, he travels down the Cacarica River
to visit the displaced people of the Chocó. In Ecuador, he whiles
away days with the drunken boys of the disappearing Cofán tribe. In
Bolivia, he descends the toxic tin mines of Potosí and befriends an
old miner who speaks like a sociology professor. But the real drama
for Chesa Boudin, the reader always suspects, is back in the United
States, where the fiery legacy of his parents was forged long ago.

The anti-establishment passions of the Weather Underground that
culminated in armed robbery and landed his parents in prison in
Attica inform every page of this book. No event happens, no person
moves through, without an accompanying polemic against the CIA, the
IMF or the greedy neoliberalists who are inflicting damage on Latin
America's poor. Granted, a reasoned account of the crippling effects
of U.S.-backed coups or the World Bank's inability to address the
urgent problems of poverty would be welcome -- even timely and
necessary. But Boudin's scattershot approach employs nothing like reason.

Eventually, Boudin admits, the American left is the real destination
of his journey. "I came to see Latin America," he writes, "as a prism
through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical
left in the United States, and the role my country plays in a global society."

So, there we have it. Though we await desperately needed insights
into the promise that has always been Latin America, we get the shaky
road map of a callow young man.
--

Marie Arana is a former editor of Book World. Currently a Kluge
Scholar at the Library of Congress, she is at work on a biography of
Simón Bolívar. She can be reached at aranam@washpost.com.

Beal pleads guilty to marijuana charge

[4 articles]

Longtime marijuana advocate and veteran of Yippies pleads guilty to
Ill. pot charge

http://www.wqad.com/news/sns-ap-il--yippiearrested,0,478443.story

By Associated Press
May 20, 2009

CHARLESTON, Ill. (AP) A longtime advocate for marijuana
legalization and veteran of the countercultural Yippies has pleaded
guilty to misdemeanor marijuana possession in eastern Illinois.

Sixty-two-year-old Irvin Dale "Dana" Beal of New York City was
ordered to pay $1,300 in fines after pleading guilty Monday in
Charleston. Obstruction of justice charges were dropped.

Beal was arrested in Mattoon in June 2008 after an argument at a
Steak N' Shake restaurant. Police say Beal was carrying more than
$150,000 in cash. Federal authorities are trying to force him to
forfeit the money.

Beal has long advocated marijuana legalization for medical use. In
the 1960s, he was a well-known member of the Yippies, or Youth
International Party.

--------

Marijuana advocate pleads guilty to Ill. charge

http://www.wrex.com/Global/story.asp?S=10396581

May 20, 2009

CHARLESTON, Ill. (AP) - A longtime advocate for marijuana
legalization and veteran of the countercultural Yippies has pleaded
guilty to misdemeanor marijuana possession in eastern Illinois.

Sixty-2-year-old Irvin Dale "Dana" Beal of New York City was ordered
to pay $1,300 in fines after pleading guilty Monday in Charleston.
Obstruction of justice charges were dropped.

Beal has long advocated marijuana legalization for medical use. In
the 1960s, he was a well-known member of the Yippies, or Youth
International Party.

--------

Beal pleads guilty to marijuana charge

By DAVE FOPAY, Staff Writer
dfopay@jg-tc.com
May 19, 2009

http://www.jg-tc.com/articles/2009/05/20/news/doc4a12e5ee82b22679588197.txt

CHARLESTON A man who has reportedly been a longtime advocate for
the legalization of marijuana pleaded guilty to a Coles County drug
charge, which the prosecutor said he approved because federal
authorities are seeking forfeiture of money involved.

Irvin Dale Beal, 62, of New York was allegedly trying to hide bags of
money totaling about $150,000 when he was arrested in Mattoon on June
3 of last year.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge and
felony obstructing justice charges were dismissed. In accepting a
plea agreement, Circuit Judge Teresa Righter ordered Beal to pay
fines totalling $1,300.

National news reports have said Beal is also a veteran of the Youth
International Party, whose members are commonly known as Yippies, a
1960s-era hippie political movement.

Assistant State's Attorney Mick McAvoy said federal authorities
seized the money and have a pending forfeiture case against Beal, and
that case is why he was willing to let Beal plead guilty to the
lesser charge. Beal's trial had been scheduled to begin Tuesday
before the agreement was reached, and Charleston attorney Ron Tulin
represented him in the case.

A co-defendant, Jesse J. Balcom, 31, of Silver Spring, Md., pleaded
guilty under an identical agreement in December.

The two men were arrested after police responded to a report of two
women fighting at the Steak N' Shake restaurant at 1400 Broadway
Avenue East in Mattoon. According to evidence in the case, bystanders
asked officers to question a man later identified as Beal because
they saw him remove two bags from a van and hide them under a nearby car.

The two women involved in the fight were traveling with Beal and
Balcom and they gave differing stories of their reason for being in
Mattoon, according to case documents. Balcom said they were traveling
from New York City to New Mexico, and one of the women said they were
going to Kansas City, but Beal refused to make a statement.

Beal and Balcom were originally charged with the obstructing justice
offenses because they allegedly hid the bags of money from police,
interfering with the officers' investigation. Each man could have
received a prison term of one to three years had he been convicted of
that offense.

Police also said at the time that there was some suspicion of money
laundering, but the two men were never charged with that offense.

A national news report from the time of the arrest said A.J.
Weberman, also involved with the Yippie movement, said Beal told
friends he was traveling with the cash because he intended to finance
an addiction clinic. Beal reportedly advocated the legal use of
marijuana for medical purposes.
--

Contact Dave Fopay at dfopay@jg-tc.com or 238-6858.

--------

Dana Beal Pays Fine

http://www.celebstoner.com/200905222289/news/drug-bust-news/yippie-beal-pays-fine.html

Friday, 22 May 2009

Pot activist Dana Beal pled guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana
possession charge and paid a $1,300 fine in Illinois on May 20. The
court dropped a felony obstructing justice charge, but refused to
return $150,000 confiscated from the Yippie last June.

Beal, who is based in New York, was busted in Mattoon, Illinois on
June 3, 2008 after an argument broke out among his friends who were
eating in the Steak N' Shake restaurant. Beal had a small quantity of
marijuana and a large quantity of cash.

The Feds took the money and ran; they're refusing to return it.

Beal's organization Cures Not Wars runs the Worldwide Marijuana
March, which took place earlier this month. He's among the original
members of the Youth International Party (YIPPIE) founded in 1967 by
Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner and several others. Beal
operates the Yipppie Cafe at 9 Bleecker St. in New York.

Abbey Road on the River fest brings Beatlemania back again

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009905240384

By Martha Elson • melson@courier-journal.com
May 24, 2009

Beatles fans of all ages lined up to get "tickets to ride" at
yesterday's courier-journal.com Abbey Road on the River festival at
the Belvedere, a celebration of all-things-Beatles and then some.

Bands were pumping out Beatles songs on several stages, including the
mop-topped, dress-alike Beatrips from Kyoto, Japan -- delighting
Melissa Conn, 39, of Middletown with her favorite Beatles song, "Help!"

She may have had the youngest Beatles fan at the event, her
2-month-old son Ashton, who reacted to the music by falling asleep.
But asked if he was a Beatles fan, she said, "Oh, absolutely."

At the Fountain Stage next to the fountain area, the Cryers -- who
looked nothing like the Beatles -- got the crowd dancing with
"Paperback Writer."

Next to the stage was an area with Beatles photos for sale, including
one titled "The Beatles Boarding a Plane," which was marked down from
$3,200 to $2,500 for the show.

Lynda and Jamie Pearl of Fairdale, who were both wearing Beatles
T-shirts, have been coming to the festival since it moved to
Louisville from Cleveland in 2005.

"We know we're always going to have a good time," said Lynda Pearl,
who said they were pushing 50 "really hard. As for her favorite
Beatles period, "I personally like the early Beatles stuff," she said.

Billed as "the World's Largest Beatles-Inspired Music Festival," the
event also featured booths selling lemonade, frozen custard, fries,
shrimp, veggie gyros, "All you Need is Love" T-shirts and other
Beatles memorabilia.

A copper-colored "Abbey Roadster" PT Cruiser car bore the lines from
"The End," on Abbey Road: "And in the end, the love you take is equal
to the love you make."

David Steele, 11, of Bardstown, was wearing an Abbey Road album
T-shirt and a Beatles cap with Beatles buttons on it. He said his two
brothers, who are almost 10 years older than he is, often played
Beatles music, and, "I just really got into it."

"I've been hearing it all my life."

The festival continues today and tomorrow, in the Galt House area.
The lineup includes the Yellow Submorons at noon today and the Blue
Meanies at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow.
--

Reporter Martha Elson can be reached at (502) 582-7061.

R.I.P. Altamont Raceway

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/25/SPK317QG7N.DTL

David White, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, May 25, 2009

Altamont Speedway has died its thousandth death, and no one bothered
to show up for the funeral.

It was too sun-baked by day for auto racers in their fireproofed
suits, too wind-blasted by night for fans in their layered hoodies,
and too noisy on weekends for a few lawyered-up neighbors.

With no proper sendoff, the half-mile track, perched on the back side
of Altamont pass, shut down some time after the 2008 season ended in
October. The last oval, asphalt track in the Bay Area is closed for
the sixth time in its 43 years, and many think this could be the once
and for all of it.

"It's the curse of Altamont," said former track promoter Kenny
Shepherd. "I wouldn't call it a surprise. It's more a shame."

A shame, Shepherd said, because Altamont Speedway sits in the dark
and cold on Memorial Day weekend. This is the most celebrated holiday
of the racing calendar, from the Indy 500 to the little big shows at
small tracks across America.

Aside from the wandering horses and wild squirrels, all that raced
within Altamont's property lines Saturday was loose foxtails and
tumbleweed in the 30-mile per hour gusts.

Its current owners hope to get a new use permit and restart the
track, possibly by next season. Anyone who knows anything about its
long history of false starts and colossal failures share the same
plea: Let the dead be.

"I don't think anyone can make this place work," said Ken Clapp, a
NASCAR senior consultant who oversaw its western operations for 25
years. "It has always been a nightmare."

Alternate tracks

Doff Cooksey Jr. has a goatee hanging off his chin, tobacco chew
sticking in his teeth and a mean streak flying out of his 21-year-old mouth.

He towed his late-model Chevy from Brentwood to Stockton 99 Speedway
on Saturday fixing to break even with a $1,500 winner's check.
Fifteen hours later, all he had to show for an eighth-place finish
was a $350 payday and $500 in damages after 150 laps of paint-exchange racing.

The sides are scraped. The front end is busted. And now, he's got to
load up the bent mobile for a midnight run back to Brentwood, almost
an hour away if his trailer catches the green lights on crooked Highway 4.

"I'm glad to have a good place to race, but I'd rather be at
Altamont," Cooksey said. "I love racing to death but I can't be
traveling every weekend, not in this economy."

Altamont Speedway was his hometrack, just 20 minutes from his house.
Cooksey started racing there as a 13-year-old. At age 20, he finished
second out of 25 regular drivers in last year's late-model standings.
Every race is a haul now. Altamont It was the last Bay Area track
left on the oval asphalt circuit. San Jose Speedway died in 1977.
Oakland Speedway went away in 1954.

All that's left locally are dirt tracks in Antioch, Calistoga and
Petaluma. Infineon Raceway has a drag-race program and brings in the
NASCAR Sprint Cup series for a road race once a year.

But, for those interested in NASCAR's signature style of racing -
left turns on asphalt - the closest options are in Stockton,
Roseville and Madera.

Only five of Altamont's 25 late-model drivers are known to still be
racing on a regular basis. If Altamont is dead indeed, it's taking a
crop of Bay Area race teams with it.

"There's just nothing left for us in the Bay," said Doff Cooksey Sr.,
who runs a helicopter spraying business. "I can't be doing this all
the time like I used to. We work seasonally seven days a week. I
gotta get up for work at 4:30 Sunday morning."

The Cooksey family thinks re-opening Altamont would save NASCAR
racing in Northern California. Those who tried to run the track wonder why.

'Trying to figure it out'

Kenny Shepherd thought he would make things different when he was
named track president and general manager in 2006. They all do when
they buy into Altamont Speedway.

"When I got up there, some of the older guys told me to stay away,
it's cursed," Shepherd said. "I knew going in it was a nightmare. and
the odds were so big against us. I spent a lot of time trying to
figure it out."

The track itself is considered fantastic. The surface is as fast as
the straightaways are long. Smaller tracks are like bullrings, where
the winners are those who best avoid the pileups. Altamont runs more
like a sprint to the finish with elbow room.

Too bad everything else makes it such a miserable place.

No one seems to know why, but the original owner built the track in
the howling center of the Altamont Pass wind corridor. The later it
gets, the stiffer the breeze and colder the night.

"They put them windmills on those hills for a reason," current track
president Jeff Macey said.

The restrooms were rank no matter how hard the cleaning crew
scrubbed. The water in the local well had too much sulfur, giving it
the aroma of rotten eggs.

"I've never seen anything like it," Ken Clapp said. He's run some
4,150 single-day shows at 18 race tracks. He was Altamont's promoter
for a brief time in 1973.

"It was always something. Grass fires, traffic jams, power failures
were imminent. The losses were huge. For every home run, there were
99 failures. I can easily count $12 million that's been lost there
and I think it's probably a bigger number than that."

Yet, new owners keep diving in, convinced they can be the ones to
turn the track around. The track has burned through nine ownership
groups in all. The original owner sold it after three years.

The next in line rented the place out for the "Woodstock of the West"
concert featuring the Rolling Stone in December 1969. A crowd of
300,000 trashed the place beyond use. A teenager was stabbed to death
by a Hells Angels security guard. Racing did not return for three years.

"You talk to all the operators and it's the same thing," Shepherd
said. "It's a piece of Bay Area property. How can I lose on it?
Somehow, someway, they all end up losing."

Current co-owner Mel Andrews wonders why he never got the message.

Millions lost

Andrews is a Southern Californian who invests money for a living and
races vintage cars as a hobby.

He wanted to get into track ownership. In 2006, he bought into
Altamont as a lead investor in Lakeside Motorsports-Altamont, LLC.
He's been losing money ever since, more than he cares to disclose.

"I probably was not aware of the history that it had," Andrews said.
"The people that were the lead in running this either weren't aware
of it or they weren't as forthright as I would wish they'd be." I
kept putting more money into it, so I became a much bigger investor
than I had ever dreamed.

"Given what I know now about its history, I would not have gotten involved."

Truth is, no one could have seen what was around the turn.

The group spent $1.8 million in upgrades to a track that was dormant
from 2002-05. It operated under a conditional user permit from
Alameda County, but it expired in 2006.

The renewal process took on a death of its own.

A new neighbor brought complaints and land-use lawsuits against the
track because of the weekly noise. The state Department of Fish and
Game held up the track's environmental impact report because the
proposed project - adding a sign, awning and caretakers' house -
could endanger the San Joaquin kit fox and California tiger salamander.

The county allowed the track to operate last year with restrictions.
Races could only run during the day and had to end before nightfall.
Current track president Jeff Macey said those rules "strangled" them.

"It's hard enough to get people out there to start with," Macey said.
"Then to get them to come there in the heat of the day? That really
hurt our fan base."

With the restrictions the county put on us, there was absolutely no
way we could be functional as far as making a profit."

That's why the track is closed today. Big events always drew big
crowds at Altamont, especially on Memorial Day weekend, but they were
never enough to outweigh the weekly overhead of a full season.

"As much as it seems a shame to have it sit there empty," Andrews
said, "it's better than having to write a check every month to cover
the losses."

Racing teams impacted

Jeff Macey has been in auto racing for 35 years as a mechanic,
driver, builder, owner and track manager. He remains president and
general manager of Altamont Speedway, but he couldn't just sit and
wait to see if racing comes back.

So, he took the job of competition director at All-American Speedway
in Roseville, where he oversees large car fields and even larger
crowds just outside Sacramento.

Macey is using the same formula he had at Altamont: take care of the
drivers, bring in big events, and make it affordable for the fans. It
turns out, the formula works just fine.

"It must be working because the grandstands are packed and we've got
great car counts," Macey said. "Altamont always had its own set of
problems. What has there been, how many owners? That tells you it's
never been totally successful. If it had been, someone would have
kept it for a long time."

Shepherd, too, is enjoying post-Altamont success. He took over a
closed-down Madera Speedway in 2007 and brought it back to life. This
year, he has Chowchilla Speedway back in operation.

"The same business model I'm using here just did not work at
Altamont," Shepherd said. "No matter what you do, you can't get
crowds out there."

Perhaps they can draw fans some of the time, and maybe that's how
asphalt racing can return to the Bay Area.

One idea Andrews has is to re-open the track on a part-time basis
with perhaps one big race per month. That, or sell the place to
someone who wants a personal track to play in.

For now, he's focused on getting through the permit process with the
county while pushing forward plans to build a road course and
motorcycle park in Tracy.

Shepherd thinks he has the best idea of all, if only it were possible.

"If we could move Altamont race track, pick it up and slide it down
the mountain in either direction, it would be an absolute home run,"
Shepherd said. "Even if you take away the political and neighbor
pressure out of the equation, I still don't think it makes it
financially because of where it sits.

"That's just a tough place to be."
--

E-mail David White at dwhite@sfchronicle.com.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Taking Aim at AIM

[2 items]

Burying Some Questions at Wounded Knee

http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2009/05/burying_some_questions_at_wounded_knee_1.html

By Michael Getler
May 20, 2009

An ambitious and, I thought, powerful and illuminating five-part
series on the relentlessly tragic yet often stirring history of the
American Indian unfolded on PBS stations for 90 minutes on
consecutive Monday evenings from April 13 through May 11.

This unusual documentary combining re-enactments with archival
photos and films, and loaded with mostly Native American historians
and talking heads, and a narrator who carried the theme of valiant
yet ultimately fruitless resistance to the encroachment of the white
man took viewers from the time in 1621 when the Native Americans
first encountered the Pilgrims who came aboard the Mayflower to the
still-controversial siege at the historic village of Wounded Knee on
the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, in 1973.

The mini-series, titled "We Shall Remain," is part of the broader
"American Experience" documentary series produced by WGBH in Boston.
In promoting the films, PBS described the series as one that focuses
on pivotal, historic moments "from the Native American perspective"
spanning more than 300 years of American history. It "shows how
Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and
fought the extinction of their culture" and it represents "an
unprecedented collaboration between Native and non-Native filmmakers
and involves Native advisors and scholars at all levels of the project."

Scholarship and Criticism

That invocation of scholarship has become an issue for me because a
group calling itself "The Wounded Knee Victims and Veterans
Association" has issued a lengthy and detailed challenge to numerous
aspects of the final 90-minute episode that aired last week.

The letter, dated May 10, containing that challenge is signed by nine
people, seven of them Native Americans. But the lead writers are the
now retired former FBI special agent in charge during the 1973
episode, Joseph H. Trimbach, and his son, John M. Trimbach. The
father and son have also co-authored a book, "American Indian Mafia,"
which offers a sharply different and critical view of events at
Wounded Knee and especially of the activities of the American Indian
Movement (AIM) members who took over and occupied the village and
confronted Federal agents during the 71-day siege. The title of the
book mocks the name of the AIM.

The letter from the Trimbachs and their colleagues was addressed to
PBS President and Chief Executive Officer Paula Kerger, and it is a
detailed, non-stop, frontal attack on the program. Here's the first paragraph:

"We wish to express our concerns about the PBS-backed production of
'Wounded Knee,' the final installment of the 'American Experience
We Shall Remain' series. We believe that the producer, Stanley Nelson
of Firelight Media, violates PBS's own guidelines for editorial
integrity, honesty, and fairness. PBS guidelines state: 'When
editing, producers of informational content must not sensationalize
events or create a misleading or unfair version of what actually
occurred' and that '(p)roducers must assure that edited material
remains faithful in tone . . .' and is presented '. . . in a manner
that fairly portrays reality.' Wounded Knee fails on all counts. This
production employs distorted editing, deceptive statements, audience
manipulation, and a propagandistic narrative that rationalizes the
terror, violence, and murders perpetrated by members of the American
Indian Movement (AIM) during the 1973 occupation of the historic
Indian village of Wounded Knee."

The letter (which is printed at the end of this column) goes on for
six full pages, with challenges to several specific statements and
scenes in the segment. I'll come back to the body of that letter, but
on May 15, Kerger wrote to John Trimbach and included a response from
Mark Samels, the executive producer of American Experience,
"describing the steps the producers took to help ensure the integrity
of the referenced program."

Here's How Samels Responded:

"The film 'Wounded Knee' was reviewed at various stages in its
production, from script treatment to final cut, by a group of
prominent scholars of Native American history, who served as advisors
to We Shall Remain, the ground-breaking series on Native history of
which 'Wounded Knee' is a part. In addition, 'Wounded Knee' was
reviewed by several program advisors who are expert in this
particular chapter of Native history.

"Our film was not intended to be a comprehensive history of either
the American Indian Movement or the village of Wounded Knee. Instead,
it was designed to focus on what happened at Wounded Knee during the
1973 occupation, and what role the siege played in the larger story
of Native Americans in the 20th century. We were particularly
concerned with the events preceding the siege that contributed to a
sense of dislocation and desperation in many Native communities
across the country.Â And we were interested in what effect the
occupation, and its widespread media coverage, had on Indians far
removed from Wounded Knee.

"We believe there is ample evidence in the film of AIM's
controversial use of armed confrontation and violence, from the
preceding events in nearby Custer where AIM members attacked and
laid waste to the courthouse to the sacking of a family-owned store
in Wounded Knee. Archival footage featured in the film clearly shows
devastation in the village during the siege, as Mayor Dick Wilson
characterizes AIM members as 'hoodlums' and 'clowns.' As one of the
interviewees states in the film, 'Where AIM goes, chaos often follows.'

"Our producers took great pains to be even-handed in the portrayal of
the siege at Wounded Knee. This is a difficult piece of American
history and we believe our film presents it with the care and
complexity it deserves."

My Thoughts

First, a logistical note. The critique presented by the Trimbachs and
their co-signers is, as I said earlier, very long. As far as I know,
no one else has written about this other than a news story on
rapidcityjournal.com on May 13 reporting on the Victims and Veterans
Association's accusation that PBS had slanted the telling of the
Wounded Knee story to glorify AIM and disregard the real victims of
Wounded Knee, the villagers who lived there. The story did not post
the letter online. Trimbach wrote and asked that it be posted on my
site and I have done that for those who wish to pursue this in greater detail.

My reaction as a lay viewer to the series, including the final
segment, was one of feeling grateful for the production. The history
of Native Americans in this country is so extraordinary, so important
to understanding who we are and how we got here, so revealing of
diversity among tribes, of suffering by all of them, and of the
emergence of extraordinary natural leaders from within that suffering
population, that all serious reminders of this story should be
welcomed. And this was a serious production.

The reviews I read about the series in The New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, Boston Globe and The Washington Post were all
generally positive and did not focus or mention the kind of challenge
to the history of Wounded Knee that is contained in the protest
letter. As I checked various impartial online reference sources about
the siege that began on Feb. 27, 1973 and ended on May 8, including,
for example, a lengthy report by former Sen. James G. Abourezk there
was also little mention of, or material to resolve, the kind of
challenges raised by the Trimbachs and their co-signers.

On the other hand, there is no question but that there were, and are,
continuing disputes about exactly what happened inside Wounded Knee
during that period. There were deep divisions, pitting AIM and some
of its generally impoverished tribal allies against other Indians of
mixed-blood, like the authorities within the reservation who were
reviled and portrayed as corrupt by AIM and many more traditional
Indians. AIM was a militant, activist group with a long string of
protests and demonstrations, some of which had turned violent, that
had grabbed public attention. They sought to take advantage of the
growing civil rights movement in the country at that time. And, as
dramatic as the siege of Wounded Knee was, and for all the press
coverage it attracted, the Nixon administration that would try to
deal with the armed stand-off was also distracted by something else
that was unfolding at the same time Watergate.

The confrontation at Wounded Knee in 1973 which had also been the
scene of a historic massacre of Indians in 1890 was dramatic and
confusing. Some of the history and events will undoubtedly always be
disputed. In the end, it looked like a defeat for AIM and its
supporters among the local Oglala Sioux. But the episode remains one
of those formative events that focused the attention of a nation that
traditionally looks forward on something that happened in its past
that hasn't quite been fixed.

Provide a More Detailed Response

As a viewer, the film left no doubt with me that it was indeed
recorded from a Native American perspective. Yet I think Samels'
response, although brief, is correct in that the violent and radical
actions of AIM were at least there to be seen in the film. In
Trimbach's assessment, however, and that of his co-signers, although
seemingly a minority view, the role of AIM and others particularly
the government forces, the local authorities, and the "victims"
inside the village who lost everything because of the take-over and
siege was inaccurately presented and unfairly represented.

In my research, I did find some support for that view in two
relatively recent articles by Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota Indian and
founder of the Native American Journalists Association.

In his response, Samels mentions twice that the series was reviewed
by "a group of prominent scholars of Native American history" and by
"several program advisors who are expert in this particular chapter
of Native history." Having said that, it seems to me that PBS ought
to present Trimbach's complaints to these scholars or, even better, a
small group of scholars not connected to the program, for some kind
of more detailed reply. This might take a while but it seems worth
it, especially since there are a lot of teaching materials associated
with the series.

Samels is also almost certainly correct that this film "was not
intended to be a comprehensive history of either the American Indian
Movement or the village of Wounded Knee." Nevertheless, this is PBS,
where people, and students, look for authenticity, and the segment on
Wounded Knee is likely to be at the forefront of material on the
subject for a long time. So going back and taking a second look at
these challenges, responding more fully, and making changes, at least
online, if warranted, seems worthwhile to me.

