The SIXTIES

When Laguna Beach Was the LSD Capital of the Universe

2011-12-14T23:02:00.001-08:00

When Laguna Beach Was the LSD Capital of the Universe

http://lagunabeach.patch.com/articles/watch-when-laguna-beach-was-the-lsd-capital-of-the-universe#video-8703866

Olympic Protester Maintains Passion

2011-10-11T00:32:00.001-07:00

Olympic Protester Maintains Passion

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/sports/john-carlos-of-68-olympics-protest-maintains-his-passion.html

By NEIL AMDUR

Published: October 10, 2011

More than 40 years after Tommie Smith and John Carlos ignited the sports world with their black-gloved fists raised on the victory stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Carlos says, "I still feel the fire."

Any doubts that time and age have somehow diminished the passion that fueled his track and field career are dispelled with the publication of "The John Carlos Story," written with Dave Zirin and published by Haymarket Books.

"If I shut my eyes, I can still feel the fire from those days," Carlos, 66, says, as early as the second page of a memoir with the intensity and power of a 200-meter dash. "And if I open my eyes, I still see the fires all around me. I didn't like the way the world was, and I believe that there need to be some changes about the way the world is."

Those who thought they knew Carlos as a brash New Yorker may be surprised by some of his more personal recollections, including having an early obsession with swimming across the English Channel and having Fred Astaire as a childhood hero. Carlos says Astaire would show up outside the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in "top hat, tails, shoes and cane," watch Carlos and his young friends perform dance and acrobatic routines and then reward them with silver dollars.

And there are the poignant admissions that he was embarrassingly dyslexic as a grade-schooler ("in those days they didn't call you dyslexic, they called you dummy") and that he "didn't care a lick if I won the gold, silver and bronze" in the 200-meter final in Mexico (he won the bronze behind Smith and Peter Norman, an Australian).

"Before the race started," Carlos writes, "I made up my mind I wasn't going to test Tommie for that gold medal."

He adds, "I was there for the after-race."

It is that after-race for which Carlos is most remembered. Carlos and Smith bowed their heads while the national anthem played, raising their fists to protest treatment of blacks in America. As a result, they were told to leave the Olympic Village.

The positive reception that Carlos says he is receiving on his book tour is far different from the bitterness and news media backlash that affected Smith's and Carlos's lives after Mexico, and different also from the way their relationship with each other evolved. Carlos's first wife, Kim, whom he married while still in high school, committed suicide in 1977, four years after they split up, an event that led him into depression and still haunts him, he says.

Smith's autobiography, "Silent Gesture," written with David Steele, was published in 2007 and fractured Carlos's relationship with him until they were reunited in Mexico City for a 40th-anniversary ESPN special.

"I understand Tommie a lot better now in terms of who he is, his attitude and his views," Carlos said.

Carlos is less patient with the state of track and field and its assorted drug scandals. "How can you live with yourself and call yourself a champion, when you repeatedly have lied to yourself and lied to society?" he asked. "It's gotten so bad that it's actually destroying the sport and eating out the root of the sport from the bottom, and the bottom is about to fall out."

Carlos was also dismissive of sprinting's current sensation, Usain Bolt of Jamaica, saying, "I don't look at him."

At an appearance Carlos made last week at the Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, a student asked why he had risked his career to take such a controversial stand. Carlos replied, "Because it was so many individuals that were in positions of power that chose to just lay back."

Carlos will appear at the Rosenthal Pavilion in New York University's Kimmel Center on Wednesday night with his co-author, Zirin, and the writer and commentator Cornel West.

Now remarried and working as a guidance counselor at Palm Springs High School in California, Carlos offers his own prescriptions for success and survival. Don't run from the moment, he tells students; in return, he says, they teach him how to stay young.

"I'm where I need to be, or should be, or could be in my life," he writes. "I think as well as I've worked with kids, there are things I don't think I had the opportunity to do in this life. I think God had intentions for me to do more, but yet still I hear the breath of God telling me, 'You did more than most people ever thought you would be able to do under the circumstances, so just keep on keepin' on and we'll see what comes.' When I hear that voice, I tell God politely that he sounds too much like the devil for my taste."

Deadheads flock to Monterey for Furthur

2011-10-09T22:08:00.001-07:00

Deadheads flock to Monterey for Furthur

http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_19075624

Deadheads flock to Monterey for Furthur

By DENNIS TAYLOR
Herald Staff Writer

Posted: 10/09/2011

If the "Summer of Love," 1967, dissolved into whatever kind of world we live in today, nobody told the Deadheads.

More than four decades later, they flocked to the Monterey County Fairgrounds during the weekend for a two-night gig by a band called Furthur, fronted by Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, two original members of The Grateful Dead.

The fairgrounds has been a sacred venue for rock aficionados since the Monterey Pop Festival introduced much of the music world to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Otis Redding and other legendary performers in June 1967.

The Grateful Dead was there, too, led by the late, great Jerry Garcia (guitar and vocals), and featuring Weir (guitar, vocals), Lesh (bass, vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals) and Bill Kreutzmann (drums).

The core of that group stayed together for 30 years, playing cheap or free concerts all over the world, trailed by hordes of fans — Deadheads — who, in many cases, arranged their lives so they could see every show in every city.

"There's a line from a Grateful Dead song that says, 'Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right,'" said Peter Lull, 35, who lives in Big Sur, Berkeley and Squaw Valley, and says he watched at least 150 shows that featured Jerry Garcia.

"Grateful Dead shows are about the hedonism within the context of community and expanded consciousness. There's a loving awareness among multi-generations

of fans of The Dead — an appreciation of each other that exists within the celebration. (Deadheads) look out for each other and enhance each other's experiences."

Garcia, the heart and soul of The Dead, died Aug. 9, 1995, but remains a messiah figure to the original Deadheads and their descendants, who continue to follow Weir and Lesh wherever they're booked to play.

The scene outside the fairgrounds before Furthur took the stage wasn't just reminiscent of Haight-Ashbury, the famous San Francisco intersection that became the heartbeat of the hippie movement in the mid-'60s — it was the real thing. The vast majority of those milling along the sidewalks on Fairground Road were dyed-in-the-wool Deadheads who would have fit perfectly into the scene at The Haight 44 years ago.

Indeed, some who were actually part of The Summer of Love are still following the music, wearing their thinning, gray hair long and wild over tie-dyed T-shirts. Others are 20-, 30-, or 40-somethings who, somewhere along the line, became mesmerized not so much by Weir and Lesh, but by the vibe of the Deadhead community. Lull describes part of the Deadhead movement as "people who maybe were disenfranchised from their own, traditional family environments and found an opportunity for friendship, camaraderie and brotherhood within a very accepting community."

"I would never travel 14 hours, three weekends in a row, to do anything other than this," said Vermont native Lizzy Farley, a 20-year-old domestic exchange student at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon.

"But there's some kind of crazy energy surrounding this and I feel like I have to do it. Everybody I've talked to knows everybody else. Everybody's connected and wonderful things just keep happening."

Deadheads often travel together — sharing money, food, transportation, clothing and anything else another Deadhead needs — moving from concert to concert without tickets, or lodging, or plans, other than to find a way to see the show.

"It has to do with freedom," said Todd Tholke, a 44-year-old Haight-Ashbury street musician who has seen 450 Dead concerts. "It's a bliss, a vibe that goes all over the country, and The Dead is the only band that creates it."

"I feel like I was born in the wrong era," said Devon Swinburne, a Portland State University student who made her pilgrimage to Monterey for both shows. "It's not just about the music — it's this whole community that's here to support you, and it's a circular thing."

Lull and his brother, Chris, created a website (www.gankmore.com) where they have archived audio of every Grateful Dead show from 1965-95 for no commercial purpose. He is quick to say that the Weir/Lesh band isn't the same as The Dead.

"Jerry Garcia was the virtuoso. He played improvisationally, which is why people could see him again and again," Lull said. "Jerry played The Warfield 10 times in 14 days, sold out every show, and it was the same people who were going every night." The Warfield Theater is in San Francisco.

Without tickets in hand, the Deadheads mingle among their own community, asking each other if they might have one to spare. (Lull says he has never, ever been shut out, and says Deadheads usually find a way, and they help others do the same.)

"I need a miracle right now," said Alabama native Jessica Hunter, 22, extending her index finger skyward to alert others that she was desperate for a ticket. "But miracles happen at these concerts. They happen all the time."

And if the miracle doesn't come?

"You hang out and dance outside with amazing people," said Farley. "It's really a wonderful thing."

Dennis Taylor can be reached at dtaylor@montereyherald.com

or 646-4344.

The Grateful Dead Moves Furthur

2011-10-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2011/oct/06/grateful-dead-moves-furthur/

with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh four decades after Monterey Pop.

By Adam Joseph

Thursday, October 6, 2011

In June of 1967, an unkempt and hairy ragamuffin San Francisco rock outfit brought its extended acid test jams to the Monterey Pop Festival. 

The Grateful Dead had already started gaining underground notoriety for their epic improvisational instrumentals, but the Monterey County Fairgrounds was a coming-out party of sorts – not just for them, but for a whole approach to music appreciation and celebration. 

Rock Scully, a Monterey Peninsula local and the Dead's manager from 1965-85, regards the unprecedented three-day, outdoor music festival as the "first of its kind to feature electric rock and roll" and "a prototype for all the rock festivals that followed." It was a platform used to introduce the world to little-known talents at the time, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. The event also highlighted world music acts like sitar guru Ravi Shankar and introduced hippies to the heart-throbbing voice of Georgia native Otis Redding. Additionally, Scully says the festival showcased many of San Francisco's "free-flowing" bands of the time, including Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Moby Grape.  

At the apex of that amorphous, psychedelic music scene was the band that he managed for 20 years, fueled by Jerry Garcia's inquisitive musical experimentation, which always appeared to expand exponentially. 

But Scully, Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist-singer Bob Weir and the rest of the band were not very happy with their performance at the fairgrounds.  

"It was terrible," Scully says. "We were sandwiched between The Who and Jimi Hendrix on Sunday night. Also, the wall in the back of the arena was breached so everyone started flooding in."  

A bigger hindrance arrived when Mickey Dolenz, drummer for one of the original boy bands, The Monkees, interrupted the Grateful Dead's set to announce, "The Beatles are NOT here!" All weekend, rumors swirled the Fab Four were at the fairgrounds; the band, in fact, was recording in London.  

Those plot twists inspire Scully to admit he's glad he refused to sign a release, before the Dead played, that would've allowed them to be filmed for D.A. Pennebaker's pivotal documentary, Monterey Pop. Weir concedes his most memorable moments of the 1967 festival didn't necessarily come on stage, but while he watched Hendrix play from the side of the stage and when he listened to Joplin blow the minds of all the spaced-out kids in the audience. (Scully adds that he had a blast checking out all the musicians interact, meet, hang out and hold late-night, impromptu jam sessions on the Monterey Peninsula College football field.)  

Weir continues: "I remember being nervous [playing the Pop Festival] and we didn't get to use our own backline gear, which sort of impacted us a little bit, but [our performance] was also flat. It wasn't a bad night, it just wasn't an exceptional night by any means." 

Fortunately he will return to play the arena stage at the fairgrounds once again, for the first time in 45 years, this Friday and Saturday with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and Furthur, the latest incarnation of the seminal band. 

"It will be interesting to play [the fairgrounds] again," Weir says. "I remember it being a good-sounding place so I'm looking forward to it." 

~≈~≈~ 

Between then and now, troves of fans have discovered the group.  

"By 1967, [the Dead] were already the center of a lot of attention in San Francisco," Scully says. "It would only be a matter of time that after the festival kids would start flooding The Haight. And they did." 

In fact, the Grateful Dead became so ingrained as a way of life – for both the musicians involved and their loyal fans – that even when the group's unofficial leader Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, the Dead didn't stay dormant very long.  

In 1998, Weir and Lesh started touring as The Other Ones, an offshoot featuring Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, sax-man Dave Ellis and guitarists Mark Karan and Steve Kimock. After a few years, The Other Ones became The Dead (without Grateful) for a short amount of time before disbanding to take on separate side projects.  

But by 2009, both Weir and Lesh were itching to delve back into that expansive Grateful Dead song vault – after all, Weir believes, if Jerry were still alive, he would still be touring. 

"We've got nothing better to do," Weir says. 

For diehard Deadheads, that represents a divine decision, and one that will evoke memories shared by thousands, of quitting jobs and selling homes to tour with the Dead. The devotion even led some to hold their weddings in parking lots before shows. That undying love, Weir insists, remains the group's driving engine. 

"[The audience] feeds us," he says. "They let us know what they like and we work with that. When you're out in the audience you can feel it and we sure as hell feel it too. We're always a part of the experience as much as the audience." 

Adds Scully, "[Furthur] shows are really exciting because the audience is so appreciative. This isn't like watching a Grateful Dead cover band; it's an extension of the band. It says it in the name, Furthur: It's really a deep investigation into the music and what makes it so special." 

Furthur, which was the name of the candy-colored school bus that transported Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters around the country dosed on LSD, which was idealized in Tom Wolfe's journalistic account of counterculture in the 60s, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, is also a way for the cultural phenomenon that is the Grateful Dead to live on. 

"This is the only life I've ever known," Weir says. 

Lesh and Weir's musical connection with Furthur's younger bandmembers – Jeff Chimenti (keyboard), John Kadlecik (lead guitar), Joe Russo (drums), Sunshine Becker (backing vocals) and Jeff Pehrson (backing vocals) – finds a familiar improvisational chemistry. 

"We listen to each other and play off each other," Weir says. "It's pretty much like it's always been. On a nightly basis I get surprised by certain songs standing out. The tunes never quit surprising me. Beyond that, it's business as usual."  

Adds Scully, "[Weir and Lesh] have become really good team leaders and the band is a team effort."  

Lead guitarist/singer Kadlecik spent several years touring with the popular Grateful Dead tribute band Dark Star Orchestra and is known for his ability to come scarily close to replicating Jerry Garcia's voice.  

Furthur, meanwhile, replicates the Dead's penchant for extended songs – and shows – playing for as long as four hours while offering everything from Garcia solo work like "Reuben and Cerise," to marathon Grateful Dead classics like "Weather Report Suite," "Let it Grow" and "Eyes of the World," which have all been known to meander on for more than 15 minutes if the band's feeling it.  

"The jams are still spontaneous and can be combustible or completely knock you off your feet, which is part of the reason why they're so popular," Scully says. "They want to pack more of their experience and knowledge about what works and what doesn't work, and try to make it better and work more often." 

When Furthur lights up the Monterey County Fairgrounds on Friday and Saturday nights, Weir says it may be fun to revisit the set they played on that very stage at the Monterey Pop Festival. Not that he's living in the past – far from it: "It's sometimes hard for me to be involved with the past," he says, "because there's so much future-oriented work in my scope."  

FURTHUR plays 7pm Friday and Saturday, Oct. 7-8, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, 2004 Fairgrounds Road, Monterey. $55.25. 394-8432. www.furthur.net

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

2011-10-05T16:47:00.001-07:00

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

http://articles.boston.com/2011-09-30/ae/30230052_1_blaxploitation-era-footage-tanya-hamilton

'Black Power' speaks the truth: Film doesn't need to preach

September 30, 2011

By Wesley Morris

One reason people object to "The Help'' is because of movies like "Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,'' a documentary that comprises footage from Swedish television journalists covering black Americans during the end of the civil rights era and the Vietnam War. The challenge and actual revolution that scare "The Help'' are freshly, thrillingly apparent in "Mixtape.''

For instance, the documentary contains film of Angela Davis. Even in defiance she maintains a stirring placidity that belies reality - she was headed to death row for aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder (a jury eventually found her not guilty). You look at that Afro, hear that commandingly gentle diction (part scholar, part Southerner), and sense her power and you wonder, "Where's the movie about her?'' Actually, you watch the material here and wonder whether most of the movies made about black people are meant to pacify general audiences, to distract them from demanding more of the movies.

Where are the films about black America in the late 1960s and 1970s? Last year, Tanya Hamilton released a tiny drama about a sliver of the movement, with Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, called "Night Catches Us.'' It quickly disappeared. It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country. Pending the arrival of another film like Hamilton's, there's "Mixtape.''

Göran Olsson spent years paring down the footage with his co-editor Hanna Lejonqvist. He then showed that material to activists (Harry Belafonte, Sonia Sanchez, Davis) and to Ahmir "?uestlove'' Thompson, Talib Kweli, and Erykah Badu, highly regarded, iconoclastic musicians who, in Olsson's thinking, connect the two eras. The assemblage of images compresses nine turbulent years into 95 minutes. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 are flashpoints for a social revolution whose urgency waned as drugs flooded black communities, turning blacks away from fighting for justice to fighting each other. In that sense, the film manages to explain how the movies swung from the blaxploitation era to, I don't know, "The Klumps.''

Olsson acknowledges in a disclaimer that his distillation amounts to significantly less than the whole story. But what he's done achieves significance nonetheless. We don't see any of the other interviewees. All we hear is their voices playing over the footage as commentary. The observations are incisive, though Abiodun Oyewole, of the Last Poets, gets a few of his dates wrong (Olsson doesn't correct him, and it almost doesn't matter; the Last Poets were there). Really, it's the footage that astounds and fascinates: Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey P. Newton holding separate news conferences, a group of schoolkids at a kind of black power training academy singing an altered chorus from "Land of 1,000 Dances'' so the "naaa nananana'' is "pick up the guns.'' This country once endured something like an Arab Spring. It was a headache for the government, and the footage makes a compelling case for the assertion of Malcolm X - and many others - that the influx of drugs in those neighborhoods wasn't an accident.

This is a movie that shows us the black experience through European eyes. But the Swedish filter is an important one. Early on we see King Gustav VI warmly receiving Belafonte, Martin Luther King, and Coretta Scott King in 1966. They toured Europe to drum up support for civil rights, and, during that trip, King made an appearance in Vilgot Sjöman's new-wave cult provocation "I Am Curious (Yellow).''

The film later mentions a TV Guide cover story accusing Swedish and Dutch television of anti-Americanism. In the 1960s, those countries enjoyed the luxury of relative societal harmony. The social issues of the day belonged to other countries, and Europe - Scandinavia and the Netherlands, in particular - developed a rather aggravating affinity for ours. So the Swedish journalists came to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, the Dutch documentary filmmakers - for starters Johan van der Keuken, Heddy Honigmann, and the South-African-born, Dutch-trained Aryan Kaganof (born Ian Kerkhof) - toured the world looking to rub our noses in atrocity and injustice.

Everyone meant well. But in the finished result there was often the stink of condescension and naïveté and a backhanded compassion for the indigent. Behold these poor and oppressed. Look at how not like us they are. How sad! It's how directors like the Danes Lars von Trier ("Manderlay'') and Susanne Bier, who made this year's insufferable foreign-language Oscar winner, "In a Better World,'' can produce movies that decry racism and dehumanization while deploying the tools and tropes of racism and dehumanization.

On the one hand, "Black Power Mixtape'' is a distant relative. It's about the Swedish affinity for and curiosity about black America made with the same affinity. But this isn't a work of propaganda or heart-tugging. Olsson doesn't tell us how to feel. He doesn't have to. His sharing this footage is a moral act whose righteousness can stand on its own. The material obviates the need for an outsider's commentary. It's powerful, vivid, inspiring, demoralizing, and damning enough to speak for itself.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com

.

Gala commemorates struggle

2011-10-05T16:33:00.001-07:00

Gala commemorates struggle

http://utdailybeacon.com/news/2011/oct/4/gala-commemorates-struggle/

Jamie Grieg, Staff Writer

Published: Tue Oct 04, 2011

aNearly 900 people gathered last week in the Knoxville Convention Center to celebrate 50 years of African-American achievement at UT.

The event was part of UT's year-long celebration commemorating the first black undergraduates to enroll in the university.

The large crowd honored UT administrator Theotis Robinson, the families of Charles Blair and the late Willie May Gillespie with a standing ovation.

UT Trustee Anne Holt Blackburn, a 1973 alumna and Emmy-award-winning anchor for Nashville's WKRN-TV, served as the mistress of ceremonies.

"Today's students owe a debt of gratitude to the brave men and women who broke down the walls of segregation at the university," Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek told attendees. "The events of the past have brought us to where we need to stand today — a campus open to and committed to diversity."

The celebration, organized by the 50th Anniversary Committee, featured musical and dramatic performances highlighting the challenges and accomplishments of the last five decades.

UT students, faculty and staff, along with community members, were part of the music and dramatic production.

The 1970s were represented by a song and dance production of the song "Age of Aquarius."

The All Campus Theatre and Strange Fruit Productions student groups joined forces to produce a play highlighting the 1980s and the on-campus struggle for equality.

The families of Gene Mitchell Gray, the first African-American graduate school student, and Lincoln Anderson Blackney, the first African-American law school student, were also recognized at the celebration.

Many African-American achievers attended, including Brenda Peel, the first UT African-American undergraduate to obtain a degree; Lester McClain, the first African-American scholarship athlete, who played football in 1967; and Wade Houston, the first African-American basketball coach in the Southeastern Conference.

Among the many other individuals and groups celebrated for achievement was the late Fred Brown, who founded UT's Minority Engineering Scholarship program.

Cheek noted the impact of Brown's work and highlighted the efforts of the campus' Love Gospel Choir and ME4UT student organizations.

Cheek also made note of Brown's role in nurturing many students, including UT trustee Spruell Driver, a 1987 engineering graduate.

Driver was named a Torchbearer upon graduation and went to Duke University to earn a law degree. He also was celebrated at the event as the first African-American president of the UT National Alumni Association.

Music faculty member Donald Brown, a three-time Grammy nominee and internationally renowned jazz pianist, played "Someday We Will Be Free," accompanied by vocalist Kelle Jolly.

The program reflected on the role of sports in UT's African-American achievement.

Including Larry Robinson, the first African-American to receive a scholarship for UT's varsity basketball team; linebacker Jackie Walker, who became the first African-American football team captain; and Condredge Holloway, who was named the school's first African-American football quarterback and UT alumna Benita Fitzgerald, who was the first African-American to win a gold medal in the Olympic 100-meter hurdles.

The program gave credit to the work of Rita Sanders Geier, who filed a lawsuit against the state in 1968, which led to a long-standing consent decree and dedicated funding for minority recruitment, scholarships and faculty hiring at UT. Geier came to work at UT in 2007 as a special assistant to the chancellor and retires this fall.

UT junior Jessica Session gave a riveting slam poetry performance, which was accompanied by vocalist Shana Ward, pianist Kristopher Tucker and cellist Jeremiah Welch, all of whom are UT undergraduates.

The gala ended with the university's Alma Mater, sung first in traditional style and then reworked into a modern arrangement for the grand finale, which showcased all the evening's performers.

Cheek thanked celebration co-chairs, Charles and Annazette Houston, and members of the committee for an enjoyable and inspiring event.

Avery Howard, agriculture and natural resources leadership and table host at the Gala, remarked on the event's meaning.

"It was incredible to see the achievement of African-Americans who attended UT. It inspired me to see that I can make an impact just as they did," Howard said. "African-American students at UT are not here solely because they want to be but because of the work of others who have come before us. Reflecting on the 50 years of accomplishments by African-American students makes me want to continue to make a difference for another 50 years."

Viet Cong vet finds friendship with former foes in Sacramento region

2011-10-04T22:02:00.001-07:00

Viet Cong vet finds friendship with former foes in Sacramento region

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/03/3954917/viet-cong-vet-finds-friendship.html

By Stephen Magagnini
smagagnini@sacbee.com

Published: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011

A Viet Cong anti-aircraft gunner engaged several U.S. Army helicopter pilots Sunday in a Vietnam-era chopper parked inside a West Sacramento warehouse.

Dinh Ngoc Truc didn't have his big 37-mm cannons as he seized the controls of the olive-drab Huey UH-1C "Gunship" that flew with the Army's 175th Assault Helicopter Company out of Vinh Long South Vietnam in 1970.

"I used to shoot at these," Truc told Vietnam veteran Ken Fritz, who hosted Truc at his Orangevale home this weekend.

"Talk about sleeping with the enemy," said Fritz's wife, Marcia. "Saturday night, over beers and wine, they were talking about how they used to shoot each other like they were playing video games. They said it's a good thing we didn't meet back then, because one of us would be dead."

The unlikely friendship between former combatants 36 years after the Vietnam War ended began last November, when Fritz and fellow helicopter pilot Jack Swickard of Roswell, N.M., returned to Vietnam.

Vietnam, though still run by the communists, has a full-throttle capitalist economy, and the current generation of Vietnamese don't care about "the American War," as the Vietnam War is known there.

It's not easy to find many of the old battle sites, so Swickard and Fritz joined Truc, now a Vietnamese official with the International Press and Communication Cooperation Center.

"He's a funny guy who wears loafers – they call them 'lazy man shoes,' " said Fritz, 65, co-founder of the 10,000-member Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association. Its motto is: "On the eighth day God created the Huey."

A war hero himself, Truc had joined the Viet Cong at 18 and became an anti-aircraft gunner firing at South Vietnamese army aircraft along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

"My battalion shot down three planes," said Truc, who helped capture Saigon on April 30, 1975. He carries a snapshot of himself in front of the South Vietnamese presidential palace.

"I waved my arms up and down to inform my mom in Hanoi that I'm safe and alive," said Truc, 55.

Truc led the U.S. pilots on a tour of the demilitarized zone then separating North and South Vietnam. He took them to Khe Sanh, where the North Vietnamese laid siege to a Marine base for 77 days in 1968 in a bid to stop the U.S. clampdown on weapons flowing to South Vietnam along the nearby Ho Chi Minh trail.

"Khe Sanh is considered like Dien Bien Phu," where the Vietnamese defeated the French in 1954 after a bloody battle, Truc said. "Khe Sanh dealt a very big blow to the Americans. After this battle, the Americans start thinking they cannot win the war and start withdrawing troops."

"We never lost a battle, but people here in the U.S. lost the war," Fritz countered.

The North Vietnamese fired 130 mortar roundss at the U.S. base in one hour, Fritz said. "We lost 112 guys and they lost over 10,000, but we pulled out of there."

"We never say how many we lost at Khe Sanh," Truc said. "We win because the Americans stopped bombing us."

He took Fritz and Swickard to battle sites in Hue and Da Nang, where a huge U.S. air base has been converted to a commercial airport. They visited China Beach and Marble Mountain.

Next stop was Chu Lai, Fritz's home base in 1968 and 1969, where he logged 1,640 flying hours as an assault helicopter pilot.

"We were flying west of Quang Nai over some rice paddies and a guy jumped up and put a zipper of gunfire right through the middle of the helicopter," Fritz recalled. "My co-pilot got hit in the neck, and my door gunner, who was 18, took a round in his back."

As Fritz relived the war in Vietnam, "the hair stood up on my neck and arms, and chills went up and down my spine," he said. "Helicopters were like horses in Vietnam. The best job was leading the grunts out of the jungle, out of harm's way. The worst job was hauling them in."

But wherever they went in Vietnam, "the people were extremely friendly when they found out I was a veteran," Fritz said. "I felt like we made a whole lot of friends."

In West Sacramento, the restored Huey is parked at the Western Truck School owned by Mike Nord of Elk Grove, one of 140 former Vietnam helicopter pilots in Northern California.

After examining the Huey, the old combatants climbed into a truck trailer converted into a "Mobile Officers Club" featuring a corrugated tin roof and a bar made from a shuffleboard table.

The Officers Club is lined with battle photos, maps and a poster honoring those missing in action.

In Vietnam, Truc offered to let Fritz climb into his old anti-aircraft gun, but Fritz declined, saying "Jane Fonda already did that."

Fritz's wife admitted she too opposed the Vietnam War, which claimed about 58,000 U.S. lives – the average age being 23 years old. Another 292,000 were wounded. Between 1 million and 2 million Vietnamese died in the war.

Inside the trailer, Truc rubbed his black hair and remarked, "I feel the war was really stupid and good for nothing, and caused lots of casualties on both sides."

"We feel exactly the same," Fritz said. "We should never have been there in the first place. We were doing what we were told to do."

One of the pilots played "Red River Valley" on his cellphone for Truc, who fell in love with country music while secretly listening to the Voice of America as a child as B-52s bombed Hanoi.

"I feel very happy to be with my friends," Truc said. "We were on different sides, but we are now united."

Would ‘Hanoi Jane’ be an enemy combatant today?

2011-10-04T21:57:00.001-07:00

Would 'Hanoi Jane' be an enemy combatant today?

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20111002/news/710029767/

10/3/2011

By Chuck Goudie

Jane Fonda was a traitor to America in 1972 and still is if you talk to many Vietnam War veterans.

Judging by the airstrike against American terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, Fonda should consider herself lucky to be alive today.

"Hanoi Jane," as she is still known in VFW halls and American Legion clubs across the country, was one squeeze of a trigger away from being an enemy combatant.

In July of '72, as the war in Southeast Asia raged, the activist-actress accepted an invitation to visit Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam.

The U.S. was fighting a war against North Vietnam and tens of thousands of our soldiers had already died in terrible combat.

Fonda appeared with North Vietnamese leaders and made numerous broadcasts on the communist Radio Hanoi during which she called U.S. officials "war criminals." Her well-publicized trip infuriated military officers, politicians, and regular Americans, even some who opposed the war.