Here Is the Protest Letter:

"This film attempts to explain away the destruction of the village by
invoking historical issues (broken treaties, Indian boarding schools,
government-sponsored relocation, etc.) and by rationalizing the
criminality of the perpetrators. One of the film's worst
transgressions is its contemptible disregard for the real victims of
Wounded Knee, the villagers who lived there. Aside from a brief
statement from one of the Indian hostages, Agnes Gildersleeve, the
villagers' stories are virtually absent from this film. 'Wounded
Knee' does not even show how AIM systematically tore the village
apart and reduced it to complete devastation. The film does not
mention that AIM looted the town, stole people's personal
possessions, slaughtered cattle in their bedrooms, fire-bombed their
homes and vehicles, and desecrated their churches. AIM occupiers
stole or destroyed a collection of priceless Indian artifacts when
they pillaged the Wounded Knee museum. Rather than condemn AIM
violence, 'Wounded Knee' serves as a mouthpiece for the perpetrators
who spew their distortions and lies without challenge. To glorify AIM
in this way is not only deceitful, it is offensive. This film
cheapens genuine Indian valor and heroism.

"For a documentary that purports to be about the armed takeover of a
community and its consequences, these are serious shortcomings that
demand a response. From a philosophical point of view, the argument
that the terror, violence, theft, and loss of life associated with
the razing of an Indian village were somehow justified is an argument
that is fundamentally flawed and must be exposed.

"Producer Nelson went to great lengths to tell only the perpetrators'
side of the story. He misled interviewees, such as Wounded Knee
resident Walter Littlemoon, about what would be in the film. Nelson
reneged on his agreement to interview Wounded Knee veteran Richard
Two Elk, a condition agreed to in exchange for Joe Trimbach's
participation. Nelson used Trimbach's interview anyway. Nelson or his
surrogates omitted American Indian Mafia from the PBS bibliography.
This book, which is supported by thorough documentation, is arguably
the most complete and factual account of Wounded Knee's destruction.
After Joe Trimbach registered a complaint with your legal department,
Mafia was added to the PBS list. One wonders if Mafia was initially
excluded simply because it exposes several of the books in the same
list as falsified and fraudulent accounts of AIM history and of
Wounded Knee. Nelson relies on these falsified books to support his
distorted version of what happened in the village. To reference only
the falsified accounts is inexcusable. To use this tainted
information to construct leading questions for the PBS-endorsed
school curriculum is equally scandalous and must also be exposed.
There is not one question, for example, that asks how the villagers
lost everything they owned.

"We believe that Nelson's failure to interview Two Elk was partly due
to the fact that he witnessed the Wounded Knee murder of Perry Ray
Robinson, a topic Nelson shows no interest in pursuing. Robinson, the
only black man seen inside the village during that period, was a
civil rights activist and a colleague of Martin Luther King. Robinson
was shot by an AIM leader during a heated argument. His death and
burial near the village ruins is one of many AIM secrets that
Nelson's production has now helped cover up. A letter from Robinson's
widow, Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, is attached.

"Another example of deception is the conspicuous absence of any
footage showing Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a prominent and highly
visible AIM member at Wounded Knee. Aquash was murdered by AIM
leaders in 1975 because they mistakenly believed that she was an FBI
informant. Ironically, Wounded Knee warrior Madonna Thunder Hawk,
featured throughout the film, is also implicated in Aquash's murder
and its subsequent cover-up. Carter Camp, another featured AIM
leader, has been repeatedly caught in a lie about knowing Ray
Robinson. Today, Camp denies ever meeting him. On camera, Camp has
nothing to say about Anna Mae either. In fact, most of the AIM
leaders interviewed for this film have been implicated in the Aquash
and Robinson murders. Anna Mae likely knew about the Robinson
shooting and her leaders' attempts to keep his death a secret, and
now it appears Nelson has joined the effort to write her out of
existence as well. AIM leaders must surely approve.

"Attached are specific examples of the distortions and outright
falsehoods in this film. We believe these examples prove that
'Wounded Knee' falls well outside what might be allowable under
artistic license or interpretation of historical events. Instead of
documenting Indian history, this film denigrates genuine Indian
sacrifice and makes a mockery of true Indian heroism shown in
previous segments. We intend to pursue every means available to
expose this film for its dishonesty, its revisionist agenda, and its
abject failure to tell a fact-based and fair-minded story of Wounded
Knee. This production abuses the public trust by recycling and
legitimizing what can only be described as vintage AIM propaganda. A
PBS-sanctioned curriculum that indoctrinates our children must also
be challenged. We therefore demand redress. We want equal time for
rebuttal, balance, and clarification. The American public deserves
better from our publicly-funded programming. We ask for your
immediate response to our concerns.

The Signers

JoAnn Gildersleeve Feraca (Chippewa)
daughter of Agnes and Clive Gildersleeve,
Wounded Knee Trading Post

Romona and Saunie Wilson (Lakota)
daughters of Tribal Chairman Richard Wilson

Richard Two Elk (Lakota)
Wounded Knee Veteran and former member,
American Indian Movement

Joseph H. Trimbach
FBI Special Agent in Charge (Retired)

Professor Patrick LeBeau,
(Cheyenne River Sioux, Chippewa)
Professor of Indian Studies,
Michigan State University

Paul DeMain (Oneida-Ojibwe),
Editor, News from Indian Country

Shawn White Wolf (Northern Cheyenne)
CEO, White Wolf Media Group

John M. Trimbach
Co-author, American Indian Mafia

The Letter Continues with 'Examples of Distortions and Falsehoods'

'Distortions'

"'Wounded Knee' constantly cites historical events of the 1800s, the
boarding schools of the 1900s, and the government-sponsored Indian
relocation plans as a means of rationalizing the terror and violence
visited upon Wounded Knee, a village where most of the residents were
Indians. Destroying the village had nothing to do with what AIM's
Russell Means called 'dignity and self-pride' and must not be used to
glorify AIM leaders.

"Film narrative: 'For the next 71 days, Indian protestors at Wounded
Knee would hold off the federal government at gun-point.' This
statement misreports the facts: government roadblocks were set up to
contain the violence and minimize casualties, not to engage the
militants in gunfights. This false allegation plays right into the
perpetrators' hands and is characteristic of the falsehoods that AIM
leaders have so often hoodwinked the media into reporting. It would
be more correct to say that Federal Agents and Marshals, in the face
of almost nightly, unprovoked gun fire from the militants, tried to
protect surrounding villages and towns from violent attacks that
could easily have spread across the reservation.

"The film shows several views of Indians donning war paint but does
not mention that they were gearing up for the firefight of March 8,
1973, when several carloads of militants attacked a handful of FBI
Agents and U.S. Marshals at Roadblock 3. At the beginning stages of
this unprovoked attack, AIM gunmen armed with long-range rifles
nearly shot to death one of the FBI's first female Agents, who was
armed with only her pistol. The group's distress calls were answered
by other Agents who rushed to the scene and repelled the attack.
Featured warriors Milo Goings and Webster Poor Bear were injured when
FBI Agents returned fire. 'Wounded Knee' neglects to mention that
this incident and dozens of shooting incidents were initiated by the militants.

"The APCs: 'Wounded Knee' leaves the false impression that the
armored personnel carriers were brought in as offensive weaponry. No
one from law enforcement is shown explaining that the APCs were moved
into position at the roadblocks to protect FBI Agents and U.S.
Marshals from almost daily gunfire attacks. At night, the militants
would venture out of the village, move towards the roadblocks, and
open fire. Law enforcement personnel, showing incredible patience and
restraint, often opted to take cover rather than return fire and risk
shooting misguided militants. At times, however, there was no other
choice but to repel attacks with return fire. The APCs saved lives on
both sides of the barriers at Wounded Knee, a fact never mentioned in
the film. Another point not mentioned is that government riflemen
could have picked off dozens of militants on numerous occasions. The
two official deaths occurred in the late, desperate days of the
occupation, during the most intensive gunfights. Had it not been for
the professionalism of the FBI and the U.S. Marshal Service, the
casualties at Wounded Knee would have been much higher.

"The hostages: 'Wounded Knee' leaves the false impression that the
hostages were free to leave once Senators McGovern and Abourezk
arrived. This is akin to people breaking into your house and holding
you against your will until the authorities arrive and declare that
you are now free to leave and turn over all your worldly possessions
to the invaders. The truth is, the hostages were never really free,
and the media presence may have been the only reason they were not
further brutalized. The film fails to report Agnes Gildersleeve's
statement that she would give up her home ' . . . only over my dead
body. If you're going to burn my home, I'll go with it.' Nor does the
film report Dennis Banks's reply, 'That can be arranged.' Agnes's
only mention of her status as a hostage is relayed via her captor
Russell Means. She is not shown speaking candidly about her
predicament. This technique of having the criminal speak on behalf of
his victim is patently biased and propagandistic.

"Film narrative: 'On April 26, Wounded Knee sustained the heaviest
gunfire of the siege. When the shooting subsided, Buddy Lamont, a
thirty-one-year-old Oglala from Pine Ridge, came out to investigate.'
This glib distortion fails to report the events that preceded
Lamont's death. Lamont was shot and killed during the fiercest gun
battle of the occupation, after sustained fire from the militants was
aimed at all roadblocks following an illegal weapons and ammunition
re-supply. Lamont did not 'come out' as he was already engaged in the
firefight. Heavy firing from the village continued from the late
hours of April 26 until past noon the next day. The militants had
posted one or more snipers at the left flank after which the
supervisor on the scene authorized return fire. At 12:20 pm, the
militants refused a ceasefire offered by the U.S. Marshals. Lamont
was shot during the ensuing firefight, but it is unclear who shot
him. Reports show that Lamont was shot in the back. AIM commanders
Carter Camp and Stan Holder chose to leave Lamont's body where it lay
in a field for two hours before calling for a ceasefire. How did they
know if Lamont was even dead? None of these facts are mentioned in the film."

'Half-truths'

"FBI Agent Trimbach's statement that he immediately proceeded to the
main entrance to Wounded Knee is juxtaposed with a daytime
reenactment of two cars driving by. Trimbach actually approached
Wounded Knee at night, soon after the militants had taken over the
village. This distortion minimizes the dangers faced by Trimbach and
the handful of poorly-armed Agents left exposed at the emergency
roadblock on Big Foot Trail.

"Trimbach's explanation of what it was like to initially approach the
militants the first morning of the takeover, unarmed, is juxtaposed
with Trimbach's fourth meeting with the militants, once the media had
arrived to film it. This distortion minimizes the danger Trimbach
faced, since the militants had already fired at FBI Agents,
responding Indian firemen, and Indian policemen the night of the
takeover. Footage of the fourth encounter does not reflect the
reality of the first; it does not show the small group of angry
riflemen, all aiming their weapons at Trimbach at close range, as he
alone walked up to the barricade. The militants were much better
behaved when the cameras were rolling. 'Wounded Knee' constantly
showcases the staged, on-camera behavior of the militants to distort
the reality of what was happening.

"Film narrative: 'After stripping bare the Wounded Knee Trading Post,
the village's only store, the protesters took over a local church,
holding the minister and other white residents hostage.' In fact, the
majority of hostages were enrolled members of various tribes. The
film fails to mention that the militants later burned the Trading
Post to the ground and that the hostages were threatened and
intimidated into making complimentary statements about their captors
when the media was present and the cameras were filming. 'Wounded
Knee' completely papers over the fact that the captives were always
under duress.

"Film narrative: 'When traditional Oglalas challenged corruption in
the tribal government, Dick Wilson responded with force.' 'Wounded
Knee' repeatedly demonizes Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson with charges
of corruption and strong-arm tactics but fails to report that Wilson
initially supported AIM until they looted the BIA building in
Washington, D.C. After that incident, during which Indian land deeds
were lost and destroyed, Wilson warned Means not to bring the
violence back home. 'Wounded Knee' also fails to report that Wilson
and his family, under death threats from AIM, were placed under
protective custody on February 23, 1973, four days before the
takeover of the village. The record shows that much of the violence
that engulfed the reservation following the occupation of Wounded
Knee was in fact instigated by AIM members, not the Wilson
administration. The U.S. Justice Department investigated over 50
allegations of civil rights violations against the tribal chairman
and found evidence of possible wrongdoing in only a few cases. Some
of those incidents were likely instigated by AIM members. The film
does not mention that the Wilson administration was audited by the
accounting firm of Touche, Ross, & Company and that no serious
wrongdoing of any kind was found. Additionally, Wilson's 'Goons'
[Guardians of the Oglala Nation], much maligned in the film, were in
fact a legally sanctioned group created for the express purpose of
protecting tribal buildings from AIM violence. It is fair to say that
Wilson's Goons came into existence to oppose Russell Means's AIM goons.

"Film narrative: 'Prompted by the dissidents, the tribal council held
impeachment hearings in February, 1973. But Wilson intimidated
witnesses, strong-armed council members and managed to survive.' This
statement is read while showing a newspaper article that contradicts
this statement. The narrative also fails to mention that Russell
Means and his AIM recruits intimidated and terrorized people far more
than Wilson and his deputized 'Goons.'

"Film narrative: 'Just weeks before the occupation of Wounded Knee, a
white man killed an Indian near Custer, South Dakota, fifty miles
from Pine Ridge.' This statement leaves the impression that the
Indian was an innocent victim. In fact, the Indian involved was
beating another man to death with a tire chain outside a bar in
Buffalo Gap. The third man intervened with a pocket knife and
inadvertently nicked the assailant's aorta. This incident led to the
Custer riot. By failing to mention the details of this death, PBS
plays right into the hands of AIM propagandists."

'Falsehoods'

"Film narrative: 'Not only was Dick Wilson still firmly in charge, he
would exact revenge on his opponents as the federal government looked
the other way . . . In the three years following the siege, two FBI
Agents and more than 60 AIM supporters were killed, giving Pine Ridge
the highest per capita murder rate in the country.' Even when
juxtaposed with Dick Wilson's bravado, these statements are false and
inflammatory. The FBI investigated all murders that fell within their
jurisdiction. The myth that 60 AIM supporters were killed is nothing
but off-the-shelf AIM disinformation. This falsehood has been
repeatedly exposed as such and has been rebutted in an FBI report.
Some of the listed victims were children who died from abuse or
adults who died from exposure after intoxication. Some of the genuine
AIM victims were likely murdered by AIM members. Repeating this lie
about 60 murders is a despicable attempt to excuse AIM violence and
exonerate the guilty. Furthermore, a U.S. District Court found that
there was no evidence that the FBI failed to investigate alleged
abuses of non-AIM members. Upon examining these cases, the Court
stated that the case files did not ' . . . reveal a lack of
investigatory effort on the part of the FBI towards non-AIM members,
nor do they indicate a failure to prosecute once meaningful evidence
had been discovered . . . the evidence simply does not show that the
efforts of the government to limit criminal conduct and to bring the
perpetrators of it to justice have been discriminatorily directed at
the AIM faction.' Parroting the lie that the federal government
'looked the other way' serves no purpose other than to deceive the
viewing audience, promote disrespect for law enforcement, and further
the lies of AIM leaders.

"Film narrative: 'The Oglalas had exhausted all legal options' in
response to 'Wilson's harassment and intimidation.' This statement,
offered as fact, is specious. AIM had committed dozens of illegal
acts in the run-up to Wounded Knee. It is dishonest to suggest that
the Oglalas had tried all legal options before inviting AIM violence
onto the reservation, and it is incorrect to characterize the tension
between Russell Means and Dick Wilson as only Wilson's doing. The
statement also ignores the dozens of tribal programs initiated by
Wilson to improve living conditions on the reservation. The film
ignores the views of the vast majority of Pine Ridge residents, who
resented AIM's intimidation and violence. 'Wounded Knee' also fails
to mention that Wilson, who was largely supported by a sometimes
contentious tribal council, later defeated his opponent Russell Means
in the tribal chairman election.

"Film narrative: 'Government negotiators were uncompromising. They
rejected demands to uphold treaty rights and insisted that they were
powerless to remove Dick Wilson, regardless of the charges against
him, as he was chairman of the sovereign Indian nation.' This
statement is false and misleading because treaties require
Congressional action: government negotiators are powerless to either
uphold or reject treaty rights. Furthermore, the Oglala Sioux tribe
had a constitution which governed the rules of impeachment. It is
misleading to suggest that government representatives would not allow
Wilson to be investigated. In fact, the Wilson administration was
investigated by the U.S. Justice Department which later cleared him
of the charges alleged by AIM members and supporters.

"Film narrative: 'In the frigid winter of 1890, Chief Big Foot was
leading a group of Lakota, mainly women and children, to shelter on
the Pine Ridge Reservation. On the morning of December 29, they were
attacked by the U.S. Army on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek.' This
statement is blatantly false and misleading. On December 28, Chief
Big Foot surrendered under a white flag to Major Whitside and his
troops. Whitside elected to lead Big Foot and his people to a site
near Wounded Knee Creek. The gun battle erupted the next morning
after the Indians refused to give up their weapons. There were
casualties on both sides. There is ample factual material in the
Congressional record which tells the story of what really happened at
Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. There is no justification for inventing
details of this historic event."

--------

Taking Aim at AIM (the American Indian Movement)

http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2009/05/the_mailbag_7.html

May 22, 2009

I agree that this series was very informative. It touched on areas
that would spark interest, raise questions and bring into focus the
state of Indian Country here in America. I was an active AIM member
during the 70's and witnessed first hand how things were. It was the
leadership that first brought the truth and focus to light. And it
was the leadership that brought shame upon our people when the money
and fame went to their heads. The spirit of the American Indian
Movement was and continues to be the everyday Native American. We
truly believed in what we were doing, bringing about a positive
change and justice to right all the wrongs that our ancestors had
endured. Today, we want exactly what we wanted then. The sad truth is
that the leadership of the past has slipped into the category of
those that need to be dealt with through the justice system. Programs
like the one that PBS has aired are welcomed by the majority of us in
Indian Country. As for the detractors from this wonderful series,
they all have their own agendas, each with their own means to gain by
trying to shed a bad light on such an outstanding project. Thumbs up
from a grandmother who is teaching her grandchildren the truth about
our personal history!

M.W., Fullerton, CA

It may be understandable that recent events in the Native American's
story would evoke responses, but let's look at the entire series. It
was naturally painful and heartbreaking to watch, but long overdue
that things should be examined and recorded from their side.

In Hawaii we are similarly confronted by the story of our native
population, and only recently has what we all read in our history
books been balanced by the actual events of the overthrow of Queen
Liliuokalani, as shown on TV. I say let's continue to be brave
enough to absorb all sides of history, and PBS should be commended
for helping us to do just that.

Karin Hazelhoff, Kamuela, HI

Thank you for your words and for presenting a comprehensive story.
There will always be controversy about this issue. Most times the
truth is ignored, on both "sides" of the issue. I am Alaska Native
(Kenaitze) and married to a Crow. It is important for our histories
to be told to a broader audience and especially for our next
generations. And it is especially important to be able to relate
multi-faceted viewpoints. Somewhere in the middle is the truth. We
need to tell our own stories, in our own words, and instruct our
children in how to do that effectively. Thank you for your writing.
Please keep it up.

Eagle River, AK

Thank you for opening the door to further discussion about what went
on behind the barriers at Wounded Knee. In addition to the Robinson
murder, there are other secrets AIM leaders at Wounded Knee are
trying to hide. Our concern is that the film "Wounded Knee" has
helped them do just that. We have heard from people who were
assaulted, chained to beds and interrogated, and raped. We have been
told by people who claim to know that as many as half a dozen people
were shot to death inside the village during the last desperate days
of the occupation. We believe it is only a matter of time before
these crimes come to light. To the extent you have enabled the
conversation to continue, we appreciate your comments and welcome
your support. Perhaps some day there will be another film about
Wounded Knee that will tell a far different and much more disturbing
story than that which has now taken center stage. Until then, the
real story of Wounded Knee must take a back seat to the PBS
production and other media treatments of the village's demise.

John Trimbach, Atlanta, GA

Just watched the Wounded Knee episode for the 2nd time. Thought it
was excellent.
I could see the revisionist history from Trimbach and all coming. I
do think PBS would have been better served by presenting more of
Wilson's side by having his supporters interviewed, but I know that
opens up a whole can of worms that is not appropriate for this series.

A few observations about Trimbach's letter:

1. I believe the U.S. Government found that Dick Wilson stole the
election from Means that Trimbach mentions as proof the Lakota
supported Wilson. Convenient memory.

2. The paternalistic tone of much of Trimbach's letter, where he
dismisses the concerns of Indians nationally, and in Pine Ridge, is
laughable. It would be great if PBS could take a serious look at the
so-called "reign of terror" imposed by Wilson before Wounded Knee,
but especially after.

3. Especially with respects to the Reign of Terror, I think the film
actually is too easy on just how terrible Wilson's regime was to
people that did not agree with it.

Doug Shinkle, Denver, CO

As one who was an adult during Wounded Knee '73, it was good to see a
portrayal of the events. I was deeply moved and saddened and ashamed
how my own government has treated Native Americans. It brought tears
of sorrow and sense of deep compassion for all Native Americans who
have suffered since 1492. A follow up to what has changed or improved
since '73 is important. Thanks for including the segment of the
horror of the Indian schools and the relocation stories. New
information for many Americans. We all need to examine our conscience
how we can begin to right the thousand wrongs perpetrated on our
Native Americans.

Richard Roth, Tubac, AZ

Having just watched We Shall Remain: American Experience on Wounded
Knee I am having considerable difficulty trying to understand why no
mention whatever was made of Leonard Peltier who, I understand, still
is imprisoned in a federal penitentiary for a crime he allegedly
committed at Wounded Knee but from all that I can read he was
convicted by an all-white jury and even the FBI admits he did not
commit the crime for which he was charged. Why wasn't this obvious
miscarriage of justice not referenced in a film on Wounded Knee? This
appears to be gross neglect and another egregious injustice committed
against an innocent Native American, something I am surprised and
disappointed by from PBS.

Charles Silas, Mason, MI

I'm a California Indigenous person of Esselen decent and I would like
to compliment PBS on their series on "Native American Indians." It is
very important to us Indigenous people that the truth gets out to the
American people of the loss of our Heritage, Pride and Dignity. Also
I believe that your series also shows of how we are still fighting to
protect what we have left.

Roots Rosales, Monterey, CA

Thanks for covering this issue. I don't know about other journalists
or bloggers, but I'm covering it in my Newspaper Rock blog.

Rob Schmidt, Culver City, CA

In my personal opinion, Native American History is something that has
lacked coverage. American Experience brought something to the table
that others have not. Though certain individuals would like to
dispute the accuracy or authenticity of "We Shall Remain," American
Experience has opened our eyes to parts of history that have been
pushed into the shadows. If these individuals really think that their
story has not been told in a fair and just manner, there are many
avenues that they may take to dispute them. I have always been
interested in the Lakota Nation and American Experience's coverage on
the Siege of Wounded Knee was another exciting and informative study
in Lakota History.

Seth M. Ward, Indianapolis, IN

Leonard Peltier nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_6028.shtml

By Saeed Shabazz
Staff Writer
Updated May 21, 2009

The North Dakota-based Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
circulated a release on April 28 stating that the imprisoned Native
American activist had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for a
sixth year.

Mr. Peltier was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in 1977 for
the shooting of two FBI agents during an altercation on the Pine
Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

"The basis for Leonard Peltier's Nobel nominations has been his
remarkable success in furthering the causes of peace and human
rights," stated the release from his support group.

According to the website for the five-member Nobel Peace Prize
Committee, which is located in Oslo, Norway, their letters of
nomination, names of nominees, and other information about
nominations cannot be revealed to the public for 50 years. The
committee reportedly sends out 1,000 letters each year inviting
qualified people to submit their nominations.

Qualified nominees are persons such as professors of social sciences,
history, philosophy, law and technology, leaders of peace and
research institutions, members of national assemblies and members of
international courts. Nobel Peace Prize recipients may also make nominations.

"Even though the nominations are not revealed, we have it upon good
authority that Leonard was nominated this year," his niece and
chairperson of the LP-DOC, Karie Ann Cowan, told The Final Call. She
said there were 205 names nominated for the Nobel Prize this year.
ABC News said the amount of names submitted for 2009 was "a record."

ABC somehow learned that Pres. Barack Obama and the French Pres.
Nicholas Sarkozy were nominated, but their nominators were not
immediately known. The network also mentioned that a Macedonian
artist was nominated by the Macedonian government; an Austrian
children's charity was nominated by the Austrian government and an
American was nominated by six members of the U.S. Congress for his
Asian school building charity. ABC did not mention Mr. Peltier's
nomination. A person may not nominate him or herself.

The Nobel committee cuts their list to 10 names in April, and
announces the winner in mid-October Ms. Cowan said they have not been
told if Mr. Peltier has made it to the short-list. "We've never been
able to find that out," she said.

A 2004 letter from a former member of the Canadian Parliament, Jim
Fulton, has surfaced on the American Indian Movement (AIM) website to
the Norwegian Institute in support of the activist's nomination: "The
Nobel Peace Prize in my view is the only key that can fit the lock to
release Leonard Peltier; the freedom of the Aboriginal peoples of the
Americas await his release."

The AIM website mentions several projects that Mr. Peltier has worked
on since being incarcerated some 33 years ago such as playing a role
in getting people from different tribes to come together as he
advocates for peaceful resolution of all issues.

The Leonard Peltier Health Care Reform package has been said to have
fundamentally changed health care delivery on reservations in the
U.S.; and he has put forth proposals to stimulate reservation-based
economics and investment. In 1992, Mr. Peltier established a
scholarship at New York University for Native American students
seeking a law degree; and every Christmas he sends gifts to the
children on the Pine Ridge reservation.

It is also estimated that Mr. Peltier has raised millions for
charities through sales of his art work.

In his 1999 bestseller "Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance," Mr.
Peltier states: "We are all in this togetherthe rich, the poor, the
Red, the White, the Black, the Brown and the Yellow. I believe in the
good of human kind."

Leonard Peltier, Dino Butler, and Donald Pier

http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=13256

Diary Entry by Allan Wayne
May 25, 2009

Murder, intrigue, and Native American Rights.

I am sympathetic to Leonard Peltier's plight, given the vicissitudes
of Pine Ridge vs. the Government in 1975. Peltier's associates, the
Butler Brothers, I have run across some, having operated a tavern
that they frequented occasionally in Newport, Oregon, where the
clientele are commercial fishermen and loggers, and a host of others,
including Native Americans. When Dino Butler was extradited from jail
in Canada, if my memory serves me correctly, he had fled to Canada
for allegedly murdering a man in Toledo Oregon, seven miles from
Newport, a man named Donald Pier, for robbing Indian grave sites. My
wife worked at the school across the street from the apartment where
Dino broke in at night and cut the man's throat (a newspaper article
stated that an accomplice testified that Dino said stabbing him was a
very powerful feeling). The victim had a 16 year old son, I believe,
who escaped by jumping out the window.

CULTURE AS JUSTIFICATION, NOT EXCUSE

By Chiu, Elaine M
Publication: The American Criminal Law Review
Date: Fall 2006

State v. Butler

Gary Butler, Dino Butler and Robert Van Pelt were Native Americans
who belonged to the Siletz tribe and lived in the Portland, Oregon
area.10 They also belonged to a politically active organization known
as the American Indian Movement. They began to hear from fellow tribe
members that artifacts buried in the graves of dead relatives had
been appearing for sale at local antique shops.11 For many years one
of the names circulated as a grave robber of valuable objects from
Siletz burial grounds was Donald Pier.12 On January 21, 1981, these
three men went to Donald Pier's home where they smashed his fingers
in order to get him to confess to robbing Siletz graves and then cut
his throat.13 They believed that killing the grave-robber restored
the spirits of their ancestors.14

The case was dismissed on a technicality, I believe, some mistakes
that the investigators made, and Donald Pier, whoever he was, remains
dead and forgotten. Whatever happened to his son, I do not know; he
probably does not rob graves. Grave robbers, I suppose, deserve a
special place in hell. Whether they deserve to be murdered or not is
debatable, given that there are already laws in place. At the time,
the murder was kind of a big story on the Oregon coast.

Still, I wish Leonard Peltier well, and hope he is set free. Just
once in a while, however, I wonder who Donald Pier is, or what his
son is doing. I suppose if someone robbed his bones, maybe justice
might be served. Just maybe, in some cases, all life is not sacred.

Marilyn Buck: Reflections on Liberation and Poetry

Marilyn Buck from the Greybar:
Reflections on Liberation and Poetry

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/marilyn-buck-from-greybar-reflections.html

23 May 2009

The following is from former Austinite and Ragamuffin (contributor to
our Sixties underground paper), long-time political prisoner and poet
Marilyn Buck, the latest of her continuing letters to a legion of
friends and supporters hopefully awaiting her release, perhaps in 2010.

Her informal reflections on current events provide an important
perspective too often missing from our debates. Far removed, as yet,
from the world of blogs and tweets, Buck is forced to observe events
unfold on their terms, and to objectively weigh their relative importance.

You can see Marilyn's work on The Rag Authors' Page.
http://ragauthorspage.blogspot.com/2007/12/marilyn-buck.html
-
Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2009
--

'Already it's May! National Poetry Month in April, celebrated poetry
in... more public quarters. I think of prisoners buried in dark cells
(maybe not so dark, but bleak without signs of spring and nature).'

By Marilyn Buck / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2009

My legs are tied with a rope
and my arms are bound by my side,
but I smell the sweet perfume of woodland flowers
and hear the birds. Impossible
to keep these from me.
Anyhow, now the road is not so long,
and I am not alone.

Ho Chi Minh

I didn't quite get to an International Women's day/month letter, but
as always my spirit is renewed through the evidences or our ongoing
struggle for equality as human beings.

My spirits were not renewed at all on learning Uncle Sam's lackey in
Afghanistan signed a law legalizing men's right -- at least in the
Shia communities -- to forcibly have sex with their wives, turning
anti-women culture tradition into modern law. A few giant steps
backward for women, everywhere. And then there's Nicaragua's and
Uruguay's presidents, D. Ortega and Tabaré, ostensibly "progressive,
former leftists," signed laws further criminalizing abortion and
women's right to choose.

Let us see how the other progressing nations of Latin America develop
programs that do or do not benefit more than half of their
populations, the women. If a politic or struggle does not work to
liberate the women of the country, the country will not be able to
advance very far. Not a good sign for anyone, woman or man,
especially among those who advocate for justice and liberation.

Nor is it a good sign that our brother Mumia Abu Jamal's Supreme
Court petition was denied. I hope more strategies will emerge to free
our comrade. It continues to be dangerous to give voice to the
voiceless, especially when the voice and militancy is African.

Already it's May! National Poetry Month in April, celebrated poetry
in [....] more public quarters. I think of prisoners buried in dark
cells (maybe not so dark, but bleak without signs of spring and
nature). Even though at times it may seem frivolous, excessive, not
serious enough for these times in which we live, poetry... is
important for the famished spirit. Spring, with its bursting of
flowers, greenery and new life gladdens our hearts, despite the
dying, torture and brutality that generates poetry of war, incredible
loss and anguish.

Many of us like to think of poets as artists-advocates of progress or
justice. I am reminded of the Fascist poets, and, recently I read a
short essay by Slavoj i ek , "The Military Poetic Complex" which
reminds us of the role of Randovan Karadzic, a
poet/psychiatrist/leader in ethnic cleansing and the torturous
dismemberment of Yugoslavia. i ek reminds us that poetry can advocate
for the worst of human behaviors.

As for my own poetry, I've not been writing much. Nevertheless,
recently a graduate music student (now university teacher) in Texas,
Lauren Morgan, used three of my poems as the lyrics for a post-modern
musical suite, performed in early April in San Marcos, Texas and sung
by an operatic-level soprano. She won a competition for her
composition! Finally, [my] translation of [exiled Uruguayan poet
Cristina Peri Rossi's] State of Exile was a finalist in the Northern
California Book Awards. It was quite a surprise!

May you be well. Spring calls us to renew our energies and to
generate collective work towards possibilities of liberation, justice
and peace.

Marilyn Buck
FCI Dublin, California

[Marilyn J. Buck was an activist in Austin, Texas in the late
Sixties. She was a staffer on The Rag, the underground newspaper that
was The Rag Blog's inspiration. She is also a former editor of the
original SDS' New Left Notes, former member of San Francisco's
movement film project Newsreel, an accomplished poet, and a literacy
and AIDS prevention educator. She is one of the longest-held woman
political prisoners in the US today. To learn more about Marilyn's
history, her incarceration and her creative work, go to her entry on
The Rag Authors' Page.]

Also see Marilyn Buck from the Greybar: Thoughts on the Recent
Election, by Marilyn Buck / The Rag Blog / Dec. 28, 2008
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/marilyn-buck-from-greybar-thoughts-on.html

Newark group recognizes birthday of Malcolm X

http://www.nj.com/newark/index.ssf/2009/05/newark_group_recognizes_birthd.html

by Chanta L. Jackson/The Star-Ledger
Thursday May 21, 2009

The People's Organization For Progress (POP) will commemorate the
birthday of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) today at 7 p.m. at
the Abyssinian Baptist Church 224 West Kinney St. The church is
located on West Kinney between Prince and Broome Streets. The theme
of the program is "Malcolm X: An Enduring Voice in Trouble Times."
The guest speaker will be Amiri Baraka.

"The People's Organization For Progress celebrates the birthday of
Malcolm X because of his tremendous contributions to and leadership
of black people's struggle for liberation in this country," said
Lawrence Hamm, POP chairman.

Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm X was
assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

For more information, call (973) 801-0001.

King film obstacle not likely to be last

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2009/05/24/king_film_licensing_agreement.html

By JILL VEJNOSKA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, May 24, 2009

Got any more good ideas, Mr. Spielberg?

You're going to need them. Assuming the children of the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. stop squabbling and let you proceed with making a
movie about his life, you've still got big problems to overcome.

Such as: The plotline's already incredibly well-known. And it boasts
enough "big drama" moments Selma, the Nobel Peace Prize, "I Have a
Dream" to fill a five-hour feature, something today's moviegoers
aren't apt to sit through. On the other hand, what do you leave out?

And whom do you hire to portray King, a man who sorry, Denzel
probably could out-orate the best Hollywood has to offer?

"It presents a lot of challenges," said James L. White, who wrote the
screenplay for "Ray," which won Jamie Foxx an Academy Award for best
actor. "[But] I can't say anything because I want the job myself."

White is not the only one following the project with great interest.
Last week's announcement that Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios
had acquired King's "life rights" spawned countless "Dream"-filled
headlines and a blogosphere's worth of speculation about who might
win the role of the slain civil rights icon.

Some of the air went out of the balloon the next day when Martin
Luther King III and the Rev. Bernice King said from Atlanta that they
would try to block the deal that their California-based brother,
Dexter, had negotiated without their knowledge.

While some observers said Hollywood should have seen it coming the
siblings are already battling over control of their late mother's
papers DreamWorks released a carefully worded statement about
wanting to proceed with the film "provided there is unity in the
family." Even then, production could be two years off, said producer
Suzanne de Passe.

'Great Man' dilemma

Meanwhile, others have been left to speculate about cast and script
and to discuss the myriad of challenges this big-screen biopic could
confront before reaching a multiplex.

There's also the nagging question of why, more than 40 years after
his assassination in Memphis, King has yet to receive the prestigious
"Ghandi," "Malcolm X" or Johnny "Walk the Line" Cash treatment.

"Besides racism, it goes back to the so-called 'Great Man' biopics of
the 1930s," suggested Thomas Doherty, professor of film studies at
Brandeis University and author of five books on Hollywood and American culture.

Whereas "great men" like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell came
off in the movies as earnest and devoted to their life's work, the
films themselves were rather dull. A King film faces a similar
predicament, according to Doherty.

"He's so well known, and he's a secular saint," he said. "A saint's
life might be admirable, but it's not necessarily dramatically compelling."

Neither is the so-called "cradle-to-grave" story approach, which
doesn't skip over a single significant moment or supporting character
on the way to telling an often bloated, ultimately unrevealing story.
While it will be especially difficult on a King film to leave things
out (no "Letter From Birmingham Jail" scene?), veteran screenwriters
say it will have to be done.

"People in his life are going to have to be condensed," said Ken
Rotcop, who wrote and produced the Atlanta-made "For Us, the Living:
The Story of Medgar Evers." Longtime civil rights activist and NAACP
head "Roy Wilkins might become six people in the film."

More important will be using the most well-known aspects of King's
life and work to tell audiences things they don't already know about him.

Robert L. Freedman wrote and produced the TV biography "Life With
Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows," which won five Emmys. Of a possible
King film, he said: "I don't think it's enough to just replicate the
Lincoln Memorial and 'I Have a Dream,' even though DreamWorks could
probably have the budget to do it.

"But what don't we know about that day, for instance? Because we've
seen the images over and over, that's what's imprinted on my mind.
But I want to see more than what was captured on the TV that day. I
want to know a lot more."

How to humanize?

To Rotcop, it all comes down to something as simple and
unbelievably difficult as making a movie about a real person.

"The biggest challenge to me is humanizing the man," said Rotcop,
pointing to "Milk" as a textbook example of a biopic that
successfully found the living, breathing, feeling human underpinnings
to a public figure's iconic speeches and well-known stands. "I would
want to know more about what he and Coretta talked about in bed at
night than what the headlines told me about him."

All well and good, except for another potential problem that raises.
Namely, who gets to decide how to humanize Dr. King? And how much?

Director Spike Lee offered his version of it in "Malcolm X," suggests
Brandeis' Doherty. An FBI agent wiretapping the title character's
phone conversations with his wife jokes, "Compared to King, this guy's a monk."

It's "an irreverent line about King in the middle of a film" that
"only Spike Lee could get away with," Doherty concluded. "I don't
know if [this] film can go there, and its absence will be felt."

Ten years ago, director Oliver Stone tried to offer his version in a
King movie for Disney that never got made. One reason, screenwriter
Stephen Rivele recalled, was conflicting visions of the civil rights icon.

"The big concern at the studio was how King would be portrayed," said
Rivele, who also wrote the script for Stone's 'Nixon.' We thought he
should be portrayed as a human being, a three- dimensional person,
and human beings have flaws. But that became a problem."

If you don't think you're going to be wrestling with all sorts of
image-related stuff like this, Mr. Spielberg, call your buddies over
at NBC. Its six-hour miniseries, "King," hadn't even hit the airwaves
back in February 1978 when all heck broke loose in Atlanta.

On one side were the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams and other
SCLC officials who claimed the script depicted King as "a very weak
and cowardly sort of leader." They called for a national protest. On
the other side was King's widow, who defended the project in words
that somebody over at DreamWorks might want to consider filing away
for future use.

"'King' is a drama and not a documentary," said Coretta Scott King,
who was compensated for cooperating with the project, according to
press reports at the time. "Therefore, it should be judged as such."

Given all this, what are the chances that Spielberg and DreamWorks
will get their King movie made?

"It's going to happen," laughed film professor Doherty. "He could
greenlight a movie about Emily Dickinson's poetry."

The Backstory to Woodstock '69

http://www.theimproper.com/Template_Article.aspx?IssueId=15&ArticleId=3544

By TheImproper.com
[May 2009]

Brother and sister Weston and Julia Blelock grew up in Woodstock, New
York, left town for many years and pursued separate lives and diverse
careers. But they both were drawn back to the region and are now
business partners in WoodstockArts.

As the 40th anniversary of the seminal music festival approaches,
they are releasing a book that tells the backstory behind three days
of love and music that shook the world.

The book is called "Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The
Backstory to Woodstock." TheImproper sat down with them for an
exclusive interview before the release of the book, which is an oral
and pictorial history of the whole Woodstock festival happening.

IM: Weston, you were present at the original festival. Can you tell
us what that was like?

Weston: It was an amazing event in my life. Music has been a
life-long passion. After attending several Sound-Outs and hearing
about a big event planned for August 1969, I was psyched. It was the
talk of Woodstock that summer. I remember distinctly leaving work on
Friday, Aug. 15, and wondering what Monday would bring. I had a
friend visiting from London, so we set out together. After hearing
that the New York State Thruway was closed, we drove around to
Binghamton and hitchhiked about 15 miles to the site from that direction.

As we drew closer I was astonished to find cars and campers parked on
the left and right of the road as far as the eye could see. Coming to
the entrance of Hurd Road, I saw a lone state trooper. As we walked
toward the concert area I marveled to see as many people walking away
as going in. I thought that with that many people leaving, we could
get pretty close to the stage. I was wrong. However, we did find a
spot at the top of the hill near the concession stands. I heard the
Incredible String Band, Canned Heat and some other acts. In
retrospect, being so far from the stage made the event much more of a
community experience, about tolerance and helping one another out and
sharing. That's what remains with me to this day.

IM: Which stand out as some of the more memorable moments from the
'69 festival?

Weston: In that very challenging time, humanity rose to the occasion
and a wonderful outcome was achieved. It provided a great example for
us, today. If only we could bury our differences and all pull
togetherwhether it's with respect to the economy or the environment,
great things are possible. For more about that time, I wrote up an
account of my experiences in a book called "It Happened in Woodstock"
( it's the final chapter in the book: "The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969").

Julia: I was 16 that summer, and our parents didn't want me going to
the festival. So they promised that I could "go next year." Wow, what
a bummer! It took me a long time to get over that one.

When I returned to prep school in Connecticut in September of '69, my
classmates suddenly had a whole new take on my home town. What had
seemed to them like a rather weird place was now totally cool.

IM: Much of the dialogue for the book stems from an event you both
held last year. Fill us in on your concept for the book, and tell us
about some of the principal behind-the-scenes players.

Weston: Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival is about the run-up of
events leading to the Woodstock festival, from the perspective of
Woodstock, New York. Beginning in the early 1900s the place had been
an artists' colony, and it was a magnet for creative people. In those
days all kinds of artists and musicians made their homes here. In the
1960s, as the folk and rock music movement grew, a number of
musicians like Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin and Van Morrison moved to the
area. Gradually a vibrant music center developed, and this in turn
attracted to town Michael Lang, the legendary Woodstock '69 promoter.
He crafted his event, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair from the local
scene. Last August, we organized a panel discussion to determine why
the Woodstock festival retained the Woodstock name, and why it was
not located in this town. We invited as panelists a number of
townspeople familiar with these events, including Lang; Jean Young,
co-author with Michael of Woodstock Festival Remembered; Bill West, a
town official in the '60s; Jeremy Wilber, a bartender at the Sled
Hill Café, a key rock n' roll watering hole in the '60s; and Paul
McMahon, a musician and a bona fide hippie. The event was well
received, so we decided to turn the transcript into a book. We added
a photo essay to help readers put into context personalities and
themes raised during the panel discussion.

Julia: I've done a lot of traveling through the years, and whenever
people hear that I'm from Woodstock, they're fascinated. They want to
understand the mystique behind the town and the concert. If I explain
that the concert actually occurred in Bethel, they want to know why
it kept the Woodstock name, and why the town of Woodstock is so
famous. With this book we've explored the backstory to the '69
festival, including the town's history as a colony of the arts, and
its long tradition of music festivals, dating back to the early 1900s.

IM: How long have each of you been located in Woodstock? What have
you seen in all that time? How has the area changed and how has it
remained the same? Your PR man told me that when he visited recently,
he saw that much appears to have changed, but much also seems to be
reminiscent of the '60s.

Weston: We have had a presence in the area since 1956. Woodstock
undergoes change all the time. New artists are constantly coming in
and leaving. During our adolescence the town transitioned from a
place of classical music and art to a folk/rock and art destination.
However, the core of the town's spirit remains undiminished. We all
honor the creative spark in our works and we continue to be
enthralled by the natural beauty that surrounds us.

Julia: Woodstock was a dynamic place to grow up, with artists and
musicians everywhere, a very "happening" locale. I was privileged to
take art and music classes from some very talented local artists.

Forty years later the town still has more artists per capita than
almost anywhere else in the country. As in the '60s, Woodstock these
days is about the natural beauty of the Catskills and the lively art
and music scene. A new component is the region's commitment to
wellness, with a great many spiritual and healing centers. And a
particularly exciting development is the town's 2007 Zero-Carbon
Initiative a pledge that as a community we will have a neutral
carbon footprint by the year 2017. To Weston and me, the Woodstock of
today represents, in many ways, the promise of the '69 festival fulfilled.

IM: There are so many points in the book that completely captivated
me. First and foremost, the concept and execution of the
"Sound-Outs." Tell me a bit more about them and how they factored
into the original design for the festival.

Julia: The Sound-Outs were a series of very hip concerts that took
place at Pan Copeland's farm on the outskirts of Woodstock from 1967
through 1970. As Michael Lang made clear during the Roots of '69
Woodstock Festival panel discussion last year, he and his partners
were guided by the model of the Sound-Outs in developing the concept
of their 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

Weston: During the panel discussion Michael Lang said that the
Sound-Outs sparked his thinking about holding his event in the
countryside. Lang said these concerts had all the ingredients he
wanted to employ in his event. The Sound-Outs were initially produced
by John "Jocko" Moffitt, a strapping Californian, who came to
Woodstock in 1966. He created an outdoor stage, booked more than 20
bands, and held his first Sound-Out over Labor Day weekend in 1967.
Performers like Richie Havens and Tim Hardin participated. People
parked their cars in the field and could camp out on the grounds.

IM: Also, the story of the just-married couple, driving around
Woodstock, trying to find the exact location of the show, was
priceless. But, I imagine that happened more often than not.

Weston: This still happens a lot. It's a question that is constantly
raised at the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce & Arts information booth.
The festival was incubated in Woodstock, and like so many other
ventures, had to move elsewhere due to space constraints.

Julia: Yes, people are constantly arriving in Woodstock and asking to
be pointed to Max Yasgur's farm. They're incredulous when they hear
that it's located more than sixty miles away! But most people hang
around and seem to find plenty of the flower-power spirit here. There
are numerous shops and other venues in Woodstock that pay tribute to the '60s.

IM: I am told that you both will be producing an anniversary concert
in August. Tell us some more about that.

Julia: It's a 40th anniversary event scheduled on Aug. 15 at the
Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. That's a great space, an intimate,
250-seat venue. It's part of the complex built by Albert Grossman
back in the '70s. The challenge is how to evoke a '60s feel with the
concert, but at the same time make it very relevant to today's
audience; and how to share it with the world in an environmentally
responsible way. So we're in discussion with a cable TV partner to
capture the events leading up to the concert and the performances themselves.

Weston: The concert will help raise money for the town's Zero-Carbon
Initiative. As Julia mentioned earlier, this was passed in 2007 and
with it local citizenry pledged to neutralize the town's carbon
imprint via solar-, wind- and hydro-power installations.

IM: We heard that Steve Walter, from The Cutting Room, will be
involved as well.

Weston: We're very pleased to have Steve Walter involved. During his
years at The Cutting Room he developed impeccable music industry contacts.

Julia: Yes, we're thrilled. Steve is a really creative guy, with a
great vision for the concert. We feel as though we're totally in
synch with him.

IM: Tell us about WoodstockArts.

Julia: WoodstockArts is a publishing and production company based in
Woodstock. It's a business that Weston and I launched when we
returned to Woodstock after absences of many years. Our tagline is
"All the Arts of Woodstock Including the Art of Living." What we mean
by art of living is environmentally sustainable lifestyles.

Weston: We publish high-quality regional art books. These books
support the environment by using recycled paper in the stock make-up.
I've driven a Prius since 2003 and we have a 7.2 kilowatt solar-array
installation.

IM: What is the enduring lesson of Woodstock? It certainly
transcended being just a location . . . it's almost an experience.

Weston: Woodstock is a state of mind. We dedicated the "Roots" book
to all the people throughout the world who support a peaceful,
loving, music-filled and artful way of life.

Julia: To us the Woodstock State of Mind represents the
counterculture, an alternative channel that one can choose to tune
into. I think the lesson of Woodstock is that idealism and dreams and
flower power aren't faddish, they matter. The Woodstock of today is
not a perfect place by any means. But I think that its commitment to
art, music, wellness, diversity, environmental sustainability and
respectful dialogue offers a hopeful approach for the 21st century.

IM: What are you hoping to accomplish with the book and the concert?

Julia: We're hoping to share the Woodstock story and to showcase the
Woodstock of today.

Weston: The Woodstock festival of 1969 grew out of 1960s Woodstock.
The Roots book speaks to this. The Roots concert shows that this
spirit is very much alive and well in Woodstock. We want to
demonstrate that the promise of the 1960s lives on in the 2000s.
That's why part of the proceeds from the concert will be donated to
Woodstock's Zero-Carbon Initiative. We want to deliver on the
commitment suggested by the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s.

IM: I understand from Steve that the show will feature a variety of
acts. Can you talk about that?

Julia: We're looking for a mix of '60s musicians and more
contemporary acts. Stay tuned for more on that soon!

IM: Thank you both and good luck!

Conventional views on liberalism and Black Power challenged

Conventional views on liberalism and Black Power challenged by VU professor

http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/news/releases/2009/05/22/conventional-views-on-liberalism-and-black-power-challenged-by-vu-professor.80703

Devin Fergus' research revisits era of LBJ, Nixon and New Right

5/22/2009

Black Power's complex relationship with liberalism during the civil
rights era and the surprising consequences of that interaction are
explored in Devin Fergus' book Liberalism, Black Power, and the
Making of American Politics, 1965-1980.

"Unlike some of the previous scholarship on Black Power, my research
found that the movement did not develop in isolation but as an
extension and expression of civic nationalism during the 1960s,"
Fergus said. He noted that civic nationalism is rooted in the belief
that one belongs to a particular nation if he or she chooses to live
there, regardless of one's race or ethnicity.

"One of my goals was to reinsert and relocate Black Power into the
broader narrative of American history, which has important
implications for how we view the world today," Fergus said. "And as
an important instrument of nationalism, Black Power remained engaged
and open to change and moderation through its interaction with liberalism."

While groups such as the Black Panthers were considered by many to be
on the radical fringe, other Black Power organizations moderated
their political agendas through interaction with liberal-oriented
institutions, such as the American Civic Liberties Union and the Ford
Foundation. "Liberalism proved that it could engage radical civic
ideologies and bring those ideologies back from the brink of
political violence," Fergus said.

One example he cites is Soul City, N.C, a new town organized by
African American businesses and funded by the Nixon administration's
Department of Housing and Urban Development. He writes, "Republican
administrations, at the federal and state levels, contended that Soul
City offered the nation a new growth polean emerging market that
would attract trade, commerce and manufacturing investment, and that
would stimulate job growth."

Fergus also writes that Presidents Nixon and Ford as well as North
Carolina Gov. James Holshouser Jr. believed that job opportunities in
Soul City would reduce the migration of many blacks out of eastern
North Carolina. In addition, Soul City "would provide a safety valve
for America's riot-plagued, socially roiled northern cities."

Fergus later writes how the Soul City initiative "helped fuel a
backlash led by conservative insurgents, such as Sen. Jesse Helms,
within the GOP." The author speaks to contemporary issues as he
points to efforts inside the Republican Party to diversify its
electoral base that actually led to the purging of moderates and
minorities. Fergus argues that the rise of conservative Republicans
during the 1980s was as much or more a negative reaction to the
liberal and moderate GOP policies of the Nixon and Ford
administrations as to those of Great Society Democrats.

In addition, the book looks at President Obama's views about black
power, which sparked discussion and concerns from some voters during
the campaign.

Fergus teaches and writes about modern United States history and the
African American experience, with specializations in politics and
society since 1945. Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of
American Politics, 1965-1980, has been published by the University of
Georgia Press. For more information or to hear a podcast about the
book, visit www.ugapress.org.