It was no different than if Donna Reed or some other well-known actress had gone to Berlin during World War II and denounced the United States.

The most memorable anti-American act by Fonda while in Hanoi was her photo opportunity sitting on an anti-aircraft gun. There was Fonda, wearing an enemy helmet, seen pointing the gun to the sky — where U.S. pilots were flying missions and some had been shot down, captured or killed.

Lucky for Fonda that she just sat there and didn't have a twitch in her trigger finger.

Had Hanoi Jane actually fired that gun, she could have rightly been considered an enemy combatant, having crossed the line from just a hair-brained, misguided protester and enemy puppet. While there were no drones available back then, she might have found herself in the way of a 105 howitzer blast or too close to a "daisy cutter" bomb.

Maybe Anwar al-Awlaki cut class when Vietnam was covered in American history classes during his years in New Mexico, where he was born, and in Colorado and California, where he attended college. Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was a strong Islamic advocate and organizer back then and loudly outspoken against American policies.

He also served as an Imam at several mosques in the late 1990s and befriended men who would later become attackers on Sept. 11. Authorities suspect that al-Awlaki's lectures, preaching violence and hatred, encouraged them to become martyrs.

In 2005 though, when he moved to his parents' homeland of Yemen to work as a college lecturer, al-Awlaki crossed the line from preacher to participant, a decision that effectively ended his American citizenship and ultimately his life.

According to federal authorities, he began plotting kidnappings of U.S. officials overseas and attacks on Americans abroad and here at home. Working with al-Qaida operatives, al-Awlaki had a hand in the planning or execution of the Fort Hood, Tex. shooting attack by a Muslim Army psychiatrist; the Christmas Day "underwear bomber" who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner; and the ink-cartridge bombs in packages addressed to Chicago-area synagogues that were placed on cargo jets bound for the U.S.

He also admitted to being a traitor and an instigator and plotter of violence against Americans. Had he stopped at rhetoric and stupid behavior such as Jane Fonda's photo-op with the NVA artillery battery, he could have gone on forever. Anti-American speech is protected. Becoming a soldier for the enemy in the War on Terror or any other war isn't.

He might even have been able to continue working on Inspire, al-Qaida's online English magazine that aims to radicalize American Muslims and encourage violence. One issue last fall showed Chicago as a backdrop for an article about "one-man jihad," and urged Islamists to stage attacks whenever they wanted, not waiting for orders from overseas.

Jane Fonda never pulled the trigger on the enemy gun she mounted that day in 1972. She has apologized for it time and again. Says it was a terrible mistake, thoughtless and cruel and blah, blah, blah.

Of course, to this day, many veterans don't believe her and think she should've been charged as a traitor — or worse. Some still show up to protest when she makes appearances. A few years ago one vet, harboring decades of anger, spit in her face.

But at least she's around to apologize and try to make good on what she did wrong.

Al-Awlaki may have been the first American who was killed in this manner. But because of his recruiting skills, it's likely he won't be the last.

A Good Day to Die

2011-10-04T20:51:00.001-07:00

A Good Day to Die

http://www.journeyman.tv/62536/documentaries/a-good-day-to-die-hd.html

[30 September 2011]

In 1968 the abused, neglected and repressed American-Indian people fought back. From the depths of despair Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM), led his people into confrontation with the government and changed their lives forever. A stirring account of the forgotten Indian civil rights movement, this documentary recounts not only the struggle but also depicts the terrible repression they endured.

"I was crying and I was yelling. The kids didn't want to go." Dennis remembers the first time he felt the American repression against American Indians, when he was forced to go to boarding school for "cultural assimilation". Taken away from his family at the age of 5, he wouldn't be allowed to return home for four years. "You couldn't relate to your Indianness" he explains. If someone was caught speaking their native language, they would be violently punished.

Inspired by feminist, anti-war and civil rights movements that were taking place at the time, Dennis began to be more and more interested in how he could bring about a change for native people. On July 28th 1968, he gathered other American Indians to talk about the problems they faced, such as severe police brutality, unemployment and slum housing. "I felt we hit on a nerve", Dennis explained; "People were striving for change". Clyde Bellecourt, also an AIM co-founder, explained that the only solution was to "use confrontational politics". This meeting marked the beginning of AIM. From this moment on, AIM was to face multiple battles to be able to achieve the change the movement was pursuing. From the siege of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C in 1972 to the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973, the movement faced a tumultuous struggle. One of the most decisive moments in the AIM struggle was the aftermath of the murder of a young American Indian. Although it was proven the act was premeditated, the murderer, a non-native, was not charged for murder. This is when Dennis said his famous words and the real battle against injustice started: "We will not tolerate any more abuse" he proclaimed. "This is where it started, and this is where it's going to end. It's a good day to die." This inspirational documentary is a powerful insight into the modern day struggle of the American Indians while following the life of one of the community's most important figures; Dennis Banks. Speaking about his part in a lifetime of repression and struggle, Dennis humbly concludes, "I will go to my grave knowing that I tried my part to bring about meaningful change. I did my very best".

.

6 Things I Learned from Charles Bukowski

2011-10-04T20:47:00.001-07:00

6 Things I Learned from Charles Bukowski

http://www.businessinsider.com/6-things-i-learned-from-charles-bukowski-2011-10

James Altucher | Oct. 4, 2011

Bukowski was disgusting, his actual real fiction is awful, he's been called a misogynist, a Nazi, overly simplistic, (and probably all of the above are true to an extent) and whenever there's a collection of "Greatest American Writers" he's never included.

And yet… he's probably the greatest American writer ever. Whether you've read him or not, and most have not, there's 6 things worthy of learning from an artist like Bukoswski.

I consider "Ham on Rye" by Bukowski probably the greatest American novel ever written. It's an autobiographical novel (as are all his novels except "Pulp" which is so awful it's unreadable) about his childhood, being beaten by his parents, avoiding war, and beginning his life of destitution, hardship, alcoholism, and the beginnings of his education as a writer.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit he's an influence. Many people hate him and I'm much more afraid of being judged than he ever was.

1) Honesty. His first four novels are extremely autobiographical. He details the suffering he had as a child (putting his parents in a very bad light but he didn't care), he details his experiences with prostitutes, his lack of interest in holding down a job, his horrible experiences and lack of real respect for the women he was in relationships with, and on and on. His fiction and poetry document thoroughly the people he hates, the authors he despises, the establishment he could care less about (and he hated the anti-establishment just as much. One quote about a potential plan the hippie movement was going to do: "Run a pig for president? What the fuck is that? It excited them. It bored me.")

(my favorite comic book artist, R. Crumb, often illustrated Bukowski's poems and stories)

Most fiction writers do what fiction writers do: they make stuff up. They tell stories that come from their imagination. Bukowski wasn't really able to do that. Whenever he attempted fiction (his last novel being a great example) it fell flat. Even his poetry is non-fiction.

There's one story he wrote (I forget the name) where he's sitting in a bar and he wants to be alone and some random guy starts talking to him: "its horrible about all those girls who were burned" and Bukowski says (I'm getting the words a little off. Doing this from memory), "I don't know." And the guy and everyone else in the bar starts yelling, "This guy doesn't care that all those little girls burned to death". But Bukowski was honest, "It was a newspaper headline. If it happened in front of me I'd probably feel different about it." And he refused to back down and stayed in the bar until closing time.

(Matt Dillon playing a young Bukowski in "Factotum")

He had very few boundaries as to how far his honesty could go. He never wrote about his daughter after she reached a certain age. That's about the only boundary I can find. Every other writer has so many things they can't write about: family, spouses, exes, children, jobs, bosses, colleagues, friends. That's why they make stuff up. Bukowski didn't let himself get hampered by that so we see real raw honest, a real anthropological survey of being down and out for 60+ years without anything being held back. No other writer before or since has done that. For a particular example, see his novel, "Women" which detailed every sexual nuance of every woman who dared to sleep with him after he achieved some success. Most of these women were horrified after the book came out.

I try as hard as possible to remove all boundaries. But it's a challenge with each post I do.

2) Persistence. Bukowski got two stories published when he was young (24 and 26 years old) but almost all of his stories were rejected by publishers. So he quit writing for ten years. Then, in the mid 1950s he started up again. He submitted tons of poems and stories everywhere he could. It took him years to get published. It took him even more years to get really noticed. And it finally took him about 15 years of writing every day and writing thousands of poems and stories before he finally started making a living as a writer. He wrote his first novel at the age of 49 and it was financially successful. After 25 years of plugging away at it he was finally a successful writer.

25 years!

Most people give up much earlier, much younger. Both my grandfather and father wanted to be musicians, for instance. Both gave up in their 20s and 30s and took what they thought was the safer route. (The safer route being, in my opinion, what ultimately killed both of them).

And this persistence was while he was going through three marriages, dozens of jobs, and non-stop alcoholism. Some of this is documented (poorly) in the move "Barfly" but I think a better movie about Bukowski is the indie that Matt Dillon did about his novel, "Factotum" which details the 10 years he was going from job to job, woman to woman, just trying to survive as an alcoholic in a world that kept beating him down.

He wrote his first novel in 19 days. Michael Hemmingson who I write about below, wrote me and said Bukowski had to finish that novel so fast because he was desperately afraid he was going to be a failure at being a successful writer and didn't want to disappoint John Martin, who had essentially given him an advance for the novel.

(a tattoo of the epitaph on Bukowski's tombstone)

3) Survival. When I think "constant alcoholic" I usually equate that with being a homeless bum. Bukowski, at some deep level, realized that he needed to survive. He couldn't just be a homeless bum and kill himself, no matter how many disappointments he had. He worked countless factory jobs (the basis of the non-fiction novel, "Factotun") but even that wasn't stable enough for him. Finally, he took a job working for the US Government (you can't get more stable) working in the post office for 11 years. He didn't miss child support payments (although he constantly wrote about how ugly the mother of his child was), and as far as I know he was never homeless or totally down and out from his early 30s 'til the time he started having success as a writer.

And despite writing about the overwhelming poverty he had, he did have a small inheritance from his father, a savings account he built up, and a steady paycheck. The post office job is documented, in full, in his first "novel" called, appropriately, "Post Office". Many people think that's his best novel but I put it third or fourth behind "Ham on Rye" and "Factotum" and possibly "Women". He also wrote a novel, "Hollywood" about the blow-by-blow experience of doing the movie "Barfly". All the names are changed (hence its claim to be fiction) but once you figure out who everyone is, its totally non-fiction. Like all of his other novels (not counting "Pulp", which was the worst American novel ever written and published).

[See, 33 Unusual Ways to Be a Better Writer - many tips I got from reading his books.]

4) Discipline. Imagine working a brutal 10 hour shift at the Post Office, coming home and arguing with your wife or girlfriend, or half-girlfriend, half-prostitute that was living with you, finishing off three or four six-packs of beer and then…writing. He did it every day. Most people want to write that novel, or finish that painting, or start that business, but have zero discipline to actually sit down and do it. If there was any talent that Bukowski had that I can't actually figure out how he got it, its that discipline.

When he was younger (early 20s, late teens) he spent almost every day in the library, falling in love with all the great writers. The love must have been so great it superseded almost everything else in his life. He had to write like them or he really felt like he would die. He had to "put down a good line" as he would say. And every day he would try. And good, bad, or ugly, he probably ultimately ended up publishing (many posthumously) everything he ever wrote. I try to match that discipline. Even when I don't post a blog post I write seven days a week, every morning. At least 1000 words and a completed post. I used to do this in my 20s when I was trying to write fiction. My minimum then was 3000 words. I did that for five years.

It adds up. The average book is 60,000 words. If you can write 1000 words a day then you'll have 6 books by the end of the year. Because poetry books are much smaller, Bukowski probably had around 80 or so books published by the time he was dead and I bet there are more coming.

(his first novel at age 49. You're never too old).

5) His "literary map". He was inspired by several writers and he inspired many more. Some of my favorite writers come from both categories. He was probably most inspired by three writers: Celine, Knut Hamsun, and John Fante. I highly recommend Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night". Celine is almost a more raw version of Bukowski. He was constantly angry and trying to survive and do whatever it took to survive. The thing about Bukowski, as opposed to many other writers, is he didn't concern himself with flowery images or beautiful sunsets. He totally wrote as if he were speaking to you and Celine does that to an extreme but he's so raw and smart that the way he "speaks" is like an insane person trying to spew out as much venom as possible. 600 pages later his first book is a masterpiece and I often use it in my pre-writing hour every morning when I read stuff to inspire myself to write.

John Fante wrote the underappreciated "Ask the Dust" which was completely forgotten until Bukowski's publisher republished it and all of Fante's books. (I also recommend the movie with Colin Farrell and a naked Salma Hayek).

(maybe Hayek's best role)

Bukowski was almost afraid to admit how much Fante directly influenced him. He wrote in one "short story", "I realized that admitting John Bante had been such a great influence on my writing might detract from my own work, as if part of me was a carbon copy, but I didn't give a damn. It's when you hide things that you choke on them."

Note he spelled "Fante" as "Bante". That's the extent of Bukowski's fiction. Another interesting thing is the last line. Nothing flowery, nothing descriptively beautiful, yet a line like that is what made Bukowski unique and one of the best writers ever, getting at the hidden truth of what was really happening in his head, rather than telling yet another boring story filled with flowery descriptions like most books and stories are.

Then there's the authors Bukowski influenced. Michael Hemmingson wrote an excellent review of Bukowski in the book "The Dirty Realism Duo: Bukowski and Carver" which I highly recommend. Raymond Carver comes from the same genre of down-and-out, oppressive relationships that were beyond his ability to cope with them, and realist, simple writing that was mostly autobiographical (although that's a little less clear in Carver's case). I'd also throw Denis Johnson's book of short stories (Jesus' Son) in that category (Johnson studied with Carver) and more recently, books like the above-mentioned Michael Hemmingson's "Crack Hotel", "The Comfort of Women", "My Date(Rape) with Kathy Acker" and other stories. I'm dying to find other writers in this category.

(I haven't seen the movie. Is it good?)

I read how Denis Johnson needed $10,000 to pay the IRS. So he threw together some vignettes he had forgotten about, called the collection "Jesus' Son" and sent it off to Jonathan Galassi and said, "here, you can have these if you pay the IRS". So I Facebook-friended Galassi and asked him if he could tell me one author in Denis Johnson's league but I'm still waiting for a response.

I wish I could find more writers like these. Perhaps William Vollmann who wrote "Butterfly Stories" but his bigger fiction is too difficult for me to read (anecdote: he wrote the afterward to the recently re-published Celine's "Journey of the Night" so all of these writers tend to recognize their common lineage.)

6) Poetry. I really hate poetry. When I open up the New Yorker (blecch!) and read the latest poems in there I can't understand them, they all seem like gibberish to me, they all seem too intellectual. And yet, out of all the poets I've read, the only ones I really like are: Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson. Poetry allowed them to master making each word in a sentence effective and powerful. It was this training that allowed them to destroy the competition when they sat down to write their longer pieces. It makes me want to try my hand at poetry but even the word "poetry" sounds so pseudo-intellectual I just have no interest in doing it.

Bukowski: Alcoholic, postal worker, misogynist (there's a video you can easily find on Youtube where he must be almost 60 and he literally kicks his wife in anger while he's being interviewed.), anti-war, anti-peace, anti-everything, hated everyone, probably insecure, extremely honest, and he had to write every day or it would kill him.

In his own words, words which I hope to live by: "What a joy it must be to be a truly great writer, even if it means a shotgun at the finish".

————————

Suggested Reading:

Biographical:

- Michael Hemmingson: The Dirty Realism Due: Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver

- Howard Sounes: "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life"

Bukowski's Writings (that I recommend):

- "Ham On Rye"
- "Factotum"
- "Women"
- "Post Office"
- "Hollywood"
- "Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook"
- "Absence of the Hero"
- "The Last Night on theEarth"(poems)
(I don't recommend "Pulp" – don't read it).

Other fiction in the "Dirty Realism"category:

- Celine, "Journey to the End of theNight"
- Fante, "Ask the Dust"
- Raymond Carver, "Cathedral"
- Denis Johnson, "Jesus' Son"
- William Vollmann, "Butterfly Stories"
- Michael Hemmingson, "This Other Eden"
- Junot Diaz, "Drown"
- Jerzy Kosinski, "Steps"

Poem:

"You Don't know What Love Is (an evening with Bukowski)" by Raymond Carver.

Article: John Fante, father of LA Literature:

Movies:

"Factotum"

If anyone can think of anybody else in this specific "dirty realism" category, please put it in the comments. I'd also like to read women in this category but I think it's a particularly male category. Jack Kerouac falls somewhere in there but he's more "beat" which I think is different. And Chad Kultgen's recent books ("The Average American Male", for instance) are also somewhat in the realism category but not quite "dirty" enough.

Activist Dana Beal Sentenced, Suffers Heart Attack

2011-10-04T01:46:00.001-07:00

Activist Dana Beal Sentenced, Suffers Heart Attack

http://cannabis.hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/09/29/activist-dana-beal-sentenced-suffers-heart-attack-2/

9/29/2011

By Phillip Smith

Iconic activist Dana Beal suffered a heart attack while in a Wisconsin jail awaiting transfer to a state prison to begin serving a 2 ½ prison sentence for marijuana trafficking. According to Celebstoner.com and the Free Dana Beal and Free Ourselves Facebook page, Beal was stricken Tuesday morning, and at last report, he was hospitalized in stable condition under sedation at the Intensive Care Unit at St. Mary's Hospital in Madison.

[image:1 align:right caption:true]Last week, Beal was sentenced to prison in Wisconsin after pleading guilty to trafficking 180 pounds of pot in a bust that unraveled when his 1997 Chevy van got pulled over for expired tags and no tail light. He also got 2 ½ years of probation to be served after his jail time. He got credit for 267 days already served.

Despite courtroom testimonials from Beal supporters, including "Guru of Ganja" Ed Rosenthal and Wisconsin medical marijuana patient Jacki Rickert, Beal got prison time. But it was less than the four years the prosecution asked for and well below the 15 year maximum allowable under Wisconsin law.

Beal was already on probation after being busted with another 100-pound-plus load in Nebraska in 2009. The previous year, the New York City-based activist saw more than $100,000 in cash seized in Illinois, although he avoided any convictions in that case. He also has previous drug convictions in 1971, 1987, 1993 and 2006.

When not fighting his own cases, Beal has built a career as an activist, first with the Yippies in the early 1970s, then as a founding organizer of the Global Marijuana Marches, and in recent years, as a crusader for the addiction-treating powers of ibogaine with his group Cures Not Wars.

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Review

2011-10-04T01:27:00.001-07:00

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Review

http://www.thefilmpilgrim.com/reviews/black-power-mixtape-1967-1975-review/6182

Rob Fred ParkerBy – September 30, 2011

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is a documentary consisting of footage and interviews shot by Swedish filmmakers eager to objectively explore this most significant period of American history. The original footage on display here was captured when a group of Swedes travelled to America ,and sensing that the complex civil rights struggle in the late 60s and early 70s was being alternately ignored or portrayed in the US media as a violent, terrorist movement, they were eager to create an impartial document of the period. Director Göran Hugo Olsson has compiled this footage, which has lied undiscovered for the last three decades and is unseen outside of Sweden, adding contemporary interviews with first hand authorities to accompany the often grainy yet always striking images.

During the late 60s it was becoming clear to countless black Americans that to achieve equality, and even just survive, the non-violent approach, advocated by Martin Luther King and displayed by the legendary bus boycott, was not enough, and could not stand up to the increasingly violent oppression of the U.S. government. 1968 was a pivotal year, and alone saw the assassinations of King, who was adopting a more militant stance in his opposition of the Vietnam war; fervent civil rights campaigner, Robert Kennedy; and activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Regarding the shift in stance, influential Black Power pioneer Stokely Carmichael comments, onscreen: "Dr. King's philosophy was that non violence would achieve gains for black people in the U.S. He only made one fallacious assumption: in order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The U.S. has none".

The film provides powerful footage of the beginnings of The Black Panther Party, of which Hampton and Clark were prominent members, harrowing images of police attacks, and affecting interviews with Angela Davis, an activist and professor who was held in a murder trial which became 'historic in its injustice', the government's eagerness to quell Black Power overriding the lack of any real evidence to incriminate Davis.

Olsson's use of soundtrack is unobtrusive and subtle, greatly effective throughout. Minimal hip-hop beats and soulful ambient music lie beneath sound-bites and create a cohesive aural motif. Adding to this are the Jackson Five's 'Rockin' Robin', and 'Unwritten' by The Roots, which features throughout (although perhaps too often), band member Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson providing voice-over commentary to many of the film's scenes.

The footage on display here is, at times, difficult to watch, such is its intensity. Scenes capturing violent police attacks in Harlem, an interview with a teenage prostitute, and gaunt newborn babies addicted to heroin, due to the influx of drugs in black communities instigated by the CIA and FBI in hopes to make activists docile, are particularly hard-hitting. In the couple of instances in which the film presents a more abstract approach, it is no less effective. A particularly successful scene arrives in a screen of out-of-focus, fizzing colours. The voice-over discloses of how black people felt severely let down by their government, which failed to offer support to communities struck by poverty, yet spent frivolously on trivial initiatives. As the camera slowly pans out from the extreme-close up, and the letters USA crawl across the screen, we learn that we're watching an American space-shuttle take off. A quote arrives subsequently which sums up this contradiction directly; "It's a tragedy that we live in a society that believes we can go to the moon, but it does not believe that it can cure a drug victim of a malady that the society has caused. That's a disgrace". This scene is perhaps the best critique of the American Space campaign since Gil Scott-Heron's song 'Whitey on the Moon'.

For all the harrowing images, the film's celebration of the achievements and ultimate legacy of the Black Power movement is, however, greatly uplifting, due to the unrelenting strength and conviction of those interviewed (especially the unjustly condemned Angela Davies). The Black Panther Party actively promoted structured education and unity within and between communities, and their initiatives, such as providing breakfasts for students before school (which was labelled 'the greatest threat to the internal security of this country' by J. Edgar Hoover in 1969, yet eventually adopted by the American government) had a profound effect, not only in America. The positive influence the movement has on subsequent liberation movements, such as second wave feminism and gay equality campaigns, is also evidenced convincingly.

"We, as black people, have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history, the history becomes twisted – and we get written out", a sound-bite declares during the film. The commitment and balance of the Swedish group of filmmakers who captured the original material, as well as that of director Olsson, go a long way in making sure their subject's' aren't written out. Their sincere interest and relative impartiality has produced a reasonably objective, engaging documentary, which will stand alongside recreational films such as Malcolm X by Spike Lee (1992), the TV mini-series King (directed by Abby Mann, 1978), and particularly Geoff Small's 2008 documentary Black Power Salute, which centred upon black American athletes at the 1968 Olympics, as a document of an incredibly important period in for civil rights. Recent cases, such as the contentious execution of Georgia citizen Troy Davies, strongly suggest the message of the Black Power campaigners is very much relevant today.

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 will show at the BFI London Film Festival on the 14th and 17th October

Fugitive in hijacking case caught after 40-year hunt

2011-10-04T01:25:00.000-07:00

[2 articles]

Fugitive in hijacking case caught after 40-year hunt

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-new-jersey-fugitive-20110928,0,7729854.story

Convicted killer George Wright, who escaped prison in 1970 and joined a black nationalist group that hijacked a plane two years later, is arrested in Portugal without incident.

By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times

September 27, 2011

Reporting from New York—

The FBI agents wore swimsuits — the better to ensure they were unarmed as they delivered $1 million in cash to the hijackers. The criminals wore beatific looks, traveled with young children and were "polite as possible," a passenger on the ill-fated Delta flight recalled at the time.

For one man, it was the perfect crime — for nearly 40 years.

But on Tuesday, the FBI said it had caught up with the last hijacker, a convicted killer named George Wright who had escaped from prison in 1970 and resurfaced two years later when he joined members of a radical black nationalist group in forcing the jet to fly to Algeria.

Wright, now 68, was picked up outside his home in Portugal as he headed to a neighborhood cafe, said Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service in New Jersey.

"Can you imagine?" Schroeder said, envisioning Wright's surprise when Portuguese police, who had Wright under surveillance and were working in collaboration with U.S. officials, captured the fugitive.

Officials planned to request his extradition to New Jersey to finish serving his sentence of 15 to 30 years for shooting to death a gas station employee during a robbery the day after Thanksgiving in 1962. It was unclear whether Wright could also face trial for the hijacking, which made headlines with its radical perpetrators, record-setting ransom and wild costumes. In addition to the FBI agents in swimsuits, news reports at the time said that one of the hijackers — alleged to be Wright — wore priestly robes and hid his gun in a hollowed-out Bible.

"It read like a Hollywood script," Schroeder said of the case, which had gone cold until 2002, when he said the marshals service created regional fugitive task forces throughout the country. Wright's case, with its dramatic flair and heroic victim — the man killed at the gas station was a 42-year-old decorated World War II veteran named Walter Patterson — quickly became a priority.

Witnesses and relatives of Patterson were re-interviewed. Old reports were scoured. Age-enhanced sketches and busts were created to show how Wright might look today.

"Our guys really blew the dust off this case," Schroeder said. "The key was working every lead."

An address in Portugal was one such lead, and it paid off Monday when Wright was arrested without incident.

It marked the apparent end of a life on the lam whose chapters hark back to an era when hijackings were a common tool of militants, when it was possible to board a plane without being patted down or putting your carry-on through X-ray machines, and when $1 million was enough to make five hijackers happy.

In July 1972, when the three men and two women of the Black Liberation Army commandeered the flight from Detroit to Miami, $1 million was the most ever paid for the release of airplane hostages. The $50 and $100 bills were stuffed into a briefcase, which was tied to the end of a rope dangling out the jet window at the Miami airport. After it was hoisted inside and all of the approximately 90 passengers were freed, the Delta DC-8 made its way to Algeria.

Algerian officials seized the plane and the money and returned them to the United States, but the hijackers were let go. Several years later, four were captured in France, but the fifth — who had used the name Larry Burgess but whom FBI agents at the time identified as George Wright — remained missing.

The FBI said Wright had joined up with the Black Liberation Army after fleeing prison and moving to Detroit. In subsequent years, the BLA would be accused in a number of violent crimes and sometimes worked with members of the Weather Underground, another radical group.

Members of the two groups were convicted in the 1981 holdup of a Brink's armored truck, in which $1.6 million was stolen and two police officers and a security guard were shot dead.

News reports from 1972 said Wright and several other BLA members had lived together in Detroit and often discussed going to Algeria, where they thought the socialist government would welcome them. They said the reason for the hijacking was to flee "decadent" America, the pilot of the seized airline, William H. May, said at the time.

When Algeria seized the ransom, the group was indignant. "We are shocked and bewildered to be branded as criminals for our revolutionary activities," it said in a statement.

Despite the group's revolutionary rhetoric and record of violence, the hijackers were not accused of abusing the passengers or crew members. However, they did insist that the FBI agents who delivered the cash wear either swimsuits or underwear, to be sure they did not carry weapons.

"There were no threats to any of the passengers, and they were polite as possible," said one of the passengers interviewed after the hijacking, George Coppal of Detroit.

After U.S. officials got a tip that Wright might be in Portugal, authorities in that country were notified. Fingerprints submitted by Wright to get a national identity card there matched those on file with the FBI, officials said. Schroeder said relatives of Patterson had been notified of Wright's capture and were "ecstatic."

"The crime left two young girls without a father," said Gary Lanigan, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Corrections. "Despite the passage of time, justice has been served, and George Wright will pay for his crime."

tina.susman@latimes.com

--------------

Hijacker-fugitive George Wright caught after 41 years, says FBI

http://www.montereyherald.com/living/ci_18985449

By Casey Glynn: September 27, 2011

A convicted killer who escaped a New Jersey prison in 1970, then hijacked a U.S. airliner two years later, has been captured in Portugal after four decades on the run.

George Wright, 68, was arrested Monday by Portuguese authorities at the request of the U.S. government, the FBI announced Tuesday.

New Jersey publication the Star-Ledger reports that the U.S. is now seeking Wright's extradition from Portugal so he can serve the remainder of his 15-to-30 year sentence.

Wright, who was convicted of the 1962 murder of war hero and New Jersey gas station owner Walter Patterson, eight years later escaped the Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, N.J. along with three other men.

According to the FBI, Wright became affiliated with the Black Liberation Army and resurfaced in 1972 when he and his associates hijacked a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami. After releasing the passengers in exchange for a $1 million ransom, the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston, then on to Algeria.

According to CBS station WCBS, Wright was briefly detained but released and has been in hiding ever since.

Wright's associates were arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976. Wright was the last remaining fugitive in the case.

It is unclear how he was tracked down.

Michael Ward, Special Agent In Charge of the FBI's Newark Division, said today in a statement:

"The investigation into George Wright serves as an example of law enforcement strength and tenacity. Even after 40 years, the commitment of law enforcement is unwavering and through the vast contributions of a multitude of people in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Portugal, Wright was successfully taken into custody. This case should also serve notice that the FBI's determination in pursuing subjects will not diminish over time or distance."