Media contact: Ann Marie Deer Owens, 615-322-NEWS
annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu

Editor's note: Davis-Kidd Booksellers will host a book-signing and
discussion with Devin Fergus on Tuesday, May 26, at 7 p.m. The store
is located at 4007 Hillsboro Road in Nashville.

Olympic legend John Carlos speaks to students

Olympic legend John Carlos speaks to James River students

http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/education/article/JOHN23_20090522-221409/269452/

JUAN ANTONIO LIZAMA TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Published: May 23, 2009

Ethan Radtke, a socially conscious senior at James River High School
in Chesterfield County, had doubts that track and field Hall of Famer
John Carlos would accept an invitation to speak at his school.

Carlos proved him wrong yesterday.

Carlos, who won the 200-meter bronze medal in the 1968 Summer
Olympics in Mexico City, and gold medalist Tommie Smith stunned the
world during the medal ceremony while "The Star-Spangled Banner"
played and the U.S. flag was raised.

Both athletes, wearing black socks and no shoes, bowed their heads
and raised their black-glove-clad, clenched fists in the air to
represent black power. The International Olympic Committee removed
Carlos and Smith from the U.S. team.

Yesterday, Carlos stood in front of a student-filled auditorium at
James River to tell his life story. He described growing up in a time
of segregation and poverty.

"When I grew up in New York, I was a thug," he told students. "I was
a thug like Robin Hood."

He said he broke into freight yards near Yankee Stadium to steal food
and give it to people who needed it.

He also said that heroin spread like a disease through his community
because people got high to forget their problems.

"Many black men, in particular, had a situation that was very
difficult for them to face the guy in the mirror," he said.

He looked in textbooks and the movies to see himself represented,
Carlos said, but "I wasn't there," he said. "I was the invisible man.
I had no respect for me because I didn't see me."

As he pursued his dream to go to the Olympics, he tried basketball,
boxing and swimming. Then he discovered running. Soon he became a
notable track and field athlete and went to East Texas State
University on a scholarship, then transferred to San Jose State
University in California.

"In retrospect, I say to any of you guys, all you're supposed to do
is make sure you have the foundation because you can't control where
you're going to be," he told students. "God controls that."

Radtke contacted Carlos and asked him to speak as part of a capstone
project for his Sports in Literature class.

Tracy Hamner and Peter Schumacher, both coaches and English teachers
at James River, first considered offering a Sports in Literature
course four years ago. Now, the course has grown from one to five
classes, and a similar class is offered at Thomas Dale High School.

"I was interested to hear from an athlete that kind of transcended
from sports into more of a social figure," said Radtke, who plays
soccer. "I admire what both John Carlos and Tommie Smith showed
during the 1968 Olympics."
--

Contact Juan Antonio Lizama at (804) 649-6513 or jlizama@timesdispatch.com .

American and European Art in the Era of Dissent

The Rise of the Sixties:
American and European Art in the Era of Dissent

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/events/the-rise-of-the-sixties-american-and-european-art-in-the-era-of-dissent-1610240/

Date/Time:Tue., May 26, 6:30pm
Price: Free
Contact Info: 305-375-4073

Eat Some Crow

BY P. SCOTT CUNNINGHAM

No need to wait until 2012 for the new Miami Art Museum building to
be completed; MAM has a ton of diverse programming for the
intellectually starved local. Besides its JAM@MAM parties and the
Morning Lecture Series, the museum also hosts an art book discussion
group at Books & Books in Coral Gables. This Tuesday, the group will
delve into Thomas Crow's 2005 tome, The Rise of the Sixties: American
and European Art in the Era of Dissent. A professor of art history at
the University of Southern California, Crow wrote this influential
study of that sexiest of decades in 1996, and the book has gone on to
become the definitive interpretation of how '60s artists such as
Warhol and Twombly fit in with the contemporary social, cultural, and
intellectual movements.

Purchase the book in advance at Books & Books for 20 percent off, or
show up ignorant and mooch off the other brains at work. Just don't
be the douchebag who hasn't read the book yet finds a way to dominate
the discussion nonetheless.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Huston Smith: Rock star of religions turns 90

[2 articles]

Huston Smith: Rock star of religions turns 90

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/21/DD1G17MMIH.DTL

Heidi Benson, Special to The Chronicle
Thursday, May 21, 2009

A floor lamp with more arms than Shiva brightly illuminates a desk
where the phone rings, a computer hums and messages fly from the fax
machine. This is the command center of religious scholar Huston
Smith, in the Berkeley assisted-living center he now calls home.

Outside, faded Tibetan prayer flags are strung along a balcony where
potted bamboo sways in the sunshine. Inside, the Quran shares the
bookshelf with the works of Plato, and Smith holds forth from a black
leather recliner. He is abuzz, quick with jokes.

"I no longer stand on my head every morning," he says of his longtime
yoga practice. "But if my osteoporosis gets any worse, I just might."

It is a busy time. This month, he celebrates his 90th birthday, as
well as the 50th anniversary of his best-selling book, "The World's
Religions," which inspired a popular PBS series. In addition, his
autobiography, "Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine," has
just been published by HarperOne. At just 200 pages, it is a dizzying
tour of a singular life.

Smith was there when the 1945 U.N. charter was signed in San
Francisco. He met Mother Teresa, interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt and
invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at Washington
University in 1956. Seeking enlightenment, he took mescaline with
Timothy Leary and peyote with an Indian shaman. He counts Saul
Bellow, Aldous Huxley, Pete Seeger and the Dalai Lama among his
legion of friends.

Uncanny timing

Asked about his uncanny timing, he declares: "Don't overlook
Tiananmen Square!" Late on the night before the 1989 uprising, he
arrived unsuspectingly in Beijing for a conference on Chinese
philosophy. "In the morning, we got word from BBC Radio, all the way
from London, that Beijing was in chaos," he recalled.

He and his colleagues went down to the street, where "everyone was on
the side of the students." And where everyone was headed to Tiananmen
Square. They climbed in a car with a sign taped to the window:
"Foreign Visitors Support Student Strike."

"We couldn't get closer than three blocks. It was like a funnel. But
when the students saw the sign, they waved us through," he recalled.
"One of our party was hoisted onto the top of the car. In Chinese he
said, 'Democracy is not only for America. Democracy is not only for
China. Democracy is for the entire world.' There was a tumult of cheers."

Looking back as a witness to history, he rebuffs the notion of divine
intervention, but allows: "It almost seemed like it was masterminded
for me to be in the right place at the right time."

Smith was born in 1919 in China, where his parents were Christian missionaries.

"In my town, I had only one adult American male role model: my
father," he explained. "I grew up taking it for granted that
missionaries were what American boys grew up to be."

He came to the States for college, expecting to earn his degree and
return to China. "But I hadn't calculated on the dynamism of the
West," he said.

Propelled by intellectual curiosity, he earned a doctorate at the
University of Chicago, where he met Kendra, the woman who would be
his wife for 65 years. Soon after, he took his first teaching post in
St. Louis, and his parents were expelled from China after the 1949
Communist takeover. Now, there was no going back.

He went on to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Syracuse University and UC Berkeley, write 15 books, receive 12
honorary degrees and create television specials. He has been called
the rock star of religious studies. As a kind of participatory
scholar, he has applied to his life that which he's learned from the
world's great faiths. And his inclusive approach has rhymed with the times.

"I happen to be a Christian. I was brought up and drenched in that,"
he said. "I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life
the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form."

But, he explained, "I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think
that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight
civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in
those civilizations."

Today, on a sunny morning in Berkeley, he reiterates his belief in
the power of human intention. "The Buddha is in me, the Buddha is in
you," he says, with a dazzling smile and a bit of a challenge. "Live up to it."

Is he optimistic about the future?

'On the hook'

"I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. An optimist says, in
effect, 'Don't worry, it's going to turn out all right.' A pessimist
says, 'It's going down the drain, and there's nothing you can do
about it,' " he said.

"Both get us off the hook. Our place is on the hook. Whether things
turn out for the better depends on what we do. We ought not spend our
time masterminding the future, but recognize our marching orders: to
do the best we can for history and the planet.

"One of my favorite prayers was written by a 9-year-old. His mother
found it scribbled on a note beside his bed: 'Dear God, I'm doing the
best I can.' "
--

E-mail Heidi Benson at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

--------

Praise Everyone

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201131.html

Matthew Shaer
May 24, 2009

TALES OF WONDER
Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography
By Huston Smith, with Jeffery Paine.
Harper Collins. 209 pp. $25.99

Midway through his lush new memoir, the religious scholar Huston
Smith pauses to rattle off a list of fond remembrances: dancing among
the whirling dervishes in Iran, camping with the Aborigines in
Australia, sharing a chuckle with a gaggle of Masai warriors on the
darkening Serengeti plains. Each anecdote is offered up with minimum
explication and just a few choice adjectives, as if Smith's sense of
marvel at the strange bounty of the world should suffice. And in most
cases, it does.

"Tales of Wonder," co-written with Jeffery Paine, opens in the
medieval town of Soochow, China, where Smith's parents served as
missionaries, and ends, some 200 pages later, with a quote from Saint
John Chrysostom: "Praise for everything. Praise for it all!" In
between, Smith meets with some of the 20th century's major luminaries
-- Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Martin Luther King, Jr. -- and sets
out to carve his own name into the face of history. When he was just
shy of 40, Smith published his opus "The World's Religions," a now
classic study of comparative theology. Its popularity opened the door
to a series of professorial posts and several trips around the globe,
each one more spectacular than the last. "For me," confides Smith,
now nearly 90, "any real reason to travel, even a bad one, was a good
reason to pack my bags and set off. If a place was on the map, and
especially if it wasn't, I wanted to go and learn what could be
learned only there."

Book Review: A Day in the Life by Robert Greenfield

[2 articles]

Book Review:
A Day in the Life by Robert Greenfield

http://prairieprogressive.com/2009/05/22/book-review-a-day-in-the-life-by-robert-greenfield/

Regardless of genre, an interesting subject or theme is not always
alone sufficient for a writer. Most authors also face the challenge
of having characters or individuals the reader will care about,
whether for good or bad. Therein lies the problem with Robert
Greenfield's A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, and
the End of the Sixties.

May 22nd, 2009
by A Progressive on the Prairie

A Day in the Life tells the story of Tommy Weber and his wife, Susan
Coriat, who were among the hip, glamorous couples in the London of
the Swinging '60s. Yet other than as voyeur, it is difficult for the
reader to really care for either of them as their lives spin into
chaos. In fact, about the only sympathetic people in this otherwise
well-researched biography are their sons, Charley and Jake, who grow
up amidst the wreckage of their parents' lives.

Both Weber and Coriat, called "Puss" by her family and friends, were
children of Britain's privileged class, thanks to their mothers.
While their fathers may have been of questionable character, Tommy
and Puss, born in 1938 and 1943 respectively, were both trust fund
babies. Granted, their trust funds weren't so large as to withstand
their hedonism, but they had the looks and wherewithal to become part
of the London scene. When they married in 1962, they were not only
tabloid fodder, they became one of the hippest couples in the city.
The book drops plenty of names of the people with whom they
associated, such as Steve Winwood, Jimi Hendrix and members of the
Beatles, to name just a couple.

Although they dabbled with careers Tommy in auto racing, real
estate and filmmaking and Puss by modeling and opening a hip teahouse
they were far more interested in simply enjoying life. Both fell
into drugs and by 1969 they had separated and divorced, although
there is little doubt they remained in love with each other. The flip
side of their journeys of pleasure was the impact on their children.

For example, following the divorce, Puss spent quite a bit of time
dragging Charley and Jake around India, Turkey and Greece on her
personal search for enlightenment. Letters written before, during and
after this trip revealed her growing detachment with reality. By the
end of the trip, seven-year-old Jake now an actor on the television
series Medium was taking care of her and his younger brother. Not
long after their return, Puss would be committed to a mental
institution before committing suicide in 1971.

Back in Tommy's custody following their mother being
institutionalized, the boys didn't fare a great deal better. Tommy
had been smuggling hashish from Afghanistan for several years but
1971 saw him and his sons living with the Keith Richards entourage in
a villa in southern France during the making of Exile on Main Street.
Two things solidified Tommy's place in that world. Puss had become
friends with Richards' girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, in a mental
health facility. Sealing the deal, though, was that Tommy smuggled in
a kilo of cocaine as a wedding present for Mick Jagger (all of which
was consumed long before the wedding). How did Tommy do it? He taped
the cocaine to his sons' bodies, figuring they were least likely to
be searched by customs officials.

Although Tommy would live until 2006, much of the balance of his life
was spent in the throes of heroin addiction and he would spend time
in prison. His sons, meanwhile, ended up living with relatives.
Charley and Jake somehow survive their upbringing and become primary
sources for author Robert Greenfield. Greenfield, who has written
extensively about the Rolling Stones, met Tommy at Richards' villa
during the recording of Exile on Main Street. Puss provides the most
direct insight, though, as a variety of her letters have survived.
They clearly portray her crumbling mental state and her love for
Tommy and her children.

While Greenfield does a good job of biography, it still remains hard
to really care about Tommy or Puss. To some extent, their story could
be a metaphor for their era, a tale of promise that, with liberal
doses of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," devolved into
self-absorption and self-ruin. Yet, aside from hanging out with
famous people and being part of "the scene" themselves, their journey
of self-destruction often doesn't even rise to the level of the car
wreck you can't look away from. Instead, it is more like pricey cars
rotting from the inside.
--

…my generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed
liberalism, because of our excesses. -- Camille Paglia, Sept. 19, 1991

--------

Carmel author Robert Greenfield delves into the exciting, tumultuous
lives of a young couple in Swinging London of the '60s

http://www.montereyherald.com/entertainment/ci_12418538?nclick_check=1

By LILY DAYTON
Herald Correspondent
Updated: 05/21/2009

His books, articles, profiles, stories and scripts have made his
voice one of the prominent spokespersons for the 1960s.

In his work, he delves beneath the surface of the lives of some of
the most important figures of this music generation, showing readers
the humanity that lives beneath fame and glory.

Carmel author Robert Greenfield's new book, "A Day in the Life One
Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of the Sixties" was
released this month by Da Capo Press/Perseus Books.

To celebrate, Greenfield will be signing books at the Henry Miller
Library this Sunday at 3 p.m. This event will feature music,
beverages and appetizers.

A former editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone magazine,
Greenfield is the author of the classic "S.T.P: A Journey through
America with the Rolling Stones" and "Exile on Main Street: A Season
in Hell with the Rolling Stones."

He has also written the critically acclaimed biographies of rock
promoter Billy Graham, Grateful Dead lead guitarist Jerry Garcia and
acid guru Timothy Leary.

His latest book chronicles the little-known story of a young couple
from 1960s upper-class London, Tommy Weber and Susan "Puss" Coriat.

Their seemingly fairytale marriage begins to unravel as these two
people from privileged upbringings lose themselves in an excess of
drugs, sex and broken dreams.

The story expands beyond the couple as their relationship mirrors
society's transformation from the psychedelic '60s to the more
sobering reality of the '70s.

In their glamorous lifestyle, this couple's world included many
famous icons of the generation, including Keith Richards, Anita
Pallenberg, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Jimi Hendrix.

This world also included their two sons, Charley and Jake Weber (who
plays Joe DuBois on NBC's hit series "Medium"), both of whom managed
to survive their tumultuous upbringing and go on to lead productive
adult lives.

"The book is about this rarefied circle of people with an inner life
that exemplified the social revolution going on at that time," said
Greenfield. "I met the protagonist of the book, Tommy Weber, at Keith
Richard's house Villa Nellcote in the south of France in the
springtime of 1971. Tommy also appears in my biography of Timothy
Leary and in my last book, 'Exile on Main Street.'"

"I was very young and not from his world. I saw him as a character
out of 'Tender is the Night' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I reconnected
with Tommy just before he died. After he died, it seemed apparent to
me there was a book here."

So Greenfield began to do research, which is how he starts all of his
writing projects.

He interviewed Charley and Jake Weber as well as other relatives of
Tommy and "Puss," friends and various players of the 1960s London music scene.

"I interviewed everyone I could find," said Greenfield. "I visited
the places Tommy and Puss had lived, went to Tommy's school,
Haileybury, and went to Whetley Manor, the mansion where Puss had
grown up in Wiltshore (now it's a hotel). I went to Rugby, the city
where Tommy spent the last years of his life. I went to the newspaper
morgues and found clippings. I spoke to everyone who knew them who's
still alive."

Jake Weber, who was 8 years old when Greenfield first met him, had
intended to make a documentary film about his mother, so he had
extensive video footage of interviews that he gave to Greenfield. He
also let him read the heartfelt letters that his mother had written.

"I really believe in research," said Greenfield. "The more I
researched, the bigger, the more extraordinary the story got. This is
a story no one knows."

"There was a great romance between Tommy and Puss. They are gifted,
beautiful, talented, charismatic. Yet they were involved in a time
when there was a social revolution in England. Puss and Tommy tried
to break social boundaries. They were beautiful people with money;
they didn't understand the consequences of their actions.

"This is also about the two young boys and how they survived their
chaotic upbringing, as well as all the people in their social circle,
living in an extreme, self-destructive manner. One of the themes is
that nobody is what they seem to be. When you're writing about real
people, it's not black and white. The story is about the end of the
'60s, the broken dreams of that era."

Greenfield said that this is a different than the books he's written before.

"I wrote it because it's so human. It's a dysfunctional family, but
there is something so basically human about it that will reach out to
people on an emotional level. These seductive people take you on
their journey and this is really what writing is all about."
--

Lily Dayton can be reached at montereybay lily@gmail.com.
--

BOOK SIGNING ·What: Book signing by author Robert Greenfield for his
"A Day in the Life One Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of
the Sixties" ·Where: Henry Miller Library, Highway 1, Big Sur ·When:
3 p.m., Sunday, May 24 ·Tickets: Free ·Information: 667-2574 or
online at www.henrymiller.org

Make love, not war [Denver Art Museum]

Make love, not war

http://www.snowmasssun.com/article/20090522/FRONTPAGE/905229997/1064%26ParentProfile=1039

May 22, 2009
By Robert Weller

An Animals' song was going through my head as I entered the Denver
Art Museum to see its large collection of psychedelic music posters.
(Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmIy7Ch4M84

"Strobe lights beam create dreams
walls move minds do too
on a warm San Franciscan night
old child young child feel all right
on a warm San Franciscan night
angels sing leather wings
jeans of blue Harley Davidsons too
on a warm San Franciscan night
old angels young angels feel all right
on a warm San Franciscan night."
"I wasn't born there perhaps I'll die there
there's no place left to go...

Adding to the atmosphere were photos of Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh
standing under a Haight/Asbury sign. The exhibition, called The
Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters From The San Francisco Bay Area,
1965-71 runs until July 19.

I had been in the city by the Bay in 1968, officially working on the
presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy. I was 21 years old, a senior
in college, and never had seen anything like it. Nobody had. Few have
seen anything like the Star Wars-Pyramid-like new wing of the Denver
museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind.

I remember a cacophony of noise in San Francisco. Street dances
called the Mime Troupe, sometimes held to raise money to get
musicians out of jail.

My bosses took me to a topless bar. I think it was called "The Ore
House." I remember hearing Otis Redding's voice singing "Your love
lifts me higher than I have ever been lifted before."

Sex was everywhere. Freud's wildest theories about sex, even those he
had rejected, would have been confirmed.

Pressure for a new style of poster had been building up as drug use
increased and opposition to the Vietnam War increased.

It wasn't the first time that drugs had influenced art by any means.

The Roman poet Ovid incorporated them into his work, and like some
that followed him ended up in exile.

Absinthe, the green fairy, was the elixir used by painters and
writers including Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Oscar Wilde and
Edgar Degas.

As good as the posters displayed now are, it seemed to me that every
time I heard The Doors, Jimi Hendrix or someone like that my
attention was distracted from the posters. Make of that what you will.

I have a friend, like me with more than 35 years as a mainstream
journalist behind her, and we have both asked each other what
happened after all this love in 1968? The war went on, and on.

Wes Wilson was working at a small printing press company after
attending San Francisco State University, when he began developing
psychedelic posters, including anti-war designs, and got the trend going.

His career took off when he went to work for the Avalon Ballroom and
Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium.

Strobe lights and liquid light shows led to new designs. The late
Jerry Garcia, of the Grateful Dead, often would turn his back to the
audience to watch the lights, a museum board says. Visitors can make
their own posters and do their own light shows.

The museum's AIGA Associate Curator of Graphic Design, Darrin
Alfred,formerly on the curatorial staff at MOMA in San Francisco, led
the development of the exhibition, selecting about 300 posters from
nearly 900, hanging them in salon style.

He selected the works of Wes Wilson, Bonnie MacLean, Alton Kelley and
Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Lee Conklin and David
Singer and several other artists of the period. Experts say Conklin's
work was the boldest in expressing the psychedelic experience.

Moscoso, who studied under color theorist Josef Albers, created
posters that seemed to move as a result of the moving lights.

"Incredible Poetry, which seems to make lips open and close.

A quote from a guitarist in the Charlatans, one of the startup bands
that got it rolling, Richard Olsen, "we were all so zonked that we
weren't even playing together."

Author Ken Kesey, from La Junta, organized parties called "Acid
Tests" in the city after volunteering to take part in CIA studies of the drug.

To bring some of the rest of the era to visitors, a room has been set
up with memorabilia. "We wanted to give people a taste of everything
– love, peace, the anti-war movement," said Lindsey Housel, museum
manager of adult and collect programs.

A coffee table was set up to let people put their feet up and share
the atmosphere, which included patchouli. An issue of Life magazine
led with "The Draft, Who Beats It And How." The famous poster of Che
Guevera was on one wall.

Several Rolodex-like devices were set up for people to post comments.

One note, unsigned, was that just like the '60s we are in a war we
don't want. The anti-war sentiment hadn't reached its peak yet though
many protest marches had been held. Kent State was still to come.

A couple of old-fashioned telephones let you dial into YouTube to see
a video of stars of the time, including Jimi Hendrix playing his
guitar with his teeth. I can remember him burning a guitar and
smashing it, as well as delivering an unforgettable performance of
the Star Spangled Banner.

Movies about rock posters will soon be making their debuts, including
"American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art."
--

Robert Weller covered stories around the nation and the world for
Associated Press for more than 35 years.

Sly Stone steps up for daughter

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/05/25/sly.stone.returns/?iref=mpstoryview

May 25, 2009
By Alan Duke

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Stories about Sly Stone usually
start with the word "reclusive."

Don't call him that anymore, because the superstar who blended funk,
rock, soul and psychedelic sounds in the 1960s and '70s before
disappearing from the scene in the '80s is not in hiding, his
youngest daughter said.

Stone's media shyness in recent decades earned him a comparison to
the late billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, but he's just been living
his life and making his music out of the glare of great expectations
that superstars suffer.

"It's not like he wasn't making music," said Novena Carmel, his
27-year-old daughter. "He was enjoying his life and riding
motorcycles, one of his passions."

Now 66, Sly Stone is talking to interviewers again and sometimes
taking the stage at Los Angeles clubs with Novena and her group, BabyStone.

"She is the force that keeps him straight," said Anthony Valadez, a
disc jockey with Los Angeles public radio station KCRW. "I think it's
her energy and their bond that is so sacred that keeps him in line.
That's what brings Sly out."

The Sly and the Family Stone founder gave a rare interview to KCRW's
"Morning Becomes Eclectic." Though it airs Monday, the interview was
taped days ahead -- given Stone's 40-year reputation for not showing
up for concerts and interviews.

Sly Stone -- who was Sylvester Stewart before changing his name as a
radio DJ -- didn't reminisce in the interview about past troubles.
Guest host Chris Douridas kept the conversation about the music.

He said he was a child, performing in his family's gospel group, The
Stewart Four, when he first realized the power music has over people.
It happened as he sang "On the Battlefield" during a Sam Cooke show
at the Oakland Auditorium when he was 4.

"Towards the end of the song, people starting running down the aisle
and I didn't know what was going on," he said. "I didn't know what
was going on. I didn't know they were just happy. So, I turned around
and ran, and I've been running ever since."

Stone now says he didn't know then where he was heading.

"Where I was is where I was," he said.

Stone wrote his first hit song for someone else. Bobby Freeman made
"Come On and Swim" a Top 10 pop hit in summer 1964.

When he formed Sly and the Family Stone in 1966, the mix of race and
gender was unusual for its time.

"It was on purpose -- that's what I intended to do," Stone said.

He recruited two white musicians -- drummer Greg Errico and
saxophonist Jerry Martini. Though African-American women were mostly
used as backup singers back then, Cynthia Robinson played the trumpet.

Larry Graham's revolutionary style of "slapping" his electric bass
guitar strings added to the Family Stone's groundbreaking sound.

The songs appealed to white and blacks equally and regularly topped
both the pop and R&B charts.

Stone's lyrics often carried dual meanings.

"Hot Fun in the Summertime" -- released in summer 1969 -- might be a
tribute to the fun of summer days to one listener, while another
might see satire about the summertime race riots of the late '60s.

Stone set the stage for other superstars to follow, but the band
dissolved after one hot decade and success became as elusive as Stone.

Novena may understand her dad better than anyone these days. She's
lured him back to the stage for several performances, which she
avoids calling concerts. With those, "people expect certain things,"
such as wanting performers to be what they were 30 years ago, she said.

Instead, it's the "Sly Stone Variety Show," which allows her father
"to do whatever he wants to do in the moment."

"It's very wild, in the sense that they have the Sly Stone trivia
game onstage with diehard fans," said Anthony Valadez, who has been to several.

The show format is designed "for him to connect with people and
people to connect with him," his daughter said.

Novena also knows to not plan too far ahead with her dad, so he
doesn't have time to back out.

"If it's done quickly, then it works," she said. "But if he has a
tour, then there's a lot of expectations that you have to meet for
everybody to be happy."

"My dad would be like, 'I wanna do a show as soon as possible,'" she
said. That gives her just about a week to get the show together and promote it.