Kerouac Festival Connects Beats to Today

2011-10-03T23:26:00.001-07:00

Kerouac Festival Connects Beats to Today

http://www.uml.edu/News/stories/2011-12/LCK-Preview-2011.aspx

10/03/2011

By Julia Gavin

Today, Jack Kerouac could Skype with poets across the nation, keep up with his friends on Facebook instead of taking a road trip and write "On the Road" on a smartphone. But the 23rd annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival will explore why he would prefer the old way.

The festival, co-sponsored by UMass Lowell, will connect the Beat Generation to the Social Media Generation by engaging a new audience in the author's work and showcasing up-and-coming writers. The keynote talk by new UMass Lowell professor Dr. Todd Tietchen will discuss Kerouac's thoughts on computers in addition to the popular readings and tours that every year attract visitors from across the nation to the festival.

"I'm looking forward to another wonderful celebration of the ongoing Kerouac presence in Lowell," says Steve Edington, president of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!, the main organizing group for the festival, which runs Oct. 6 through 9 this year. "I'm especially happy that we'll be introducing Dr. Tietchen to the greater Lowell -- and Kerouac -- communities."

Tietchen, who began teaching in the English Department this semester, will give a keynote talk titled "The Kerouac Legacy" on Saturday, Oct. 8, at the Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center. His talk will consider Kerouac's attitudes on computing technology and multimedia culture, which even in the 1950s and '60s the author considered a threat to literary and American culture.

"Kerouac was always interested in experience," says Tietchen. "To him, anything that stood in the way of direct experience was a threat to human well-being. When we start to understand this, it puts a lot of his other work in perspective."

As part of his research, Tietchen was "graciously" given access to one of Kerouac's unpublished manuscripts by John Sampas, the author's brother-in-law and executor of his estate. The story takes place in a dystopian future where computer algorithms dictate daily life. Expanding on Kerouac, Tietchen plans to link hippie culture, physics, Buddhism and algorithms, resulting in "something for everyone" the professor says.

"I hope to bring new audiences to the festival with this perspective," Tietchen says of his science-related paper. "I understand these things philosophically, but to have a computer scientist there to bring new understanding would be interesting."

The festival will also be the first chance for many Kerouac fans to see the new exhibit on the author at the Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center. Developed by Prof. Michael Millner, acting director of the Kerouac Center for Public Humanities, and Paul Marion, UMass Lowell executive director of community and cultural affairs, the exhibit covers Kerouac's life and features recordings of his work.

The festival will take place Oct. 6 through 10 with events and tours throughout downtown Lowell. For a complete list of events, visit the festival's website. http://www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org/

'Magic mushroom' drug may improve personality long-term

2011-10-01T00:42:00.000-07:00

'Magic mushroom' drug may improve personality long-term

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2011-09-29/Magic-mushroom-drug-may-improve-personality-long-term-/50602264/1

09/29/2011

In new research that will almost certainly create controversy, scientists working with the hallucinogen psilocybin -- the active ingredient found in "magic mushrooms" -- have found that a single dose of the drug prompted an enduring but positive personality change in almost 60 percent of patients.

Specifically, tests involving a small group of patients in a strictly controlled and monitored clinical setting revealed that, more often than not, one round of psilocybin exposure successfully boosted an individual's sense of "openness." What's more, the apparent shift in what is deemed to be a key aspect of personality did not dissipate after exposure, lasting at least a year and sometimes longer.

"Now this finding is really quite fascinating," said study author Roland R. Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. "And that is because personality is considered a stable characteristic of the psychology of people. It's been thought to be relatively immutable, and stable across the lifespan.

"But, remarkably, this study shows that psilocybin actually changes one domain of personality that is strongly related to traits such as imagination, feeling, abstract ideas and aesthetics, and is considered a core construct underlying creativity in general," he added. "And the changes we see appear to be long-term."

Griffiths said it's possible psilocybin could have therapeutic uses. For example, he is currently studying whether the hallucinogen might be useful in helping cancer patients cope with the depression and anxiety that often accompany the disease, and whether it might help smokers quit the habit.

Griffiths and his colleagues discuss their findings, funded in part by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, in the new issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Working with 51 psychologically healthy volunteers, the study authors conducted baseline personality tests before engaging the participants in a total of two to five experiment sessions, each lasting about eight hours.

The researchers said that almost all of the study participants deemed themselves to be "spiritually active." Roughly half had completed a post-graduate education.

Not all the sessions involved psilocybin. In fact, the hallucinogen was administered only once, at a dose described as "moderate to high," and the volunteers were never told which session actually entailed drug exposure.

A minimum break of three weeks was allotted between sessions.

During each session, participants were asked to lay down while wearing both eye masks and headphones (with music piped in) to screen out their external environment and focus on their interior experience. Neither the participants nor the session monitors knew which session involved psilocybin use.

The results: repeated personality and so-called "states of consciousness" testing revealed that some critical aspects of the participants' personalities remained unchanged. In the key domains of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness, psilocybin appeared to register little to no impact.

The exception: "openness." Not only did openness increase significantly in response to high doses of the hallucinogen, it also remained at an elevated level throughout a 14-month follow-up period.

"Certainly we want to underscore do not try this at home," Griffiths cautioned. "Because clearly there are several kinds of potential downsides. One is that personality changes are personality changes. Now, we don't have any reason to think that the changes we see are toxic in any way. It appears to be a change that people value in a positive way. But certainly more research needs to be done.

"And the other note," he added, "is that we've conducted our research under conditions where we've screened out people who are potentially vulnerable to adverse effects. And we've given the drug in a hospital setting with two people at their side throughout, so there's virtually no opportunity for the patient to do something dangerous. But we know that, shockingly, all the time people who use mushrooms recreationally sometimes end up getting into accidents or engage in homicidal behavior or suicide.

"So we certainly don't want to imply that there's not risk associated with these compounds," stressed Griffiths. "And we wouldn't want to be a reason for an uptick for non-medical, uncontrolled use of this sort of thing."

Dr. Stephen Ross, clinical director of the NYU Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction in New York City, said he viewed Griffiths' work as a "landmark" in the field of hallucinogen research.

"I say this because we think of personality as being cemented in your 20s, certainly by your 30s," he said. "So the fact that openness was increased, seemingly permanently, after a single experience of psilocybin is quite remarkable.

"But, of course, as interesting as the implications for future therapies from this might be, the message should be that people should not try this at home or in any kind of uncontrolled environment," Ross added. "This is preliminary research that needs to be replicated. And replicated in a carefully controlled treatment environment."

North Bay Utopian Communities

2011-09-30T23:28:00.001-07:00

North Bay Utopian Communities

http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/09.a21.11/feature-utopian-communities-1138.html

We revisit the many fascinating cults and communes that have flourished in the North Bay's illustrious utopian history.

By Leilani Clark

09.21.11

Morning Star

Founded: Lou Gottlieb, bassist for folk trio the Limeliters, bought 32 acres on Graton Road near Occidental in 1962. After retiring from showbiz, the grizzly-bearded musician declared the ranch open land, inviting anyone and everyone to live there for free. In 1966, it became a super-mecca for Diggers, dropouts, the "technologically unemployable" and wild children of all ages.

Beliefs: "Open-land" and "voluntary primitivism" were Morningstar's philosophical lynchpins. People built tree houses, frolicked and cooked in the nude, took drugs and grew vegetables that fed not only the residents but provided supplies for free-food programs in San Francisco.

Unraveling: Where Gottlieb saw utopia, authorities saw safety and health violations. The Sonoma County Health Department and the sheriff began staging raids on the "Happiness People" after neighbors complained about open fires, open-pit toilets and rough living conditions. By 1971, the county had bulldozed the shelters and campsites, and Gottlieb left for India, deeding his property to God.

Remnants: Gottlieb died on the land in 1996, and caretakers have allowed the site to return to its natural state. "The land has just been resting very quietly. That's what Lou wanted," says Ramon Sender, a San Francisco writer and former resident who's archived Morningstar's history at www.badamamama.com. In 2011, Gottlieb's heirs announced plans to sell the property. A group called Friends of Morningstar is raising money to buy the property for placement in a land trust, says Sender.—L.C.

Wheeler Ranch

Founded: Bill Wheeler opened his 320-acre Coleman Valley Road ranch to the displaced folk of Morningstar in the late 1960s.

Beliefs: Wheeler espoused the same open-land ideas as Gottlieb. The community became home to errant flower children, runaways and soldiers AWOL from Vietnam. "What was important to us was that there was a lot of art, there was a lot of music and there was a lot of creativity," Wheeler told the Bohemian in 2003.

Unraveling: Once again, the county stepped in after complaints were lodged by neighbors against the freewheeling nature of the ranch. In 1973, bulldozers razed the tents, lean-to's and rough-hewn houses that had sprung up across the property and the uprooted community disintegrated.

Remnants: Wheeler still lives on the pastoral property that once played home to nearly 400 free spirits. He tells the Bohemian that everything from the days of the ranch was bulldozed or burned to the ground by the county, leaving nothing at all behind. Rumors that the ranch site eventually became the Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center are unfounded, though "we enjoy a great friendship," says Wheeler.—L.C.

Dennis Banks Visits an Ailing Russell Means

2011-09-30T12:07:00.001-07:00

Dennis Banks Visits an Ailing Russell Means

http://www.nativenewsnetwork.com/dennis-banks-visits-an-ailing-russell-means.html

Levi Rickert

September 6, 2011

SAN JOSE, NEW MEXICO - In its glory days, the American Indian Movement served as a major catalyst for the resurgence for American Indians throughout the United States.

During the 1970s, Dennis Banks, Ojibwa, and Russell Means, Lakota, emerged as two of the American Indian Movement's most recognizable leaders. Some could argue they have been the most visible and vocal American Indian leaders during the past half-century.

Together they fought for American Indian rights. Both men led the American Indian Movement's 71-day siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Both men were indicted and put on trial and were tried together in St. Paul, Minnesota in a trial that lasted some eight months. Both men were freed when the Federal Judge Fred Nichol dismissed charges against them and accused the US Department of Justice and the FBI with misconduct because of their tactics used in their attempt to prosecute both men.

Over the ensuing decades, both men have remained fighters for American Indian rights.

Both men were together again in New Mexico last week Thursday, as Means is in the fight for his life. In July he was diagnosed with esophagus cancer and elected not have surgery which would have required removal of a major portion of his tongue.

Banks flew to Albuquerque and traveled to visit to see Means at his rural home near San Jose, New Mexico.

"He is a fighter. He is in the battle with cancer and seeking alternative healing,"

Banks told the Native News Network Friday evening.

"He is still very strong - strong-minded, and robust as ever,"

Banks continued.

"We both talked about establishing a health agenda. We both have had serious health issues,"

said Banks.

Means is relying on American Indian spiritual healers to assist him with his treatment.

Accompanying Banks on the visit was Paul Collins and his wife, Carol. Paul Collins is an internationally-acclaimed artist who met both men at Wounded Knee in 1973. At the time, Collins was there painting a series of portraits, which resulted in "Other Voices- A Native American Tableau."

After many years as an American Indian activist, Means became a Hollywood actor. Since 1992, he has appeared in "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder," "Natural Born Killers," "Windrunner: A Spirited Journey," "Thomas and the Magic Railroad." His served as the voice of Chief Pawhatan in "Pocahontas" in the hit 1995 Disney movie.

Also, during 1995, Means released his autobiography, "Where White Men Fear to Tread," co-written with Marvin J. Wolf.

On Saturday, Banks was back home in Minnesota and will try to go back to spend some extended time with Means.

Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War

2011-09-29T11:26:00.001-07:00

Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/books-mariann-g-wizard-jonah-raskins.html

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / September 29, 2011

[Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War by Jonah Raskin (High Times Books, 2011); Paperback, 154 pp. $12.95.]

Jonah Raskin has written about marijuana (cannabis) politics and culture since the 1970s. A professor at Sonoma State University in northern California, he teaches communication law and American literature and coordinates an undergraduate internship program. Jonah has authored 12 books, including biographies of Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jack London, and Field Days, about farm workers, organic farms, and farmers' markets.

Outside academia, he created the story and characters for the stoner movie Homegrown, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Kelly Lynch, Hank Azaria, Ted Danson, and Jamie Lee Curtis. He's a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Reader, Village Voice, and the International Herald Tribune. Jonah also was active in the Sixties with the Youth International Party (YIPPIE).

I knew much of this before reading Raskin's latest, Marijuanaland, but didn't know he'd spent some growing-up years in the "Emerald Triangle," the three California counties -- Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity -- that together produce some of the most legendary smoke grown, in great quantities and with the openness and civic pride of public harvest events much like Texas' annual watermelon, peach, and other agricultural fests.

Jonah's dad, a retired attorney who'd been a youthful rum runner in the waning days of alcohol prohibition, grew a personal pot patch after retiring to northern Cali, where young Jonah shared the sacred herb with his parents and others over the years.

In some ways, then, Marijuanaland is a personal memoir, a coming-home story by the smart young fellow who went to the city and became a hot-shot college professor, returning to his roots. As with most everyone who tries to go home again, there is some bitter with the sweet as he sees the effects of long-time-passing on parts of the once-immortal wilderness of youth.

Raskin connects the nickname "Emerald Triangle" with the equally-famed "Golden Triangle" of southeast Asia, where much of the world's heroin originated before globalization really got rolling. He doesn't mention the maybe-mythical "Bermuda Triangle," where Atlantic and Caribbean meet Outer Space.

My own limited northern Cali exposure, however, made the connection clear to me. In Mendocino County, I visited the House of Hathor (chapel of the Egyptian cow-headed goddess); saw endless acres of blooming pink azalea forest, like a far planet in an old Star Trek episode; and lounged around quaint, politically-correct Mendocino-by-the-Sea, where there are no cell phone towers, the main grocery store is an organic co-op, and human carnivores are rare. Off-shore drilling is a constant threat to the spectacular coastline.

In Humboldt, mountainous roads wind through log-cabined communities where everyone knows everyone else, or give glimpses of hand-hewn estates clinging to impossible slopes. Forested hills go straight up and down, crossing coldwater creeks, and up and down again to rocky strands where the tide comes in fast through narrow inlets. Whalers and rum runners used these coves and foundered on these cliffs; crabbers and kelp-collectors use them still.

Vast Trinity County, northernmost of the three, remains virtually untouched by development. Mining, lumber, and ranching interests dominate the economy but leave most of Trinity unpopulated.

Since the 1970s or so the whole tri-county area has been the Hippie Heaven of the Western World, far as I know; where straight people try to act hip so as not to feel gawky. It's a place where community runs deep. It's a place where an outlaw can just about disappear.

Passage of California's medical cannabis law, Proposition 215, in 1996, wrought many changes in the Triangle. Enormous profits in sales to cannabis dispensaries -- themselves springing up on every corner, spurring zoning and licensing battles statewide -- attracted a new class of growers, without local or even counterculture roots and devoid of ethics, wreaking environmental chaos in the primeval forest.

At the same time, increasing heat along the U.S.-Mexican border and completion of the infamous "border fence" south of San Diego pushed some enterprising Mexican pot growers to move to el Norte, cutting shipping and distribution costs and bringing their product closer to the consumer, growing in the national forests and other parkland in slash-and-burn fashion.

That both of these unpleasant results of partial cannabis legalization are due to its partiality is evident to serious observers. Demand for cannabis far exceeds its therapeutic or strictly medical use. The one inexorable law of capitalism is that demand produces supply; a law not subject to legislative or even popular repeal. California activists succeeded in 2010 in placing Proposition 19 on the November ballot, to legalize, tax, and regulate cultivation and sale of recreational cannabis in California despite continuing federal prohibition.

Marijuanaland, subtitled Dispatches from an American War, begins just as the campaign for Prop. 19 began in earnest and meanders through a year in the cannabis growing cycle, looking at marijuana-influenced culture, politics, economics, medicine, and law in the Emerald Triangle. Raskin visited with pot growers young and old, activists for and against legalization, newspaper editors, sheriffs, medical patients, healthcare providers, and friends-of-friends along the way. His quest ended as Prop. 19 went down to defeat and plants that had survived arbitrary annual raids on sun-drenched hillsides were harvested.

I've long known that the so-called "drug war" is a war of violence waged against certain drugs and people, but at first saw the subtitle as a kind of subculture marketing tool, like the full-color center section photos of spectacular plants, cured buds, and proud-but-headless growers in classic High Times magazine style.

But in the Triangle, the drug war is more than feds vs. heads. It's long-time growers torn between a comfortable, rather smug "outlaw culture"; the prospect of lower profits and more competition balanced against legal status (a potentially enormous cost savings; many growers keep a lawyer on retainer). It's sheriffs carefully timing raids to fall after most ganja has been harvested; who clearly know the folly of prohibition but love the shiny toys -- helicopters, spy equipment, and such -- the drug war offers its troops. It's small town newspaper editors who think marijuana is evil and oppose legalization but pay the printer with half-page ads from pot defense lawyers.

As debate over Prop. 19 rose, some elected officials proposed copywriting trade names like "Emerald Triangle" much as wineries protect the names of their cultivars. In others, officials called for repeal of Prop. 215 and stronger enforcement.

Activists hedged their bets, favoring legalization for some growers but not others, especially not the newcomers from south of the border. There was deep division as well on specifics of Prop. 19, with some seeing it as a step forward, away from the current chaos, and others seeing the tax-and-regulate provisions as a cop-out, unworthy of support.

Some were suspicious because the initiative was first launched and supported not by a "traditional" marijuana advocacy group but by cannabis dispensary innovator Richard Lee of "Oaksterdam" (Oakland); others, sick and tired of "traditional" advocacy careerism, wanted change in their lifetimes.

Throughout the Prop. 19 campaign, public and private meetings throughout the Triangle revealed sharp divisions between those who felt themselves inundated with profit-seeking outsiders, local growers with or without vision and confidence, patients afraid of losing access to their medicine, and other interest groups.

Prop. 19 lost in the counties of the Emerald Triangle by as much as 3-1. A record cannabis harvest was hanging in the drying barns as votes were counted. Prices fell despite the defeat. Today, while marijuana is sold and smoked rather openly almost everywhere in California, the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to raid California's legal medical cannabis providers and sheriffs continue selective enforcement against growers in rural areas.

If "the Garden of Eden is within you," so is the Garden of Evil. The drug war, Raskin shows, is being fought in the hearts and minds of straights and stoners alike, where activists elsewhere like to envision a liberated zone.

Marijuanaland makes the pitfalls of partial legalization, profit-based politics, and widespread misinformation painfully clear. In the latter category is the book's perpetuation of the myth that "Cannabis indica" is a separate botanical species from "Cannabis sativa," the latter somehow inferior as a smoking herb.

From a botanical standpoint, this is hogwash; there is no agreement on whether indica is even a legitimate variety of C. sativa, but there is total agreement that C. sativa is one species much as Homo sapiens is; that is, any pot plant can (theoretically) breed with any other; since the plant is polymorphous, it has every evolutionary reason to remain one species, indivisible. Those who think otherwise contribute to outrageous retail prices for cannabis consumers; "indica" is but a marketing tool.

Raskin writes humorously of Triangle parents who work hard in the trade, make good money, and provide their kids every advantage in an area where non-marijuana-related income is limited. Whether the kids flee rural isolation for the city, "never to return," or become low-achieving slackers content to smoke Dad's weed and rodeo their ATVs through the forest, they're bound to disappoint, at least for a while. Some things never change.

But the real crux of generational conflict on legalization is that some older users still think they're part of a minority and fear change. Crying, "What about the children?" gains no traction against certain facts: the harm to children of having a parent jailed cannot be overstated.

Wherever cannabis use is decriminalized, use by teenagers drops substantially. And with 40+ years worth of kids like Raskin nurtured by pot-smoking parents in hundreds of communities all over the USA, demonstrably no more are bad apples than other youths of similar age and economic circumstance. The kids are, pretty much, alright.

The question America faces today is whether to cling to a world of scarcity and individual competition or find a new model of plenty and social cooperation. A huge majority of second- and third-generation "hippies" and perhaps of 20- and 30-somethings are creative, self-assured, resilient, tolerant, and determined to build the sustainable future we have utterly failed to leave them. The cannabis plant, in its entirety, offers a strong material basis for that future.

To move beyond even the present tug-of-war between state and federal authorities on voter-approved medical legalization, activists must launch more rigorous educational efforts and more successfully urge people out of the "emerald closet" of silent complicity. We must re-vision a world in which human beings love one another, respect the earth, and strive to relieve suffering in all living beings. Marijuanaland will offer many clues to the thoughtful on what is needed.

Cannabis is more than just a mildly naughty weed that makes flirting more fun, or a powerful medicine for pain and alienation. It isn't just an endlessly renewable source of nontoxic fuels and fibers. Or the most nutritious food known to man. It is also a plant teacher, and until human beings recognize that there is other intelligent life on earth and heed its wisdom, we will bar ourselves from the Garden.

.

John Carlos and the Moment That Still Matters

2011-09-29T11:24:00.001-07:00

John Carlos and the Moment That Still Matters

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/sport-dave-zirin-john-carlos-and-moment.html

Troy Davis, John Carlos, and
the moment that still matters

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

On September 21st, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of Barack Obama's White House and chanted "No Justice, No Vote." At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today.

It was 43 years ago this week when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic Medal Stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all-time in the American consciousness.

This week also marks the release of John Carlos's autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I've long wondered, "why?" Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune, and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.

Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black freedom struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the games. There were scant black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.

John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star -- walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell -- to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal stand moment.

The answer to "why do so many of us still care" was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years -- even decades -- after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and t-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell t-shirts emblazoned with that image?

The most obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it. A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them "Black-skinned storm troopers." But their "radical" demands have since proved to be prescient.

Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism, and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing. After years of death threats, poverty, and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.

But it was the Howard students, chanting, "No Justice, No Vote" to an African American President on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power. Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause.

As Carlos says,

A lot of the [black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain't going to save your momma. It ain't going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?

Carlos' attitude resonates because for all the blather about us living in a "post-racial society," there are reservoirs of anger about the realities of racism in the United States. The latest poverty statistics show that the black poverty rate of 27.4% is nearly double the overall U.S. rate. Black children living in poverty has reached 39.1 percent. Then there's the criminal justice system, where 33% of African American men are either in jail or on parole.

The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness, and freedom that I believe many people find sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly Free Men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.

Biker ethos kick-started Folsom scene

2011-09-29T02:14:00.001-07:00

Biker ethos kick-started Folsom scene

http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=6057

Tony K. LeTigre

09/22/2011

Around the beginning of September when the black and blue flags go up, everyone knows it's that special time of year again: two months of sunlight and a whole lot of leather.

On September 25 Folsom Street between 7th and 12th streets will be cordoned off for the Folsom Street Fair, as it has been for 27 years now, since "Megahood" started it all in 1984.

Many of Folsom's attendees simply enjoy the fair for what it is today, without pondering its evolution through the years, or the South of Market neighborhood conditions that led to its creation.

The gay male leather culture that hangs on today in SOMA and peaked in the pre-AIDS era has its roots in motorcycle clubs and marooned sailors and waterfront bars of the 1950s like Castaways and the Sea Cow. The first leather bars popped up in the Tenderloin, and were usually short-lived and subject to police harassment: The Spur Club, Why Not, and The Hideaway were all raided and closed between 1959-62.

Author, anthropologist and leather historian Gayle Rubin, in her essential 1998 essay "The Miracle Mile," traces the roots of today's gay male leather culture back to sailors and bikers: queer men who confounded the prevailing notion of homosexuals as effeminate and easily identified sissies.

"If gay male leather can be said to have a core meaning, it would have to be masculinity," Rubin wrote, adding that the motorcycle, more than anything else, symbolized that masculinity.

"Homomasculinity" was the word coined by Drummer magazine editor and pop-culture polymath Jack Fritscher to describe the gender expression of masculine-identified leathermen.

Gay motorcycle clubs started with the Satyrs in L.A. in 1954. The Warlocks and the California Motorcycle Club, both San Francisco-based, soon followed. The first CMC Carnival in 1966 marked the inception of a social institution for the emerging leather scene, continuing to the birth of the Folsom Street Fair.

"Leather culture was constructed on a discreet circuit of bike runs, bars, back rooms, and the annual autumn orgy of the CMC Carnival," wrote Fritscher in his essay on the first Folsom, "Leather's Burning Man."

Rubin identified the opening of the Tool Box on Harrison Street in 1962 as the catalyzing agent of the leather scene "South of the Slot," as SOMA was called in the old days.

Tool Box featured Chuck Arnett's legendary mural epitomizing the homomasculine ideal of the gay leather set and garnered national attention, including an infamous Life magazine spread in 1964 that crowned San Francisco the nation's "gay capital."

The Life exposé largely conflated "homosexual" with "criminal pervert," but made some astute observations, including the objection of "homophile groups," like the Mattachine Society and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, to the military's practice of dishonorably discharging known queers from its ranks. (In case you thought the now repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" started with Clinton.)

A police raid on a dance at California Hall on New Year's Eve in 1965 has since been branded "San Francisco's Stonewall" for the way it galvanized not only the nascent gay rights groups but also mainstream public sentiment through media coverage and the judicial system against police prejudice and abuse of power.

Fair nights in the valley

So began the feast of the kings, a latter-day Bacchanalian orgy when, in the words of San Francisco recording artist Donald Currie, "Gays took over, and we turned the city into a bathhouse."

Febe's opened on Folsom Street in 1966 and long reigned as the leading gay biker bar. Mike Caffee's iconic "Leather David" served as the bar's logo. One elegist in the 1996 treasure trove Gay by the Bay recalled Sunday afternoons at Febe's as "a massive grope-a-torium where anything happened."

The Stud, eldest surviving statesman of the scene today, opened the same year as Febe's. It started as a leather bar with a Hells Angels crowd but had morphed into a hippie haven by the time of Woodstock, complete with dance floor and psychedelic blacklight mural.

All through the 1960s and on into the superlative 1970s new bastions of the leather kingdom sprang up: Bathhouses and sex clubs (The Barracks, The Plunge, The Sutro Baths, The Catacombs), shops and galleries (A Taste of Leather, upstairs at Febe's; a leather shopping mall called Big Town; Fey-Way Studio, the first gay art gallery), groups and events (The Warlocks' "Witches Christmas," CMC Carnival, the Satyrs' annual Badger Flat Run).

And a plethora of bars joined the scene. To name just a few: Off the Levee, Ramrod, the No Name Bar (known by many names over the years, presently Powerhouse), the Trocadero (where Sylvester performed), the Bay Brick Inn (a lesbian pleasure palace), Folsom Prison, the Black and Blue, the Red Star Saloon.

A spreadsheet maintained by the GLBT Historical Society lists 211 different names of gay bars, bathhouses, and related businesses in SOMA, past and present, though some are multiple names for the same location.

The SOMA scene, in particular the bars grouped on and around Folsom Street in the vicinity of the present-day street fair, also acquired nicknames, sociological markers of a legend-in-the-making: The Miracle Mile, Valley of the Kings.

The former name was bestowed by the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the latter by "Mr. Marcus" Hernandez, first Emperor of San Francisco and longtime B.A.R. leather columnist before his death in 2009.

"Valley of Kings conveyed an image of powerful, cocky, independent, and sexy masculinity," Rubin expounded. "It contrasted with Marcus' nickname for Polk Street, 'The Valley of the Queens,' in reference to the older and sometimes more effeminate population of gay men associated with the area."

The Castro was "The Valley of the Dolls," in reference to its "hordes of young and beautiful men" (in Rubin's words) as well as its pharmaceutical drug culture, "dolls" being old-school slang for pills.

Circa 1971 the bandana or "hanky" code entered currency as a discrete way for leathermen to communicate their orientation and kinks. The first International Mr. Leather conference was held in Chicago in 1979, spinning off locally the Mr. San Francisco Leather Competition, as well as the Mr. Drummer Contest sponsored by Drummer magazine.

Mr. Drummer led to the inception of San Francisco Leather Pride Week, as Rubin discussed in her heartfelt essay "Elegy for the Valley of the Kings."

Miracle on Folsom Street

At the same time that the Miracle Mile was coming into its own, an antithetic current was flowing through the neighborhood, a trend of "slum clearance and urban renewal."

Folsom Street Fair co-founder Kathleen Connell, together with LGBT historian Paul Gabriel, penned an in-depth history, "The Power of Broken Hearts" available at http://folsomstreetfair.org/history, that documented the SOMA anti-gentrification movement.

Connell and Gabriel chronicled how neighborhood activists organized against ruthless developers and government agents that regarded the neighborhood as an example of "urban blight" and traced the way that movement led to the genesis of the Folsom Street Fair.

In 1980, while working for the South of Market Alliance, a neighborhood advocacy group, Connell met and befriended fellow gay activist Michael Valerio, who was also the assistant director for Tenants and Owners Development Corporation.

Valerio and Connell found common ground in their support for low-income families, artists, senior citizens and the gays in SOMA, and in their desire to incorporate their "gay selves" into their work.

The neighborhood was threatened by the encroachment of high-rise development, and the gay men's community was under attack by a new plague first identified in 1981: AIDS. Connell and Valerio decided to launch a SOMA fair as the best resistance against the powers that would destroy (or displace) them.

"In addition to community preservation, we were making a big statement about the AIDS crisis, and trying to raise funds as there were no social services to speak of at that time," Connell told the B.A.R.

From their efforts came "Megahood," the first Folsom Street Fair, in 1984. "South of Market Sizzles in September" promised a headline in the June/July 1984 edition of the South of Market News, a neighborhood paper whose hype helped insure a good turnout.

In the beginning Folsom was not explicitly a sex or leather event, but the gay leather scene was a significant presence from the start. Drummer endorsed the first fair, albeit with some misgivings.

"Leatherfolk anxiety ran deep in Orwellian 1984, rightly suspicious of event producers purposing leather for fundraising parallax to the way Harvey Milk started the Castro Street Fair to sign up voters," Drummer editor-in-chief Fritscher recalled.

Up Your Alley Street Fair, which started in 1985 on Ringold Street, was a dedicated gay leather event from the beginning. Ringold is an alley south of Folsom between 8th and 9th onto which a number of the leather bars exited. It wasn't the fair's home for very long.

Connell's history recalled, "Ringold is a residential alley, and the neighbors, while tolerating dead-in-the-night activity, did not take kindly to this sudden explosion of leather and fetish men and women on their street. They successfully petitioned the city and the SFPD to rescind the granting of a license for a third year."

If the move seemed a setback at first, the fair survived and then some. Around 12,000 people - mostly gay leathermen - attend Dore Alley, as locals now know it, the last Sunday in July.

Panic at the bathhouse

The Folsom Street Fair sizzled, but the SOMA leather scene fizzled. It was AIDS, of course, that killed the party. The "Gay Cancer" triggered a wave of homophobic panic and revulsion directed at leathermen in particular. Feast abruptly turned to famine.

The Castro survived to become the international attraction it is today, but the Folsom scene fell into permanent disrepair. The Castro's core was politics, which were fanned to a blaze by the AIDS crisis; but the core of Folsom was sex, and sex lost its infrastructure when the bathhouses closed.

Bars closed, too. Tool Box had been torn down in 1971, a victim of redevelopment. A large fire in 1981, starting at the former Barracks, destroyed many homes and a number of key establishments. By the mid-80s, as the effects of AIDS intensified, leather bars began dropping like dominoes.

When Febe's closed in June 1986, "Even the TV news covered it," as recollected in Geoff Mains' 1989 novel-elegy Gentle Warriors, which provides a poignant look back at the Miracle Mile's heyday in the form of a "last motorcycle ride" through the ailing bar district.

Partly due to the toll of AIDS, the producers of Up Your Alley merged with those of the Folsom Street Fair in 1990, and it was around this time that the official posters and promotional images for Folsom became overtly "leather-ized," as they had not been previously.

One of the many casualties of AIDS was Michael Valerio. He had gone on to form other community organizations and win various awards before succumbing to the disease at the age of 40. The B.A.R. printed his obituary in 1995.

The bathhouses remain closed today: the legacy of public policy-makers swayed by hysteria and a virus we've learned to manage but not eradicate. A prowling sex fiend must cross the Bay Bridge and head to Steamworks in Berkeley for a club with private rooms. It seems the state of affairs of the mid-80s persists in the mainstream LGBT community to this day, a watershed shift away from open and unbridled sexuality.

What does this mean for a demographic whose defining trait is sexual orientation?

"I understand the panic back in the day, but now most sex clubs don't have proper cleaning facilities - aside from bathroom sinks," said B.A.R. leather columnist Scott Brogan. "I think that's much less healthy than having a private room with a bath that you can wash up in - or the public showers at the baths."

Queer scholar Greg Jones, 36, who has written on bondage and sadomasochism in ancient Greece, recalled, "When I first moved to the city in 1998 people were still smoking pot and giving each other blowjobs in the back of the old Hole in the Wall. But the last time I tried to get frisky there the bartender came round and scolded us.

"Now there are signs in bars, literally posted every 5 feet - especially during Folsom Weekend - that yell 'No sexual activity!'" added Jones.

(Wicked Grounds Cafe now occupies the space of the original Hole in the Wall, which has moved a couple blocks away to 1369 Folsom St.)

Former Lone Star Saloon manager Steve Hoffman, 46, said proprietors are caught between patrons who want Folsom to live up to its lascivious past and health and law enforcement officials reacting against that same reputation.

"I can see the customer's point of view, but I definitely understand the owner's perspective too, because if you let people have sex in the back room and get busted, you lose your liquor license," Hoffman explained.

Just such an incident caused the closure of My Place, formerly the Ramrod (1225 Folsom St.) The space re-opened as Chaps II in 2008. (The original Chaps was located where the DNA Lounge is now.)

No one would suggest that sex itself is seriously endangered. But what about the leather community?

"It's obvious the leather scene isn't as strong as it used to be," said Hole in the Wall bartender Miguel Chavez. "And bars can't survive if they cater to people who only go out once a month."

That explains the re-branding of Chaps II as Kok in spring 2011. Lone Star changed management and most of its staff in 2010, alienating some. (Hoffman hasn't been there since the change.) Most recently, the Eagle Tavern closed last April after nearly 30 years, ending a long tradition of Sunday afternoon beer busts that drew a diverse crowd including fetishists of all flavors. [See story Page 1.]

(El Rio now hosts a beer bust called "The Eagle in Exile" on the first Sunday of every month - 3158 Mission St. at Precita.)

Hoffman said that "leather" today has broadened into a catch-all term for kink in general, encompassing a profusion of fetishes – bears, military gear, sportswear, golden showers, exhibitionism, varieties of bondage and discipline. Furries, anyone?

The Leathermen's Discussion Group, which meets the 4th Wednesday of every month above Blow Buddies (933 Harrison St.), held a panel discussion in July with historian Rubin as a panelist that asked, "Is Leather Dead?"

"The leather community has become more privatized, and its ability to occupy public space in the Folsom has become more limited and occasional," Rubin wrote on the subject. "However, the Folsom is still a magnet, a piece of sacred ground, and a powerful symbol."

Brogan attended the July discussion and described it and Rubin as "a blast."

"The hanky code and leather uniforms in the old days were ways of letting people know what you were into," Brogan added. "It's true that things are much more open and accessible these days. Some might say too much so, but I believe things evolve naturally and there isn't anything to do about it except to enjoy the ride."

Fists raised across generations

2011-09-29T01:52:00.001-07:00

Fists raised across generations

http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/27/fists-raised-across-generations

When Howard University students raised their fists for Troy Davis on the night of his execution, they were invoking the spirit of John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

September 27, 2011

ON SEPTEMBER 21, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of the Barack Obama's White House and chanted "No justice, no vote!"

At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today. It was 43 years ago this week that Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic medal stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all time in the American consciousness.

This week also marks the release of John Carlos's autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I've long wondered, "Why?" Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.

Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black freedom struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the Games. There were scant Black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.

John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star--walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell--to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal-stand moment.

The answer to "Why do so many of us still care?" was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years--even decades--after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and T-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell T-shirts emblazoned with that image?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE MOST obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it.

A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them "Black-skinned stormtroopers." But their "radical" demands have since proved to be prescient. Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing.

After years of death threats, poverty and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.

But it was the Howard students, chanting "No justice, no vote!" to an African American president on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power.

Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause. As Carlos says, "A lot of the [Black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain't going to save your momma. It ain't going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?"

The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness and freedom that I believe many people think are sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly free men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.

First published at TheNation.com.

Longtime fugitive US hijacker caught in Portugal

2011-09-28T23:48:00.001-07:00

[2 articles]

Longtime fugitive US hijacker caught in Portugal

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HIJACKER_FUGITIVE_CAPTURED

Sep 27, 2011

By SAMANTHA HENRY

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- A 1970s militant who escaped from a murder sentence in New Jersey and carried out one of the most brazen hijackings in U.S. history was captured in Portugal after more than 40 years as a fugitive, authorities said Tuesday. After decades of stagnancy, there was a sudden break in the case when police matched his fingerprint to a resident ID card.

George Wright, 68, was arrested Monday by Portuguese authorities in a town near Lisbon at the request of the U.S. government, said a member of the fugitive task force that had been searching for him for nearly a decade.

Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of a gas station owner in Wall, N.J. Authorities say Wright and three associates had already committed multiple armed robberies on Nov. 23, 1962, when he and another man shot and killed Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran and father of two, during a robbery of the Collingswood Esso gas station in Wall.

Wright received a 15- to 30-year sentence and had served eight years when he and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison farm in Leesburg, N.J., on Aug. 19, 1970.

The FBI said Wright then became affiliated with an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a "communal family" with several of its members in Detroit.

On July 31, 1972, Wright, dressed as a priest and using the alias the Rev. L. Burgess, hijacked a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to Miami accompanied by three men, two women and three small children from his communal group, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter, according to Associated Press reports at the time.

When the plane landed at the Miami airport, the hijackers demanded a $1 million ransom - the highest of its kind at the time - to free the 86 people on board. After an FBI agent delivered a 70-pound satchel full of money - wearing only a pair of swim trunks, per the hijacker's instructions - the passengers were released, according to AP accounts.

The hijackers then forced the plane to Boston, where an international navigator was taken aboard, and the group flew on to Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum.

The group was taken in by Eldridge Cleaver, the American writer and activist, who had been permitted by Algeria's Socialist government to open an office of the Black Panther Movement in that country in 1970, after the Algerian president at the time professed sympathy for what he viewed as worldwide liberation struggles.

The hijackers had identified themselves to the passengers as a Black Panther group, police said at a news conference, according to AP reports at the time. They said the hijackers smoked marijuana continuously during the flight.

Algerian officials returned the plane and the money to the U.S. at the request of the American government, and briefly detained the hijackers before letting them stay. Coverage of the hijackers' stay in Algeria said their movements were restricted, and the president ignored their calls for asylum and requests to return them the ransom money.

The group eventually made its way to France, where Wright's associates were tracked down, arrested, tried and convicted in Paris in 1976. France refused to extradite them to the U.S., where they would have faced far longer prison sentences. According to news reports at the time, the defense hailed the light sentences they were given as "a condemnation of American racism" after the jury found "extenuating circumstances" in their actions, apparently agreeing with the defense's assertion that the hijacking had been motivated by "racial oppression in the United States."

But Wright remained at large, and his case was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the task force.

The Department of Corrections brought along all its old escape cases nine years ago when the task force began operating, Schroeder said, and investigators started Wright's case anew, never taking a prolonged break from working on it for the past nine years.

They looked at reports from the 1970s, interviewed Wright's victims and the pilots of the plane he hijacked. They had age-enhanced sketches made and tried to track down any communications he may have made with family in the U.S.

The address in Portugal was one of several on a list of places they wanted to check out. But Schroeder said there was nothing about it that made it seem especially promising. "It was another box to get checked, so to speak," he said.

That changed last week, when details started falling into place with the help of authorities there.

"They have a national ID registry," Schroeder said. "They pulled that. That confirmed his print matched the prints with the DOC. The sketch matched the picture on his ID card."

By the weekend, U.S. authorities were on a plane to Portugal. And Monday, Portuguese police staking out his home found him.

Schroeder said he has not been told what, if anything, Wright said when he was caught.

Wright made an initial court appearance in Portugal on Tuesday, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney. He was arrested for purposes of extradition on the state of New Jersey's homicide charge, and would serve the remainder of his sentence on that charge if returned to the U.S.

------------

US fugitive hid in Portugal hamlet

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/H/HIJACKER_FUGITIVE_CAPTURED

Sep 28, 2011

By BARRY HATTON

ALMOCAGEME, Portugal (AP) -- He lived the sweet life for decades. But nobody knew he was on the run. After breaking out of a New Jersey prison 41 years ago, George Wright settled in a picturesque seaside town in Portugal.

He married a local woman, raised two children and grew old in a pretty house on a cobbled street near a stunning beach. Locals knew him as Jorge Santos, a friendly man from Africa who did odd jobs and spoke fluent Portuguese.

He kept his true identity secret: convicted murderer, prison escapee and accused hijacker.

Wright's decades-long flight from justice ended when the 68-year-old American was taken into custody by local police Monday at the request of the U.S. government. On Tuesday, he appeared before a judge in Lisbon, the capital, for an initial extradition hearing.

Residents of this charming coastal town were coming to terms Wednesday with the fact that a man they knew and liked had been living a lie.

"I never imagined George was in trouble," gas station attendant Ricardo Salvador said.

Most assumed Wright was African, not American. His Portuguese identity card said he was born in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. A photocopy, shown to The Associated Press, bore the name Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, an alias U.S. officials said Wright used. It was issued in 1993 and expired in 2004.

Salvador and other residents said Wright had business cards that gave his first name as Jorge or George, and many called him by the latter.

"He was a very nice guy," Salvador said as he took a break from pumping gas on a sunny autumn day in Almocageme, 28 miles (45 kilometers) west of Lisbon. "He used to wave as he drove past and I'd shout out, 'Hey, George!'"

In his younger years, Wright was a darker character.

He was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran shot during a robbery at his business in Wall, New Jersey.

Eight years into his 15- to 30-year prison term, Wright and three other men escaped from the Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, New Jersey, on Aug. 19, 1970.

While on the run, the FBI said Wright joined an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a communal family with several of its members in Detroit.

In 1972, Wright - dressed as a priest and using an alias - is accused of hijacking a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami along with four other Black Liberation Army members and three children, including Wright's companion and their 2-year-old daughter.

His capture drew reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ann Patterson, daughter of the murdered New Jersey gas station owner, told the AP she wants Wright sent back quickly. "I'm so thankful that now there's justice for Daddy," she said. "He never got any kind of justice."

Rui Santos, who works at the Almocageme village council, said he was "stunned" by the news. "I'd never have thought it possible," he said outside a newsstand.

He said Wright approached him in the mid-1990s and offered to coach local kids at basketball, though the project never got off the ground.

Until his arrest, life was quiet for Wright in this hamlet of a few hundred residents, where neighbors said he lived for at least 20 years. Speaking Portuguese with a slight foreign accent, he worked at a series of odd jobs, most recently as a nightclub bouncer, said two neighbors who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared being stigmatized for speaking out.

Wright also once had a stall at the beach and ran a barbecue chicken restaurant.

He married a Portuguese woman, identified by neighbors as 55-year-old Maria do Rosario Valente, the daughter of a retired Portuguese army officer. They had two children - Marco and Sara, now in their early 20s - who used their mother's last name when they registered for swim classes at the local pool.

The family lived in a neat whitewashed house with terra cotta roof tiles, a yellow door and a small front garden. At the front gate, a black mailbox in the shape of a barn carried the words "U.S. Mail." A gray VW Passat station wagon that neighbors said Wright drove was parked on the narrow dead-end street.

A woman who answered the door confirmed she was Maria do Rosario Valente and said she had no comment about the arrest.

About a mile (1.6 kilometers) away was the breathtaking Praia da Adraga beach, a sandy cove surrounded by steep rocky hillsides that has a natural rock tunnel where ocean waves blast through.

A fingerprint contained on Wright's Portuguese ID card as required by law was the break that led a U.S. fugitive task force to him, according to U.S. authorities.

Wright's capture was among the top priorities when the New York-New Jersey Fugitive Task Force was formed in 2002, according to Michael Schroeder, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, who worked with New Jersey's FBI and other agencies on the case.

"They have a national ID registry," Schroeder said of Portugal. "They pulled that. That confirmed his print matched the prints with the (Department of Corrections in New Jersey). The sketch matched the picture on his ID card."

Schroeder said the task force had been aware for at least several months of the possibility that Wright could be in Portugal. "Once the investigative group had a strong belief that George Wright might be in Portugal, we proceeded to take the next steps immediately. But those steps take time," Ward said.

Wright was being detained in Lisbon while the extradition process continued, but Portuguese police refused to release any details about the case.

U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said she couldn't speculate on how long extradition might take.

Back in 1972, Wright and his alleged accomplices released the hijacked plane's 86 passengers in exchange for a $1 million (euro730,000 million) ransom - delivered by an FBI agent wearing only swim trunks as ordered by the hijackers. They then forced the plane to fly to Boston, where an international navigator was taken aboard, and the plane was flown to Algeria.

The group was taken in by American activist and writer Eldridge Cleaver, who had been permitted by Algeria's socialist government to open a Black Panther Movement office in 1970. The Algerian president then professed sympathy for what he saw as worldwide liberation struggles.

At the request of the U.S. government, Algerian authorities returned the plane and the ransom to the United States. They briefly detained the hijackers before allowing them to stay. But their movements were restricted and the Algerian president ignored their requests for asylum.

Wright and the others left Algeria in late 1972 or early 1973 and settled in France, said Mikhael Ganouna, producer of a 2010 documentary about the hijacking, "Nobody Knows my Name."

Wright left the group after breaking up with a girlfriend, and no one knew where he went, Ganouna said.

Wright's associates were all eventually tracked down, arrested and tried. They were convicted in Paris in 1976, but the French government refused to extradite them to the U.S., where they would have faced longer sentences.

One of them, George Brown, lives in Paris but isn't worried about being extradited because he has already served his sentence, Ganouna said.

Over the years, the New Jersey Department of Corrections task force on fugitives reviewed reports from the 1970s, interviewed Wright's victims and the pilots of the hijacked plane, had age-enhanced sketches made of the fugitive and tracked any possible links to his family in the U.S.

An address in Portugal was one of several leads they wanted to check, but Schroeder said there was nothing special about it.

"It was another box to get checked, so to speak," he said.

That changed last week when details started falling into place with the help of Portuguese authorities.

By the weekend, U.S. authorities were on a plane to Portugal. On Monday, Portuguese police took Wright into custody.

William May, the pilot of the Detroit-Miami flight hijacked in 1972, said Wright was the group's leader.

"It's been 40 years," May said. "I'm surprised there was even any interest in finding him still."

Christiania – a small community with big ideas

2011-09-27T02:56:00.000-07:00

Christiania – a small community with big ideas

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/24/christiania-community-big-society-40-years

Amid all the incoherent 'big society' talk, consider Christiania, a democratic Danish community celebrating 40 years of autonomy

David Goldblatt
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 September 2011

Christiania, the community created in the heart of Copenhagen, is celebrating its 40th birthday this weekend. There is much to celebrate and even more to be learned.

In 1971, the Danish defence ministry closed its huge 18th-century fortress and left it to rot. Locals first tore down the fences to create a playground for their kids and were then joined by squatters and alternative characters of every kind. They took over the place and founded Christiania; a democratic and autonomous free city that would make its own laws and raise its own taxes. The Social Democratic government of the time declared it a "social experiment" and allowed it to continue.

Since then, and after much travail, Christiania has grown to be a community of over 1,000 people. They have renovated the old buildings and built new and wondrously eclectic ones for themselves; established and run their own rubbish, recycling and sewage systems; maintained a system of common property, collective responsibility for dealing with crime and a politics of intense democratic discussion; kept cars out and pioneered the cargo bicycle; and become a key hub of the city's musical and cultural life.

It might not be everyone's idea of utopia but the informal waiting lists to join the community are very long. While some come and go, many are staying for the duration. As one resident put it to me, when reflecting on growing old in Christiania, "The people that I live with here are my pension." Christiania is now considered by most Copenhageners to be an essential part of the urban fabric and is among the city's biggest tourist attractions.

The celebrations of these remarkable achievements will be all the more intense because as recently as this spring many observers were predicting Christiania's imminent demise. The Danish rightwing coalition government appeared intent on forcing massive new conventional housing developments on the community, putting roads through this car-free zone and permanently closing down the open trade in marijuana that has flourished on the infamous Pusher Street (and which accounts in part for both the tourist trade and some locals' affections).

Then, over the summer, the government and Christiania cut a deal: no developments, no roads, and the chance for the community to buy the place at a sub-market rate while maintaining both their system of communal land ownership and a high degree of autonomy from the Danish state.

In itself this was a remarkable political victory, worthy of celebration and testament to the real pragmatism of Danish politics. But more than this we should be celebrating Christiana as a fragment of the alchemist's stone of urban and social policy; how can we transform our lives as atomised, alienated individuals into the pure gold of real functioning social capital and social networks of collective action and decision-making.

Christiania may be a one-off, the product of an unrepeatable combination of circumstances and opportunities. Even so, it has a lot to teach us. If you really want to emotionally engage and energise people – the raw materials out of which social solidarity is made – then give communities access to land, property and other assets before the developers get there. It is simply incredible what energy, skills and visions people can collaboratively mobilise when they have the chance to experiment with their communal and living space.

Once that's happened, have the courage to back off and let things happen. In some ways politicians and government agencies have become such a neurotically overactive presence in policy-making; Christiana was born of a judicious amount of benign indifference and tolerant disapproval. The same goes for the private sector too. Christiania's complex networks of social enterprise, collective service provision, self-help and exchange have had the space to evolve and grow independently and keep money, energy and work local.

The incoherent conversation we are currently having about the "big society" would be enriched by thinking about small societies as well. They needn't look or feel like Christiana, bohemia is entirely optional; but if the 40th birthday party is true to form it would be no bad thing of one or two did.

Pranksters on the Road

2011-09-27T02:09:00.001-07:00

Pranksters on the Road

http://www.cornellsun.com/section/arts/content/2011/09/23/pranksters-road

September 23, 2011
By Patrick Cambre

I would be willing to wager that nearly everyone at Cornell, or of collegiate age, has been in some sort of social setting with that guy or girl who reminisces on the freewheeling, youthful spirit of the 1960s. He or she might tell you about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, about the CIA's experiments with LSD, or maybe they'll tell you about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The thing is, usually you don't know that they're talking about, and neither do they. They weren't there.

Magic Trip, a new documentary by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, takes viewers onboard the bus "Further" with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters on their journey from La Honda, California to the 1964 New York World's Fair and back again. As you might expect from a group this irresponsible, the original 16mm footage of the trip was lost and needed restoration. Likewise, audio tape recordings and voiceovers had to be brought back into sync with the original footage.

Despite all of the challenges presented with bringing film like this to the screen, Magic Trip manages to look crisp and colorful. It is evocative of the hipster-handicam style long before there were handicams or hipsters. Making a point of comparing the black and white world of the 1950s to the world of the 1960s, the film features striking shots of this fluorescent school bus and its colorful inhabitants against the beige desert, or the grey background of New York City. Filmmakers looking to make a historical film that looks good by modern standards should take note, as this is how it's done.

The audio is hit-or-miss, however. One of the best scenes of this movie is a long audio recording of Ken Kesey as a graduate student during an LSD experiment at Stanford. The recording plays behind a trippy animated sequence synchronized to Kesey's words. This is the high point, so to speak. On the downside, most of the video clips have audio that is completely out of sync or missing altogether, and at times it removes the viewer from the weird realm that the directors spend so long trying to draw them into.

It seems that the directors' hope for this documentary was that the footage would somehow reaffirm Kesey and the Pranksters as psychedelic revolutionaries and forerunners of 1960s drug culture. Most people, however, will get the sense after watching this film that they only watched a small group of people take lots of LSD and drive across the country for two hours. Great fiction writers follow the principle of "Show, don't tell," yet this film and the voiceovers constantly tell the viewer that what the Pranksters were doing was revolutionary and unprecedented without really showing it.

Yet somewhere in the film, a different picture emerges of the Pranksters. Neal Cassady, bus driver and inspiration behind Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, sits behind the wheel and speaks a constant, manic, speed-induced nonsense. Stark Naked, one of a few interesting Pranksters with nicknames, stands stark naked on the back of the bus under the influence of tremendous amounts of LSD. Kerouac himself is featured sitting on a couch during a Prankster party, somewhat amused but visibly annoyed at the band of lunatics his work has spawned. While Tom Wolfe may have captured Kesey and the Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the movie brings in a visual element to this story that cannot be ignored. For all of the effort made to make them appear as revolutionaries, most of the Pranksters appear on film as a group of weird kids.

Understandably, Magic Trip focuses more on Ken Kesey as the pensive, de facto leader of the psychedelic movement. Coming from a traditional all-American background, wrestling and playing college football at Oregon, to writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962 and beginning this trip two years later, Kesey is deserving of the study Magic Trip represents. Seeing Kesey move "beyond Acid" is equally interesting, and provides for a nice final few scenes of the film.

So while Magic Trip may not be the most effective cultural study of the 1960s, or even the psychedelic movement, there is enough previously-unseen footage of Kesey and his cohorts out of place in America to make this film worth a look. Kesey once said he was "too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie." Fans who want a closer look into this transition period will enjoy Magic Trip for the long, strange trip it chronicles.

Make it a mad Monday for Christiania’s Big 4-0

2011-09-27T02:04:00.001-07:00

Make it a mad Monday for Christiania's Big 4-0

http://www.cphpost.dk/in-a-out/157-event-calendar/52188-make-it-a-mad-monday-for-christianias-big-4-0.html

Thursday, 22 September 2011

David Sauriol

For 40 years Christiania has been a fixture of Copenhagen cultural life, and on September 26 it will be having a massive birthday celebration. Cake, music, and a spirit of revelry will take place under a warm, enveloping cloud of marijuana smoke. Alternative culture and bohemian pathos will be celebrated by the approximately 1,000 Christiania locals and anyone else looking for a good party. Forty years old, but hardly middle-aged, Christiania will showcase the independent spirit that has made it a hallmark of Copenhagen life.

Back in 1971, in the pursuit of some green space for their children to play, Danish hippies knocked down the fence on the corner of Prinsessegade and Refshalevej and went into the disused navy base that would become known as Christiana. Under the leadership and ideals of journalist and activist Jacob Ludvigsen, the residents of Christiania formed a mission statement citing unaffordable housing as the reason that Christiana was needed. That moment began an immigration of all types of 'new age thinker' and a new society blossomed in the 'freed land'.

Christiania began the open sale of marijuana - fuelling both an alternative culture and an increase in the quality of the drug. In a display of Denmark's tolerance this sale was allowed largely unhindered until 2004 before sanctions were brought in to moderate it.

And Christiana's liberal conceptualisation of property ownership, and by extension property tax, also led to tension with the authorities, and for a long time it looked like the city council might actually sell the land to developers. However, in the end it agreed to sell Christiana to its members, who are now in the process of purchasing their land and gaining legal legitimacy. In honour of this development, the 40th birthday is sure to be that much more special and a celebration of both Christiania's past and its future.

The celebrations on Monday will kick off with a free breakfast. There will also be cake, a film in the afternoon, and of course loads and loads of free music. Among the main performers over the day are:

Car Park North

As one of Denmark's leading rock bands, their electronic rock, catchy choruses and assertive songwriting will ensure a great show.

The Floor is Made of Lava

Bringing a modern approach to rock, their riffs are simple and take you back to the 1970s and the era in which Christiania was born.

Clemens

Called by many the godfather of Danish rap, Clemens is an outspoken, multi-faceted artist. His music has sampled and taken from old school rap, rock, and dub step.

Lucy Love

Referencing the likes of Lady Sovereign and classic electronic legends Kraftwork, the queen of the Danish grime scene's stage show is dynamic and her costumes lavish.

Any of these four acts are enough on their own to fill up any venue in Denmark, so this promises to be a wild birthday celebration. Come down, have fun, and join the free city as it blows out, in cannabis-scented breath, 40 candles.

Christiania's 40th Birthday

Corner of Prinsessegade and Refshalevej, Christianshavn; Mon 10:00-late; free adm;

check www.christiania.org for details of events on Sat & Sun

Peace, Love And Capitalism

2011-09-27T02:02:00.001-07:00

Peace, Love And Capitalism

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1010/entrepreneurs-own-words-peace-capitalism-gerry-durgy.html

I'm no hippie, but buying Woodstock was still one of the best deals I ever made.

Edwin Durgy, 09.21.11

We're not entertainment people, we're not music buffs, and we're not groupies or leftover hippies or anything like that. We're businesspeople, and we thought that buying the original site of the 1969 Woodstock festival would be an opportunity to perhaps contribute to the economic welfare and development of the area that I grew up in.

Going back as far as the 1930s, when my family came here, Sullivan County was a vacation mecca, with hundreds of hotels. By the mid-1990s the area had fallen on hard times, and today that industry is all but gone.

I don't want to sound corny, but if these communities are going to last in this country you can't have everyone run off to the cities and abandon the heartland. Our idea was to draw upon the fact that the Woodstock event in 1969 was held in Sullivan County and the land that it was held on had developed into some sort of shrine. For years, although the site was undeveloped, scores of people would come to visit and"pay their respects." We thought we could memorialize the site and at the same time resurrect the tourist business by bringing some responsible management to the site.

We started in 1998 and 1999, a couple years after we'd sold out of the cable business--running music festivals on the anniversary weekend of Woodstock with musicians who'd played at Woodstock and others who were more popular then. We had tens of thousands of people show up during those two events. The consensus after they were over, after talking to a lot of those people, was they'd love to come back, but these 50-, 60-, 70-year-olds were really looking for a little more comfort. We set about designing what we considered to be a world-class outdoor amphitheater.

There was an awful lot of detail in putting together something that would be different and unique from anything else that is out there--the acoustics, the sight lines, the seating and the contour of the lawn. We have 4,500 seats and room for another 10,500 people on the lawn. That lawn is tapered so that when you're performing on the stage you can look everyone in the eyeballs.

The artists really, really like the operation. We built special rooms for them--dressing rooms, lounge rooms. We fed them very, very well. We took extra-special care with the parking. These folks come in with their big tractor-trailers full of music gear and stage equipment and all that other stuff--this is some thing I didn't learn in the cable business. Fast-forward here, we're wrapping up our sixth season right now at Bethel Woods. We didn't want to call it Woodstock. We felt we were creating not only something respectful to commemorate what occurred 40-plus years ago, but also a new experience for those who would return for a visit or for those who would visit for the first time.