P-funk architect George Clinton and actor-comedian Eddie Murphy
showed up for the last one, which was a sold-out celebration of
Stone's 66th birthday.

One indication that Stone has changed his no-show habit, which marred
his reputation in younger days, is he actually arrives for shows
early, Valadez said.

"Coming early to these gigs, you watch Sly and his affection for his
daughter and it's evidence he would do anything for her," he said.

Stone's complete interview can be heard at KCRW.com.

Taos celebrates 40th anniversary of 'Easy Rider'

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/22/taos-celebrates-40th-anniversary-of-easy-rider/

By Evelyn Kanter
May 22, 2009

It's been 40 years since the motion picture "Easy Rider" roared
across our movie screens, turning Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack
Nicholson into instant stars and creating a thriving culture of
freewheeling, free-spirited open-road drives on motorcycles.

The movie spawned the culture of customizing bikes, like the ones
Messrs. Fonda and Hopper drove into our psyches. The Captain America
Chopper with its flaglike stars and stripes tank, and the Billy Bike,
with its air-brushed "flames" and orange body, still inspire chopper
shops and motorcycle riders today.

Much of the iconic 1969 movie was filmed in and around Taos, N.M.,
which is celebrating the anniversary with a summer-long series of
music, art and bike events. I was in Taos in early May for the
kickoff of "Summer of Love 2009," when Mr. Hopper was named honorary
mayor of Taos. He joked about the irony that one of the world's most
famous hippies would be so honored. But we all grow up, don't we?

Mr. Hopper, who also directed "Easy Rider," told me he fell in love
with the town of Taos in 1967 when he was scouting locations for the
movie and has lived here part time ever since, including doing much
of the film editing. He said he wasn't making a motorcycle movie as
much as a comment on the cowboy way of life - good guys vs. bad guys
- and the political turmoil of the '60s, with the Vietnam War and the
assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin
Luther King. Also, he said, nobody had yet made a movie about the
counterculture hippie movement.

In addition to movie acting, Mr. Hopper is a respected artist and
photographer, and curator of an exhibit by artists who have been
living in Taos since the original Summer of Love, including fellow
actor Dean Stockwell. Some of Mr. Hopper's own work is included in
the exhibit at the Harwood Museum of Art in downtown Taos.

The 2009 motorcycle events begin with the biggest rally in New Mexico
on Memorial Day weekend, drawing an estimated 10,000 bikes, and
features a concert by the band Hot Tuna. The weekend of July 10-12 is
the Taos Mountain Motorcycle Rally and Music Festival, which includes
classic rock concerts, such as the "Born to Be Wild" soundtrack from the film.

On Labor Day weekend, there's the annual Bavarian Mountain Weekend
BMW Motorcycle Rally just outside town at Red River. This event
includes all-day rallies and rides along spectacular S-curves through
the mountains, high desert plains and the Rio Grande gorge, and
around Taos, through some of the same scenery as in the movie. Even
though I was in a car, not on a bike, the long, empty stretches of
road and the beautiful landscape kept me smiling. And in between,
there's an outdoor showing of "Easy Rider" at the Taos County
Sheriff's Posse Arena on June 20.

The motorcycles in Easy Rider were Harley-Davidson Hydra Glide
models, all former police bikes, purchased at auction and customized
for the film. There were four bikes - two were backup duplicates.
Today, there are hundreds, but they are replicas in automobile and
motorcycle museums around the world.

"Easy Rider" wasn't the only movie filmed in Taos. So were parts of
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Terminator," "The Milagro
Beanfield War," and "No Country for Old Men." Go to
www.taossummeroflove.com for more information.

N.J. lawmakers call on Cuba to return murderer of state trooper

http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/05/two_state_senators_and_new.html

by The Star-Ledger Continuous News Desk
Thursday May 21, 2009

TRENTON -- State lawmakers in New Jersey plan to introduce a
resolution calling on President Barack Obama and Congress to urge
Cuba to return a woman who gunned down a state trooper in 1973.

JoAnne Chesimard escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for
Women (now Edna Mahan) in 1979. She was serving a sentence of 25
years to life for the murder of State Trooper Werner Foerster and
related crimes.

Sen. Sean Kean and Sen. Fred Madden will introduce the resolution
calling on the United States to withhold normalization of diplomatic
relations with Cuba until Chesimard is extradited. The Senators said
Obama's move to ease sanctions against Cuba is an opportunity to
bring back Chesimard.

The Black Liberation Army, now known as Assata Shakur, was convicted
of shooting Foerster as he lay on the ground.

The U.S. Justice Department has offered a $1 million reward for her capture.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2005 appeared to defend Shakur without naming her.

The senators are expected to be joined by David Jones, State Troopers
Fraternal Association president, Anthony Wieners, New Jersey State
PBA president, Dennis Hallion, New Jersey State Troopers
Non-Commissioned Officers Association president and Ed Brannigan, New
Jersey Fraternal Order of Police president.

Idealist's slaying in '71 still haunts today

[2 items]

Idealist's slaying in '71 still haunts today

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/23/MNU217OU14.DTL

John Koopman, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 24, 2009

Mary Alice Willey arrived in San Francisco in 1969.

She was 21 years old, the product of a conservative Southern
California family, newly divorced and ready to experience life in the
free-wheeling Haight-Ashbury district.

She rented an attic apartment and enrolled at San Francisco State,
where she eagerly participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam
War sit-ins and demonstrations.

Then Mary Alice discovered the black power movement.

She became a strident devotee of George Jackson, the charismatic but
militant San Quentin inmate who had gained international fame for his
best-selling prison classic, "Soledad Brother." She wrote letters to
Black Panther Johnny Spain, who was also incarcerated at San Quentin.

And she began associating with members of the Black Liberation Army,
a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers that would become implicated
in the Aug. 29, 1971, killing of a police officer at San Francisco's
Ingleside Station. There is reason to believe that Mary Alice may
have played a role in the attack and the slaying of Sgt. John V. Young.

But less than two weeks after the attack on Ingleside Station, Mary
Alice disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Thirty-seven years would pass before an investigator with the
Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department would determine that an
unidentified body found floating in a canal near Modesto on Sept. 11,
1971, was Mary Alice.

She had been stabbed 65 times. Ten of the wounds were fatal, the rest
defensive. Her body had been buried in the Patterson District
Cemetery. Atop her grave was a beige stone that said, simply, "Jane Doe."

Investigators don't know who killed Mary Alice - or why.

But on June 8, seven alleged former members of the Black Liberation
Army are scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing on charges
that they murdered Sgt. Young, and it's possible that the proceedings
will shed new light on the sad story of Mary Alice Willey.

Feeling unwanted

Mary Alice stepped lightly during her short time on earth. Only a few
people remember her well. But a handful of photographs capture the
arc of her too-short life.

Among the earliest photographs are black-and-white images of a chubby
little girl standing with her parents in front of a ranch-style house
in Anaheim.

She was an only child, and her parents were in their 40s when she was
born. Together they attended a nearby Christian Scientist Church,
said her best friend, Barbara Spiker.

Mary Alice's mother, Maxine, adored her daughter and would do
anything for her, Spiker said. But her father, Paul, was aloof with
an impenetrable personality. Mary Alice, Spiker said, saw her parents
as old and uncaring. She was convinced they didn't want children, and
she was a mistake.

Mary Alice was smart. She skipped a grade in elementary school.

In eighth and ninth grades, she decided to go by the name Carol
Willey. That was how she was listed in her eighth- and ninth-grade
yearbooks. Spiker thinks the name change was an attempt by Mary Alice
to re-create herself and distinguish herself from the staid
personalities of her parents.

High school years

By the time she entered Loara High School, Mary Alice was once again
using her given name. She became involved in activities typical for
high school girls in the early and mid-1960s. She joined the French
Club and spent three years in Future Homemakers of America. She was
also a member of the National Honor Society. Yet she barely left an
impression.

"She was the kind of girl who was quiet and nice but not really out
there," classmate Pam Menazer recalled. "She was just kind of on the
edge of the crowd."

But Mary Alice was also willful, according to Spiker.

"She had a certain amount of rebellion in her," Spiker said. "We used
to drive up to Hollywood and cruise around, and Mary would want us to
get some alcohol. She had a wild streak that most people never knew."

Mary Alice appears in only a few photographs in her high school yearbooks.

In her junior year, she is seen in group photographs for French Club
and Future Homemakers of America.

In the French Club photograph, she is seated in the front row wearing
a horizontally striped sweater, ankles crossed, hands folded on her
lap. She looks glum.

In another photograph from that year, a couple of FHA girls are
serving lunch to members of the faculty. The caption contains no
names, but Mary Alice can be seen in the background, looking at the
camera from between the other kids.

The only photo of her as a senior is her class picture. It shows a
pretty young lady wearing an off-the-shoulder evening gown, hair
shoulder-length in a Marlo Thomas flip. For once, she's smiling.

The newlywed

Mary Alice graduated from Loara High in June 1965, at age 16, and in
the fall entered California Polytechnic State University San Luis
Obispo, where she met a fellow student named Andrew Broom McGregor.

Within months, they decided to marry.

There is a photograph of Mary Alice at her wedding shower. She is
just 17. A present is open on her lap, and she is holding a teacup.
Her hair is in a tall bouffant-style hairdo. Her smile is wide and pretty.

She and McGregor were married on June 16, 1966.

McGregor, now a real estate professional living in Boulder, Colo.,
said he and Mary Alice were typical late-'60s college kids. They
liked rock 'n' roll and protested the war in Vietnam. Mary Alice let
her hair grow long and learned to pluck a guitar.

But in 1968, McGregor asked for a divorce. Mary Alice didn't want the
marriage to end, he said, but he'd decided he was too young to be
married. He wanted his freedom.

After the divorce, McGregor never heard from Mary Alice again.

Next stop: San Francisco

Shortly after the breakup, Mary Alice dropped out of Cal Poly and
joined the migration of young people drawn to San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury district.

She settled into an apartment on Page Street, just a few blocks from
the intersection of Haight and Ashbury, and in fall 1970, enrolled at
San Francisco State using her married name, Mary McGregor.

It was a tumultuous time on campus. Just two years earlier, minority
students, demanding more senior faculty of color and a new ethnic
studies curriculum, had launched a student strike that became the
most violent episode in campus history. As the nation watched, police
hit striking students with batons, and hundreds of students were
arrested after throwing rocks and firebombs.

The mood at the school had cooled a bit by fall of 1970, but not
much. Student anger at the Vietnam War and at society's unfair
treatment of black people was high.

Mary Alice attended class for only two semesters, but while she was
there, she met a fellow student named Patrick Warren McDowell. A big
Irishman with the gift of gab, McDowell previously had been convicted
of burglary, auto theft and a variety of other petty crimes. He said
he had been recruited to the college under a program to bring
ex-convicts to college campuses. San Francisco State has no record of
him attending, but officials say their record-keeping from that time
might not be completely accurate.

He and Mary Alice dated casually. McDowell said they mostly went
together to protests, sit-ins and demonstrations and what was called
"street theater."

A photograph from 1970 shows Mary Alice and McDowell in her attic
apartment. She is wearing a loose, floral-print dress. McDowell is
embracing her from behind. On a wall is a blow-up of a check from the
"Bank of Amerika." The phrase "Keep the faith baby" is painted
whimsically on the wall.

Barbara Spiker recalled talking to her childhood friend on the phone
after she'd moved to San Francisco.

Mary Alice, she said, was excited about the fun she was having. She
was a San Francisco hippie and loving it.

A bungled ski lodge holdup

McDowell described himself as a die-hard militant. He said he was a
member of several radical organizations, including the Symbionese
Liberation Army, the notorious group responsible for the slaying of
Oakland schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and the kidnapping of
newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

But his actions weren't always politically motivated.

Needing money, McDowell hooked up in February 1971 with another
ex-con named Robert Barr, who had hatched a plan to rob Sugar Bowl
Ski Lodge near Lake Tahoe.

On Feb. 8, McDowell borrowed Mary Alice's car and drove with Barr to
Sugar Bowl. Armed with a submachine gun and a revolver, they entered
the lodge late in the evening, rounded up a half-dozen employees and
tied them up. They believed the safe contained $100,000 in cash, but
none of the employees knew the combination.

As McDowell watched over the employees, Barr went to the manager's
home adjacent to the lodge. His intention was to force the manager at
gunpoint to open the safe, but the manager saw him coming, grabbed
his shotgun and started firing into the snowy darkness.

Barr and McDowell fled, but Placer County sheriff's deputies took
them into custody after a two-hour search. They were transported to
Auburn to stand trial for kidnapping, armed robbery and assault with
a deadly weapon.

Inside the car McDowell had borrowed from Mary Alice, deputies found
a revolver. It belonged to her. McDowell said he doesn't know why
Mary Alice had the gun. She was never considered a suspect in the
Sugar Bowl job, and her car eventually was returned to her. The gun
remained with Placer County.

Mary Alice's sham marriage

McDowell complained to his attorney, Robert Zweig, that jail
conditions in Placer County were horrible. He said he was beaten
daily and fed once a day in a dog dish. Zweig advised him to find a
wife. A wife, he said, could file complaints on McDowell's behalf and
get him better treatment.

In May 1971, McDowell and Barr went on trial in the Placer County
courthouse under tight security. In the middle of the trial, Zweig
asked the presiding judge to officiate over the marriage of his
client and his client's girlfriend - Mary Alice.

Superior Court Judge Ronald G. Cameron declined, explaining that to
do so would be a conflict of interest. Zweig obtained a mail-order
pastorship from the Universal Life Church and, during a recess in the
trial, stood up and turned to face his client and then Mary Alice,
who was sitting in the front row of the gallery.

"I now pronounce you man and wife," he said. It was May 20, 1971.

Stories about the wedding appeared in The Chronicle and other
Northern California newspapers.

A photograph in The Chronicle shows Mary Alice standing in front of
the courthouse and holding up her marriage license. In the
background, law enforcement officers with shotguns and high-powered
rifles are positioned in front of and on top of the courthouse. The
headline says, "Shotgun Weddings Do Happen."

McDowell admits the wedding was a sham.

"She never would have married me otherwise," he said.

McDowell and Barr were convicted on July 7, 1971. McDowell was
sentenced to five years to life in prison. He never heard from Mary
Alice again.

Today, McDowell lives quietly in Salem, Ore. He has remarried and,
according to authorities, has not been in serious trouble with the
law since serving time for the 1971 crime.

He was reluctant to talk about Mary Alice or the past.

"There are things out there that are still alive," he said.

Mary Alice's killer, McDowell said, is still on the loose.

The black power movement

McDowell has two photographs of Mary Alice that reflect her
involvement in the black power movement.

One shows Mary Alice looking confident, her face thrust forward and
hair swept back. Near the top of her crew-neck sweater is a pin in
the form of a black power fist.

The other shows her in a large, black, Afro wig, wearing a fake fur
coat, double-breasted like a peacoat. She has a serene smile. On the
back of the photo, Mary Alice had written: "To Patrick. Je t'aime
beaucoup mon homme. Soyez sage! Venceremos!! Mary."

Translation: "I love you very much my man. Be good! We shall triumph!! Mary."

Mary Alice had become infatuated with George Jackson, a militant
prison inmate and best-selling author who had become a powerful voice
for prison reform and civil rights during his years behind bars at
Soledad State Prison in Monterey County.

He had been sent to Soledad in 1961 at age 18 after being convicted
of robbing a gas station of $70. He was sentenced to one year to life
under California's indeterminate sentencing law in effect at the time.

He read widely in prison and became a Marxist. As his reputation
grew, the Black Panthers decided to capitalize on his popularity by
making him a field marshal in their organization. In 1970, he and two
other inmates were accused of beating and hurling a white prison
guard to his death from a Soledad tier, apparently in retaliation for
the exercise yard slayings of three black inmates. Known as the
Soledad Brothers, the three were transferred to San Quentin for trial.

In October 1970, Jackson published a collection of letters. "Soledad
Brother," a searing indictment of the prison system. The book turned
Jackson into an international celebrity, especially among the new left.

McDowell said Mary Alice loved Jackson and would do anything for him.

"She bought into his big plan, which was to get out of San Quentin
and start the revolution," McDowell said. "She talked about how great
it was going to be when they were together."

He said Mary Alice once asked him to get involved in a scheme to help
Jackson, but McDowell declined.

"I told her, 'That's your thing. Leave me out of it,' " he said.

Rebellion in San Quentin

On Aug. 21, 1971, a young lawyer named Stephen Bingham visited
Jackson at San Quentin. Authorities allege that Bingham smuggled a
gun into the visiting room and gave it to Jackson, who allegedly hid
it under an Afro wig that Bingham had also brought in.

As Jackson was being led back to his cell, a guard noticed the gun.
Jackson drew the weapon and, paraphrasing Vietnamese revolutionary
leader Ho Chi Minh, declared: "This is it, gentlemen. The dragon has come."

It became the most violent day in California prison history. Inmates
freed from their cells murdered three guards and two white inmate
trustees. They tried to kill several others.

As the prison went to lockdown, Jackson and another inmate ran across
the prison yard. A guard in the tower fired twice. Jackson was dead
before he hit the ground.

Marin County Superior Court Judge Terry Boren, who as an assistant
district attorney prosecuted the inmates known as the San Quentin Six
for their roles in the bloody prison uprising, remembers seeing the
name Mary McGregor on documents related to Jackson. He says he may
have seen her name in San Quentin's visitors log. Law enforcement
officials say her name shows up on some documents related to San
Quentin, but the full extent of her involvement remains a mystery.

Ingleside Station attack

Seven days after Jackson's death, a bomb went off at the Bank of
America branch at Stonestown mall, and all available officers from
San Francisco's Ingleside Station rushed to investigate.

A short time later, a young white woman entered the station to report
a missing purse. After she finished filling out a report, she walked
out and was seen shining a flashlight toward the street.

Twenty minutes later, a car pulled up. Several black men got out and
walked into the station.

One shoved a shotgun into the voice grate of the station's
bulletproof glass and fired. Sgt. John V. Young was hit in the chest
and died on the station floor. A civilian aide was wounded.

Two days afterward, The Chronicle received an anonymous letter from a
group calling itself the "George L. Jackson Assault Squad of the
Black Liberation Army." The note said the Ingleside Station was
attacked to retaliate for Jackson's death.

Police have long thought the woman who had come to the station to
report her stolen purse was a lookout connected to the BLA, and they
believed that woman was Mary Alice.

Witnesses to the Ingleside attack - the wounded civilian and an
officer who had been in the back of the station - described the woman
for a police sketch artist.

The sketch shows a young woman in a blond wig, parted in the middle.
She had high cheekbones, a stern mouth and octagonal, rimless
glasses. An accompanying bulletin described the lookout as
attractive, about 5 feet, 9 inches and wearing a micro-mini skirt and
"modish" tan coat. It said she had "somewhat heavy legs."

The sketch and description bore a resemblance to Mary Alice.

There is also a San Francisco Police Department memo, undated but
believed to have been written not long after the Ingleside attack.

Detective Ken Hedrick of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department,
the investigator who identified Mary Alice's body and is trying to
solve her murder, said the memo was written by an SFPD homicide
lieutenant. It says, "Intelligence gathered in Marin County indicates
that the lookout on the Ingleside shooting was one Mary McGregor."

Inspector Joe Engler, the San Francisco Police Department's lead
investigator on the Ingleside case, would neither confirm nor deny
the memo's existence. The department is currently investigating and
helping to prosecute seven alleged former members of the Black
Liberation Army for murder in connection with Young's death.

One more thing piques the investigators' curiosity. The name given by
the woman who reported her purse missing: Carol George. Carol was the
name Mary Alice went by in junior high school. George Jackson's death
was cited as the justification of the attack.

The case against the BLA

The investigation into the Ingleside attack has been long and fraught
with controversy.

Investigators tracked some of the suspects to New Orleans and
extracted incriminating statements from them, but in 1975 that
evidence was thrown out by a judge after it was alleged that New
Orleans police used torture to get the information.

The case languished for decades until 1999, when San Francisco police
made one last effort to investigate it. A re-examination of a
cigarette lighter found at the station yielded a thumbprint allegedly
belonging to a member of the Black Liberation Army. In addition, a
BLA member apparently agreed to testify against his former associates.

Eight men, allegedly all former BLA members, were arrested in 2007.
It was a controversial move, considering the length of time that has
passed since the attack and the advanced ages of the accused.

Authorities charged them with murder and conspiracy, but a judge
ruled that the statute of limitations had expired on some of the
conspiracy charges. One man, charged only with conspiracy, was
dropped from the case.

Now the seven remaining suspects are about to defend themselves in
San Francisco Superior Court for Young's murder.

A body in the canal

Thirteen days after the Ingleside shooting, on Sept. 11, 1971, Mary
Alice's body was found floating in the Delta-Mendota canal.

She was wearing only a handmade blouse and an earring when she was
pulled from the water. The coroner said she had been dead for 12 to 24 hours.

She had 65 stab wounds, most of them defensive, but at least 10 were
considered fatal. One stab wound entered under her left breast and
hit her spinal column. One wound penetrated her skull and entered her
brain. Her throat was cut.

An autopsy indicated that someone tried to cut off her hands and
failed. Her killer then tried to cut off a couple of fingers and
failed at that, too. One thumb was removed with much hacking.

But she had no identification. Investigators couldn't determine who
she was. For 37 years, she lay in a grave marked only by a large
stone that said "Jane Doe."

Jane Doe no more

In the spring of 2008, Hedrick, the Stanislaus County Sheriff's
Department investigator, decided to see if new technologies could
help identify the woman found dead in the canal back in 1971. He had
the body exhumed, a forensic anthropologist made a facial
reconstruction, and technicians tried to get a DNA sample for a match.

In late summer, a cousin of Mary Alice stumbled upon a short
newspaper story explaining the detective's interest in solving the
case. The cousin, Corey Oisen of Santa Cruz County, called Hedrick,
and the two compared notes. Oisen arranged for a DNA test.

It was a match. Finally, the body in the canal had a name.

On Oct. 31, a small ceremony for Mary Alice was held at the Patterson cemetery.

A perfectly rectangular hole was dug in the soft earth in the exact
spot where she lay as Jane Doe. Atop the grave, a bronze casket.

Several chairs were placed in front of the casket, under a small
tent-top. Three women took their seats. They were Mary Alice's first
cousin, Mary Jones; Jones' daughter, Sally Wilson; and Oisen. Mary
Alice's parents had passed away years ago, never knowing what became
of their missing daughter.

The women prayed and sobbed as a police chaplain read a eulogy and
talked about the terrible crime that had taken Mary Alice's life.

Mary Alice now has a proper gravestone. In it is carved her real name
and the dates of her birth and death. There is an image of a
lighthouse, to reflect the idea that her family never forgot about
her and kept the light on for her.

An inscription at the bottom says, "Forever Loved, Never Forgotten."
--

E-mail John Koopman at jkoopman@sfchronicle.com.

--------

Date: Mon, 25 May 2009
From: SF-8 case <cdhrsupport@freedomarchives.org>
Subject: [Freethe SF8] SF 8 supporters reply to Chronicle

I sent a letter to the Chronicle yesterday regarding their terrible
article. Although they may not publish any letters, I think it would
be good for as many people as possible to send a quick message
expressing outrage over their article. This could help get a meeting
with them or support effort to get an op ed supportive of the 8
published. Letters can be sent to letters@sfchronicle.com or through
their website comments section.

Below are letters from Stuart Hanlon & Michael Lyon which they sent
and could help people frame their comments although I don't think
each letter needs to be that detailed since the point is more to
register our disgust.

Diana Block
*****************************************
From Stuart Hanlon, attorney for Herman Bell

I am one of the attorneys for the seven former Black Panthers
charged with the 1971 murder of a S.F. police officer. Your article
"Idealist Slaying Still Haunts Today," not only is misleading , but
contains outright lies and is based on nothing but the speculation of
your writer or others who know nothing about this case

We have received hundred of thousands of pages of evidence and there
is no evidence whatsoever that links this young woman to the killing
of Sgt Young, or her killing to those seven men facing charges, or
the Black Panther Party or any other organization connected in any
way to the case. Yet your article says she was likely involved and
that the seven men facing charges are responsible for her death.

It is difficult to imagine any reason why you would print such an
article filled with these false innuendos linking the sad and tragic
death of this young woman with this group of men facing a trial for
something that happened close to forty years ago other than a
blatant attempt to bias the prospective jury pool against the seven
men on trial. It is difficult enough to get a fair trial
thirty-eight years after a crime, when evidence is destroyed,
witnesses dead or senile, and all memories faded by time and age.
Your article makes the possibility of a fair trial even more remote.

This case is being prosecuted by the Attorney General of California
and investigated by the FBI and SF police department. They don't need
any more help trying to falsely convict these men from a biased and
misinformed writer and a paper that cares nothing about truth or justice.

****************************************************
Editor,

Your sensationalist May 24 article, "Idealist's slaying in '71 still
haunts today," shows just how baseless the State's prosecution
of the SF8 for the 1971 killing of a SF policeman is. This
prosecution is based only on "confessions" tortured out of the
defendants by New Orleans police in 1973, but the Chronicle
shamelessly helps prosecute the case by insinuating that the SF8
also killed a young woman whom the Chronicle says cooperated in the
policeman's killing. The story says a woman was discovered murdered
37 years ago in Stanislaus County, but gives questionable evidence
that she is missing Panther sympathizer Mary Alice Willey, and no
evidence that the woman who entered the Ingleside Station to file a
stolen purse police report before the killing was Willey, or even an
accomplice at all. It's all spin. This entire SF8 case, with its
missing murder weapon, its misplaced records on fingerprints which
failed to implicate the SF8, and its DNA evidence which fails to
implicate the SF8, is a plan to promote racist conspiracy theories,
in hopes of stalling future movements against police brutality and
burying the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Drop the
charges against the SF8 in their Preliminary Hearing on June 8th.