We have a maximum capacity of somewhere around 16,000 or 17,000 people. They come up here from all over the world--from Europe, the Far East. We've met people from Japan. There's a big monument on the grounds where the original stage was in 1969, and people come out there just to stand on that ground. It's an amazing thing. It's like some sort of a mystic calling. Several people have said,"We've come here to feel the vibes."

So far it's working. The best part is the letters that we get thanking us for"giving us Bethel Woods." So there is a lot of satisfaction. But most importantly, it's hard to say about anything that it's good for everybody, but this is good for everybody.

Sixties-L is now on Facebook...

2011-09-27T01:59:00.001-07:00

Sixties-L is now on Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sixties-L/175130659231077?sk=wall

or just search for Sixties-L

Best, the modr8r

Aspen's Two Old Hippies gets expansion fever

2011-09-27T01:52:00.001-07:00

Aspen's Two Old Hippies gets expansion fever

http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20110926/NEWS/110929892/1077&ParentProfile=1058

Nashville location is an extension of local guitar shop

asalvail@aspentimes.com">Andre Salvail
September 26, 2011

ASPEN — Two Old Hippies, an Aspen bastion of acoustic guitars, flower-power threads and just about all things groovy, has taken its act on the road.

Owners Tom and Molly Bedell have opened a 8,000-square-foot outlet in the Gulch, a recently redeveloped retail, office and residential district near downtown Nashville, Tenn. Monday marks the one-week anniversary of the launch in the artsy mixed-uses district.

It's an extension of the Aspen shop, albeit one that is eight times larger than the sister store, with much more room to navigate. There, you'll find the same types of items: expensive Breedlove-brand acoustic guitars, novelty items with some sort of '60s connection, even clothing inspired "by the art of John Lennon." Only there's a lot more of it in the sprawling store, which also features a Volkswagen van painted in trippy colors.

Molly Bedell said she and her husband realized a year and a half ago that it might be time to take their business concept elsewhere.

"You know the nature of (retail) in Aspen; it's just short-lived in terms of tourism and all the shoulder seasons," she said. "We said, 'It'd be really nice to test this concept that we have in a year-round market.' "

They thought of New York or California, but had friends in Nashville, so they visited the Tennessee capital about a year ago and started scouting potential locations. Bedell found the right spot in March and began negotiating what would be a 10-year lease with an option to renew.

"This (property) was an old print shop. Then it was a bakery before us. It's in a very old building with a long rectangular space. We almost completely gutted it and started fresh. We kept a few rooms. It has a lot more of everything because it's so much larger but it still has the same feel and flavor of the Aspen store. It's very eclectic; just think 'a lot more guitars.' "

Two years ago, Two Old Hippies took over the Monarch Street space formerly held by guitar shop The Great Divide. The Great Divide line is still sold at Two Old Hippies and is slowly being phased out.

The Nashville shop features a room they call "The Vault," which Bedell describes as home for Breedlove and Bedell guitars where customers can try out the various styles.

"It's been great. People are absolutely loving it. They've never seen anything like it," she said of the new location.

Bedell said she enlisted the help of Nashville designer Leah Sohr to get the building ready. "We both think and see things the same. We had so much fun, with everything from making custom jewelry cases and fixtures to all the paint selections," she said.

The company's website holds that Two Old Hippies not only is about retail and business, but also a philosophy. "Two Old Hippies is inspired by the values of our generation, steeped in the beliefs that we are one human race, that all living things have equal value and purpose, that we have stewardship responsibility for our Mother Earth, and that the more love we give — the more we get!"

Further, the unique enterprise represents "a lifestyle — an attitude — a connectivity among how we live, work and treat one another."

An expansion of that lifestyle and attitude in another city is possible, she said, but her next venture may be something a bit different: a shoe store in Nashville, across the street from Two Old Hippies. She's got her business plan together, and plans to call it Two Old Soles.

By the way, the Aspen store, despite the rollercoaster tourism seasons, is doing well, Bedell said, and still figures prominently in the company's plans. The local store employs five workers, and the Nashville store has 11.

Bedell said she's lived in Aspen for 30 years and will remain a resident here.

asalvail@aspentimes.com

Six ways to get acquainted with Marshall McLuhan’s legacy

2011-09-27T01:42:00.001-07:00

Six ways to get acquainted with Marshall McLuhan's legacy

http://www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/September-2011/Five-ways-to-get-better-aquainted-with-Marshall-McLuhans-legacy/

By Evan Andrew Mackay

Sep 22, 2011

A hundred years after the birth of Marshall McLuhan, "prophet of the Information Age" and Canada's most baffling icon, his legacy is being celebrated this year around the world with McLuhan 100, especially in Toronto, where he made his home and his mark on the world. In preparation for Monday's event at the Toronto Reference Library, McLuhan 100: Toronto's Future in McLuhan's Global Village, here are six ways to get a better understanding of McLuhan.

1. Only got a minute? Review that history minute you must have seen on TV a while back.

2. Got three minutes (or 93)? Famous for being as quotable as he was misunderstood, McLuhan did a cameo in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, which might make you laugh as well as think. Allen attended one of McLuhan's Monday Night Seminars at University of Toronto (as did Pierre Trudeau, John Lennon and Yoko Ono).

3. If you have a bunch of minutes, have a look at the CBC archives, which have several TV and radio clips of McLuhan.

4. If the weather is right, you could do the McLuhan Walking Tour after downloading the audio tracks to your cell phone or MP3 player.

5. Or, if you're still stuck in the Print Age, you can read about McLuhan in the summer issue of The Walrus and the autumn issue of U of T Magazine.

6. If you have lots of time, you can have a go at some of McLuhan's books (for a guy who declared that "the age of writing has passed," he sure wrote enough of them). The good thing is that if McLuhan is to be believed, you'll only have to read the right hand pages.

McLuhan 100: Toronto's Future in McLuhan's Global Village, Toronto Reference Library, Sept. 26

McLuhan's message is in the multimedia

2011-09-27T01:39:00.001-07:00

McLuhan's message is in the multimedia

http://www.montrealgazette.com/Bill+Brownstein+McLuhan+message+multimedia/5439558/story.html

By BILL BROWNSTEIN, The Gazette
September 22, 2011

Richard Kerr took a most circuitous path to Marshall McLuhan. But 36 years after first connecting with the Canadian philosopher, visionary and, to many, prophet of the information age, Kerr is paying an appropriately unorthodox yet inspired tribute to the man, in the year when McLuhan would have been celebrating his 100th birthday.

In conjunction with Pop Montreal's Art Pop program, Kerr, an experimental filmmaker and professor at Concordia's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, has created Marshall McLuhan: (My) Teacher . Classroom to Studio, which runs until Sunday at the festival's headquarters on St. Urbain St. The homage has three distinct elements: a 60-minute McLuhan video monologue, which Kerr recorded in 1975; a four-screen digital projection; and a selection of Kerr's renowned motion picture weavings - recycled film frames mounted and meshed into dazzling abstract installations.

"This is not a theoretical tribute - I'm not big on theory - but rather a humanistic response to the man," says the animated Kerr, holding court in his Concordia office/workshop in a Guy St. high-rise.

Kerr is an unlikely prof, but one most students would dream of having. He doesn't stand on convention, but he does encourage students to always follow through on their creative impulses.

A career in academia wasn't initially in the cards. He dropped out of high school in Kitchener-Waterloo - "actually, I was asked to leave" - to focus on a burgeoning junior hockey career. But when his dad died a year later, he gave up on the hockey and began working odd jobs to help support his family.

Six years later - at 22 - he resurfaced to attend Sheridan College's School of Art and Design in Oakville. "I thought I was going to a trade school to learn to make car commercials for a dealership in Kitchener-Waterloo," Kerr recalls.

"But my life changed forever that first week of school. The dean came into our class and asked for a volunteer to videotape Marshall Mc-Luhan, who was doing a lecture at the school. I had heard McLuhan's name before, but, honestly, it didn't mean much to me. I took the assignment mostly because it gave me something to do."

No matter that Kerr hadn't operated a video camera before. "The only thing I knew was to keep focus and not to move the camera around."

It didn't take Kerr long to realize he had something in that video. He chose not to erase it, and stored it for future use while learning as much as he could about McLuhan, who died five years later.

"He was such a great performer who took on people (in his lectures)," Kerr says. "And he was really funny."

True enough. On the video Kerr shot, McLuhan began his lecture by announcing that he likes to start by "heckling" his audiences before they can heckle him. "We say what's new. This is, of course, the remark of the guy who walks into the antique shop," McLuhan cracked. "When you ask what's new, you don't really expect to be told anything, do you?"

McLuhan proceeded to regale the students with his theories on humour, noting that it is invariably based on grievances and that catharsis is relief.

Then the man considered by many to possess one of the sharpest minds of them all dropped a nugget about a couple who had been desperately trying to have a baby. Finally, they got their wish, except the baby was born without legs or arms. "But the parents prayed really hard," McLuhan relayed. "And eventually the child grew arms and legs."

Sadly, this child later ran into the street and was run over by a car. "And the moral of the story?" the deadpan McLuhan asked, before answering it himself: "Stop when you're a head!"

"McLuhan had an offbeat sense of humour," says Kerr, who has a fairly offbeat sense of humour himself. "It took me five or six years to realize the impact that video shoot had on me. I absorbed as much as I could from him. I asked people questions. That's the way I educate myself."

Kerr conceived of his project not just as a tribute to McLuhan, but as a means to convey to his own students something about their professor's background.

"I was always curious, so I assume they are somewhat curious as well. McLuhan was an iconoclast, constantly questioning structures. And the first thing I do when I have a new class of students is flash a sign that reads: 'Question authority.'

"Marshall McLuhan, for me, opened the classroom door, which led directly to the studio. As a naive and unformed student, I volunteered to document a talk he gave at Sheridan College. Coincidence led to opportunity, which turned to epiphany. My encounter with McLuhan formed my understanding of the arts and shaped the ensuing 30 years of studio practice."

Operating from the famed McLuhan aphorism that "the medium is the message," Kerr uses footage from that 60-minute address along with two scrolling texts in the borders - "in one showing an asynchronous transcript that weaves around McLuhan's dialogue, and in another, reinforcing McLuhan's talking points like a ticker on cable news." What emerges is an intriguing and unique insight into McLuhan.

"What I most admired about the man is how he stood tall when he was being persecuted by colleagues. Creativity frightens a lot of people."

Though Kerr has accumulated an impressive body of work in the experimental and documentary fields - one that has been showcased internationally - he balks at being called an artist.

"I'm just a teacher/practitioner - that's it," the grinning prof explains. "Now this show represents 30 years of residual thinking on meditation. Think of it all as McLuhan residue."

Prior to moving to Montreal and teaching at Concordia in 2000, Kerr taught at the University of Regina for 10 years. "The whole family moved en masse here, but we didn't realize how complicated it would be. I really wasn't on balance here."

He was even less on balance when his N.D.G. home burned down six years ago. "The firemen blamed our dog, but my jury is still out on that one."

Thanks to his two children, who found the home on the Internet, Kerr has since uprooted to Bromont, while his wife stays in Kingston (where she teaches at Queen's) during the week.

"I was wiped out financially after the fire," Kerr says. "But now I've found bliss in the mountain. I never would have imagined I'd end up there. Then again, I never would have imagined how any of my life would have turned out."

Richard Kerr's exhibition Marshall McLuhan: (My) Teacher . Classroom to Studio runs until Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Pop Quarters, 3450 St. Urbain St. Free. 514-842-1919.

Due to scheduling and travel conflicts, Drawn and Quarterly bookstore has had to cancel Sunday morning's reading by Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. As scheduled, Spiegelman will be presenting his lecture What the %&*! Happened to Comics?, Saturday at 3: 30 p.m. at Concordia University, H-110, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. General admission tickets ($20) are available through Pop Montreal by calling 514-842-1919. VIP tickets ($150) are available through SBC at 514-861-9992 or info@sbcgallery.ca.

bbrownstein@ montrealgazette.com

Movie review: 'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975'

2011-09-27T01:38:00.001-07:00

[2 articles]

Movie review: 'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975'

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-blackpower-20110923,0,4110537.story

Forgotten interview footage of some of the biggest names in the movement lend Goran Hugo Olsson's documentary its electric intensity.

By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

September 23, 2011

Stokely Carmichael. Angela Davis. Huey P. Newton. Bobby Seale. Names to conjure with in recent American history, when the Black Power political movement was a force in the land, but names that no longer mean what they did back in the day. A Swedish filmmaker named Goran Hugo Olsson aims to change that with a singular documentary called "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975."

It was Olsson who discovered reels of 16-millimeter interview footage of these significant individuals and others taken by Swedish television journalists, footage that had sat abandoned and forgotten in the network's archives. To see these clips is to think of the classic Weavers political song "Wasn't That a Time." A dramatic time for sure.

Stitched together with contemporary audio commentary by artists like Erykah Badu and Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the images in "Black Power" are electric. They have the immediacy of history being lived in front of the camera and the charm of allowing us to glimpse the people who made that history before they turned into icons.

The Swedish journalists who shot this footage got it partly because they were on the scene when the Black Power advocates came to Europe to speak and partly because they were curious enough to come to America to seek them out for further comment and conversation.

Perhaps the most compelling footage involves the young and passionate Carmichael, the firebrand leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Carmichael is first seen speaking in Stockholm, in effect giving a tutorial on the differences between himself and the Rev. Martin Luther King in relation to nonviolence.

"Dr. King's assumption," Carmichael explains, "is that your opponents will be moved by your suffering. For that to happen, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none."

Even more impressive is an interview situation in the apartment of Carmichael's mother, Mabel, who is so initially nervous about speaking in front of the camera that Carmichael himself patiently walks her though stories about his father's experiences with institutional racism.

Starting in 1969, the Swedish interviewers concentrate on stories about the Black Panthers. We see footage and interviews with Newton and Seale, shots of Kathleen Cleaver in the Panther headquarters-in-exile in Algeria, and, most unforgettably, scenes of young children chanting in Panther schools in Oakland. "Come on, people, join in the struggle," they say. "Pick up a gun, put the pig on the run."

Aside from the Carmichael footage, "Black Power's" most memorable interview is with Davis, the first interview she gave from her jail cell in Northern California while awaiting trial on charges that she provided the weapons in a courthouse shooting that left four people dead, including a judge. (She was acquitted.) Wearing a bright red sweater but looking worn and tired, she is both articulate and furious.

"When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible," she says. "A person asking that can have no idea about what black people have gone through in this country."

Once the Panthers leave the scene, the Swedish television reports become more generic but still involving, like a piece on Lewis Michaux and his National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem and an affecting interview with a young prostitute.

"Black Power Mixtape's" contemporary audio, though it tries hard to involve us, can't hold a candle to this kind of footage. But if having these current voices on board helped get the luminous glimpses of the past back on the screen, we owe them a vote of thanks.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

----------------------

Black Power — Swedish style

http://www.wavenewspapers.com/entertainment/Black-Power--Swedish-style-130320683.html

By BY OLU ALEMORU, Staff Writer

Story Created: Sep 21, 2011

The political and physical response to centuries of oppression that manifested itself in the Black Power Movement of he late 1960s and early 1970s was — given its threat to the White power structure — inevitably undermined in America as a terrorist insurrection that had to be put down.

This included the COINTELPRO (acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) — a war of infiltration, provocateurism, entrapment and assassinations against domestic activist organizations, most notably The Black Panthers, whom then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called "the most dangerous group in America."

However, that was not the case beyond these shores, where foreign governments and their people viewed such freedom movements as a right of the oppressed to self-determination.

For instance, Scandanavian countries have been known for their solidarity with liberation movements. Norway was pivotal in the signing of the 1993 historic Oslo Accords between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization. And Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel gave the world The Nobel Peace Prize — which has been won by Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and President Barack Obama

From this tradition stems "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975," a fascinating documentary playing an exclusive week-long engagement beginning Sept. 23 at Santa Monica's Landmark Nuart Theater.

The movie culls 16mm footage that laid undiscovered in the cellar of a Swedish television station for 30 years, and combines it with contemporary music and audio interviews from leading Black artists, activists, musicians and scholars.

The film features interviews and appearances by the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and commentary from super stage performers Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli and Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson.

The documentary is directed by Göran Hugo Olsson and co-produced by Louverture Films partners, Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes.

In a discussion with journalists Monday in Los Angeles, Glover said the film connected strongly with his activist roots. "[There were] several reasons I wanted to be involved," he explained.

"Certainly, the fact that in some ways my life has been intertwined with the Black power movement when I was young. I'm 65 years old now, and when you're a young person in 1967, you remember that. So, you're always trying to articulate images that [are] a part of your life."

Also noteworthy, but too long to name individually, is the list of 28 Swedish cinematographers whose footage shaped the film's narrative.

The grainy footage opens in sleepy, rural Florida. The Vietnam War is going on overseas and perhaps the filmmakers' natural naiveté make for an interesting contrast when a White store owner in town gives his opinion of living in America, saying a man has more freedom of speech, protection and possibility of a good life if he just works hard to get there.

Meanwhile, at the other end of town, devoid of any businesses, where shacks take the place of homes, a Black man talks about coming back home from Vietnam, only to be "ridiculed and having to fight for his life in certain parts of the country."

Giving an outsiders' perspective of the social upheaval that was taking place, the audience is taken on a journey from Carmichael criticizing King's message of nonviolence, Malcolm X speaking in London, the Black Panther Movement in action, the Attica uprising and massacre, the attempted legal lynching of Davis, the emergence of Louis Farrakhan and the drug blight that infested Black communities like Harlem.

"A boycott is a passive act, the most passive, political act anyone can commit," said Carmichael. "[You're saying], 'We will not ride your buses.' The major assumption [of the nonviolence movement] is that your oppressor will see your suffering and be moved to change his heart. But what if your oppressor has no conscience ... the U.S. has none?"

Carmichael, who popularized the use of the term "Black Power," is also shown interviewing his own Caribbean-born mother, chronicling the cycle of poverty and racism perpetrated against the Black man in American society and his emergence on the global stage.

"Aren't you worried about going to jail?" he is asked by a White reporter.

"I was born in jail," replied Carmichael.

Carmichael's influence, even beyond his death in 1998, is testified to by Kweli, who recalled an incident when he was pulled off a plane by the FBI for listening to one of the activists' speeches.

"Stokely was the first to understand and talk about Black Power," Kweli said. "I was flying somewhere, and I don't know how they knew — they must have planted some sort of bug — and I had a recording of a speech he made in 1967 when he said 'This is for the FBI … I'm coming for you.' Even today they're still scared of him."

Talk Like a Beat? No Way Daddy-o!

2011-09-26T23:36:00.001-07:00

Talk Like a Beat? No Way Daddy-o!

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/talk-like-a-beat-no-way-daddy-o.html

Posted by Ian Crouch
September 26, 2011

Noting the popularity and general good humor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (which I posted about last week), David Barnett at the Guardian has suggested a new literary-diction holiday, Talk Like a Beat Day, which he proposes for October 7th, anniversary of the night that Allen Ginsberg first recited his poem "Howl" in San Francisco. Beats, like pirates, are an easy target for caricature: pirates were surely less salty, and likely less interesting, than the image we now have of them, and beats, as Barnett himself admits, were not the "pad" living, "rod" driving, "juiceheads" that now inhabit the popular imagination. When we talk like pirates, though, we're not really offending much of a literary tradition. To talk like a Beat, however—and to embrace the parody of the Beats as beatnik: the drum-tapping, finger-snapping denatured male animal with a beret pulled low over his eyes, cowering in the safety of the coffee house—is to ignore the real substance of the movement's written language.

Louis Menand, in a piece appraising the Beat movement in the magazine in 2007, wrote that Kerouac and his literary circle had more in common with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack than with the young men who would later flock to Greenwich Village. They weren't effete pseudo-intellectuals or proto-hippie communist peaceniks—though it's easy to see how a watered down version of an already loosely assembled ideology could move in those directions. "On the Road," Menand writes, is, among its other qualities, "a story about guys who want to be with other guys." Like all boys' clubs, it developed short-hand and codes—and adopted a series of cultural poses—but the prose fits more comfortably within a longer-view literary tradition than it does isolated in a slang dictionary. (Barnett, who recognizes the essential silliness of his suggested holiday, links to a kitschy collection of Beatisms.) The characteristic, exuberant prose of the Beats conveys an angry and aggressive young male lyricism that runs both forward and backward through the history of literature, and, to trace just one narrow line in America, goes from writers like Hemingway to Salinger to Kerouac to Mailer.

Consider this excerpt from one of the movement's supposed founding documents, the "Joan Anderson" letter that Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty in "On the Road," wrote to Jack Kerouac in 1950.

Fresh from the shower, mirror-primped, stepped my heroine resplendent in her new friend's housecoat. Just when you think you've learned your lesson and swear to watch your step, a single moment offguard will pop up and hope springs high as ever. One startled look and I knew I was right back where I started; I felt again that choking surge flooding me as when first I'd seen her.

Cassady was most likely drug-addled when he composed the letter, which is said to have run to seventeen pages (most of it has been lost). But he wasn't a loopy hep-cat; instead, he was a young man using frank, straightforward, common language to express the full range of his exorbitant moods. Part of the appeal of the Beats was that they wrote in a widely-used American vernacular, not that they created a language of their own.

Kerouac died at forty-seven, but even at that young age he seemed to have lived too long. Looking back on the Beat Generation, something he was often asked to do and occasionally obliged, he wrote:

Maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's "peace" officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.

Talk Like a Beat Day is a good idea, if it nudges us back to the rich sources that were later obscured by parody. If you're moved to join in, try to forget how all the hipster cats sing, and instead maybe ask yourself, thinking of the sad, disaffected young men out there: What would Jake Barnes or Seymour Glass or Sal Paradise say?

64 + 5 - what next for Paul McCartney?

2011-09-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

64 + 5 - what next for Paul McCartney?

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/311915

Sep 24, 2011 -
by Alexander Baron

Will you still need me...when I'm sixty-four. Next year, the amazing Mr McCartney will reach the Biblical three score and ten, yet is still hard at work. Does he need the money, or is there another reason for his extraordinary output?

Those of us who are old enough to remember the Beatles, including that song, will also remember the hysteria that went with it, known as Beatlemania. Although their career as a band was actually relatively short – from 1960-70 under that name, their influence has been extraordinary in both music and popular culture. All four wrote songs, but the backbone of the group was the partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. John was regarded as the serious one, and Paul the not-so-serious; many also regarded him as the least talented. If Lennon hadn't been murdered in December 1980, there is no telling how he would have progressed as a songwriter and more generally as an artist, but although his achievements will stand for all time, he would have had to go some to keep up with his baby-faced namesake John Paul McCartney. The two men shared their writing credits but generally they wrote songs individually, and it doesn't take an aficionado to tell who wrote what. I Am The Walrus bears Lennon's stamp, while Yesterday was written by or predominantly by Macca. For an idea of how they influenced other artists, check out Terminal Eyes, by Al Stewart; it is impossible to hear that and not think of I Am The Walrus. It is generally accepted that Macca is if not the most prolific songwriter of all time then the most prolific of the modern era, and if not that, then the most prolific/financially successful/acclaimed/talented of all time. Yesterday is the most covered song of all time, so that is at least two individual titles he holds. After the Beatles it looked like it was all over for him, career wise if not music wise. While it would be impossible to write as many songs as he has without the odd turkey – anyone remember the quite awful frog chorus We All Stand Together? – and while his Beatles days set the benchmark, he has produced innumerable songs of similar quality: the 1977 anthem Mull Of Kintyre, which he co-wrote with Denny Laine – the first UK release ever to sell two million copies. Before that there was the James Bond film soundtrack Live And Let Die; there have also been songs that brought him into conflict with the censor: Give Ireland Back To The Irish – a song that has even less melodical merit than political, and simply awful lyrics; Hi Hi Hi – which was also banned by the BBC, for an entirely different reason; and Big Boys Bickering, his contribution to the fight against environmental despoliation which led to his classic comment to an interviewer "...I'm talking about, erm, the ozone layer and the big hole in it, fifty mile wide hole. I don't think well that's a flipping hole..." Macca has always been specifically a songwriter; although a multi-instrumentalist, as predominantly a bass player on stage he has never been big on either instrumentals or soloing, so it came as some surprise that he decided to try his hand at composing a ballet. In a BBC interview shortly after its New York debut, he showed typical humility when he said he didn't know much about ballet, but that he wanted to try something he hadn't done before. He ended up writing the story as well, and adopting a generally hands on approach. He admitted too that he doesn't actually write music, though this admission needs some qualification. He tried with the old lady down the road when he was a kid; tried again when he was 16 with the guy across the road; and tried again aged 21 with a guy from the Guildhall of Music, again with no luck. Obviously he knows a crochet from a semi-quaver, and he said nothing about either tablature or chords. His daughter Stella designed the costumes, with a bit of input from Dad. Anyone inclined to put this down to nepotism should think again; Stella is a talented designer in her own right, though obviously a bit of networking helps. Macca is currently flogging the soundtrack to Ocean's Kingdom on his website, in several different formats. The big question is what next, an opera? First, we should answer the question we began with; if you haven't already guessed the answer, it is simple: that's what he does. It is what defines Sir James Paul McCartney MBE as a human being more than anything else; the desire, indeed the need to create works of artistic merit – or non-merit in the case of the frog chorus. He may well compose an opera, complete with libretto, perhaps another film soundtrack, or even another ballet, but the very next thing on his agenda is to tie the knot with his American fiancée Nancy Shevell. His previous two marriages ended in widowhood and an acrimonious divorce. Miss Shevell is an heiress, but to dispell any notion of his marrying her for her money, she is quite a looker; Sir Paul is also reputed to be worth a dinar or two, and is also shortly to receive an award for his charity work as much as for his music. As the man himself said: All You Need Is Love.

Who was John Lennon? Interview with biographer Tim Riley

2011-09-25T20:49:00.001-07:00

Who was John Lennon? Interview with biographer Tim Riley

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2011/0922/Who-was-John-Lennon-Interview-with-biographer-Tim-Riley

Lennon biographer Tim Riley talks about John, his relationships with Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, and the mystique that surrounds them all.

By Marjorie Kehe / September 22, 2011

Tim Riley has been a music critic for nearly three decades now. His first book, "Tell Me Why" examines the music of the Beatles, song by song. This month his latest book, Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music – the Definitive Life, a 700-plus page biography of John Lennon, is being released. I recently had a chance to talk to Riley about his book and his lifelong fascination with the Beatles. Here are excerpts of our conversation:

You've been reading and writing about the Beatles for much of your adult life. Was there really anything new for you to learn as you researched this book?
I learned so many different things. I can't tell you. I just learned basically how little I know.

Like what?
Beatles scholars tend to be the only people who know that Alfred Lennon, Lennon's father, left behind a memoir called "Daddy Come Home." Alf's story is fascinating because he came from the Blue Coat Orphanage, he was a song-and-dance guy on the boat in the merchant marines. He was an emcee on these ships and he was a song-and-dance man. He ran away from an orphanage to join a band. So there's a lot of fascinating stuff there. Even people who have written about Alf seem not to know.

Fall books: 20 nonfiction titles you don't want to miss

[I also had a] key moment interviewing a key subject, [Beatles friend and associate] Barry Miles, I was trying to come up with the reason that Lennon was so quiet and passive in the "Let It Be" movie [made in 1969]. So as I'm doing my research I'm realizing that [he and Yoko Ono] had just had a miscarriage at that time. So I said to Barry Miles, "Is that the reason that he's so passive?" And Barry Miles just waved me off. He said "Oh no no. We knew they were on heroin all through 1968. And we were glad. Because it got him off acid." That was really like WOW! They were really dealing with a major drug problem. And we sort of know that. In mythic terms we know that he was a major drug user.

But that just put it in an entirely new light for me. And it also put that miscarriage in a totally new light. [John and Yoko] always tried to pass that miscarriage off as a product of the press hounding him and his being arrested. But the reason she had a miscarriage is that they were abusing drugs. All the way through to the end they were very purposefully giving these interviews about what a great marriage they had and it's very interesting and there's a lot that you can't verify. But it was not a bowl of cherries. But it was very important to them that that be their story.

What Beatles book remains to be written?
I think the great unwritten Beatles book is the biography of [Beatles producer] George Martin. He had a really fascinating life and I hint at some of it in the book but a lot of the work that he did at EMI in the 50s before he even met the Beatles was revolutionary. I've seen some very good scholarship that indicates that his story, his professional story, is really, really profound for everything that comes after for rock and roll.

Will Paul McCartney ever tell his story? Do you think he will write a memoir?
I think he's going to take it all with him. [Paul] is a giant puzzle because he really doesn't care too much about scholarship and history. It doesn't matter to him the way that it matters to a critic. Because he keeps telling stories that people have demonstrated to him repeatedly are not true. But they're such great stories that you can tell that he kind of believes they are true. For him it is a kind of form of vivid truth. So he just doesn't really have a critical vantage on his own life the way we very much wish he did.