Michael Lyon
_______________________________________________
Please support these brothers by sending a donation. Make checks
payable to CDHR/Agape and mail to the address below or donate on line:

www.freethesf8.org/donate.html

Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR)
PO Box 90221
Pasadena, CA 91109
(415) 226-1120
FreetheSF8@riseup.net

www.freethesf8.org

Invitation from naked hippie goat farmers

http://www.perhameb.com/articles/index.cfm?id=12062&section=Opinion

Alan Linda, New York Mills Herald
Published Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I met an old hippie the other day. Although I was never really a
hippie, I did for a while masquerade as one, back in the day. Matter
of fact, when we moved up here 30-some winters ago, we kind of looked
like hippies, so much so that the hippies already here kind of welcomed us in.

Feeling welcomed was fine until they invited us to a naked bathing.
At this point in time, and at that point, too, there just aren't and
weren't enough drugs to get me in the mood to go to a neighborhood
hippie naked bath event. That was when I realized that I had goals
involving family that substantially differed from those of real
hippies. By not regularly attending those naked bathing events, I did
miss the evening when their milking goats got out. The goats didn't
have much trouble getting out. I saw what they called fences. Only if
the goats were as stoned as the hippies would this brand of fencing
have worked.

Anyway, several of them were soaking in an outdoor hot tub, which
sounds pretty fancy, but was in fact an old galvanized cattle tank
crudely plumbed into a wood burning stove next to it. One of them
looked up and saw the herd of goats grazing their way out onto the
gravel road, at which point everyone got out and began running after
the goats.

I've never been a goat, but all those prune wrinkled people with
flopping appendages chasing them was too much for them, so they
really took off. About then, the neighbors came back from Sunday
church, only to see what looked like a breakout from an insane
asylum. I'm sorry I missed that, as long as if I had been there, I
would have been in the car coming from church.

Some of you may remember The Mother Earth News, a monthly publication
that in many hippie enclavesand, I will admit, in some regular
enclaves, toowas regarded somewhat ahead of The Bible. The Mother
Earth News had lots of information about gardening, which was
valuable for a generation of pampered misfits who had never
considered where radishes and carrots and such came from. It had
information about building your cabin in north Alaska using nothing
but a pocket knife and a hatchet, very valuable if you were stoned
enough to take nothing else with you up there.

I remember one of the issues that I saw. It showed how to put lots of
chimney pipe on your wood stove, which you should position as far
away from the chimney hole as the room would allow. That way, you'd
gain a lot of extra heat from all that additional pipe. Some of their
example looked like the guy who had put it together had worked at a
pretzel factory.

So when I hooked up my first wood stove, of course I had to throw a
couple of extra elbows and pipe in there. No, I didn't locate it
clear across the room, which was a good thing, because when that
metal chimney pipe caught fire, it began to turn red right above the
stove. The red slowly moved toward the wall. Had it made it, keeping
warm wouldn't have been a problem for about a half hour, at which
point the house would have been completely gone to ashes.

I'll bet one of those issues showed how to turn a cattle tank into a
hot tub. Maybe even something about fencing.

When I run into old hippies, it's easy for me to recognize them by
the glitter that shines from their eyes when they begin to talk about
how they're going to harness the sun, harness water, harness
hydrogen, harness the earth. When I ran into this one, he was
demonstrating a house with a three-foot-thick wall that had been
constructed of giant straw bales.

"You know," he said, "the straw in this bearing wall wouldn't carry
the weight of the roof. We had to reinforce it with poles." He seemed
insulted by all this. The weight of his indignation at this taking
place probably seemed to him justly equal to the outright lack of
respect the straw bales had for his engineering.

Huh. Straw bales wouldn't hold up the roof. I didn't get a chance to
ask if he had been referring back to the engineering in some of those
40-year-old Mother Earth News magazines. Even if it had occurred to
me at the time, I wouldn't have. No sense ruining a good trip. Back
then, if your straw bale house sagged a bit, no real hippie cared,
given that, viewed through a smokey stupor, no one noticed in the first place.

He had other ideas for building low-energy houses, all of which were
very expensive.

How are you going to get people to spend so much money on this, I
asked the old hippie.

"Have to get them fashionably excited about decadent sustainability,"
he replied.

Decadent sustainability, the new hippie goal. Make a ton of money,
then spend it on houses built so warm that they heat comfortably with
big ideas.

On a par with goat roping and home-made hot tubs.

Land of hippies proves a hot place to visit

http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20090522/OPINION01/905209893?Title=Land-of-hippies-proves-a-hot-place-to-visit

Laura McKnight
Published: Friday, May 22, 2009

It was clean. It was quiet. But it was cool.

I'm not gonna' lie. The things I had heard about Portland, Ore.,
scared me a little.

I had been warned that Oregonians, particularly Portlanders, hold
sacred their beer, coffee and recycling.

The first two? No problem. I, too, nurture a love for good beverages,
especially those of the bean variety.

But the almost cult-like fixation with recycling unnerved me. I come
from a land where a desire to recycle is often looked upon as uppity
and impractical, a weird hippie chore better left to the crazy
liberals in California.

Trying to find a place to drop off recyclables in Terrebonne Parish
is like trying to uncover wreckage from Area 51: you think it might
exist, but no one wants to talk about it.

Talk of recycling here meets with eye rolls, and I've heard that
actually using one of those green reusable shopping bags from Rouses
can make you the target of sarcasm. A desire to recycle means you're
one of Those People, maybe even a yikes liberal.

You'd think south Louisiana would be more environmentally conscious,
that we'd try to avoid throwing garbage all over our disappearing
land, but not so much. Save our soil so we can fill it with trash? Hmm.

The attitude about recycling here could very well be an overreaction
to the West Coast's fanaticism.

Personally, the breed of West Coasters that I've associated with
recycling makes me not want to recycle ever.

It's almost like a religion, the First Church of Recycling. Deep
down, I want to recycle, but I fear becoming one of them. I think the
basic tenets of the religion are true, but the fundamentalist
followers turn me off with their self-righteous, judgmental attitudes
toward those who refuse to accept the green way of life. So I remain
an unsustainable-living heathen, headed for a global-warmed eternity
of sea-level rise, overflowing garbage dumps and sad polar bears.

I also was warned that Oregonians bristle at the sound of a southern
accent, that slow, drawled speech is associated with a slow, closed mind.

So, when I packed my bags and headed for Hippie Land, I braced myself
for condescension as well as the usual inquiries about my weird
bayou-redneck accent, which often lead to questions about whether I
rode in a boat to school and if my father wrestles alligators, etc. I
wish I were making that up, but apparently, a lot of people outside
south Louisiana have watched "The Skeleton Key" and "Waterboy" a few
too many times.

But maybe I had stereotypes, too.

I braced myself for lectures on recycling and waited for the
condescending looks, but I got none of those.

Portland was certainly proud of its green efforts the recycling and
compost bins filling the city boasted "Portland Recycles!" and
"Portland Composts!" But that was it. No one bugged me about it.

Instead, the good people of Portland treated me with friendliness a
more reserved friendliness than that of Cajun country, but a genuine
friendliness all the same.

The city reminded me of an expanded, quiet, clean version of New
Orleans' Frenchmen Street, filled with unique denizens performing
random acts of weirdness.

Exhibit A: a musical act called Karaoke from Hell. It's a brilliant
idea, and it's surprising more people haven't thought of it. The act
features a live band backing up karaoke singers. I expected this kind
of band to be pretty crappy, but they were good, really good.

Most impressive was a musician in cut-off denim shorts who performed
with such intensity that it took some time for me to notice that he
was strumming a bed knob instead of a guitar.

Exhibit B: a pagan/Wiccan evangelist on the bus. He started his pitch
with "Do you like my rose quartz?" while brandishing a crystal worn
around his neck. He then told a young woman on the bus that his
quartz held special "mother goddess powers" and asked if she believed
in the mother goddess. The answer? A very awkward "kinda." Can't
really argue with that.

Exhibit C: a guy dusting off a parking meter. That's placing a high
value on keeping the environment clean.

Portland had the type of coffee shops, bums, freaks and taco trucks
found on Frenchmen Street but to an exponential degree.

The taco trucks and I'm not exaggerating sold every kind of food
imaginable, and as my buddy Chuck says, I have a good imagination.
The taco trucks went far beyond tacos to serve Korean food,
Vietnamese food, Tibetan food, Bosnian food and on and on and on.
Ridiculous. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would find it
hard to believe.

The bums also were exponential not just in their number, but in
their loudness and aggression.

I often give change to bums in New Orleans, so I thought I'd feel
similar sympathy toward their Portland peers, but these guys tested
the limits of my charity.

I've never seen such self-entitled, able-bodied, noisy beggars in my
life. And antagonistic at that.

Nothing destroys compassion faster than a sarcastic beggar. These
bums yelled and shouted. They hurled insults. They made unkind
commentary about my 7-Up T-shirt.

Bums in New Orleans look hard up. They sit on the sidewalk in
postures of defeat, smelling of alcohol and smoke. They ask for
change with a humble look and smile even when you don't give it to them.

Portland bums don't look downtrodden enough. This might make me a
jerk, but I couldn't help but think, "If she can stand on a corner
and yell like that, why can't she get a job? How about a Wal-Mart
greeter? Car sales?"

I gave money to bums who offered some sort of skill or performance,
such as the Elvis impersonator on a street corner. I respect a man
who at least sings for his supper instead of yelling.

Also of note, this city is very pale. I had never seen so many pale
people glorying in their paleness. People flaunted glow-in-the-dark
white legs with a lack of shame I've never before witnessed.

It was refreshing for an uber-pale girl like me, who can't wear
shorts without receiving running commentary on my blinding whiteness.

In fact, I'm so pale, I managed to get a sunburn in Portland, a city
known for its lack of sun.

The Land of Hippies wound up being a totally hot place to visit, even
for a non-recycler.

Hard to turn today's youths into hippies

http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1576950

By BRUCE KIRKLAND
5/21/09

Youths today were difficult to turn into hairy naked hippies for a
movie about the 1969 Woodstock music festival, according to
filmmakers Ang Lee and James Schamus.

That was the biggest challenge in making Taking Woodstock, the two
partners in Focus Pictures said after their comedy made its debut in
competition at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival this weekend.
Producer-director Lee and producer-writer Schamus are responsible for
past films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain.

"I would say the most challenging thing was keeping all the extras
looking period," Lee said of shooting Taking Woodstock. "Young people
today have different attitudes, different body shapes and different
looks. So, to get that many people to look generally in the right
direction of the period was probably the most challenging thing to do."

For the core group of 200 hippies, the filmmakers set up a hippy camp
staffed by old hippies. But they had to go even further when it came
to coifing and trimming and finding the right body types, Shamus said.

"The biggest challenge was getting extras who were skinny but who
were not working out all the time and still had pubic hair. If you
think of it, it was a generation of people who weren't fat but who
weren't staring at themselves in the mirror all the time and not
shaving everything off down there. It encapsulates the difference of
40 years right there."

Big event, small movie

Lee and Schamus have been stung by early criticism of Taking
Woodstock as featherweight. It works around the edges of the festival
by telling a true story of how it got started. The main characters
never get near the stages where the superstars who became
immortalized in the documentary Woodstock played their music.

"To me, this was the essence of everything we were trying to do,"
Schamus said yesterday about Taking Woodstock. "So it was good being
here (at Cannes) so we can educate people in advance of what to
expect. Which is: Here is a speck on the horizon of millions of
people, while Woodstock is this big thing."

Lee said he would never try to replicate what the legendary
documentary shows. "I cannot re-create the concert. There is no way I
can do it, and nor am I interested in that. What I can do is show how
it affected small people in a very sensitive way."

Yikes

Emile Hirsch, 23, first heard about Woodstock from his parents, David
Hirsch and Margaret Davenport, and their friends. Hirsch said he
remembers them "telling stories about not showering and great music
and, when the skinny dipping started coming along, it was like:
'Okay, stop! Mom! Disgusting! Okay, not disgusting but I don't need
to hear about it!' "

Now he finds himself in Taking Woodstock as an angry soldier who
finds himself mellowed at the festival. "Getting to learn about
Woodstock was, for me, really a special thing," Hirsch says. "I just
didn't know that this is what it was like back then and that people
were that trusting and open-minded."

Christmas in May

Jim Carrey is in Cannes for an early Christmas. Carrey will be the
featured guest at the press launch of Robert Zemeckis' 3-D version of
A Christmas Carol. In the movie, Carrey plays curmudgeonly Ebenezer
Scrooge, with Gary Oldman as his clerk and Colin Firth as his nephew.
Disney is engineering a seven-month campaign to get A Christmas Carol
positioned for its Christmastime opening. At Cannes, fake snow has
turned the grassy knoll in front of the Carlton Hotel into a wintry
wonderland under the blistering Mediterranean sun.

All about Abbie

Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish's co-star in the Cannes contender Bright
Star, predicts big things for the Australian lass.

"I think Abbie's like a really interesting character because she's
got a lot of strings to her bow. She's got a hip-hop band. She might
decide that's what she wants to do. She's a very strong person and
she's on her own path and I would not presume to know what decision
she would make next or what would arrive at her feet. But I'm pretty
sure it would be amazing!"

Cornish lives in Los Angeles with actor-boyfriend Ryan Phillippe, who
divorced Reese Witherspoon to be with her after they met on the set
of Stop-Loss. Cornish is being hyped as a contender for best actress
at Cannes for Bright Star.

Bill Ayers is back

[2 articles]

Ayers encourages active citizenship

http://media.www.thejusticeonline.com/media/storage/paper573/news/2009/05/19/News/Ayers.Encourages.Active.Citizenship-3742581.shtml

by Nashrah Rahman
News Editor
News | 5/19/09

Bill Ayers, co-founder of the radical protest group the Weather
Underground and a professor in the College of Education at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke about what it means to be an
active citizen to an audience that mostly consisted of students in
Carl J. Shapiro Theater April 30.

The event was sponsored by Democracy for America, Students for a
Democratic Society, the Brenda Meehan Social Justice in Action Grant
and four academic departments: Peace, Conflict and Coexistence
Studies; Education; History; and Social Justice and Social Policy. A
question-and-answer session followed Ayers' speech.

In the 1960s, Ayers was a radical antiwar activist whose protest
group was blamed for several bombings at the Capitol and the
Pentagon. The Weather Underground was also suspected of involvement
in the shooting of Boston police officer Walter A. Schroeder during a
bank robbery in Brighton.

DFA members Liza Behrendt '11 and Mariel Gruszko ' 10 introduced
Ayers, referencing the controversy surrounding his visit to the
University campus and the recent cancellation of his planned visit to
Boston College.

"We are proud that our university has demonstrated great intellectual
integrity, becoming the first Boston-area institution to present a
speech from [Ayers] after President Obama's inauguration," Behrendt said.

In his speech Ayers advised his audience, "Open your eyes, act, doubt."

He explained that one must "see the world as it is: with all of its
suffering as well as all its joy and ecstasy; ... otherwise, you're
[just] being a good person in your mind," Ayers said.

He said that he was disappointed to hear his progressive friends and
students hope that Obama would make a difference without considering
what they could do to help the president. Similarly, Ayers asked the
audience to think about "what you did this morning for peace, what
you did this morning for economic democracy, what you did this
morning to change the frame for health care, education or GLBTQ rights?"

"In other words, Obama will not save us, but with any luck, we can
save Obama," Ayers said, emphasizing that the administration's
success ultimately lies within the hands of its country's citizens.

However, Ayers also said that he understood that it was difficult to
open one's eyes and become an active participant in the public
sphere. He referred to the abolition and women's rights movements and
acknowledged that it would have been difficult for the audience to be
support those movements when they began.

Ayers also spoke about the Vietnam War, saying, "The problem is that,
of course, because we move on without resolving that history, it's an
open wound in our history." When asked about the Weather
Underground's activities in response to the Vietnam War, Ayers
replied, "I think everybody tried something, but no one was perfect.
â€¦ We didn't end the war."

By electing an African-American president, the United States has made
progress, according to Ayers. "With the legacy of white supremacy
that we bring into this moment, â€¦ to have [an African-American
president] just seems ... enormous," he said.

When asked during the question-and-answer session about his feelings
regarding the protesters who had gathered off campus and on
University premises before and during his speech, Ayers said, "The
threats that were generated against me, toward me and toward you
because you were with me are generated by a couple of guys in their
boxer shorts. â€¦ Nothing is happening."

"A university of all places, a library, a radio station, a bookstore;
these have to be places where we insist that no matter how weird the
ideas, no matter how weird the history, we have to hear them. We have
a right to debate them," Ayers said. "It's simply having a conversation."

"You should set out on a mission to talking to everybody, reading
every book, listening to every debate to set up a mind of your own at
the end of the day," Ayers told his audience.

Claire Cooper '11, who considers herself an activist, said in an
interview with the Justice that she found Ayers' pointers for
becoming an active citizen to be very helpful.

"You always have to doubt yourself and doubt your surroundings and
always self-question, always re-evaluate. I thought that was the
message more than anything," Cooper said.

Matthew Kupfer '12 found Ayers' speech inspiring. "I just like the
hope he had â€¦ for ordinary people from the bottom," Kupfer said.

--------

Bill Ayers is back

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/19/bill-ayers-is-back/

And he's slamming The Washington Times

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 19, 2009

EDITORIAL:

Bill Ayers has kept a low profile since President Obama took office,
so we thought he might have gone underground again. That was until we
ran into him in Baltimore on Wednesday and he lobbed a bomb at one of
our editorial writers.

When questioned by The Washington Times during a lecture on racism,
Mr. Ayers went ballistic. "Did you drink the kool-aid over at The
Times or are you okay?" he asked. "What I'm saying is ... do you
actually have a mind of your own?"

This is ironic given Mr. Ayers' past in the Weather Underground. In
his 2001 autobiography "Fugitive Days," he admitted bombing
government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. He remains
unrepentant, telling the New York Times in a 2001 interview that, "I
don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." While he
used to employ explosives to intimidate Americans who did not share
his radical views, he has adapted his tactics of indoctrination in
recent years. Now he is a college professor.

Mr. Ayers' current cause is education reform, which he advocates as a
distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books, written with his
wife and fellow Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, include: "Teaching
Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom"
(Beacon Press, 2004); "Teaching the Personal and the Political"
(Teachers College Press, 2004); and "The Good Preschool Teacher"
(Teachers College Press, 1989). Presumably, Bombmaking 101 is not on
his preschool curriculum.

His radicalism and chosen profession bring to mind Oscar Wilde's quip
that, "Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching."
It is clear that Mr. Ayers has not learned much since his days as a
fugitive from the law in the 1970s. He remains as divisive as ever.
During his speech last week, he characterized the 2008 presidential
election in terms of a race war. "To see the first African-American
president, I mean what can you say?" he said. "It was certainly a
blow against white supremacy. Not the definitive or fatal blow, but a
blow nonetheless." That's funny, we thought it was about the economy, stupid.

His new book, published by Third World Press, is "Race Course Against
White Supremacy." The publisher's description on amazon.com
summarizes the thesis "that white supremacy has been the dominant
political system in the United States since its earliest days - and
that it is still very much with us." Even though Mr. Obama enjoys
approval ratings around 60 percent, Mr. Ayers insists that racism is
the dominant cultural factor in America today. "It's very hard not to
drag the chains of that history into the present," he said last week.
His goal seems to be to keep America's minorities angry, which keeps
America divided.

(Corrected paragraph:) Mr. Ayers' views remain as explosive as ever.
It's hard not to drag the history of his relationship with Mr. Obama
into the present because Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama traveled in the same
circles of community activists in Chicago, and Mr. Obama visited the
former fugitive's house early in the former's political career. Today
the president preaches hope and change, but the Weatherman shows
little faith in either.

The Dead keep on truckin'

[4 articles]

The Dead keep on truckin'

http://lohud.com/article/20090523/ENTERTAINMENT/905230310/-1/SPORTS/The+Dead+keep+on+truckin+

By Greg Kot • Chicago Tribune
May 23, 2009

The Grateful Dead won't die, in part because their fans won't let them.

The band broke up in 1995 when Jerry Garcia, one of the greatest
guitarists of his generation and the Papa Bear of Dead-dom, succumbed
to a lifetime of excess. Infighting among the survivors made future
collaborations highly unlikely.

But the Dead never went away, sustained by hundreds of archival
recordings and a community of fans that stretched into every sector
of society - including the administration of President Barack Obama.
Two of the president's senior advisers, David Axelrod and Pete Rouse,
count themselves among the legion of Deadheads.

The Obama team was instrumental in the band's latest comeback as The
Dead (no longer "Grateful," alas). The estranged band members were
invited to play an Obama rally in Pennsylvania in October, and things
went so well that the core surviving members - guitarist Bob Weir,
bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - decided
to keep rolling.

The touring lineup - last week, they played two dates at the
Meadowlands - includes singer-guitarist Warren Haynes (of Gov't Mule
and the Allman Brothers Band) and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti (of
Weir's band Rat Dog).

What is indisputable is that the Grateful Dead was a band that both
embodied its time (the band is synonymous with the hippie culture and
the psychedelic music that flourished around it in the '60s) and was
ahead of it.

Long before the Internet was a factor in the way music was made,
distributed and marketed, the Dead became a model for how bands could
thrive in a digital age.

In 1994, technology expert Esther Dyson suggested digital technology
would force creators to "distribute intellectual property free in
order to sell services and relationships."

No band was better at selling "services and relationships" to its
fans than the Grateful Dead, and no band understood better that free
distribution of its music could be a pathway to building a bigger,
more loyal audience that would reward the band's trust.

Here's how the Dead anticipated the future:

Free music: The Dead was among the first bands to encourage its fans
to tape its concerts and distribute tapes to their fellow Deadheads
worldwide. A specially designated "tapers section" was set up at each
show near the soundboard, and fans brought increasingly sophisticated
gear to document nearly every one of the Dead's 2,000-plus concerts.

Make the product unique: Garcia expressed disdain for the recording
studio countless times - heresy in an era when the studio album
became the centerpiece of music culture.

Instead, the band turned its shows into epic, four-hour must-see
events. The shows were infamous for their ups and downs, the
possibility that the band could fail, but the sense of improvisation
and spontaneity became increasingly alluring.

Fans paid to see multiple shows on the same tour, knowing that each
would be one-of-a-kind.

Who needs record companies? The Dead's operation was essentially
self-contained, a network of friends and associates from the San
Francisco area who assumed various jobs within what would become a
highly successful corporation, Grateful Dead Productions. The band's
mail-order service and later Web site, deadnet.com, became a
gathering place for the Dead's worldwide fan base and sustained the
band's legacy long after Garcia's death.

Sell direct to fans: The Dead released dozens of recordings from a
bottomless stash of archives direct to fans. The Dead released only
13 studio albums in its 30-year lifetime, but 36 volumes of the
"Dick's Picks" archival series. These releases, which were promoted
only through the band's mail-order service and (later) Internet site,
in many cases exceeded the quality of their major-label recordings.

The band as brand: The Dead dealt not just in T-shirts and hats, but
in flip-flops and golf gloves. Frisbees, mugs, bar stools and
license-plate frames. Key chains, a board game and socks. Magnets,
patches and pins. Baby clothes, hoodies and a miniature pyramid. The
band also spawned a cottage industry of books, DVDs and even a
syndicated radio show ("The Grateful Dead Hour").

Remix, remake, reinvent: Were the Dead the first modern rock band?

Like all artists, the Dead borrowed freely from the music and
traditions that preceded them. But a strong case could be made that
no band worked with a wider palette or blended the colors more audaciously.

Under the rubric of "American music," the Dead mixed blues, country,
folk, early rock 'n' roll, jazz, experimental and even classical
music into a fluid framework built not only on deep knowledge of the
past but a mischievous desire to reshape it.

The band improvised its way through thousands of shows, and suggested
that songs were not immutable artifacts, but organic entities that
could be bent, folded and occasionally mutilated to suit the needs of
the moment.

--------

Grateful Dead Drummer:
In the Key of Kreutzmann

http://crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com/Article/Grateful-Dead-Drummer-In-the-Key-of-Kreutzmann.html

by Ben Corbett
May 22, 2009

Once known as the most obscure member of the Grateful Dead,
rhythm-maker Bill Kreutzmann is a man with many hats. After a 30-year
career with the Bay Area's longest-running psychedelic rock band, and
following the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, the drummer seemed to
have disappeared off the map and onto the Hawaiian coast, where he
spent the better part of the last decade following his other passion
as a digital artist. Popping up here and there for an occasional tour
with the Other Ones, the Dead, and a 2006 run with the Rhythm Devils,
it wasn't until last year that Kreutzmann jumped back into music
full-force with a band of his own design. Lately, the co-composer of
Dead staples "Dark Star" and "The Other One" has been infused with a
renewed passion as a musician. Or, as he relates: "Right now, I'm
playing music like crazy with all kinds of people. That hunger or
something bit my ass again to go out and play." Kreutzmann's new
trio, BK3, is a musical force to be reckoned with. Featuring
guitarist Scott Murawksi from Max Creek and bass guitarist Oteil
Burbridge (or, alternately, bass guitarist James "Hutch" Hutchinson),
the trio is Kreutzmann's belated answer to RatDog, Phil Lesh &
Friends, and the Global Drum Projectthe post-Grateful Dead musical
offspring of his band mates. Relaxing at his home on Kauai,
Kreutzmann took some time to answer a few questions while packing his
bags for a tour with his new trio, followed by rehearsals for the
Dead's spring tour.

Crawdaddy!: With your new trio, how did you come up with the name "BK3"?

Bill Kreutzmann: [Dead lyricist] Robert Hunter suggested that we
should call our band "Three," but there are a lot of other bands out
there that have been called that, so I just put my initials in front
of the "Three." And "BK3" is kind of cool, I mean, that's what we
are. We are a trio. One name came our way from a great friend, Col.
Bruce Hampton. He's a good friend of mine and he said, "You should
call yourselves 'The Egyptian Windmill Operators.'" [laughs]. But
it's kind of long, so "BK3" works well.