Will we ever really know John Lennon? Or is he always going to be an enigma to us?
Oh, I think that's kind of like the core attraction here. He is, in a lot of ways, kind of like Elvis Presley. I think he was an enigma to himself. He was very mercurical, felt differently on different days, wrote differently on different days. His body of songs comprises really upbeat, earnest, simple things like "All You Need is Love" and deep dark painful jagged weird obsessive unknowable songs like "Happiness is a Warm Gun." The range of that sensibility is really quite extraordinary. And I think that, as reflected through his writing, he is really deeply fascinating and quite unknowable. I mean, "Strawberry Fields" is a giant riddle of a song. And I do my best to do an interpretation of it but it is fascinating and deeply intimate and deeply remote at the same time. And all the more compelling for being that way.

Sometimes in your book John comes across as surprisingly naïve. Was he?
He lived in an odd bubble for much of his life but I think that it's also true that in many ways he was quite parochial and quite naïve. We Americans tend to revere the British and think of them as having this long history and they've come up with all this culture and they're somehow better than us.

Is that part of the Lennon mystique?
It's a big part of the Lennon mystique. He plays it every which way. But it's also true that Liverpool is a very parochial town. One of the British critics that I engaged with pointed out how important this was when he meets Yoko Ono. [John] meets Yoko Ono at this art show and he thinks that she is just the grooviest, funniest, spaciest thing he's ever met. He can't imagine anyone more spaced out than Yoko Ono. And then he falls for her. Well, that just shows his parochialism. He hadn't been around the block. He hasn't hung out in New York. He hasn't interacted with other modern, wacky artists. To him it's just this great new world that she opens up to him.

He's really kind of like an American stuck in a British body. He was the most American member of the band.

Will Yoko Ono ever change her image or is she fated to go down in history as the woman who broke up the Beatles?
Yes, I think that is kind of a nasty ball and chain that's going to stick with her. [But] I'm sure they loved each other. I'm convinced that those two were totally hellbent and passionate about their relationship to each other, even when it was troublesome.

Despite everything that went down between them in the later years do you think that he loved Paul McCartney as well?
Oh, absolutely. I think there are great symbolic farewells to each other in their music. I think "Don't Let Me Down" is a great symbolic farewell to one another.

The same with "Two of Us." I think of those as twilight duets and they're extraordinary. And there is this very palpable sense of "We're coming to the end. We're not really writing together so much anymore but we're going to do a few final duets and we're going to hold all this great affection that we have for one another in this song." I think they're very moving on that level.

Will we ever see the like of the Beatles again? Or are they a phenomenon that can never be repeated?
I think that the urge to look for the new Beatles is kind of a mistaken urge. There is a degree of originality and chemistry there that by its nature is unrepeatable. But it's kind of like falling in love. You may say, "I'll never fall in love again." But you always have the capacity – you just don't know it.

If you could have known John personally do you think you would have liked him?
You know I have this great fantasy of him. I have this great fantasy that he would have been incredibly funny and incredibly engaged intellectually and on current events and just a hoot to hang out with. Yeah, I have that fantasy. I think every Beatles fan does.

An insightful look at '60s Civil War centennial

2011-09-25T20:36:00.001-07:00

An insightful look at '60s Civil War centennial

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/09/25/2633642/an-insightful-look-at-60s-civil.html

A Yale historian sheds light on our own time by looking back at the Cold War, civil rights and the romanticizing of an earlier war

By John David Smith

Posted: Sunday, Sep. 25, 2011

In his 1961 masterpiece "The Legacy of the Civil War," Robert Penn Warren declared, "The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history." Writing during the Civil War centennial, when Americans were abuzz with nostalgic tales of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray, Warren reminded Americans that the "Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal, as well as national, fate."

David W. Blight's richly interpretive "American Oracle" contextualizes the sentimentalized celebration of the Civil War in the early 1960s within the tense realities of the civil rights era and the Cold War. Blight, a Yale University historian, unravels the complexities of Civil War memory and meaning at a time when most white Americans considered restoration of the Union, not emancipation, as the war's grand result.

Blight penetrates the constellation of 1960s-era Civil War remembrance and reality. In these years, the Civil War centennial and the civil rights movement existed "on different planets orbiting different suns. Other times the two planets veered off course and collided." As Americans watched civil rights marchers on television being clubbed by police in Birmingham, Ala., they celebrated the war as America's national epic and denied slavery's centrality to the conflict.

To gauge understandings of the Civil War epoch during the centennial era, Blight examines works of four of America's foremost writers - Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson and James Baldwin. "Each," according to Blight, "had a compelling sense of history and was in his own way engaged in an unending quest to know the purpose of the past in life and art."

Warren (1905-1989) abhorred myths and underscored redemptive tragedy. Holding North and South equally responsible for the war, he exposed weaknesses in both the "Treasury of Virtue" (Northerners' self-serving definition as noble victors) and the "Great Alibi" (Southerners' Lost Cause justification for the war and its consequences) arguments. Rejecting a triumphal interpretation of the war, Warren branded it "a crime of monstrous inhumanity, into which almost innocently men stumbled." This, according to Blight, was "Warren's riff on the Civil Rights revolution as a crisis in motion."

Author of "Stillness at Appomattox" (1953) and other books, Catton (1899-1978) was his day's most popular Civil War historian. He considered the war a catharsis that shaped a greater America. "Catton," Blight explains, "wrote a beguiling, enjoyable military history," that endorsed the "Confederate Legend." Thanks to Catton, generations of Civil War buffs "came to 'love' the Civil War in an age when war, with its unfathomable destructiveness, was no longer lovable."

Wilson (1895-1972), a legendary cynic and iconoclast, wrote "Patriotic Gore" (1962), a monumental literary history of the Civil War era. Though vehemently antiwar, Wilson nevertheless found intriguing the war's influence on history, human values and literature. He roundly condemned Gilded Age materialism as the bitterest fruit of Union victory. Blight observes that Wilson's book "sounded the depths of those irresistible myths that have compelled Americans to make fierce claims of the past, even as they repeat its sins."

In "The Fire Next Time" (1963) Baldwin (1924-1987), an African-American, unveiled what he considered the virulent racism that infected white Americans generally and the fatuous Civil War centennial specifically. He demanded an alternative history identifying slavery as the war's cause and residual racism as its foremost legacy. "Baldwin's Civil War," Blight surmises, "was a deeply internal battle against the fear and rejection caused by racism, homophobia, and ... America's mythic sense of its own invulnerable, self-righteous, unexamined or even unknown history."

Blight's insightful "American Oracle" thus brings to mind the striking degree to which the centennial of 1961-1965, "like many pivotal moments in history, seem both oddly remote and disturbingly current."

Can you dig Talk Like a Beat Day?

2011-09-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Can you dig Talk Like a Beat Day?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/19/talk-like-a-beat-day

Make sure you're hip to 7 October as the swingingest day to pay a far-out tribute to the Beat Generation

David Barnett
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 September 2011

OK, hepcats, can the lip, turn up the stereo and fall in for the ginchiest groove of all time ... unless you're a murgatroid from Dullsville. Would I cherry tree you, daddy-o?

In other words, you wonderful people, stop talking, start listening, and get ready for a rather exciting event. Or would you rather be an uninspiring person from a boring place? I wouldn't lie to you about this, my friend. Because we're officially designating 7 October Talk Like a Beat Day.

Why 7 October? Well, there are any number of Beat anniversaries to hang it on. On the Road, the seminal work by the King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, was first published on September 5 1957 – but 7 October was the original "Beat happening": the date that Allen Ginsberg first recited Howl in San Francisco, Kerouac beating out the rhythm with a wine jug and shouting "GO!" after every line. The beat movement of the 1950s is so rich in its own language and terminology that it's crying out for its own memorial event. And let's face it, as anyone with an internet connection knows, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Participants of the latter are generally limited to "arrr", but it seems popular enough. So why not put the King's Jive to one side for another day, and Talk Like a Beat?

And what better time to practice the lingo than today, when the First Lady of Beat, Carolyn Cassady, is in London to promote a new edition of her memoir Off The Road at a special screening of seminal Beat flick Pull My Daisy? Carolyn was married to Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road) and was also Jack's lover. Carolyn will be played by Kirsten Dunst when the long-anticipated big screen version of On the Road is released next year.

Here follows a simple primer to get you in the mood.

The Beat Generation, of course, comprised Kerouac, Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and all their crazy 1950s gang. It's usually accepted that Kerouac came up with the term "beat", and fellow writer John Clellon Holmes, author of Go, was the first to get it into print in an essay for the New Yorker in 1952.

For genuine Beat reading, you need look no further than the shelves of seminal San Francisco bookshop City Lights. But Beat, inevitably, spawned a huge swathe of cultural knock-offs, lurid paperbacks and movies of reefer-addicted teens rebelling against the system, which metamorphosed into the comedic Beatnik figure. The word was coined in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1958 by columnist Herb Caen, and quickly passed into use as a disparaging term for the media stereotype of the cool cat in beret and dark glasses, tapping on bongo drums and stroking his goatee beard. On the Road was published in 1957; one short year later, the Beats had passed into parody. Joyce Johnson, who also had a relationship with Kerouac, wrote in her memoir Minor Characters: "The Beat Generation sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun — thus to be either condemned or imitated."

Which, of course, we're guilty of ourselves, with Talk Like a Beat Day. But this is an act of celebration, as well as imitation. To that end, let me direct you to a wall poster that was doing the rounds a while ago, entitled A Beatnik Glossary. This should give you a working knowledge of enough off the wall rap to get you to Swingsville on time.

For starters, you're going to want to recognise other beats. These may self-identify as hipsters or cats. Cool is self-explanatory, but to "cool it" is to slow things down a tad. If a thing is "swinging" it's good; if it's "swinging like sixteen", it's even better. And if it's "crazy", then it's fantastic … so good it's almost "cool", in fact. Which is where we came in.

Feeling "hairy"? That's good too. Feeling "off the wall"? Maybe not so good. It's OK to be "far out" (pretty weird), but get too "way out" and you'll be "kookie", and that might see you visiting the head-shrinker – no explanation required.

It's pretty easy when you get into the swing of it – cast your orbs over some of these examples (take your shades off first) and practice them on a short trip to Rio (your coffee break). It ain't tough toenails, and you'll soon get tuned in.

You probably live in a "pad" (apartment, home) and work in a "cave" (office). You might drive a "rod" (car) to work and probably "stable the iron" (park the car) near the place where you go to earn your "bread" (money). You might take a break for a "kick stick" (cigarette) and go out with your "galaxy" (group of friends) for a "juice" (alcoholic drink). Don't drink too much juice or you might become a juice-head, though, and the juiceman might not serve you anymore. Then you might "blow your jets" (get angry), end up giving "knuckles to the creep" (engaging in physical violence) and attracting the attention of the fuzz.

If you forget any of these, go with the flow. It's like jazz – you improvise. And if you have to make something up or wing it every now and again, then that's hip too. Express yourself, daddy-o.

I hope you'll dig Talk Like a Beat Day and take it to your hearts. If anyone says you're bugging them or making them go ape, then just tell them to cool it. They're probably on the "swings in Squareville" anyway (have an inferiority complex).

And you know what this is, hipsters? It's only the ever-lovin' end. Later, and don't forget to blast the Edison on your way out.

Our Gay Movement's Colossal Failure

2011-09-25T14:36:00.001-07:00

Nick Benton's Gay Science No. 50:
Our Gay Movement's Colossal Failure

http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/10170-nick-bentons-gay-science-no-50-our-gay-movements-colossal-failure-.html

By Nicholas F. Benton

Thursday, September 22 2011

When I became a vocal gay liberation leader in San Francisco after completing graduate seminary and coming out with a bang in 1969 (shortly before the Stonewall riots across the continent), I quickly came under fire for contending our liberation called for fundamental socio-political change, rather than just boundless sex.

Using my journalistic skills, I became the most prolific writer on all matters gay in the Bay Area, contributing weekly to the Berkeley Barb, often to its rival the Berkeley Tribe, to the Gay Sunshine newspaper, authoring its first editorial, to my own paper, The Effeminist, and a variety of San Francisco gay bar rags, like the Kalendar.

I co-founded the Berkeley chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, and I was voted by my peers to be the first gay spokesman formally invited to speak at a major anti-war rally. When the first collection of post-Stonewall gay writings was assembled, The Gay Liberation Book (Ramparts Press, 1973), including entries by Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs and other big names, I was the only one among those who had more than one entry. I had three.

This was all before the legendary Harvey Milk migrated from New York, where he'd been a Wall Street Republican, to set up shop in San Francisco. I had many exchanges with Milk, who dismissed all initiatives except electoral and legislative ones.

Milk and others did a great deal to win political gains for homosexuals. I ran on the same ballot with him in San Francisco in 1975. He ran for supervisor, I ran for mayor, losing with a dozen others to George Moscone, who was killed along with Milk by Dan White in November 1978.

By 1972, from my vantage point as a gay leader, it was clear that a countercultural, anarcho-hedonistic tsunami was turning the movement away from any sensibility for wider social change to focus solely on unbridled sex and license to it.

The gay "The Age of Contagion" (my term) ran from 1972 to 1996, AIDS being phase two. It was fueled by unlimited impersonal sex, which became not only normative, but a "politically correct" imperative. It was common for gays in urban centers to be infected with venereal disease almost monthly, compromising immune systems to provide opportunity for the HIV virus, while crippling the emotional capacity for sustainable romance.

I became sharper in my arguments against all this. I wrote against, and even picketed, Allen Ginsberg, the gay beat poet with two decent compositions to his credit, because Ginsberg bragged publicly about masturbating to images of young boys, ran a help-wanted ad in the Barb for a personal assistant, providing a physical description of the kind of boy he wanted, and was a founding member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

Ginsberg assailed me in the Barb, contending I was "obviously in need of a good f**k." (My fiery redheaded boyfriend insisted on writing a reply that I was not lacking in that regard).

Ginsberg, elevated to countercultural sainthood, and the gay French post-modernist philosopher, Michel Foucault, were highly visible Pied Pipers of "The Age of Contagion."

Lecturing at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1970s on the "history of sex," Foucault was notorious for spending his nights at leather S&M bars on Folsom Street in San Francisco.

Enticing young gay students and anyone else toward what he called "limit experiences" that led them to degrees of sexual degradation they normally avoided, Foucault mused, with all the trappings of academia, that the only novel invention in all the sex of the post-Stonewall era was "fisting."

The words, "love" and "romance," of course, never appear in any of Foucault's teachings, only "pleasure" and "limit experiences."

Foucault reportedly laughed cynically upon hearing the news that what became known as AIDS began appearing in the summer of 1981. In 1983, he returned to the Bay Area, manifesting symptoms of AIDS, himself, which did not deter him from almost surely spreading the virus at nightly bath house engagements until his death in mid-1984.

Overwhelmed by all this, I chose exile from the gay movement in mid-1973, and bailed out. Subsequently, despite the urban gay culture's descent into dangerous sexual excess, no one in the gay movement spoke out about it. No one. Not one leader. Not one, except for a single angry playwright, Larry Kramer who wrote Faggots in 1978 and was accused, as I'd been, of being "sex negative."

The terrible truth about AIDS is that, while outside factors introduced and perpetuated the 1970s sexual excesses, virtually every lethal infection was passed by one gay person to another. We did it to ourselves, even after knowing the consequences. Our actions caused the "Age of Contagion," starting about 1972, and our movement failed, abjectly failed, to prevent within in our own ranks what became the horrible, premature deaths of 400,000 of our beautiful, very own.

To be continued.

Ravi Shankar still making magic sitar music at 91

2011-09-25T13:45:00.001-07:00

Ravi Shankar still making magic sitar music at 91

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/sns-rt-us-ravishankartre78m5x3-20110923,0,2435253.story

September 23, 2011

Jordan Riefe

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Baby boomers may remember classical sitar player Ravi Shankar from his legendary appearances at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock, or his influence on popular music culture at the time.

But what the 91-year-old musical icon remembers most about Monterey was hearing live rock 'n' roll for the first time. It was loud, he recalls, and he walked out on Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar.

The three-time Grammy winner appears for one night, September 29, in Los Angeles at the Disney Concert Hall, and ahead of the show he spoke to Reuters about his music, his memories of the '60s and his friendship with late Beatle George Harrison.

Q: You collaborated with many high-profile Western artists in the past. In what direction are you taking your music now?

A: "Mostly I'm playing concerts. I just finished five concerts in Europe, in London, Birmingham and the Edinburgh Festival, then I went to Oslo, Norway. I finished those and now I'm looking forward to playing San Francisco and Escondido."

Q: What's on the program for the Disney Hall show?

A: "I always decide what I will play at the last moment, but I can tell you the format. I always start with very traditional classical music. The first I think will be very traditional almost dating back to 16th century. The second is a more later development known as contemporary-classical music. Another raga, an Indian raga. It's more popular, not in the pop sense, but it's a more popular second song. Of course the form we play is known as raga. Popular music with a lot of rhythmic variations."

Q: Can I take you back to the Monterey Pop Festival? It was a landmark concert and introduced you to your largest American audience. What are your memories of that show?

A: "I'll tell you very frankly, I went to see the whole night show with people like Jimi Hendrix and The Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding, the Mamas and the Papas, all these people were performing. This was my first orientation to listening in person to live performances of rock 'n' roll. It was very loud for me. I'm not used to such loud music.

"But when The Who started breaking their instruments after the songs, and they are kicking them and breaking all the instruments -- and Jimi Hendrix, after a wonderful performance, which I was so impressed with, then he took off his guitar and then he put benzene on the guitar and burned it. That I could not take. I just walked out and said, "I won't be here."

Q: But two years later at Woodstock, you did it all again.

A: "It was a horrible experience because it was raining. We went by helicopter, which landed behind the stage. There were a half a million people, it was raining, drizzling, there was mud everywhere and everybody was, most of them, were high on drugs, y'know. And this was very difficult for my instrument, and I was not happy because of the whole environment."

Q: Still, you gained fame in the West from those events

A: "There was one issue that always bothered me. They mixed my music with drugs and all that type of free love and everything. That's what I objected to. I wanted to bring them consciousness of our music to relate to like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart -- you don't go to hear a concert being on grass or misbehaving like that."

Q: Did you ever express that to an audience?

A: "I said, 'I don't want to be treated -- or my music -- to be treated like that.' So I, many a times, would walk out of my concerts until they stopped smoking and behaved properly. I didn't want to reach them on drugs, but I did want to play them our music, our Indian classical music which connected more with -- not religion but a more spiritual energy."

Q: Your introduction to the rock world came through George Harrison. What brought the two of you together for the 1971 benefit concert for Bangladesh?

A: "I was in Los Angeles at that time and I was thinking of giving a concert or two, raising as much as I could, and help them. George came to my house and said, 'Let's do it in a bigger way and raise as much as we can.' He phoned Bob Dylan and all his friends, and the show happened. One show sold out immediately, so they had another show in the afternoon. The crisis became known around the world within 24 hours."

Q: Harrison studied sitar under you before composing "Norwegian Wood" and "Within You Without You," both of which used the instrument. Was George a good student?

A: "He was a wonderful student, he was like my family, my friend and we had a wonderful time. He flew into Mumbai in 1974 and 1975 where I had a festival for 45 minutes with my musicians, and after intermission he had his group and he helped promote the concert all over the United States. He was a wonderful friend."

Beal gets prison, extended supervision

2011-09-25T03:42:00.001-07:00

Beal gets prison, extended supervision

http://www.thedodgevillechronicle.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=8&ArticleID=1869

9/22/2011

J. Patrick Reilly

Those who came to the Iowa County courthouse Tuesday to testify on Irvin (Dana) Beal's behalf would not be shocked if he walked on water. Beal has that affect on those he has helped.
But the fact the 64 year old Beal was transporting 180 pounds of medium grade marijuana through Wisconsin when his 1997 Chevrolet Astro van was stopped last January 6 for expired registration, missing bumper and cracked tail light couldn't let him walk out of the courthouse a free man.
Instead, Circuit Judge Robert P. Van De Hey sentenced Beal to five years in prison, 2 1/2 under incarceration and 2 1/2 under extended supervision.
Van De Hey also gave Beal credit for time served (267 days) and granted eligibility for early release. That is a better deal than the four years prison and four years extended supervision asked for by assistant DA Timothy Helmberger. It is a way better deal than the 15 years and $50,000 fine that is the maximum allowed by law.
Van De Hey reminded the crowded courtroom that while the passionate testimony offered by people from as far away as New Zealand, California, New York and Minnesota made valid points, he was forced to make a ruling that includes prison time.
"We are a country of laws," he said. "People have acknowledged his deeds but it is not fair to give him a free pass especially with that much marijuana on board. He has committed the offense and now must be held accountable."
"I have no problem with medical marijuana," Van De Hey said. "But I have to keep in mind the 180 pounds he had in his vehicle."
"I don't make the laws but I have to enforce the laws as they are written," he said.
This will be Beals's sixth conviction. He was convicted of drug related offenses in 1971, 1987, 1993 and 2006. He was on probation for an arrest in Nebraska when his vehicle was stopped in Iowa County.
Beal testified prior to sentencing and told the judge he would not do that particular thing again.
"I am too old," he said. "I need a different job."
He said he was taking the marijuana to be used for medical purposes in Michigan, New York and Washington, DC where it is legal.
"Would law enforcement be upset if I was moving medical marijuana to where it was legal?" he asked.
A woman from New Zealand told the court how Beal had come to her country to help set up clinics and with the use of ibogaine, a drug that cures heroin addiction. Ibogaine is not legal in the United States.
"If you put Dana away his work will stop," she said. "He has helped a lot of human beings in New Zealand and was planning to do the same in Australia. He is an expert and has paid for those who need treatment. This will all stop if he goes away. Help save our people from drug abuse."
Ed Rosenthal came from California to testify.
"I have known Dana for 30 plus years," he said. "Dana saves lives. He is not a drug dealer. You talk community service? Dana has put in 30 years of community service. Don't be part of a system where a person is jailed for his efforts."
Rabbi Issac Freese from Brooklyn said he has known Beal for 20 years and only knows good about him.
"He helped us open a medical co-op. He sacrificed himself. He lost money. He went ahead and did it anyway, not for himself but so people could get the help they need."
"Dana is needed today by the people he has helped. He has given them shelter, relief and a trusting heart."
A former meth addict credited Beal with getting her sober.
"Dana helped me get treatment," she said. "Now I am sober and have a beautiful four year old daughter."
Manhattan attorney Doug Green called Beal a champion of medical marijuana and ibogaine.
Dennis Brennen, formerly of New York and now of Wisconsin, turned to Dana when he couldn't afford medical marijuana at $30 to $40 per gram.
"He could get it for me at $10 per gram. He has helped many get affordable medical marijuana."
Jackie Rickard testified from her wheelchair and credited Beal with helping her get medical marijuana for her condition.
Paul DeReinzo, a school teacher in New York, compared Beal to Galileo who was eventually proven right in his theories after 300 years.
"Let's not take 300 years to prove Dana right," he said. "Dana's been right all along. We can do the right thing here for future generations."
Beal may eventually answer charges against him in other states.

"The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975," "Thunder Soul": a heady era

2011-09-24T22:41:00.001-07:00

Indie Focus:

"The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975," "Thunder Soul": a heady era

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-indie-focus-20110918,0,7220501.story

'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975' and 'Thunder Soul,' two documentary films, use old material to uniquely examine the convergence of culture and politics.

By Mark Olsen, Special to the Los Angeles Times

September 18, 2011

Issues of race and class in the early 1960s are playing out in the multiplex right now in the period literary drama "The Help." But two new documentaries follow that cultural thread even further forward, using recently unearthed archival material to examine historical events in a current context.

"The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975" is a loosely constructed time capsule composed entirely of film footage captured by Swedish news crews during the titular era. Director Göran Hugo Olsson uses voice-overs from African American artists, activists and scholars — including musicians Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Talib Kweli and Erykah Badu — reacting to the archival material throughout the film, which is available on video on demand and opens in theaters in Los Angeles on Sept. 23.

"Thunder Soul," on the other hand, looks at the transformative heritage of one school's music program to emphasize the importance of arts education. In the documentary opening in Los Angeles on Oct. 7, director Mark Landsman tells in essence two stories: that of Houston's award-winning Kashmere High School Stage Band in the 1970s and its dynamic leader, Conrad "Prof" Johnson, alongside the reunion of a group of Kashmere alumni for a February 2008 tribute concert as an elderly Prof's health was in rapid decline.

Given the figures who surface in "Mixtape" — activists including Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael — Olsson's film is certainly the more obviously political document. The 45-year-old filmmaker was researching another project when he uncovered news footage that closely documented the Black Power era in the United States and Europe. Much of the material had aired on Swedish television at the time and had then been dutifully filed away.

To give the vintage footage an added contemporary spin, he recruited some key figures — Davis, Harry Belafonte, former communications secretary of the Black Panther Party Kathleen Cleaver — to record audio commentary responding to images of their younger selves.

"My goal from the beginning was to create something that could be in the libraries and universities so that students could have an alternative source of trying to describe this time period," Olsson said during a recent interview from Stockholm.

The film hangs together on a timeline that transitions from optimism to disillusionment; Olsson tried to maintain a freewheeling structure reminiscent of an old-school music mixtape. The approach allowed him to include glimpses of Martin Luther King Jr. and Belafonte greeting the king of Sweden, schoolchildren chanting in a Black Panther classroom and a young junkie chronicling the degradation of her addiction. The images give an overall impression of a volatile era.

Cleaver, who now teaches at Emory and Yale universities, says the documentary points out how ideas from that time that once seemed disruptive have since been accepted as part of the broader cultural conversation.

"Power to the people, free medical care, better education, we shouldn't have to be subjected to the brutality of the police," Cleaver said. "It wasn't all that revolutionary in and of itself, it was just revolutionary when poor black people proposed that this is the way the country be changed and then proceeded to take measures to change it. That's revolutionary. But the concepts are progressive ideas that are not that out of the mainstream of American social justice."

"Thunder Soul" tells a more specific story about the Kashmere band and the dedication and influence of Johnson. Coming from an unknown, predominantly black high school in Houston, the group would go on to be invited to play in Europe and Japan. At the 1972 All-American High School Stage Band Festival in Mobile, Ala., the group's bold presence and choice of material was unlike that of any other in the competition. Its members broke barriers simply by stepping onstage.

"They might as well have been James Brown appearing on 'The Lawrence Welk Show,'" Landsman said. "It's not just that they were an amazing high school band that won all these trophies — it's that they did it at a time when an all-black band on the white competition circuit was an anomaly. And this in itself is a political statement."

Landsman, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker currently directing episodes of the TV documentary series "Intervention," had resigned himself to the fact that he might not have footage of the band in its prime and was already editing his film when he at last discovered the existence of "Prof and His Band." A short made by Houston newsman Charles Porter, that documentary constitutes much of the older footage in "Thunder Soul."

"We struggled a lot with how we were going to tell this story," Landsman said during a recent interview in Los Angeles. "I wasn't worried about the present-day vérité footage. I knew we were going to get good stuff, but I was like 'Where's the motion pictures, what archival material exists?' I researched every newsroom in Texas to see if anything existed on this high school band."

With "Prof and His Band," Landsman found what he needed. In it, the band makes plain why it was such a force in its day — the trademark performance style of the Kashmere High School Stage Band featured fresh tunes with a modern feel — many, Johnson's own compositions — augmented with syncopated dance moves on the bandstand.

It was Landsman's hope that the film's dual story lines would highlight how the influence Johnson had on the young people under his tutelage continued long after they left school, underscoring the importance of arts education.

"I knew that the reunion would make it contemporary," Landsman said, "and more than that, the issue would bring it forward and make it relevant."

Bringing the past into the present, both "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975" and "Thunder Soul" put old material to new uses. Each film manages to examine the convergence of culture and politics in a fresh way.

"It's a story each generation is going to have to tell in a new way, to take a different approach," said Olsson of reconsidering the Black Power era. "Every generation has to do it all the time. The work is not done."

.

Daughter of an icon

2011-09-24T22:39:00.001-07:00

Daughter of an icon

http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/594034--daughter-of-an-icon

Jeff Mahoney
Wed Sep 14 2011

Elizabeth McLuhan knew her father was famous. How could she not?

He was the subject of a popular two-line poem ("What are you doin', Marshall McLuhan?") on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. He was interviewed by Playboy, in company that year with Jesse Jackson and Joe Namath.

But she never thought he was necessarily "cool" — he was a communications theorist, after all — until a man came to the door of their home in 1969.

The man wore these glasses, the arms of which disappeared into the tangles of his long hair, and there was a woman.

"My brother and I were frozen."

John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Such was the reach of McLuhan's fame and influence.

"He (Lennon) came to see Dad, not the other way around. Dad greeted him in his way, nonchalant, like 'Oh, look who turned up.' But Michael (her younger brother) and I were beside ourselves." Lennon, she remembers, signed her calendar.

It's been a busy year for Elizabeth. She is executive director of the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre on Stuart Street, she's moving house ("the McLuhan genes are firmly planted in Hamilton, which we love," Elizabeth says with a smile), and 2011 is the centenary of McLuhan's birth (July 21, 1911).

The great Canadian thinker — he coined phrases such as "the global village" — is riding a cultural current again, with McLuhan conferences in places as far flung as Brussels and Copenhagen.