Crawdaddy!: The rumor was that you met Scott Murawski through Mike
Gordon in Costa Rica. What was the occasion?

Kreutzmann: To do a benefit for the educational system in this surf
town called Jaco. They really need money for their school system, so
Mike set up a benefit. The guitar player was Scott Murawski, and, of
course, Mike played bass and I played drumsa trio again. We had such
a wonderful night. There was no time limit and we played for five or
six hours that night, and the next day I asked them, "Would you like
to make this a band?" Mike, he had to apologize, he said, "I can't,
Bill, because I have my own band," which I didn't know, or I wouldn't
have asked. So I went home slightly rejected, thinking, "God, this
was so much fun, I don't want to leave this alone."

Crawdaddy!: Sounds amazing. But despite Gordon opting out, you still
pulled it together with Murawski.

Kreutzmann: I felt really great about playing with Scott. For me,
he's the first guitar player that really jumps in there and plays
like Jerrynot in style, but with his endless imagination and his
great contrast to the solo. He loves to turn corners so fast, and you
can do that in a trio. And I can't tell you how high I am on Oteil
Burbridge. He makes any drummer sound good. They're both great guys.
I'm really happy that I'm finally getting into a band with just three
guys. And we haven't been together for 35 years.

Crawdaddy!: The trio formula seems like a perfect fit for you. Do you
play in any others?

Kreutzmann: Well, I've been playing with Papa Mali a lot. That's
another band that happens to be a trio. We use Matt Hubbard, the
keyboard player from Willie Nelson's band. I met Papa Mali at this
last Oregon Country Fair, and we closed the show on Sunday night. We
played from about one to four in the morning, and we got great
reports back. People really enjoyed it. And then, this last New
Year's, I played over on Maui with him. We did two shows on Maui.
We'll probably be playing with him in June.

Crawdaddy!: Rumor has it that you play with a bunch of different
musicians in Hawaii.

Kreutzmann: I have the hottest garage bands that you've ever heard in
your life. There are very few venues on Kauai, and the ones that are
there, you've gotta play soft. There's only one venue that you can
play hard, a place called Trees. I played there last Friday night
with a wonderful bass player from Alaska named Milo Matthews. He
plays really good funk bass and he can swing right into jazz. I've
found these great musicians that like to come here around this time
of year. He spends three months out of the year down here with us.

Crawdaddy!: What was the occasion for the gig at Trees?

Kreutzmann: Dan Parslow, who's the guitar player in that band, it was
his 40th birthday. Dan is a really well-known guitar player on the
island. So it was a birthday party, and I wanted to play because I
just love to play. The show sold out and there were even people
dancing outside.

Crawdaddy!: When did you move to Hawaii?

Kreutzmann: I've only been back to Hawaii about two years ago now,
but I actually bought a place here in 1996, right at the beginning of
the year. I was surfing at a place near where I live. I drove back up
by the house and there was a "For Sale" sign, and I thought, "Jesus,
only a quarter mile away from where I love to surf." I went in and
got five acres, and it was when the real estate market was totally
down, so that allowed me to put some money into the house and fix it
up nicely. I'm real happy here.

Crawdaddy!: It must be nice having the ocean at your fingertips.

Kreutzmann: I love to surf and I love to take my boat out. Right now,
it's whale season, so we take it out to watch the whales. You just
turn the motor off and they come right around you. It's illegal to go
toward them or anything. We go camping a lot at a place that you can
only get to by boat. You have to be really careful parking a boat out
there so that it's still there in the morning. The water around Kauai
is never really flat.

Crawdaddy!: Jerry Garcia really enjoyed Hawaii, too. You shared a
connection there with your love for the island.

Kreutzmann: We went to Kona a whole lot and got our diving
certifications there together. It was a load of fun diving with him;
he really liked it, man. He loved being down there with the fish
where he could have his own space. We had a wonderful dive guide from
Jack's Diving Locker named Jeffhe was one of the owners thereand he
knows all of the best places. He even got us near some pilot whales,
and we got out in the water with the pilot whales as long as we
could. Once we had a white-tipped oceanic shark come up and chase us
back to the boat. We got to go on some great dives here.

Crawdaddy!: Why Hawaii?

Kreutzmann: Because it's less crowded. I could never live in LA or
Southern California with the strange weather and the mudslides and
all the rain and the fires. But it's all the people mostly that would
drive me mad. I couldn't deal with that. I'm really into the ocean.
It's only an island in your mind. There's a quietness and
peacefulness here, and you've got surfing and stuff. But it's really
"Aloha." People really get along here. But since I'm going to be
doing a lot more work over the next two years, I'm actually thinking
about moving back to the West Coast for a while and renting this
place out or something. I don't want to be the airplane addict,
flying all the time.

Crawdaddy!: Besides working with the BK3 tour, you're also gearing up
for a spring tour with the Dead.

Kreutzmann: I want to bring this brightness that I'm feeling now into
the Dead again. Each of us playing in different bands and coming back
together again is very helpful. They're beautiful aspects of each
other. With Bobby playing in RatDog, he's bringing in new ideas from
there, and Phil playing in his band, and Mickey. It's really
interesting because we're bringing in all this new information. For
the Dead tour, we're going to do about 20 rehearsal days before we go out.

Crawdaddy!: What was the impetus to get back together?

Kreutzmann: I'll tell you what I did. Bob asked me if I would do an
Obama gig, right? That was the very first one in San Francisco [at
the Warfield in February 2008]. I had just traveled for hours, from
Tahiti or maybe coming up from Costa Rica, and they wanted me to fly
to San Francisco the next day to do a gig. I was so out of it, that
was just impossible. But then I got another call from Bobby later in
the year asking if I'd like to do an Obama gig at Penn State.
Pennsylvania was a swing state, and playing at the college would
affect a bunch of young people to help Obama's chancesand it did. I
said "Okay, but this is my deal. If we take the trouble to get back
together to do the Obama gig at Penn State, then I want to do a tour
in early spring and summer." And everybody agreed.

Crawdaddy!: So you were the initiative behind this whole tour?

Kreutzmann: Yeah, actually, I was. I just thought, "Hey, we're all
together, why not keep being together? We can work through those old
problems. We don't have to bring that old stuff to the table
anymore." I love playing with those guys.

Crawdaddy!: What do you think of the extraordinary amount of ticket
scalping going on these days?

Kreutzmann: I hate that scalping thing. It's one of my pet peeves.
It's legal robbery. There should be a law against it. I'm not going
to mention names, but the bigwigs in the business, the
promoterswhatever you want to call themone of them now owns a
ticket company, and they were going to try to take a whole lot of
tickets and scalp them, and we got them to stop that. It's asking our
fans to pay too much money for something that really should almost be
free. Garcia always said, "Music is so good for you, it should be
free." That's a famous Jerry quote. It's a sore subject with me. Our
ticket prices are 80 bucks, and that seems like a fortune to me. I
mean, in today's market, "Am I buying food for my family or gas? Am I
taking my kids to school, or am I buying outrageously expensive
tickets?" It doesn't make much sense to me.

Crawdaddy!: What did the band do to curb that?

Kreutzmann: They were going to scalp a very high number of tickets,
and we cut it way, way down. The whole idea is that you're taking
money from people that you shouldn't be taking money from. You want
to give them something. It's simple. We got 'em to bring back a whole
lot of the tickets. Way more than half. So we did a pretty good job with them.

Crawdaddy!: You're working so much these days, have you been finding
time to work on your digital art?

Kreutzmann: I haven't. I've been putting all of my energy into
playing music. And I'm not sure if this is true for everyone, but I
have to focus on one thing or the other. It's almost like if I didn't
have gigs, I'd be doing my art. But I want to change from being a
digital artist to a hand painter. I'd like to learn oil. I have a
really good friend over here who paints like you wouldn't believe,
and he's willing to teach me. So I'm going to start getting into oil painting.

Crawdaddy!: Will it be psychedelic like your digital art?

Kreutzmann: You never know. I'm sure it's going to have a lot to do
with psychedelia. That was sort of my art school, as it were.

Crawdaddy!: Speaking of psychedelia, is it true that you met Aldous
Huxley when you were a kid?

Kreutzmann: Yeah, that's a true story, I met him. It was at a
boarding school in Arizona called Orme, and he actually heard me
play. They let me have my drum set at the school, and I set it up in
a multi-purpose room where lectures were given and so forth. Everyday
after classes, I'd go in there and play as much and for as long as I
could. One day, the headmaster walked in with this guy with these
thick yellow glasses onhis eyesight was going even then, this was
back in '63. So the headmaster puts his fingers up to his lips and
gives me the "shhh" sign really clearly, and I immediately stopped
playing. Aldous gives him an elbow in the side and says "Hey, I've
never heard anything like that. Tell him to keep going." And the
headmaster says, "Keep going!" And I did, and here I am.

Crawdaddy!: At that young age, do you think that encouraged you to
continue with drumming?

Kreutzmann: Music in itself encouraged me. These were just high
moments. They're like stepping stones of high personal times, and I'm
not talking about drugs. Thinking back on it, these are moments where
I just go, "Wow, that was far out." I'm sure I wasn't a very good
drummer yet. I was just learning.

Crawdaddy!: Aldous Huxley crossed paths with the Grateful Dead in many ways.

Kreutzmann: I think so. If you're speaking of that which I think
you're speaking, I would say yes. [Renowned mythology scholar] Joseph
Campbell loved us, too. Joseph Campbell sat behind me and Mickey and
the whole band at Winterland in San Francisco. After the show he
said, "Ah! This is the answer to nuclear war!" He felt the love from
the audience, ya know.

Crawdaddy!: Didn't he compare the Grateful Dead to a modern religious
experience?

Kreutzmann: A modern spiritual experience.

Crawdaddy!: With your trio BK3, are you playing any Grateful Dead music?

Kreutzmann: Oh yeah, we're playing "Eyes of the World", we're playing
"Estimated Prophet", we're playing "Bertha" and "Sugaree." Actually,
we changed the end of "Sugaree." Oteil came up with a beautiful,
almost gospel-like ending. If Garcia could hear it, he'd really love
it. I wish he could hear this band, he would like it. My new band is
not the Grateful Dead, but it's so damn good. Amazingly, mostly, we
laugh through the whole set, we're having so much fun.

Crawdaddy!: Is it mostly improvisation? How would you describe it?

Kreutzmann: I would describe it as improvisation within songs, and
without songs. One time, I just got up there and started playing a
drum solo, and that went on for a half hour. Then I came in with a
really strong, clear rhythm, then we just started improvising off
that rhythm. And then Scott leaned over and mouthed the tune name to
me, you know, "Eyes of the World" or something, and then we went
right into that. We just improvise like that. Robert Hunter has
written 12 or so songs for us and we're doing 10 of them. They're fun as hell.

Crawdaddy!: It's a rare occasion to see just Bill Kreutzmann behind a band.

Kreutzmann: I was always kind of the quiet member, but not anymore.
Oteil said the funniest thing to me. One beautiful day he said,
"Bill, you know, I listen to a lot of your records. I thought you
played really softly. Shit man, you're one of the loudest drummers
I've ever heard!"

Crawdaddy!: Have you been recording any BK3 material?

Kreutzmann: We have probably two DVDs in the can right now that were
shot. One was at the Gathering of the Vibes and the other was shot in
the Culture Room down in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The film work is
beautiful and the playing is beyond belief. I'm just tickled pink. So
we can release those two DVDs right now, and we have at least three
or four CDs worth of material in the can, because we recorded all of the shows.

Crawdaddy!: What about the Rhythm Devils? Any future plans there?

Kreutzmann: That's another one I came up with. I'd like to use the
Rhythm Devils with my trioMickey on percussion and drums, and Jen
Durkin, who sang with the Rhythm Devilsand make that the new Rhythm
Devils with my trio as the basis. I thought people would be
interested in seeing me and Mickey with different players. I think it
would do pretty good. I haven't even talked to Mickey about it yet,
because Mickey's such an excitable young man that if I do talk to him
about it, it will be started.

Crawdaddy!: It's great to see you so passionate. It's like you're
experiencing a renaissance or something.

Kreutzmann: I guess you could call it that [laughs]. You know, things
are opening up for me. It's amazing. I finally get to be a busy guy
again. It's fun, and it's exciting to do with different musicians. I
tried to play with other bands during the Grateful Dead times, but
they just never worked as well as these new bands are. Maybe I've
grown up a little bit or something. I don't know.

--------

The Dead | 05.16.09 | The Gorge

http://www.jambase.com/Articles/Story.aspx?storyID=18081

by: Jonathan Zwickel | Images by: Dave Vann

The Dead with The Allman Brothers Band & Doobie Brothers :: 05.16.09
:: The Gorge :: George, WA

The thing to understand is that The Dead is not the Grateful Dead.
Seemingly a no-brainer distinction, it's crucial to appreciating what
the band offers at this point in its legacy.

In some ways the Garcia-less Dead is better than the Grateful Dead of
1995, directly prior to the group disbanding after Jerry took his
final bow. Musically, they're feeling it more now than they were
then. Saturday night's sold-out show at The Gorge - 22,000 strong -
was studied and whip-tight but loose enough to feel like there was
something fresh going on.

But there's something else going on in the post-Garcia era, something
bigger than lead guitarist Warren Haynes hitting the proper tone in
his solos. It's the thrilling sense of a ship of fools that's lost
its rudder, sailing at the whim of unpredictable winds. Without a
figurehead, The Dead might be closer now to the egoless ideal that
Garcia longed for. More of a band, less of a cult (there was a time
when it was all Pigpen all the time, but they got over that loss,
too). The Grateful Dead Experience has always been a
more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts sort of culmination. That fact is
driven home by the sum's continued evolution in the absence of what
many considered its most important part.

Addressing the crowd towards the end of the second set, after Bob
unleashed an extra-screamy "One More Saturday Night," Phil perfectly
summed up that sentiment. "Thank you all very much for coming out
here, bringing our community back together again," he said. "I know
that you guys come to see each other, too. So thanks for bringing
that magic to us, which is really what it takes for us to be able to
make this music."

A second fact demonstrated on Saturday was something Garcia long
espoused: The song is the thing. Which lead to another cornerstone of
The Grateful Dead Experience arguing about the singer. In
attempting "Days Between" in the second set, was Bobby putting his
own stamp on the song or marring the unique relationship between
Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter, which originally imparted so much
of the song's gravity? Was Bobby's flubbing of the lyrics to "Dire
Wolf" worth enduring just to hear the song?

Your answer indicates your general disposition in life. There will
always be naysayers sitting out the latter-day Dead, claiming the
purity and fire is gone. Which is fine for them the Experience is
ossified, history, dead. Then there will be those that derive
something meaningful from every encounter they have with the band, no
matter what the setting or the lineup. They argue over details not to
bemoan the band's demise but to keep the band alive. These aren't
apologists or nostalgists, but seekers, thirsting for the Experience
because they believe there is still nothing in the world like a Dead
concert. Which is like life in general. You get out of it exactly
what you put in.

That said, in the context of a tour closer, The Gorge setlist was a
bit disappointing. Can't blame the band for going big at their
hometown shrine of Shoreline a few days earlier (read about it here),
but it would've been nice if they saved more spice for Saturday. The
energy coming from the stage, teetering between
hungry-with-something-to-prove confidence and victory lap
self-satisfaction, seemed largely determined by the setlist. The
highlights came in the first set, starting with a loose and groovy
"Crazy Fingers" that took an extended dip into the first verse of
"Dark Star," which bled into the aforementioned "Dire Wolf," stellar
despite Bobby's lyrical flubs. Deviating from the Dead songbook, the
band sounded especially alive with three choice covers, a
Phil-delivered "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," Warren's passionately
rendered "Into the Mystic" and Bobby righteously barking out the
Harry Belafonte classic "Man Smart Woman Smarter."

The pinnacle of the second set came with the closing of "Dark Star,"
expertly integrated into the tail end of a solemn "Days Between."
Here was the money shot we came for. Afterwards, during his brief
monologue, Phil did his "Donor Rap" recounting his liver transplant
ten years ago, making his encore of "Box of Rain" all the more
poignant. It was a sweet, sobering end to a massively celebratory day.

My last official Grateful Dead Experience came in 2000, with a Phil &
Friends show in Oakland, CA. It was a less than perfect show that
turned me into one of those naysayers for nine years. A lot has
changed since then, with the band, with the world, with my life.
Saturday's set at The Gorge (America's most epic venue, sorry Red
Rocks) wasn't perfect either, but it was joyous and thrilling and
funny in a very welcome, familiar way. The vibe ineffable and
all-important was right. To bite a cliché and all the beauty and
baggage it implies, it was like coming home. As long as The Dead are
playing at this level, they're worth seeing. They're worth believing
in. The old magic is still alive, if you want it.

The Dead :: 05.16.09 :: The Gorge :: George, WA
Set I: Music Never Stopped, Loose Lucy, Crazy Fingers > Dark Star
(verse 1) > Dire Wolf, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, Into The Mystic,
Man Smart Woman Smarter
Set II: Passenger, Hell in a Bucket, Althea, Eyes Of The World >
Rhythm Devils > Space > Days Between > Dark Star (verse 2) > One More
Saturday Night
Encore: Box of Rain
Only "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"

As for The Allman Brothers fanfuckintastic. That's a whole review
in itself. After plugging in and sitting down, Derek Trucks and Gregg
Allman exchanged a look and a hand signal a sort of "go for it"
finger twirl and blew out a monumental, 15-minute "Mountain Jam" to
open the set. The rest of the 90-minute slot was gravy, including
versions of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" and a tease of "The
Other One" that rivaled more familiar versions. With Derek Trucks
onstage, the Allmans are a generation-spanning dynasty. Rumors of
this being their final tour are as troubling as the oxygen bottle
Gregg kept on deck next to his Hammond.

And as long as they constrained themselves to their hits, the Doobie
Brothers were better than expected. "Nobody," a lesser-known song off
their 1971 debut, even sounded raw and garagey. With a four-man front
on vocal harmonies, "Jesus Is Just Alright" and "Black Water" were
powerful. But when they brought out a 50-something dude with
shoulder-length grey hair to wail a sax solo during a middling blues
jam, the Doobs exposed themselves as the county fair/Indian casino
re-runs that they typically are. The lyrics to "Back To The Chateau,"
a brand-new song about a club they used to play in the '70s, were
telling of the band's preferred era: "Gotta get back, gotta get back,
gotta get back..." Best reason to add the Doobs to this lineup: When
was the last time you saw three bands in a row with two drummers?

Allman Brothers :: 05.16.09 :: The Gorge :: George, WA
Mountain Jam, Trouble No More, Leave My Blues At Home, Good Morning
Little Schoolgirl, Statesboro Blues, Ain't Wastin' Time No More,
Orfeo > Midnight Rider, Who's Been Talking, Black Hearted Woman,
Dreams, Revival

Doobie Brothers :: 05.16.09 :: The Gorge :: George, WA
Take Me In Your Arms, Jesus Is Just Alright, Dangerous, Rockin' Down
The Highway, Nobody, Back To The Chateau, Guy Allison piano solo >
Takin' It To The Streets, Don't Start Me Talkin', Little Bitty Pretty
One, Black Water, Long Train Runnin'
Encore: China Grove, Without You, Listen To The Music

--------

REVIEW:
The Dead, Allmans and Doobies @ The Gorge

http://blog.seattlepi.com/earcandy/archives/168997.asp

by Travis Hay
May 18, 2009

Seeing The Dead live was not a concert. No, it was an experience.

The venerable jam band of jam bands proved as much when they packed
the Gorge Amphitheatre Saturday for the venue's season opener. About
22,000 Deadheads danced, sang and merrily partied the day away during
the marathon of a three-band bill that also included openers The
Doobie Brothers and Southern rock architects The Allman Brothers Band.

Really, the tripleheader felt more like a festival than a single
concert as each band came packing enough hits in their respective
repertoires and the mood, as you probably could have guessed, was
rather, ahem, festive if you know what I mean. The substances were
free flowing (I was offered drugs 13 times, which is a record high,
no pun intended, for my concertgoing career), there was enough tie
dye to force an acid flashback out of a sober hippie and there were
enough white dudes with dreadlocks on hand to fill a Rusted Root
show, or dormitory at The Evergreen State College. Oh yeah, and there
was music too and the music was fantastic.

The Doobie Brothers included two drummers, which I was pretty
impressed by until after the show when I realized every band on the
bill had two drummers. Must be a jam band thing.

The Doobies played for about 90 minutes and the set was chock full of
hits from decades past. They started with "Take Me In Your Arms" and
followed it with "Jesus Is Just Alright." Throughout the entirety of
"Jesus Is Just Alright" I couldn't stop thinking about that one scene
from "Freaks and Geeks" with Millie at the party. If you don't know
what I'm talking about, click here to find out and then do yourself a
favor and rent "Freaks and Geeks."

From there it was hit after hit with "Rockin' Down The Highway," and
"Long Train Runnin'" and "Taking It To The Streets" (which was sans
Michael MacDonald). Sadly, all I could think about during the latter
was this. Damn you Internet! Oh, and the encore had "China Grove."
You didn't think they would leave that out, did you?

Not to be outdone in the drummer department, the Allman Brothers Band
had two drummers as well and a percussionist. Oh and they also had
Derek Truck and Warren Hayes. And they started their set with a
20-minute-plus version of "Mountain Jam." Game. Set. Match.

After "Mountain Jam" the guy next to me, who probably should not have
been standing because I'm pretty sure whereas I declined all the
drugs offered to me he likely said yes to whatever was put in front
of him and had one of everything, perfectly summed up the awesomeness
that is the Hayes-Trucks duo.

"It's like two ninjas along and WOOSH! chopped my head off with
their guitars."

I don't think I could have said it better myself.

Seriously though, I've been to hundreds of concerts and seen just
about every guitar god out there except for maybe Prince and Page and
I can say with full confidence that Derek Trucks is one of the best
rock guitarists making music today. His ability adds so much to the
Allmans' music. He allows the music to stay true to its 1970s
Southern rock roots while seemingly giving it an almost entirely new
identity with his amazing ability. Seeing him play alongside Hayes
was worth the price of admission alone.

Of course, the Allmans were just a jam-filled appetizer for the
evening's main entre of The Dead. Yes, Jerry Garcia wasn't there but
his presence was felt in the thousands of Deadheads wearing shirts
featuring Garcia's mug and unforgettable smile, the fans holding
signs that read "We love you Jerry" and all the patchouli-soaked
dancing hippies wearing hemp bracelets and necklaces who looked like
they were carrying around Jerry Garcia in a pouch. (If you didn't get
that movie reference then, well you really are missing out).

In full disclosure, I am not a big Dead fan. The only Grateful Dead
record I own is a vinyl copy of "Skeletons In The Closet." I went to
the show soley for the experience and what an experience it was.

Seeing such a dedicated and passionate group of fans committed to the
music and the culture of a timeless band really was refreshing and
somewhat eye-opening. For starters, it was nice to be at a concert
where people actually dance to the music. Also, it was a great
reminder that while fads in the music industry come and go, the music
itself stays and it can have a lasting impact on people's lives.
That's the power of art and that was the power on display during The
Dead's set.

The Dead's sets (they played two full sets and one encore) contained
very few songs I recognized. There was no "Casey Jones," "Sugar
Magnolia," "Truckin'" or "Touch of Grey." Instead they filled the set
with songs like "Dark Star," "Days Between" and "Crazy Fingers." The
songs seemed to be a little on the long side with quite a lot of
guitar noodling and jamming happening, but they never reached a point
where I, as someone not as familiar with the material as most of the
people in the crowd, wanted songs to end.

The show itself was all one big experience with the music being a
large component of what everyone shared Saturday night. That music
provided the backbone of the culture, the community and the passion
of the Deadheads at the Gorge. All of whom seemed connected to one
another through the experience of seeing The Dead live. And really,
isn't connecting people through art what The Dead are about?

Rubber Souldiers picks up where Beatles left off

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/22/PKTA17AHN5.DTL

Regan McMahon, Special to The Chronicle
Sunday, May 24, 2009

What if the Beatles had gotten off the road and moved to San
Francisco and started playing the Fillmore with Quicksilver and the
Grateful Dead?

That's the fantasy scenario that Oakland singer-songwriter, guitarist
and radio host David Gans comes up with to describe the musical
approach of Rubber Souldiers, a Beatles jam band he formed with Marin
County folk-rock-pop-bluegrass stalwarts Chris and Lorin Rowan, who
with their brother Peter (a member of Jerry Garcia's bluegrass band
Old and in the Way) created the '70s pop band the Rowan Brothers.

Another way to look at it, Gans says, is "Beatles vocabulary with a
Grateful Dead syntax," where songs can intertwine and expand. "The
Beatles wrote all these kick-ass songs and these amazing grooves, and
then they quit 'em after three minutes. And so we're stretching them
out and stringing them together."

For example, the band will do a psychedelic medley that starts with a
spacey jam that goes into "Norwegian Wood," then switches gears into
"That Boy," then morphs back into "Norwegian Wood." At the end of
"All My Loving," they launch into an instrumental jam that downshifts
into a groove that goes back and forth between "Rain" and "Within You
and Without You." Their extended version of "Paperback Writer" slides
into the chorus of "With a Little Help From My Friends," which
evolves into a vocal improv.

The band features the core of Gans and Chris Rowan on guitar, Lorin
Rowan on guitar and mandolin, and all three of them on vocals, with
various musicians holding down the drums and bass at different gigs.

"The essence of Rubber Souldiers is the harmony singing, instrumental
jamming and the experimental approach," Chris Rowan says. "By
expanding on spontaneous things that happen, we're creating our sound."

It's not a Beatles tribute band, Gans says: "It's taking these songs
to a new level."