Elizabeth and her siblings (she's one of six) have been invited to numerous anniversary events. Recently she and brothers Michael and Eric were front and centre at the launching of 50th anniversary edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy.

"It's great to see the recent wave, back to acclamation," says Elizabeth. "He was always controversial."

Not your conventional scholar, McLuhan wrote about things like television, advertising and the shapeless plasma of what we now call "popular culture" before they were considered fit subjects of academic discourse.

Moreover, he wrote in this curious style — not academia's plodding march of the footnotes but a vigorous, jumped-up electric prose. He combined the pensiveness of aphorisms with the payload of ad slogans to create gnomic tag phrases such as "the medium is the message."

In fact, says Elizabeth, even Warhol scholars concede that McLuhan conceived the idea (if not the exact wording) of our "15 minutes of fame."

McLuhan had much more than 15 minutes, as the centenary illustrates.

"But it was very hard at times," Elizabeth recalls. "There were years when he was anathema. Students were actively discouraged from following him."

When he died, in 1980 at the age of 69, the University of Toronto didn't want his papers. They went instead to the national archives.

But then McLuhan was famous for being misunderstood, the punch line, in essence, of his legendary walk-on scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. He appears from behind a poster, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat, to dress down a pretentious Columbia professor who, to impress a date, has been invoking McLuhan's ideas, then mangling them.

Says Elizabeth, "My father's memory of the movie was this costume designer who kept telling him how to look like ... himself." And that Allen wasn't funny one-on-one.

The ironies. There was another, she says, with a chuckle.

"Despite all his talk about hot and cool media and technology, he barely knew how to turn on the TV."

Though a very public intellectual, he worked mostly at home, bouncing ideas off family, as well as students and visitors when they were there ("easier to ask who 'didn't' show up at our house," says Elizabeth).

That's how she remembers her dad, a complicated man, full of offbeat charisma and great comic timing, illuminating her life — with big ideas.

She doesn't even have to say it. The message is the medium and the medium is the pride in her eyes when she talks of him.

Numerous battles haven't slowed Rep. Bobby Rush

2011-09-24T22:36:00.001-07:00

Numerous battles haven't slowed Rep. Bobby Rush

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-bobby-rush-0919-20110919,0,72335.story

Cancer, small campaign war chest and rivals don't deter 10-term congressman from making another run

By Katherine Skiba, Tribune reporter

September 19, 2011

Though his speech is halting after a cancer fight a few years back, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush talks big.

The South Side Democrat, who will be 65 in November, says he has more energy than most of his aides. He says he's ready for any comers. He maintains he works his district seven days a week.

In his 10th term, Rush is President Barack Obama's congressman, and, overwhelmingly defeated Obama when he tried for Rush's seat in 2000.

Rush is grayer and leaner now, and his voice is raspy after the 2008 fight against cancer of the salivary gland. But he coasted to victory in 2010 with 80 percent of the vote.

Rush said he doesn't lose sleep over potential rivals. "I'm a pretty seasoned guy," he said in an interview. "Been through a lot, all right? I'm not intimidated by anybody and I know how to win, all right?"

Yet at the end of June, he had less than $40,000 in campaign funds, by far the smallest war chest of any of Illinois' 19 House members, some of whom have million-dollar-plus treasuries. When Rush's campaign debts are considered, his total slips to less than $16,000.

Over the years, thousands of Rush's campaign dollars have gone to his wife, Carolyn, for political consulting and to his nondenominational Christian church. Both types of disbursements are allowed.

Rush's relative lack of cash means he has begun "dialing for dollars," in his words, as he makes the rounds in the Will County suburbs that have been remapped into his district, which also includes parts of Cook County and Chicago's South Side.

Two Republicans say they'll take on Rush. That's an uphill battle, as the seat has gone Democratic since the 1934 election. Meanwhile, quiet efforts to persuade a Democrat to challenge the old war horse have gone for naught.

Rush burst into the public eye during the late 1960s when he co-founded the Illinois Black Panther Party. While some radicals continued to fight the political establishment, Rush became part of it.

His first two tries for public office, for Chicago alderman and for the General Assembly, went nowhere. But he's been winning — mostly — since he captured a seat on the City Council in 1983, the same year the city elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, who was an ally.

Rush first won the House seat in 1992, and his only electoral defeat since came in a 1999 challenge to then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Today Rush is not only a representative, he's a reverend. An ordained Baptist minister, he earned a master's degree in theology in 1998 and started a church on the South Side in 2002. His nondenominational Beloved Community Christian Church, 6430 S. Harvard Ave., has a number of social service offshoots.

Rush is coy about how many more terms he'd like. "I wasn't born a congressman and I hope that I'm blessed not to die as a congressman," he said. "God put me here and God will take me out of here. He will give me a strong message that this is the time to leave, all right?"

Has God sent a signal?

"No. I think he's warming up," Rush replied, saying he wants to accomplish "a little bit more."

After he concluded cancer treatments, his University of Chicago surgeon said his ordeal was such that it was as if Rush had been run over twice by a Mack truck. Doctors cut into Rush's face to excise a half-inch tumor beneath a lymph node and facial nerve. Later came grueling radiation treatments.

He said he didn't realize his voice had changed until he heard himself on TV. He has had speech therapy, has been advised to have more, and may. He speaks with a raspy voice — at times, almost a growl — and can have trouble enunciating.

Rush said his illness left him wanting to make every day count. He pronounced himself "strong," said he works out every day and before going to bed writes in his "gratitude journal."

He read from one neatly scripted passage. "I thank God for my health, my healing, my hope for tomorrow, my hope in my time of need, my provision, my protection, my peace, my purpose, my witness, my ministry and my witness."

A reliably liberal vote, he counts among his achievements helping pave the way for community development banks, credit unions and other financial institutions in underserved communities. On behalf of a woman with postpartum depression who took her life, he pushed for more federal dollars for research into the malady. He has shined the light on "food deserts," low-income areas lacking grocery stores and access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

He played a pivotal role in passage of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

He touts smaller victories, from a new post office in Alsip to a new ZIP code for Evergreen Park, where, aides said, residents were tired of high insurance bills because they were being confused for Chicagoans.

There have been failures, too, including gun-control efforts. Still worrisome are the economic straits of many of his constituents, whose unemployment he put at 17 percent, and, counting discouraged workers no longer looking, 37 percent.

"The economic status of my constituents is still as bad or worse and it's never changed," said Rush, who held a job fair in August.

The gloomy prospects for some of Rush's South Side constituents are sure to be exploited by rivals. Chicago police Officer Frederick Collins, a Republican and tea party member who is running, charged that Rush had been "missing in action."

Frederick, who lives outside the district on the West Side, cites crime, joblessness, a sea of foreclosures and other woes. "I'm not running against Bobby Rush, I'm running against the issues that plague the residents of the 1st District," he said.

Another hopeful is the Republican mayor of Blue Island, Donald Peloquin, a mortician and funeral home owner. He said more needs to be done for economic development, including redeveloping old industrial sites as intermodal transportation hubs.

Democrats whose names get tossed around as potential challengers — including state Sen. Kwame Raoul, 46, and 4th Ward Ald. Will Burns, 38 — said they won't challenge Rush. Asked about the area's rising stars, Rush cited state Sen. Mattie Hunter, the majority caucus whip; Ald. Michelle Harris, 8th; and former 6th Ward Ald. Freddrenna Lyle.

This year, Rush has gone to the House floor to publicly mourn constituents who have died and to laud Orland Hills for its 50th anniversary. On a more substantive score, he criticized Republicans, who recaptured House control in January, for holding a hearing on radicalization within the U.S. Muslim community.

Does he shy from meaty issues? "There are a lot of people who spend all of their time before the cameras on the House floor," he said. "I pick my fights."

But some Democrats complain that he's ineffective. "That's what attracted Barack to challenge him in the first place: He was considered a 'back bencher,'" said one longtime political activist in his district, who because of work in public policy did not wish to be identified.

Friends disagree. On the South Side, Timuel Black, a longtime activist and former teacher, said Rush may be older and frailer but he continues to advocate for the less fortunate "whether they are black, white or brown."

At DePaul University, political scientist Michael Mezey said Rush's reputation is that of a strong liberal who is neither a show horse with a national name nor a work horse who has developed an expertise so great that other lawmakers seek advice and information. "He does his job," Mezey said. "He shows up for work. He takes care of the constituency. There are a large number of people like that."

His Beloved Community Church, and its affiliated health care center and youth programs, likely have helped burnish his reputation. Rush, who said he preaches almost every Sunday before 75 to 150 people, agreed to be photographed at the church on Sept. 11, then changed his mind, saying through spokeswoman Renee Ferguson that the church board would not allow it.

The church itself has received more than $165,000 from Rush's campaign treasury. He's paid wife Carolyn as a consultant; since 2002, she's received $270,500 from the war chest. "She's a bit underpaid for what she does," according to Rush, who said she manages the political operation, oversees the filing of Federal Election Commission reports and gives advice.

Rush is close to Bill and Hillary Clinton and has campaigned for scores of candidates, including Gov. Pat Quinn. He was outspoken in favor of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's controversial decision to name Roland Burris to fill Obama's Senate seat.

He also has friends in the GOP, among them Dennis Hastert, the former House speaker from Illinois. Both Rush and Hastert said the speaker was key in getting federal dollars for the Beloved Community Family Wellness Center.

Hastert said he's betting on another Rush win despite redistricting.

"Bobby has a good chance of holding on, because he has a good base in Chicago where his votes turn out," he said.

kskiba@tribune.com

.

Ex-Red Army Faction terrorist refuses to testify at trial of former comrade

2011-09-24T22:25:00.001-07:00

Ex-Red Army Faction terrorist refuses to testify at trial of former comrade

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ex-red-army-faction-terrorist-refuses-to-testify-at-trial-of-former-comrade/2011/09/15/gIQAk497TK_story.html

September 15

BERLIN — A former leader of the leftist Red Army Faction terrorist organization is refusing to testify at the trial of a one-time comrade.

Christian Klar, 59, told a Stuttgart state court Thursday that he would make no statement concerning the 1977 murder of federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, the dapd news agency reported.

Klar, who was convicted of involvement in Buback's murder and served 26 years of a life sentence before being released in 2008, had been called to testify in the trial of Verena Becker.

The 59-year-old Becker faces three counts of murder for allegedly playing a leading role in the fatal ambush of Buback, his driver and bodyguard. She denies involvement.

She was charged after prosecutors said new DNA evidence linked Becker to a letter from the RAF sent the day of the attack.

Celebrating 40 years out of the closet

2011-09-24T21:42:00.001-07:00

Celebrating 40 years out of the closet

http://www.campustimes.org/2011/09/22/celebrating-40-years-out-of-the-closet/

By Leah Buletti
September 22, 2011

In the middle of a summer night in 1969, a group of policemen violently descended on the Stonewall Inn, a gay nightclub in the heart of New York City's Greenwich Village that had become an enclave of the up-and-coming gay rights movement.

Bottles, rocks and gunshots rained down upon the crowd of about 200 homosexual bar-goers in a melee that lasted most of the night and decimated the Stonewall Inn — already a burgeoning icon for the city's gay community. Battling on the streets lasted for days as police and homosexuals swarmed into the street, including beloved Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who may have given the moment its most apt christening: "Gay power! Isn't that great! It's about time we did something to assert ourselves."

The gay rights movement had begun.

A little more than a year later, on Oct. 3, 1970, two gay UR students, Bob Osborn and Larry Fine, stood on the steps of Todd Union, anxiously waiting to see if anyone would attend a talk by guest speakers from two regional gay rights groups. The event was the first of its kind in the University's history, at a time when society around UR was pervasively homophobic. But no fewer than 100 people came out for the event.

The fledgling group became the Rochester Gay Liberation Front and was granted formal recognition by UR, given an on-campus office and an operating budget. Part of their start-up included The Empty Closet, a four-page chronicle of the emerging gay rights fight, first published in January 1971.

The Empty Closet, which is the oldest monthly gay newspaper in New York state and one of the oldest continuously published LGBT papers in the country, transferred hands from the Rochester Gay Liberation Front to the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley (GAGV) — the name officially given to the original group of UR students in 1973. The GAGV still publishes The Empty Closet in its current form — a 40-page monthly tabloid newspaper that covers local, state, national and international news, as well as issues pertaining to the LGBT community.

Forty years after Osborn and Fine stepped out from the crowd to lead a movement in its infancy, The Empty Closet has transformed into a dynamic newspaper, celebrating its 40th anniversary this fall with a completely digitized archive, thanks in large part to UR's inculcation of the movement and financial support.

As of this fall, every issue of The Empty Closet from April 1971 to April 2010 has been digitized. The complete collection will be available on UR's online database for research purposes this semester, while the microfilm will be kept in the Rare Books and Special Collections secure storage area.

"We needed to have it digitized to make it a complete record of gay liberation in upstate New York," Evelyn Bailey, chair of a local LGBT history committee called Shoulders to Stand On, said.

To fund the project, Bailey's committee applied to numerous grants — to no avail — before turning to Richard Peek, Director of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Rush Rhees Library, who helped secure preservation grant money from UR. The CD digitization process was paid for by an anonymous donor.

Besides creating a commemorative collection of the archived issues that is for sale in celebration of the 40th anniversary, one of the main motivations for archiving The Empty Closet is a documentary project.

"If we hadn't digitized it, we would have to go through literally 40 years worth of newspapers and extract news. It would be an incredible task," Bailey said.

Bailey's committee is still working to finalize funding for the documentary, which she aims to complete by 2012 or 2013. They need to raise about $120,000.

"A community doesn't exist until history has been documented and written," she said of the importance of the project. "It's too easy to dismiss a group of people who may be involved in politics but don't have a documented history of participation. The gay community has been extremely active in Rochester, and we want it to be on record so that the LGBT community cannot be dismissed as here one day and gone the next."

Even after the passage of legislation that legalized gay marriage in New York state this July and the excitement surrounding The Empty Closet's anniversary, students have varied opinions on the LGBT community at UR.

"UR is big on supporting diversity, and I think the UR community, at least as far as I've experienced, is really accepting, tolerant and open," junior Casey Aten, publicity chair for UR's Pride Network, said. "But I also find that LGBT support is kind of background support here — people think [sexual orientation] doesn't really matter, so they think you don't really need [the support]."

Pride president and senior Melanie Davidoff said that while she doesn't feel like students are generally aware of The Empty Closet, she thinks the LGBT community at UR is strong.

"We have a decent core of LGBT students who are interested in activism, along with many others who help to create a sense of community via social events," she said. "I do think more could be done to create a larger sense of LGBT community in Rochester as a whole, rather than a bunch of smaller communities at the different colleges and in the city itself."

Davidoff also said she thinks the administration at UR has been supportive of the LGBT community in recent years, which she said is especially important given the group's push to make UR a more "transgender friendly zone."

"I've had pretty good experiences — I have good friends and feel comfortable talking about my sexuality with everyone I meet on campus, including professors," senior Charles Genese, who has been involved with Pride for four years and served on the Shoulders to Stand On Committee, said.

Genese concurred that few students, even in the LGBT community, are aware of The Empty Closet, but said that UR Pride still has a strong relationship with GAGV. Pride's fall general interest meeting saw the largest turnout in recent years, he added.

"My one complaint is that many of my gay friends find it hard to form relationships on campus because LGBT students are, of course, in the minority and many open people don't make it public knowledge," he said.

Junior Alanna Scheinerman, who is not formally involved in Pride, said she thinks prejudice still exists at UR and that more could be done to educate students.

"I think UR is a very open and welcoming community for LGBT people, but organizations like Pride aren't particularly active on campus," she said. "Gay rights issues aren't really advertised … there aren't many awareness events that would educate the average student. For example, ['don't ask, don't tell'] was finally repealed for good this week and there wasn't a celebratory rally or anything."

In 40 years, the gay rights movement has covered an immense amount of ground, starting from that night in Greenwich Village. From there, two brave souls on a cold October night went on to revolutionize LGBT acceptance in Rochester. Even recently, we see improvements in gay rights with this past Tuesday's official end to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Despite society's strides, bullying and suicides at the hands of the uneducated leave us wondering, as Bob Dylan asked, how much longer we will go on, pretending we just don't see.

Buletti is a member of the class of 2013.

You can contact Leah at leah.buletti@rochester.edu.

Friend recalls Arthur Evans, gay rights leader and York native

2011-09-24T21:40:00.001-07:00

Friend recalls Arthur Evans, gay rights leader and York native

http://www.yorkdispatch.com/news/ci_18952897

GREG GROSS The York Dispatch

Updated: 09/22/2011

When Arthur Evans saw what he perceived to be injustice, he sought to change it.

Evans, a leader in the gay rights movement, gained notoriety after the 1969 protest of a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, in New York City's Greenwich Village.

But before Evans was a leader in a movement that has made leaps and bounds the past 50 years, he was just a boy from York.

Evans died Sept. 11 of a heart attack in his San Francisco home. He was 68.

Activism: While not present at the 1969 protest, Evans was able to bundle the energy of gay men and women and their supporters to gain momentum to end the open discrimination against gays, said Hal Offen, who was Evans' friend for 40 years.

"(Evans) was brilliant at many things," Offen said. "He had a keen sense for justice."

Many years ago, a company openly refused to issue life insurance policies to gay men and women because the company claimed homosexuals were more likely to kill each other for the insurance money, Offen said.

Things like that were what motivated Evans to change how things were.

And change did come.

A number of states now allow gay marriages. Nine days after Evans' death, the federal government ended its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, allowing gay members of the armed forces to serve openly.

Such things amaze Offen.

"Our lives were not supposed to be as wonderful as they turned out to be," he said. "I, for sure, never expected to see gay marriage in my lifetime."

It was men like Evans who made that possible.

Life led: Apart from activism, Evans was also an author and a scholar. He attended Brown University and Columbia University.

He penned "Witchcraft and the Gay

Counterculture" and "Critique of Patriarchal Reason" and also translated ancient Greek and Latin to English.

Diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm last year, Evans refused surgery and instead opted to live out the rest of his life the way he wanted, Offen said.

Offen said he asked Evans what he wanted to do as death closed in. Evans replied that he wanted to stick to his routine and continue his writing and activism.

"I saw him every week. We played chess together. He had dinner at my house," Offen said.

As executor of Evans' will, Offen handled two packages that came to Evans' apartment a few days ago.

Both contained books. One was in Latin, the other in ancient Greek.

That brought a smile to Offen's face, because he knew written words brought such joy to Evans.

Offen said he'll miss his friend.

But, he added, he knows Evans led a full life and helped bring about some of the greatest advances in gay rights.

"I never lose sight of how fortunate I am to be in this place and time," Offen said.

- Reach Greg Gross at 505-5434 or ggross@yorkdispatch.com.

Gay rights activist who advocated hard line against discrimination

2011-09-24T21:37:00.001-07:00

Gay rights activist who advocated hard line against discrimination

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/obituaries/2011/0924/1224304672975.html

September 24, 2011

Arthur Evans: ARTHUR EVANS, who helped form and lead the movement in the United States that coalesced after gay people and their supporters protested against a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a New York gay bar, has died from a heart attack at his home in San Francisco. He was 68.

Evans was not at the Stonewall disturbances, but they fuelled in him a militant fervour and inspired him to join the Gay Liberation Front, an organisation started during the wave of gay assertiveness that followed. For Evans and other militants, however, the group was not assertive enough. They worried that it was diluting its effectiveness by taking stands on issues beyond gay rights – opposing the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, for example.

So in December 1969 they split off to found the Gay Activists Alliance, choosing a name to suggest more aggressive tactics.

Based in New York, the alliance became a model for gay rights organisations across the US, pushing in New York for legislation to ban discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, housing and other areas. Evans wrote its statement of purpose and much of its constitution. which began, "We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings."

To attract attention the alliance staged what its members called "zaps", confrontations with people or institutions that they believed discriminated against gay people. Among other incidents, they confronted mayor John V Lindsay of New York and went to television studios to protest about shows perceived as anti-gay, demanded gay marriage rights at the city's marriage licence bureau, and demonstrated at the taxi commission against a regulation, since abolished, requiring gay people to get a psychiatrist's approval before they could be allowed to drive a taxi.

Evans was born in York, Pennsylvania. His father was a factory worker who had dropped out of elementary school, and his mother ran a beauty shop in the front room of the family house.

He attended Brown University on a scholarship and there joined a group of self-styled "militant atheists", but left after three years and headed for New York's Greenwich Village, having read in Life magazine that it welcomed gay people. In New York, he transferred to City College and switched from political science to philosophy.

Graduating in 1967, he entered the doctoral programme in philosophy at Columbia, where he studied ancient Greek philosophy and participated in anti-war protests.

However, becoming disenchanted with academia, he withdrew from Columbia in 1972 and moved to rural Washington state, where he and a companion, calling themselves the Weird Sisters Partnership, tended a small patch of forest land and lived in a tent.

When the Washington experiment failed, Evans and his companion moved to San Francisco. There, they opened a Volkswagen repair shop they named the Buggery.

After settling in San Francisco, he wrote Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture and Critique of Patriarchal Reason (1997).

Growing up, Evans had hid his sexual orientation, though he himself was aware of it at 10, he said. By November 1970, when he was scheduled to appear on The Dick Cavett Show with other gay leaders, he had still not told his parents that he was gay. But, by his account, he did tell them he was going to be on national television.

Thrilled, they told friends and neighbours to tune in. Evans later said he regretted his handling of the matter.

Arthur Evans, born October 12th, 1942; died September 11th, 2011

A ‘Zealous’ Attorney Gets His Own Day In Court

2011-09-24T21:17:00.001-07:00

A 'Zealous' Attorney Gets His Own Day In Court

http://www.wbur.org/2011/09/21/wilson

By David Boeri
Sep 21, 2011

BOSTON — In the heat of courtroom battles, how slow to anger should judges be before declaring attorneys to be in contempt of court? It's a big question for local firebrand Barry Wilson, a well-known criminal defense attorney who recently represented now-convicted Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner in his federal corruption trial.

Wilson has a lot in common with his clients these days — they're all trying to stay out of jail. He's fighting a jail sentence after a state judge declared Wilson in contempt during a murder trial in May of this year. The Suffolk Superior Court judge held Wilson in contempt of court for being "loud, abusive, insulting and disruptive."

"He gave me 90 days. Ninety days. Not 30, not 60, 90!" Wilson said.

Ninety days in the county jail. The max, when the customary penalty is a small fine. It's a sentence that Wilson and his lawyers are hoping to avoid by coming here to the State Court of Appeals last week to get it overturned.

A lot of people, especially prosecutors and judges, think Wilson got what he's had coming to him for a long time.

"He screamed at the judge," said Associate Appeals Court Justice David Mills. In reviewing Wilson's alleged misconduct in May, Mills considered it a clear breach of decorum. "He screamed at the judge and made a scene," Mills said.

Wilson is hell on judges and prosecutors, too. He's pugnacious, a brawler who doesn't stop when the bell rings. He's as relentless as storm surf crashing on a gravel beach, which is just how he sounds.

"All I'm trying to do is stand up for my clients' rights," Wilson said. "You got to be in those pits to understand what you have to do. You're standing between your client and a jail cell. And you have an ethical, professional obligation to be a zealous advocate."

Wilson is nothing short of zealous. He started as a defense attorney in the 1970s, but he's straight out of the '60s. He wears Jerry Garcia ties, looks like a cross between Garcia and Danny DeVito, and calls judges "man."

His idol and mentor is the late and legendary radical lawyer William Kunstler. For Wilson, as for Kunstler, the world has two tones: the oppressed and their oppressors, especially the government. It's his frame of reference when defending his clients, many of them young black men charged with murder. He wins more than his share of acquittals.

Here he is in court back in May after his client — a black man — was convicted of murder:

Man it's clear that they didn't prove their case. Well, unfortunately, racism is alive and well in America. And somehow people with no evidence, none, convict the young man.

Wilson is a polarizing figure. Prosecutors hate him. He calls them "Nazis," or racists. Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley calls Wilson's behavior "repulsive."

"He has utter disregard and contempt for this institution that so many of us hold dear. When one person acts in a way that's uncivil, that strikes at the fiber of decency and fairness. I think it hurts all of us," Conley said.

It all came to a head at that murder trial in May. During jury selection, Wilson was fighting to seat some black jurors — a jury of his client's peers, Wilson said. The judge had dismissed a black woman whose two sons had minor criminal records, saying said she wouldn't be able to render an impartial verdict. When the judge, Patrick Brady, then sat a juror who had worked in law enforcement, Wilson went wild.

"Oh no, oh no. … No!" Wilson exclaimed in the courtroom.

The judge tried to interrupt Wilson.

"No, we're not going to say wait," Wilson said.

Wilson's pyrotechnics went on for six minutes.

"You're going to sit him. Lock me up now. Just lock me up, lock me up and declare a mistrial," he continued. "That's ridiculous. Fifteen years a federal agent and he's going to be unbiased — are you kidding me?"

Two weeks after that trial, during the sentencing hearing for Wilson, the same judge accused Wilson of trying to have that juror disqualified.

"Mr. Wilson said to me, 'And by the way, you got to interview that guy because he's probably standing right out there and he probably heard me and he knows,' and then he screams at the top of his lungs that I don't like him. Listen to the disk."

Here is that disk, with Wilson doing Wilson:

Wilson: I think you gotta excuse him because I think he knows I don't like him.

Brady: Mr. Wilson, is there some reason I should not hold you in contempt?

That's just what Brady did. But he delayed sentencing until after the murder case was over.

So Wilson said he was under the sword during the whole trial and therefore distracted from defending his client fully.

Then, when the time came for Wilson's hearing, Brady found his behavior "atrocious," "the worst I've seen in 22 years of presiding over trials," and sentenced him to the county jail for 90 days. This brought Wilson to the Court of Appeals and a panel of three justices last week with his attorney, Peter Parker.

"The Superior Court, this court and the [Supreme Judicial Court] caution over and over and over again (he) has to show restraint."

"Losing your temper and having a brief outburst happens to everyone, the court has to recognize that."

According to Parker, the trial judge had dropped "a nuclear bomb" without warning, and the danger of doing that is "chilling the advocacy" of defense attorneys.

But one of the Appeals Court justices didn't seem to be having any of it.

"What if he pulled a pistol out of his briefcase and put it on the table, and he says, 'I need this gun next to me to protect my client's interest'?" Mills said.

The court has not yet reached a decision, but after the hearing, Wilson was shaking his head. "I'm screwed," he said, in more graphic terms. But then he turned characteristically defiant.

"I believe this is an attempt to chill defense lawyers. If they can get Barry Wilson, then they'll get anybody," he said.

He's gone to jail before, in 1985, after refusing to testify against a client.

Wilson said if he ends up in jail this time too, he'll consider it a badge of honor. Others see his behavior as a badge of dishonor.

The Christiania Effect

2011-09-24T21:07:00.001-07:00

The Christiania Effect

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0150bwp

[see URL for audio]

Christiania celebrates its 40th birthday this year - quite an achievement for a place where an abrasive attitude to the Danish Government has meant it's always been about two weeks away from being shut down. The BBC has visited Christiania regularly over the past four decades and, in The Christiania Effect, writer and broadcaster David Goldblatt goes to the commune and examines some of those reports to tell the history of this bold experiment in free living. He has also gained access to a unique oral history of Christiania where long time members of the commune tell their own personal and sometimes surprising version of events.

In the programme David hears how an abandoned barracks in the heart of Copenhagen became a centre for liberal drugs laws, hands-off parenting and free-form architecture. He learns how it evolved from a dark and dangerous area for social drop-outs to being a focus of Copenhagen's tourist industry and a place that many of the city's residents would fight hard to defend. And he hears how it became a magnet for promoters and performers like Bob Dylan, Beck and the Arctic Monkeys.
As well as looking back at its history David assesses the future of this unique community and asks what mainstream society can learn from this unique counter-cultural experiment.

REVIEW: ‘Hair’ — The mane event

2011-09-24T00:43:00.001-07:00

REVIEW: 'Hair' — The mane event

http://www.dallasvoice.com/review-hair-%E2%80%94-mane-event-1090341.html

Posted on 23 Sep 2011

You could sense of a lot of the shock and discomfort from the audience at the Winspear Opera House as a bunch of half-naked hippies descended into their seats, swigging from their chardonnay glasses and grabbing their crotches (and hugging audience members) and handing out flowers like veterans at an airport. The '60s were before a lot of these folks were born, and most of the ones who lived through it valeted for 25 bucks in Lexus Red Parking, so they are perhaps less receptive to the communal, pot-smoking free-love message of the play than audiences a generation ago. And in fact, after intermish — which begins with 20 fully frontally naked men and women wagging their business — virtually the entire row of seats in front of me cleared out, presumably to go pray for all us sinners who hung around for Act 2.

That's the magic of Hair.

This production, which arrives direct from closing on Broadway, is full of the energy and the spirit of the original, which set the culture on its ear in 1968. That's been awhile, of course, and what has often been called the definitive "rock musical" seems less rockin' than, say, Spring Awakening, written by an actual rock musician, or Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson or American Idiot. We're uses to loud numbers and nudity onstage now.