They're not the only ones who have recently opted for what Chris
Rowan calls "a fresh approach to hallowed ground." For Cirque du
Soleil's "Love," a show set to Beatles music, Beatles producer Sir
George Martin and his engineer son, Giles, took the original tapes
and remixed some of the songs, taking a groove from one and slapping
it onto another. And the 2007 movie "Across the Universe" offered
novel arrangements that introduced a new generation of teenagers to
the power of Beatles songs.

Rubber Souldiers share a similar spirit of experimentation.

"We've written our pieces around their pieces, our hooks around their
hooks. We take some of the more obscure songs and mix them with some
of the more familiar ones. We've opened it up so things flow within
you and without you - to coin a phrase," Lorin Rowan adds with a chuckle.

"It's not just a bar band," Lorin Rowan says, although during the
past few years Rubber Souldiers have played watering holes such as
the Sweetwater in Mill Valley and the Iron Springs Brew Pub in
Fairfax. They plan to record.

The band plays next Sunday at the Larkspur Flower and Food Festival.

The origins of the band date to a moment in July 2004, when Gans
invited the Rowans to appear on his KPFA radio show, "Dead to the
World," to play live songs from their just-released double CD, "Now &
Then," on BOS Music. They came as a quartet, with Dick Bright on
fiddle and Doug Harman on cello. When, as a sound check, they did the
Beatles' "Baby's in Black," Gans says he couldn't help himself and
spontaneously added a third harmony part underneath the Rowans. They
liked it so much they asked him to sing it with them live on the air.

"And when we got off the air, we just kept singing more Beatles
songs," Gans says. "After that, I just got the bug."

A couple of months later, Gans' dear friend and business manager,
Goldie Rush, was dying of cancer and inviting friends - many of them
longtime Bay Area musicians - to visit her at the house in Stinson
Beach where she was staying. Gans invited the Rowans to go out and
play Beatles songs all day in her living room, and they brought with
them jam-band guitarist and pedal-steel player Barry Sless, who plays
with Moon Alice and occasionally with Phil Lesh and Friends.

50 Beatles songs

"We must have played 50 Beatles songs that day," Gans recalls, "and
we had the time of our lives."

After that, he kept inviting the Rowans and other musicians to join
him onstage to play Beatles songs. Sometimes on bass would be Robin
Sylvester, who plays with Bob Weir's band RatDog. He's English and
grew up on Beatles music.

"When Lorin and I would get into arguments about chord changes, Robin
became the adjudicator of Beatle court," Gans says. "He's an absolute
encyclopedia of Beatles music."

Gans has many musical irons in the fire at all times. He hosts his
nationally syndicated radio show "The Grateful Dead Hour" and is
programming consultant to Sirius Radio's Grateful Dead channel and
co-hosts its Sunday afternoon talk show, "Tales From the Golden
Road." And he's often on the road himself, playing clubs and music
festivals, such as Florida's Magnolia Fest, where Rubber Souldiers
played in October and were invited back for the Suwannee Springfest
in March. Gans' latest self-released solo CD is "The Ones That Look
the Weirdest Taste the Best," produced by Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth.

"The more I was out on the road playing solo, the more I wanted to
break things up by doing things with other musicians," Gans says.
"Musicians of a certain age grew up with Beatles music, and it's in
our DNA. Anybody I can imagine who's in their 40s, 50s or 60s,
without even thinking about it, can find their way into a Beatles
song. And, with a little study, we can work them up and do something
with them."

At a recent Ashkenaz gig, Bay Area folk favorites Eric and Suzy
Thompson sat in.

"They're like old-time bluegrass-zydeco people, and it was a little
like fish out of water to have them do Beatles songs with us," Gans
says. "But even if your specialty is something else, you know Beatles
songs. They got up onstage with us and stayed for the whole night and
it was fantastic."

Super-fast tempo

Backstage, before they went on that night, Gans suggested they do
"All Together Now" from the end of the movie "Yellow Submarine."
"Lorin counted it down at this absurd, super-fast tempo, and it
turned out to be the perfect hoedown song for Suzy to go wild on the
fiddle, Eric on the mandolin," Gans says. "So it turned out to be an
accidental masterpiece."

Lorin Rowan sees the genre bending and blending as a natural evolution.

"You see what the Beatles took from American music, and now we're
taking that and adding everything from our American musical
traditions and throwing it back at them," he says. " 'I've Just Seen
a Face': that's bluegrass. We do an a cappella 'Yesterday' that's
almost the Beach Boys meets the Beatles. We're using all the
influences we grew up with."

Chris Rowan has been a die-hard Beatles fan forever and played in a
Beatles cover band called Lonely Hearts off and on for 15 years,
before it "slid into oblivion" about 10 years ago, he says. In 1969,
at age 20, he flew to England to pursue his dream of "getting
involved with the Beatles and Apple records." He even tried to meet
Paul McCartney at his home in St. John's Wood.

At Paul's door

"I had a frame pack on my back with all my clothes in it," he
recalls. "I had an acoustic guitar in one hand and an electric guitar
in the other. And I went up to the house, where there was an
intercom. I rang the bell and his wife, Linda Eastman, answered and
said hello. And I said, 'I'm Chris Rowan and I'm a singer-songwriter
from America and I'd like to sing Paul a few songs.' There was dead
silence on the other end. Then, finally, she came on and said, 'Paul
doesn't want to see anyone right now.' So I left, dejected."

He did connect with someone at Apple Records who liked his demo, but
the Beatles' fledgling label was in the process of imploding, so that
didn't work out. He scored a publishing deal elsewhere, and an agent,
but after two months returned to Boston, where he, Lorin and Peter
Rowan got involved with David Grisman, which led them to California
and a record deal as the Rowan Brothers.

"I compare my love of the Beatles to my older brother Peter's love of
bluegrass and his mentor, Bill Monroe - having that love and wanting
to share that with other people," Chris Rowan says. With Rubber
Souldiers, "we're honoring the Beatles' music but also making it our
own." {sbox}

Rubber Souldiers play at 2:15 p.m. next Sun. at the Larkspur Flower
and Food Festival, Magnolia Avenue between Ward and King streets,
Larkspur, (415) 924-3808. For more information, go to rubbersouldiers.com.
--

Regan McMahon is a freelance writer. E-mail her at pinkletters@sfchronicle.com.

The return of the Phish phenomenon

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/05/24/the_return_of_the_phish_phenomenon/

The legendary jam band reunites, igniting fans who see themselves as
much more - a community

By Adam Conner-Simons
Globe Correspondent / May 24, 2009

At 10 a.m. on Jan. 30, Live Nation opened its online box office for
the highly anticipated summer tour of Phish, the four-piece
Vermont-based rock outfit that reunited in March after a five-year
hiatus. Within minutes, millions of requests flooded the site and
every single seat for all 15 concerts had sold out. Less than 24
hours later, tickets to the band's May 31 kickoff show at Fenway Park
were trading hands for as much as $1,600 a pop on Craigslist and
StubHub. Just like that, the tribe of Phish heads had spoken.

Plenty of music lovers are fans. The Phish contingent, meanwhile,
would be more aptly described as fanatics. They follow their band
across the country and around the globe, seeing upward of 20 or 30
gigs in a row and meticulously dissecting set lists with friends and
on online discussion boards. They collect dozens if not hundreds of
bootlegged tapes of live concerts and can recite, from memory, the
exact dates of their favorite performances.

And if you think that the fervor of Phish fandom has long since
passed its peak, then you must have missed the group's trio of
comeback concerts at Virginia's Hampton Coliseum in March. "When they
took the stage that first night, the sheer jubilation and energy in
the room took my breath away," says Jeremy Goodwin, a Swampscott
native who has seen nearly 100 shows. "Anyone who was there would be
hard pressed to name another time when they felt something - anything
- remotely like that."

Such a level of obsession is remarkable given that Phish, which is
headlining both Fenway Park next Sunday and the Comcast Center on
June 6, doesn't have any major radio hits. Its members, who met at
the University of Vermont in 1983, are goofy, geeky, overgrown
college kids. Yet thanks to the group's moderately sized but
immensely devoted fanbase, not to mention its vibrant live shows,
Phish has sculpted a highly successful career that spans three
decades and had Rolling Stone calling them "the most important band
of the '90s."

The group's unique rise to fame has been shaped largely by positive
word-of-mouth that extends back to its early days in Vermont. "It was
a very grassroots effort," says East Boston resident Peter O'Keefe,
who started listening in the late '80s. "Everybody knew someone who
had a brother that would drive up to Burlington, tape a show, and
bring it down."

The band's relaxed attitude toward taping has been integral to its
success. Since long before Radiohead was experimenting with "pay what
you want" pricing plans, or Lil Wayne was pushing out an endless
stream of unofficial mixtapes, Phish has encouraged free and legal
trading of its live shows - and the fan response has ranged from
passionate to obsessive.

"You build your Phish collection through what can only be described
as field recording," says Goodwin, who was a major contributor to
"The Phish Companion," a comprehensive reference book with more than
a thousand set lists, reviews, and other tidbits of Phish lore.
"You're trading tapes through the mail with people from all over the
country who you may not have even met before."

In the early '90s, the tape-trading phenomenon was further
intensified by the Usenet news group rec.music.phish, a pre-Internet
discussion board in which fans could trade information and
recordings. "The Phish community has always been very plugged in,"
says Jonathan Schwartz, who serves as DJ of an all-Phish program on
Sirius satellite radio. "These college kids had access to resources
and were able to use the [Usenet] group as a tool to share music." In
the early stages of Usenet, only three other artists were
represented: the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan.

Nowhere was the group's word-of-mouth ethos more clearly displayed
than at Boston's own Paradise Rock Club. In 1989, Phish hadn't yet
broken into markets outside of Burlington and was having particular
difficulty catching the eye of Paradise management. On Jan. 26 of
that year, the band rented out both the club and a bevy of school
buses that it used to bring fans and friends down from Burlington.
Within a matter of hours, there was a long line of Phish fans that
stretched along Commonwealth Avenue. Needless to say, the group
hasn't had a problem booking gigs in Beantown since.

To its credit, Phish makes concerted efforts to connect with its
audience and break down the wall between band and fan. From
golf-carting around the parking lot before shows to, more recently,
sending out live Twitter updates of set lists, the band realizes its
fans' central role in the trajectory of its career and has even hired
fans for key positions behind the scenes in the group's management
and marketing.

"They aren't just some disassociated rock stars," says Chelmsford
native Jim Raras. "They are humble enough to realize that [the
fandom] surrounding them is no small thing, and so they're definitely
very cognizant of their fans' perspectives."

Of course, there'd be no Phish mania in the first place if people
didn't like the tunes or the band's unwavering dedication to
improvisation, spontaneity, and musical variety. Drawing from a well
of more than 600 original compositions, Phish can go entire tours
without repeating songs, and its dynamic potpourri of influences -
ranging from funk and folk to bluegrass and jazz - creates an
infinite number of musical possibilities during each performance.
Unpredictability is the rule rather than the exception at shows,
whether that means playing The Beatles's "White Album" from start to
finish, switching instruments mid-song, or simply jamming all night
long. (Literally: Phish's New Year's performance in the Everglades in
2000 started just before midnight and continued until dawn broke
nearly eight hours later.)

Such epic and diverse concert experiences are what make Phish heads
return to show after show and have helped establish a close-knit
community. After the five-year hiatus, a show like Fenway is no
longer just a way to pass the evening - it's a full-blown family
reunion where you might reconnect with dozens of Phish pals. At the
first Hampton show, Raras found himself surrounded by fellow fans he
hadn't seen since the 2004 farewell show in Coventry, Vt. "The music
is the No. 1 thing," he says, "but a close second is the opportunity
to catch up with old friends."

Part of the Phish bonding stems from the pre-show "lot scene,"
borrowed from the Grateful Dead's "Shakedown Street," in which
concert parking lots become massive, festive flea markets overflowing
with fans selling food, beer, art, jewelry, clothing, and more out of
cars and picnic baskets. Maynard resident Chris Prinos, who has seen
more than 125 shows, describes it as "Mardi Gras meets a flea market, on acid."

While we're on the topic of drugs, Phish heads want to clear
something up: very few of them actually conform to the stereotype of
the shaggy-haired stoner. Fan organizations run the gamut, including
the substance-free "Phellowship," whose members travel the country
together seeing shows sober, and the nonprofit Mockingbird
Foundation, which has raised more than $750,000 for music education.
With a core demographic more than a decade removed from college,
today's fans are professionals of all stripes - lawyers and doctors,
teachers and executives - who view their Phish fandom as just another
aspect of their persona. "Some people go on fly-fishing trips," says
Raras, who is chief operating officer of a solar-power company in
Colorado. "We go on Phish trips."

For many Boston-area Phish fans, the Fenway show is a rather
appropriate collision of two equally devoted demographics. "Both [Sox
fans and Phish fans] are obsessive, type-A personalities that know
everything about the history and players involved," says Prinos.
"They don't do anything at half-speed - they start at a six, and then
turn it up to 11."

VH1 rock docs: Lords of the Revolution

VH1 rock docs:
Lords of the Revolution
- Premieres Monday, August 10 - Friday, August 14, 2009

http://ca.sys-con.com/node/973772

Beginning on Monday, August 10 - Friday, August 14, VH1 will air the
five-part 1-hour series "Lords of the Revolution," a new documentary
series from VH1 Rock Docs. The series celebrates the counterculture
icons of the '60s and '70s -- the legends who defied the social,
political and cultural mores of their time. The series is narrated by
Richard Belzer.

They trafficked in sex, drugs, music, and subversive politics. They
held peaceful protests and violent insurrections. They were the
leaders of the most significant cultural transformation of the second
half of the 20th century. From political heavyweights like the Black
Panthers to cutting-edge cultural trendsetters like Andy Warhol, this
documentary series profiles the nonconformist heroes and anti-heroes
of the 60s and 70s, telling the dangerous, subversive stories of a
cultural revolution. Edgy, colorful, visually dynamic, the docs will
feature new first-hand interviews, plenty of archival photos and
footage, an unconventional graphic treatment, and a hip rock
soundtrack. All these things will make this series feel more like VH1
than the History Channel.

The series is executive produced for VH1 by Shelly Tatro, Brad
Abramson and Stephen Mintz. Consulting producer and writer is Martin
Torgoff and Ted Kim is supervising producer.

<snip>

VH1 Classic is taking a groovy step back in time with 60's week
kicking off Monday, August 10th and includes the week long premiere
of the Roc Doc: Lords of the Revolution. VH1 Classic will air the
five-part one-hour series "Lords of the Revolution," a new
documentary series from VH1 Rock Docs that is narrated by Richard
Belzer. The series celebrates the counterculture icons of the '60s
and '70s -- the legends who defied the social, political and cultural
mores of their time; Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, The Black Panthers,
Muhammad Ali and Cheech and Chong. 60's week continues with Monterey
Pop and Creedance Clearwater Revival Live all culminating in the
premiere of the Roc Doc: Woodstock.

For more information on all these shows, please log onto http://www.VH1.com.

For more information on these and other VH1 shows, full episodes,
video extras, photos, blog commentary and more, go to Shows.VH1.com.

Film festival to laud activist Wavy Gravy

deadCenter film festival to laud activist Wavy Gravy

http://newsok.com/deadcenter-film-festival-to-laud-activist-wavy-gravy/article/3371528?custom_click=headlines_widget

FROM STAFF REPORTS
Published: May 22, 2009

The deadCenter Film Festival announced this week that Wavy Gravy will
attend this year's festival and take part in the closing night festivities.

On June 13, deadCenter will present "Peace Love and Wavy Gravy," a
festival-within-the-festival, on the lawn at NW 3 and E.K. Gaylord
downtown. The free event, which begins at 7 p.m., features the
deadCenter Awards Presentation at 9 p.m., the screening of "Saint
Misbehavin' the Wavy Gravy Story" at 9:30 p.m. and a hippie-infused
outdoor celebration.

"In response to the passionate and exuberant life explored in this
film, we've decided to expand deadCenter festivities for closing
night this year," Program Director Melissa Scaramucci said. "We've
wanted to introduce music and a 'summer fair' atmosphere to this
event for some time. When we got 'Saint Misbehavin' for our free
outdoor screening, we knew this was the perfect film to showcase the
best of our community."

The subject of the closing night film is Wavy Gravy, a lifelong
activist who famously stood on the stage of the original Woodstock.
The film, directed by Michelle Esrick, who also will be in
attendance, follows the icon for 10 years. The film documents his
life as the founder of the entertainment/activist commune the Hog
Farm, his time with the Merry Pranksters, his co-directorship (with
his wife, Jahanara) of Camp Winnarainbow, a performing arts program
for children that takes over the Hog Farm for 10 weeks every summer,
and the organization of all-star rock concerts to raise money for a
variety of charitable causes.

"Peace Love and Wavy Gravy" attendees will learn from local community
activists and action groups and enjoy concessions, live music, works
from local artists and a free outdoor/sunset yoga class. Attendees
are encouraged to bring blankets and lawn chairs. For more
information, call 501-2700.

The deadCenter Film Festival will be June 10-14 and will screen more
than 90 films in seven downtown locations. To learn more about the
film screenings, times, venues and educational panels, go online to
www.deadcenterfilm.org.

Philip Glass: 'I think I'm built for this kind of life.

Philip Glass: 'I think I'm built for this kind of life. I train like
an athlete'

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/philip-glass-i-think-im-built-for-this-kind-of-life-i-train-like-an-athlete-1688870.html

The world's most austere composer drove taxis until he was 42. He
reveals how his fastidious life informs his music

By Christina Patterson
Friday, 22 May 2009

When I told a friend I was interviewing Philip Glass, he gave me some
advice. "Just ask him," he said, "the same question, again and again
and again." It's a view that once gave rise to a New Yorker cartoon.
Two men in pith helmets are standing in a jungle. "That," says one to
the other, ear cocked to a distant rumble, "is either a dissonant,
repetitive sound or a new Philip Glass piece."

After several weeks washing up to Philip Glass, and cooking to him,
and going to sleep to him, I can testify that those repetitions do
strange things to the brain. Famously hypnotic, the shimmering scales
and arpeggios are also quietly relentless, veering between the beauty
of a waterfall, or of waves crashing on a beach and well, you
wouldn't want to talk about water torture, but let's just say that
sometimes you long for a nice little tune. The most prolific composer
on the planet, and one of the most successful, creator of more than
20 operas (all with pretty weird titles), eight symphonies, numerous
concertos for violin, piano and timpani, and more than 30 film scores
(including, most famously, The Hours) sure as hell knows how to mess
with your mind.

"So why do they send a poet, rather than a musician to meet me?" he
asks, when I volunteer, perhaps unwisely, my woeful lack of musical
knowledge. I'm not a poet, alas, but we've been talking about Rumi,
one of a number of poets Glass has set to music. Others include Allen
Ginsberg and his friend, and fellow Buddhist, Leonard Cohen. For a
moment, I fear that I've unleashed some rather un-Buddhist
irritation, but then Glass softens. "If someone's not interested in
it academically," he says kindly, "you could be better off. People
get distracted by all sorts of non-essential things. Schools of music
and historical values. It doesn't really explain what you're listening to."

We're sitting in the basement bar of The Boundary, a super-hip new
"project" in a Victorian warehouse in the East End. With its stripped
brick walls, black and white photos and funky leather armchairs, it
has something of the feel of a New York SoHo loft, the kind in which,
you imagine, Philip Glass might have spent happy evenings knocking up
genre-bending works with Laurie Anderson, say, or David Byrne, or
Brian Eno. Because Glass, more than any other contemporary composer,
has worked across the art-forms in theatre, dance, opera, the
visual artists and rock. He has pushed the boundaries of music,
pushed the boundaries of cross-arts collaboration, pushed the
boundaries of opera and, at 72, is still pushing boundaries now.

He has, as always, been up since six. Last night, as usual, he went
to bed at one. And after our strict hour, he's dashing off to catch a
train. How does he keep going? "Well, you know," he says, "I think
I'm built for this kind of life. It doesn't bother me at all. I
train," he adds, "like an athlete, in terms of exercise, diet and
sleep. I do yoga. I also do Qigong. I've been doing it since I was
20." And is he, as I've read, a vegetarian? "Since I was 20." And
does he drink? "Just a glass of wine, maybe three times a week."

Gosh. This friend of David Bowie and Lou Reed, who lived in Paris in
the Swinging Sixties, and discovered Ravi Shankar before the Beatles,
clearly lives like Gwyneth Paltrow. "You say I'm disciplined," he
says, as I mentally tot up my own weekly tally of units, "but I think
I'm not disciplined. My discipline is that I'm afraid of not being
disciplined." Er, right.

Maybe it's an American thing. Americans, I say, are good at doing
things like going to the gym before work. "My girlfriend does," he
volunteers. "She runs and does pilates." Is his girlfriend Wendy
Sutter? "Yeah," he says, "but she doesn't... she likes to be called
my girlfriend, but she is also an artist in her own right." Wendy
Sutter (whose date of birth is coyly absent from all her publicity
material but who looks several decades younger than Glass) is indeed
an artist in her own right. She is the cellist who inspired Glass's
Songs and Poems for Solo Cello, some of which Glass will perform with
her next week, in an evening of chamber music at the Barbican.

The Songs and Poems were hailed by The Washington Post as "not merely
pleasant, but gripping" and by Bloomberg.com as "the first major solo
cello work of the 21st century". And they are exquisite plangent,
fierce, passionate, full of yearning and aching with what could be
joy or pain. They reminded the San Francisco Classical Voice (and me)
of the Bach cello suites. Were they a conscious homage to Bach? "Oh
yeah," says Glass. "The cello is often remarked as the instrument
that's closest to the human voice, in that it's the instrument that
mimics the range. It kind of plunges you into the interior of what an
individual psyche must be like."

Well, if all that aching beauty has anything to do with spirituality,
or personal pain, or his feelings about Sutter, Glass (who has been
married four times) is clearly not about to give anything away. So I
ask about his father, who set the whole thing off, in his radio
repair and record shop in Baltimore in the Forties. "Some paper in
England said my father was an immigrant," says Glass. "He'd have been
shocked. He never left the country. His parents did come from Russia
or Belarus, or some place like that." "Some place like that"? If his
parents were, as Glass says, "totally Americanised", so, it seems, is
their son, who appears not to have bothered even to find out where
his grandparents came from.

Still. At the age of eight, inspired by his father's love of music,
Glass started learning the violin and the flute. "I had to take a
streetcar across town by myself," he says, "and I had to walk home in
the dark. But I was the youngest one at the conservatoire and they
looked after me." At home with his parents, he listened to music "all
the time. "One of the great things about my father," he says, "was
that he had to know all about music because his customers liked all
different kinds. He preferred chamber music, central European and he
liked modern music: Bartók, Shostakovich. He never told me that one
was better than another. In fact, there was a kind of enforced democracy."

High, low, classical, modern, chamber, orchestral he sounds like a
bit of an early postmodernist. He sounds, in fact, like someone whose
son might also end up embracing an astonishing range of musical
genres, and art-forms, and producing work (operas, symphonies, songs
for cello) that might be classified as high art and work (film
scores, jingles for commercials) that might be classified as low art.
Does he have this father to thank for this? "Yeah," he says. "He
didn't know much about world music, but no one did. On the other
hand, I learned a lot about jazz when I was a kid, and I was going to
school in Chicago by the time I was 15. The Fifties in Chicago was a
great time for jazz."

At 15, Glass fails to mention, he was actually an undergraduate at
the University of Chicago, studying mathematics and philosophy. It
was there he started learning the piano and there, too, that he
started composing, because he wanted to find out "where music came
from". At 20, he went to study composition at the Juilliard School of
Music (where Steve Reich was a fellow student) and then enrolled in a
composer-in-residence scheme for two years in Pittsburgh schools. In
1964, he moved to Paris to study with the composer Nadia Boulanger
and in 1967 moved back to New York where he founded the Philip Glass
Ensemble. Looking at his CV from this time on, it would be tempting
to say that the rest is history, but artistic output, as so often in
life, did not automatically translate into money.

Glass didn't earn a living from his music, in fact, until he was 42.
Until then, he drove cabs, shifted furniture and worked as a plumber.
"I was careful," he explains, "to take a job that couldn't have any
possible meaning for me." Stories of
famous-composer-actually-working-man-shock from that period abound.
The art critic Robert Hughes was astonished to find the avant garde
composer mending his dishwasher. On another occasion, a woman tapped
on the side of his cab and told him that he had the same name as a
"very famous composer".

Gradually, the commissions trickled in and, by the time Glass was 44,
he realised that the cab driver's licence that he'd renewed as a
precaution might not be needed. Einstein on the Beach, his music
theatre collaboration with Robert Wilson, performed at the Met in
1976, was followed by Satyagraha, an opera which drew on the early
life of Mahatma Gandhi, and then by Akhnaten, a vocal and orchestral
composition sung in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Egyptian.
Clearly, we are not talking populist. On the other hand, Glass was
soon reaching a mass audience with his film scores. His first, for
Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio, is still regarded as one
of his best. Others include Kundun, The Truman Show and Notes on a Scandal.

What effect has the film work had on him? "It has made me very
happy," says Glass with a rare burst of laughter. "The high-art music
and commercial, they're different metiers, they're different
languages. I'm like the painter," he adds with a grin, "who does
abstract painting at home but likes to go to the sidewalk and do
sketches of people in the street."

Among the many artists Glass has worked with ranging from Doris
Lessing to Patti Smith and Woody Allen it's one he didn't actually
meet who has, perhaps, had the greatest influence on his work. In
1963, when he was living in Paris, Samuel Beckett was "in the
neighbourhood". Glass "didn't have the pleasure of knowing him" but
wrote music for his work. "To me," he says, "he represented the
quintessential postmodernist. He took away the meaning of a work and
made it meaningful. It's a perfect John Cage strategy, in that he
denied the independent, inherent existence of the artwork. It had n