But also, not. The message of the show — trippy, anti-war and pro-youth, sexually frank and equally fluid — is, in an era of talk about "job creators" and "Obamacare" and FoxNews, equally radical, even if the songs have entered the realm of show-tune classics more than hippie anthems. It feels oddly relevant again — especially as it deals with the draft, on the morning of the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell." All the sexual liberation and "what-makes-a-good-American" talk has renewed depth.

The production itself is fun, though it suffers a lot as it always has from problems — a long Vietnam fantasy in Act 2, marginal character development, rituals like draft-card burning that may not resonate with an audience weaned on an all-volunteer Army — though the bromance between Claude and Berger, and the hot, heroin-chic bodies of the men, add a layer of homoeroticism that you're kinda glad makes the audience a bit uncomfortable. It's good to shake people up sometimes. Peace out.

Through Oct. 2. Attpac.org.

The Beatles Would Support Ron Paul

2011-09-24T00:38:00.001-07:00

The Beatles Would Support Ron Paul

http://lewrockwell.com/orig12/miller-james1.1.1.html

by James E. Miller

September 24, 2011

My local Starbucks has been on a Beatles craze lately. For the past two weeks, albums such as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band" and "Magical Mystery Tour" have been on heavy rotation. This got me to thinking; if the Beatles were still together today, which candidate would they support to be the United States president? The answer is quite obvious: Congressman Ron Paul.

Time and time again, whenever there is a top 100 ranking for "greatest rock and roll band," "greatest album," or "most influential musical artist," the Beatles consistently come out on top. As Eric Olson of MSNBC puts it, "The Beatles are unquestionably the best and most important band in rock history." While you may agree or disagree on the musical talent of the Beatles, their influence on culture during their heyday was tremendous.

Barry Manilow, the famous soft rock crooner responsible for hits such as "Mandy," recently endorsed Ron Paul's candidacy. Just a week ago, singing legend Tony Bennett had these particularly candid remarks on the Howard Stern show:

"To start a war in Iraq was a tremendous, tremendous mistake internationally."

"But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don't make a right."

"They flew the plane in, but we caused it. Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop."

Sound familiar?

[see URL for video]

"What would we do if another country, say China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?"

There is even a Ron Paul punk rock anthem.

So would an incredibly influential band such as the Beatles jump on the anti-war and pro-market Ron Paul bandwagon? The first overtly political song by the Beatles was "Revolution" written by John Lennon in direct response to the Vietnam War.

Lyrics:

Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out
Don't you know it's gonna be all right
all right, all right

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
Don't you know it's gonna be all right
all right, all right
all right, all right, all right

The above lyrics represent a clear desire to "change the world" without violence. As Ron Paul wrote in his newest book Liberty Defined:

"People must understand that we can't use violence to have our own way over others – nor should the agents of our government have that power. Even a majority vote should never be accepted as legitimatizing government's use of violence against the people."

"People must understand that we can't use violence to have our own way over others – nor should the agents of our government have that power. Even a majority vote should never be accepted as legitimatizing government's use of violence against the people."

Lennon's criticism of Chairman Mao and communism in "Revolution," is certainly in line with Ron Paul's beliefs. Paul has always acted on the side of liberty and decentralizing power, not empowering the state for the sake of achieving his ends. In an interview with Reason magazine:

Paul: "Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that's a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they're willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws."

Ron Paul's position is one of peace and cooperation. The State, by definition, supersedes voluntary cooperation by establishing itself as a monopoly on coercion and violence. This has grown to include drug prohibition. Just in the federal prison system alone there are approximately 103,000 people locked up for drug offenses, that's 50% of the whole federal prison population.

The influence of drugs on the composition of the Beatles' music has been speculated for years. While it is widely known the Beatles used drugs during the recording of their most popular albums, they never endorsed their use. Ron Paul has never endorsed the use of drugs either but has held the strict belief that individuals have an absolute right to their body and therefore the government should abstain from prohibiting the use of narcotics. In a Republican presidential debate back in May, Paul outlined his position on drug prohibition brilliantly:

[see URL for video]

It's not a stretch to think that John Lennon or the rest of the Fab Four would get behind such a position based on property rights, self-ownership, and social harmony.

With songs like "Revolution" and "All You Need is Love," the Beatles catalog contains many songs promoting peace and non-violence. While "Revolution" is often characterized as the Beatles' most political song, "Taxman," written by the under rated George Harrison, is a scathing attack on the State's parasitic need for more revenue:

"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet."

If the Beatles were still together and all with us today, it is not farfetched to assume they would support a presidential candidate such as Ron Paul who embraces the libertarian philosophy of non-aggression that detests coercion and violence. Though John Lennon may have drifted toward anarcho-communism (think "Imagine") later in life, his message of peace and cooperation is completely in line with Ron Paul's principles.

All America needs is not another slick talking politician ready to throw his grandmother under the bus for the sake of one vote. What the country needs is a principled intellectual who holds a record of not only speaking out against the impoverishing policies of the federal government, but one who consistently advocates for peace. Ron Paul is all we need.

Milwaukee legend recalls poetry’s relationship with music

2011-09-23T01:20:00.001-07:00

Milwaukee legend recalls poetry's relationship with music

http://www.uwmpost.com/2011/09/19/milwaukee-legend-recalls-poetry%E2%80%99s-relationship-with-music/

19 September 2011
By Graham Marlowe

The fusion of poetry and music is one of human civilization's earliest forms of artistic expression, going as far as back as the illustrated walls of prehistoric caves, Native American ghost dances and Charles Cros' experiments with art songs throughout the 1800s. But the idiom – "a sonic binding" of poetry's word, as UW-Milwaukee's Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum calls it – is better traced via recordings. With numerous theories emanating from the varied approaches that poets and musicians have taken over time to differing results, Dr. Rosenblum continues to shine a light on poetry and music in his scholarship and personal artistry. Well into his 60s, Rosenblum has lived through the majority of the idiom's important moments and is compelled to recount some of history's most significant examples.

Jack Kerouac/Steve Allen recordings (1957)

Prior to these recordings, it was poetry being performed next to jazz. In the Kerouac/Allen recordings, it's as if they are overhearing each other, raising their eyeglasses and introducing themselves as they interact onstage.

When author Jack Kerouac went on The Steve Allen Show, high on the success of his novel On The Road, it incited a rock 'n' roll-inflected thirst for literature in America. Suddenly everyone had become an amateur Beat poet, when really it had just been a while since an American writer had made literature cool in the way that Kerouac's prose had been doing. The duo effect is warm and natural. Allen's playing brightens Kerouac's words at every turn.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Poetry Readings in the Cellar (with the Cellar Jazz Quartet): Kenneth Rexroth & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1957)

Recorded at The Cellar in San Francisco, this album is downright cinematic, particularly on "The Statue of St. Francis," where the true hypnosis that's felt in poetry/jazz fusions is most easily found. Ferlinghetti didn't record himself much, largely because he was too busy managing the poetry community (and the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco) to be doing much else. It's a shame he never got out of the office more.

Kenneth Rexroth – Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk (1958)

While this record contains evidence of a strong personality, like any "young" style of music, it has its shaky, developmental first steps. The juxtaposition of familiar big band jazz licks behind Rexroth's dark, contemplative images of the everyman works to varying degrees of success. (The guy can draw amazing pictures in the mind.) Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk revealed to the American public that this stuff could be fun, and that's what mattered – and still does. It's understood, in the content of Poetry, that "something important is happening, right here, right now…"

In Rexroth's words, it's different. The poetry and the jazz "happen" simultaneously but are not bound to each other. (In other words, the text and the music operate on separate planes.)

Kenneth Patchen – Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz In Canada (1959)

Performance-wise, Patchen was a wildcard to the early days of 1950s poetry, despite that his words appeal to a wide spectrum of experience. Patchen's synergy with the band puts an extraordinarily dark spin on everyday life, which he felt was transcendent. And in 1959, the relationship between jazz and poetry had only recently blossomed. But from a distance, Patchen's life-questioning observations were extraordinarily colorful in a black-and-white era.

Martin Jack Rosenblum – Music Lingo (with Jack Grassel) (1987)

Music Lingo was an innovative step for the genre and proved to be "like dropping an atomic bomb in a cornfield" for the music industry at the time of its release.

Rosenblum, a well-educated poet and Bob Dylan scholar, felt poetry had hit a wall ("boring [him] to death"). Grassel was fed up with the jazz community for not taking chances at the time (ex: Spyro Gyra, "smooth jazz").

On Lingo, the two took a jazz musician's approach to the reading of poetry, feeling out the mood of a room and focusing on the now – that time, that place, those people, right there and adjusting their improvisatory performances to that setting. Lingo's overseas popularity is strange enough, but its local, underground popularity set the stage for what artists could do with poetry from that point forward.

The Roots – "The Return to Innocence Lost" from Things Fall Apart (1999)

Things Fall Apart showed people that the Roots were also capable of startling reflections on black consciousness in the '90s (third-wave feminism, poverty, domestic violence). This track is an example of work younger audiences might recognize from their seminal 1999 album. Truth be told, however, the African American poetry experience is considerably different than that of, say, the young white male. But the complexity of that experience makes for something difficult to discuss in a concise article.

The track's gross realism (literally) finds meaning in life's darkest, saddest moments – the narrator's voice ending as a beat reporter starts dictating the details of a crime via telephone. This may be off-putting to casual Roots fans.

Various Artists – Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (1997)

This spoken word tribute album coincided with a '90s resurgence of interest in the writing of Jack Kerouac. The on-screen success of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas re-lit the fire caused by the Beat poets in the '50s and '60s and gave writer Hunter S. Thompson exactly what he didn't want: more fame. Even the guy's surprisingly-well-thought-out funeral caused a ruckus. It involved, of all things, a monolith cannon with a logo he designed for the occasion. Needless to say, the compilation might not have shined the kind of light it set out to achieve for its less-famous contributors, but it shows a different side to the personalities of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Richard Lewis.

Lastly, Kicks Joy Darkness opened up a vein of networking for the poetry community that continues today and brought a handful of fringe poets out of the darkness they were living in.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

In the world of post-rock music, an anything-goes mentality suits the best bands best. Godspeed's first album used poetry as post-apocalyptic narration from which the music is built around – a technique they've followed with nearly all of their subsequent work.

Where Godspeed succeeded in the indie-rock niche made it a tough but convincing sell to experimental music listeners at the turn of the millennium. Here the focus is lifted from the words, but the music is built around them. Through the distant rumble of strings and chaotic instrumental climaxes, the environment densely coats the narrator's words.

To be continued in next week's issue.

The Prankster: Dick Tuck

2011-09-23T01:16:00.001-07:00

The Prankster

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-prankster/BestOf?oid=3155586

Dick Tuck

by Jim Nintzel

SECRET IDENTITY: Dick Tuck

SECRET POWER: Able to cloud the minds and puncture the egos of politicians

SECRET ORIGIN: After returning home from World War II, Dick Tuck joined a new fight: The battle against GOP politicians! Who knows what bad policy proposals lurk in the hearts of Republicans? The Prankster knows!

THE REAL STORY: Born in Tucson, Dick Tuck, 87, has long been involved in the background of American politics. He was a close friend of Robert F. Kennedy and was in the kitchen with RFK when Kennedy was shot in 1968. He worked with both Pat and Jerry Brown when they were governors of California. His marriage was officiated by Hunter S. Thompson. Tuck launched his own 1966 campaign for the California State Senate at a cemetery and told reporters that just because people had died, it didn't mean they'd lost their right to vote. After he lost the race, he uttered the immortal words: "The voters have spoken—the bastards."

Tuck is particularly notorious for his pranks against Richard Nixon. Regarding their first meeting: Tuck, for some reason, was assigned the job of setting up a speech for Nixon at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Tuck rented out an enormous auditorium, invited only a few people, and introduced Nixon with a lengthy speech before asking Nixon to speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon's words to him afterward: "You've done your last advance, Dick Tuck!"

Attica rebellion commemorated

2011-09-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

Attica rebellion commemorated

http://www.workers.org/2011/us/attica_0929/

By Ellie Dorritie
Buffalo, N.Y.

Published Sep 21, 2011

When the historic rebellion at Attica Prison erupted forty years ago, many Buffalo, N.Y., activists were intensely involved with support and solidarity for the righteous demands of the prisoners, and with their long, long struggle for justice after Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered the State Police to massacre the uprising's participants.

Activists joined many demonstrations and courtroom shows of solidarity in Buffalo in the years following that massacre. During the recent 40th anniversary of the rebellion, activists who were incarcerated during that time joined with activists who carried on solidarity work in a series of events here. Others were drawn in by the deep history of the struggle centered here.

Sept. 9, was the anniversary of the date that the prisoners at Attica, after months of being denied a hearing for their grievances, rose up and took control of half the prison, saying, "We are men. We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten and driven as such." To commemorate and honor the struggle, the Prison Action Committee, WNY Peace Center, held a pilgrimage to Attica Prison, with an early morning rally in Buffalo, before a two-day walk to Attica, ending in a rally at the prison.

The evening before, a screening of the 1974 film, "Attica," was held at Burning Books. This documentary shows how the Black, Latino and white prisoners united and became brothers, and how their demands and their unity became political, inside D Yard as well as around the world. This explains why the state was so anxious to violently and brutally crush the uprising.

On Sept. 12 and 13, panels held during a Law Center conference at the suburban campus of the University of Buffalo focused on the importance of the prisoners' reclaiming of their humanity and brotherhood. The conference focused its opening panel on the fact that the state of New York still has never apologized, now after 40 years, and that those who directed and committed the murders, the governor and the state troopers, have never been held accountable.

On the evening of Sept. 12, a community forum in the center of the Buffalo — "Mass Incarceration and Its Impact on the Community" — presented panelists from prison ministries, some former prisoners themselves. These people spoke forcefully about the bitter toll taken on the most oppressed communities as the rate of imprisonment of their people skyrockets.

Over and over it was emphasized that prisons have become a huge, profitable industry, and that reforms promised after the Attica rebellion have been wiped out. This has subjected prisoners everywhere to the same old abuses.

Panelists and a community speakout called for an unrelenting fight for justice. The program was organized and presented by Prisoners Are People Too, and had nearly a dozen university and community co-sponsors.

On the evening of Sept. 13, surviving Attica Brother Dacajeweiah — "Splitting the Sky" — spoke at a second Burning Books event. He described the violence and racism directed by the state against Native nations, and told of the many years of fightback carried on, and about the fight for justice that was the Attica rebellion, and the long fight afterwards for justice that has not yet been won.

Dacajeweiah was the only person who received a conviction after that event, despite the fact that it was really a mass execution of prisoners by police. He said, "I am not here trying to make prisons a better place to live. We need to make the world a better place to live — without greed and racism — but we have to continue always to fight against the state to win — against the torturers and war criminals — so that there will still be a world for our descendants."

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

2011-09-21T22:22:00.001-07:00

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/the-black-power-mixtape-1967-1975/Content?oid=2993526

What Nixon and the FBI didn't want us to see.

By Kelly Vance
September 21, 2011

The art houses have seen a steady stream of "Baby Boomer history lessons" recently, as if that overbearing, fascinating, endlessly self-absorbed generation were hurrying to put the finishing touches on its official documentary legacy before shuffling off to that big Woodstock in the sky. They come from every angle imaginable — visual arts and feminism (!Women Art Revolution), literary hijinks (Magic Trip), Latin American politics (Nostalgia for the Light), folk music (Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune), rock music (Ladies and Gentlemen ... The Rolling Stones), hippie Berkeley-ana (Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie), etc.

But The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is unique. It gathers together a treasure trove of original film footage produced for Swedish television and shot in the US during that tempestuous period of American history, when the Black Power movement, anti-Vietnam-war protests, rebellious students, and a general resistance to authority captured the attention of the world — especially in Sweden, where in the words of filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson, documentary-makers reacted "with a combination of commitment and naïveté" to the upheavals across the Atlantic.

The gift Olsson's doc gives us is to see ourselves as others see us. The "global perspective" makes even the most over-analyzed events seem fresh. And so when Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis calmly and persuasively explain their discontent with the enigma that is America, we can listen to them with different ears, through that Swedish filter. Assembled by Olsson from archival sources, Mixtape presents the kind of news reports we very seldom saw in the US in those days, particularly on TV. The Swedes' point of view is intriguing because they don't have the same preconceptions as Americans. That distance, however, did not protect Sweden's state-run TV from being labeled as "anti-American" by none other than TV Guide. (Indeed, that Scandinavian country's skepticism of official American policy was a sore point with Washington — in 1972, when Prime Minister Olof Palme publicly denounced the US bombing of Hanoi, the US State Department angrily froze diplomatic relations with Sweden for more than a year.)

The filmmakers, who include co-producer Danny Glover, added a 2011 commentary track from people inspired by the era, among them singers Erykah Badu and Harry Belafonte, hip-hop artist Talib Kweli, and actor/director Melvin Van Peebles. Amir "Questlove" Thompson's music soundtrack is superb. But the voices from the past are what really count. This is the first time most of us have had a chance to hear Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and radical filmmaker Emile de Antonio (In the Year of the Pig, Point of Order), who offers a scathing summation of the political situation. We visit Oakland, Harlem, and Hallandale, Florida, and listen to returned Vietnam vets, Malcolm X, attorney William Kunstler, performer Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets, and Lewis Michaux, the proprietor of an African-American bookshop. These are the men and women Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and the networks didn't want us to know about.

The 16mm footage is beautiful — that grainy, fast film conveys immediacy differently than digital — and filmmaker Olsson's intentions are beyond reproach. In his "Director's Notes," he states: "The people in the film changed the world for the better. Not only for black people in America, or any marginalized group, but for all people." Catch The Black Power Mixtape before it slips away.

Scorsese's George Harrison film gets Liverpool premiere

2011-09-21T12:57:00.001-07:00

Scorsese's George Harrison film gets Liverpool premiere

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-14931924

15 September 2011

Martin Scorsese's profile of the late Beatle George Harrison is to have its UK premiere in Liverpool.

George Harrison: Living in the Material World will be screened at the city's Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) on 2 October.

The film was made in collaboration with Harrison's widow Olivia and follows his life from his upbringing in Liverpool.

It includes interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono.

'Deeply moving experience'

Scorsese, who won an Academy Award as Best Director for The Departed, said: "Like so many millions of people, I first came to know George through the music, which was the soundtrack of our world.

"George was making spiritually awake music, we all heard and felt it, and I think that was the reason that he came to occupy a very special place in our lives.

"So when I was offered the chance to make this picture, I jumped at it."

Chris Peters, general manager of Picturehouse at FACT said: "FACT is over the moon to be bringing Liverpool audiences the premiere of George Harrison: Living in the Material World in the city where George's story began.

"A spiritual and musical journey, the documentary places the imaginative and inspired eye of one of cinema's greatest filmmakers on one of the world's most influential men, and Liverpool audiences should expect a deeply moving and touching experience."

Zimmerli to mark 50th anniversary of Fluxus

2011-09-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

Zimmerli to mark 50th anniversary of Fluxus

http://ns.gmnews.com/news/2011-09-22/Front_Page/Zimmerli_to_mark_50th_anniversary_of_Fluxus.html

September 22, 2011

Fluxus, the art movement led by George Maciunas and made widely known by Yoko Ono, is returning to its starting place on the campus of Rutgers University. The celebration will be held from Sept. 24 toApril 1.

The exhibit, "at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers," is at the Zimmerli Art Museum in celebration of Fluxus' 50th-anniversary. From sculptural objects, assemblages, prints, multiples, ephemera and books to films, sound works, photographs and performance documentation, more than 60 works will be assembled at the Zimmerli from the museum's permanent holdings and private collections.

One section of "at/around/beyond" brings together works by themost influential of the Fluxus artists at Rutgers, including Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks and Al Hansen, who were teachers; Larry Miller, 1970 graduate with a Master of FineArts; and George Brecht and Philip Corner, who were each an important presence on the campus.

Watts, who taught at Rutgers for 35 years, is represented by a number of seldom-seen objects on loan from his estate, including a chrome pencil, a pair of Fluxus underwear, and a stamp machine loaded with his own stamps. Other notable objects by the Rutgers artists include Brecht's Water Yam (1963), a box of Brecht's printed instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores, which could either be performed in public or left to the imagination, and Geoffrey Hendricks'Flux Divorce Box, a wooden box inside which is Hendricks's own wedding album, sliced in half.

The Zimmerli will also present a number of Fluxus films, including 89 movies by

Robert Watts, and the Fluxfilm Anthology, compiled by Maciunas. In the reading room, visitors will be able to peruse Fluxus books like Yoko Ono's "Grapefruit" and editions from the "Great Bear" pamphlet series published by Dick Higgins'Something Else Press.

There are black-and-white prints capturing Yam Festival events such as Kaprow's Tree Happening at George Segal's Farm in North

Brunswick, the legendary Flux-mass at Rutgers in 1970, and Philip Corner's performance of Dick Higgins' "One Thousand Symphonies" (1968), a musical score created with the help of New Jersey police who fired a machine gun into sheets of music paper — the holes they made marked notes of music.

Ahighlight of the exhibition is the presentation of a Fluxus concert led by Fluxus artist

Larry Miller to be performed by a contingent of Rutgers students, 6-7 p.m. Nov. 2 as part of the museum's Art After Hours program. After the concert, visitors will be invited to participate in games of Sound Chess, Fruit and Vegetable Chess, or to play Shiomi's Fluxus

Balance game in the galleries. The Fluxus concert and the events at Art After Hours are free to Rutgers faculty, students and staff, and free to the public with museum admission.

The museum is located at 71 Hamilton St., on the campus of Rutgers University in New

Brunswick. Hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday Friday, and noon-5 p.m. Saturday and

Sunday. Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for adults over 65, and free for museum members,

Rutgers students, faculty and staff (with ID), and children under 18.

Visit www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu or call 732-932-7237, ext. 610, for more information.

An Explanation of My Withdrawal from Cal

2011-09-21T12:52:00.001-07:00

An Explanation of My Withdrawal from Cal

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-09-18/article/38407?headline=An-Explanation-of-My-Withdrawal-from-Cal

Ruby Pipes

Monday September 19, 2011

When I received my notification of acceptance from University of California, Berkeley I cried. I called my father and he wept. There was screaming and cheering and days of telling everyone I could about my incredible good fortune. As if I had won the lottery. I mean, really, I'd been accepted into the best public university in the world. Best in the world. Me: a two-time community college drop-out. Me: the girl who drank through her junior year of high school. Me: small-town kid from Washington state who was considered a success because she hadn't gotten pregnant or addicted to methamphetamines yet. Everyone got a phone call. "Ruby's going to Berkeley!" There wasn't a discussion, just working out the details so that I could get down there and start studying. My dad tapped into IRAs and life savings. We filled out all the forms we had to for the financial aid package that would double my debt within a year. It was worth it. It was Cal. I stayed up at night reading about courses I could take, surfing the internet for virtual tours of the campus. Over and over I found myself watching Mario Savio's infamous December speech on the steps of Sproul Hall. I'd make friends and family watch, too, and explain matter-of-factly, "I'm going to stand on those steps. I'm going to go down there and changing the world."

Less than two months later my sister and I were driving a van down the I-5 corridor; heading to my new apartment in Oakland and to my incoming student orientation. We were still completely awestruck. When we saw the first exit for Berkeley we both screamed. I could see the Campanile on the hill for the first time in real life. My heart was pounding. "This is it, dude! This is where everything begins." The opening speech at orientation made me cry all over again.

My sister grabbed my arm and squeezed it tight. "Holy shit," she silently mouthed to me as the professor told us what incredible human beings we are and how fantastically extraordinary we must be if we were accepted here. This theme was pounded into our heads over and over during the initiation process. "You are so lucky to be here. We could have had anyone and we wanted you." We were to be grateful for this opportunity and we were to never question the authorities that brought us there.

After the chaos of orientation was over, we decided to walk the three miles from campus to my new apartment. We left the towering white marble buildings and the yuppie-soaked sidewalks of Berkeley and made our way down the hill into Oakland. Ironic coffee shops and bookstores quickly faded out in favor of churches, liquor stores, and barred-up windows. The overwhelmingly white students of UCB disappeared and the majority population turned black. I started to feel sick, all clenched teeth and hard footsteps. "What the fuck, dude? I'm going to a school that the people who actually live here can't afford to attend. How the hell are Oakland and Berkeley adjacent to each other and absolutely nothing alike? They did that on purpose. That is so fucked up."

A week later I started my first class. I was taking one class over the summer to get the swing of it and finish up my last admission requirement. It was an English class on the Black Arts Movement taught by an incredible graduate student. We read Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed. I fell in love with the honesty of an entire generation of people and the discussions that my professor facilitated were thought provoking and beautiful. The class had eleven other students and it was two hours of bliss, twice a week. This was what I'd come to Berkeley for. Learning about people that wanted to change the world and discussing it with the people who— in the not so distant future—would. I got a 4.0 that term. But I was still boggled by the fact that all my neighbors were black and all my classmates were white.

The fact that even though I could ride my bike to my school, it was still so incredibly out of reach to anyone I spent my off time with. And I began to question why I was paying close to $30,000 of money I didn't have to support an institution that is not only not helping their community, but actually cutting the benefits of the people that work there. How could I go home and talk to my neighbors, single immigrant parents who worked on the custodial staff at Cal, who weren't getting a raise this year and were facing not being able to pay their rent. Where the hell was my money going? It wasn't even my money. It was my debt that I was willingly taking on to support a system that is so profoundly broken. A system that continues to raise tuition and drop standards. While the vital workforce is denied their promised pay increases, a new football stadium is built. While the students drink coffee in the Free Speech Movement Café, no one mentions how nothing that influential has happened at Cal since. I came to this school because I foolishly believed that it practiced the things it preached. I came to this school because I thought that I was giving my time and money to an institution that wanted its students to succeed and genuinely believed in humanity. I came to this school on a forty-year-old premise and a romanticized idea.

When Mario Savio stood on the steps of Sproul on December 2, 1964 he said, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." The students and faculty of Cal all know this, but they do not live it. It's the big-picture equivalent of standing on a street corner in Nikes, trying to get a petition to close sweatshops signed. Coming in, I knew that universities were corporations cleverly disguised as pinnacles for higher education where great minds would meet and build the future. I naively believed that Berkeley had to be different. Unfortunately, the school has had its reputation so well cemented that it no longer has to provide that difference. In a world where a Bachelor's Degree is just another box that you are expected to check if you want to "succeed", the premiere university to earn it at can let thousands of students pass through unnoticed without anyone raising an eyebrow. They can treat their employees badly. They can raise their tuition and fees in tandem with their administrator's salary. They can put 500 students in a classroom and charge hundreds of dollars for a term's worth of books. They can turn out a graduating class of privileged white kids that don't understand a thing about the real world or why they are now part of the problem. I understand that this problem is not unique. I understand that the university system is inherently corrupt. I understand that the country is fundamentally broken. These are all things that I know—that Cal would never teach me, mind you. What I also understand is that being angry is not enough. That no matter how many students turn out to rallies about tuition hikes or talk about how Berkeley ought to take better care of its employees or how wrong it is that minority groups—even when they are in majority—are not presented with the same options and few will go to university we are still supporting it. We still take on the debt or hand over the cash to help this machine perpetuate this type of blatant corruption.

So I had a choice to make. I could go through the next two years and continue to take on tens of thousands of dollars of personal debt to fuel this corrupt machine for a piece of a paper that may or may not do me any good. I could continue to put my life on hold and act as if I'm going to be able to be proud of the place I got my degree. Like I'm going to be able to hang it on a wall and go fight for human rights and social justice and not remember the employees on staff that were taken advantage of right in front of me while I got it. (Maybe even so I could get it.) I could act like the mountain of debt putting a choke-hold on me while I try to enter the professional world is really going to be worth the educational quality. Like there will be anything I got at Cal that I couldn't get somewhere else for half the price and a quarter of the social injustice. Or I could leave. My parents raised me knowing that you vote with your dollar more often than your ballot. And I positively refuse to continue to support what the University of California system is doing. We're here again, Mario Savio. It has become so odious that I must throw my body against the gears. It may not stop the machine, but my withdrawal most definitely won't help it continue forward in this way.

Radical students in changing times

2011-09-19T02:09:00.001-07:00

Radical students in changing times

http://dailycollegian.com/2011/09/15/radical-students-in-changing-times-by-max-calloway/

By: Max Calloway | September 15, 2011

Today, only some seniors and juniors remember the days of the Radical Student Union. Unfortunately for current first-years, the organization disbanded in 2009.

But the group – originally founded in 1969 as a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society –helped leave a left hand print on the University of Massachusetts student body. Today, the RSU's spirit survives through the International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, Food Not Bombs, Students for a Free Tibet, Students Against the War, Bikes Not Bombs and, of course, the famed Cannabis Reform Coalition.

Granted, UMass is one of the better places for such radical roots to flourish.

The valley has been fertile ground for community organizing of a humanitarian bent for generations. But it's not just the result of a large concentration of educated, wide-eyed, idealistic youth looking for any excuse to "expand minds" or naively rail against perceived social problems in a relatively small area – it's just the area.

Despite boasting one of the premier business and management programs in the country, UMass is also known for housing one of three east coast economics departments that lean towards the theories of a certain heavily bearded, German philosopher whose name, in select circles, was taboo during the Cold War.
Yes, UMass' economics department is Marxist.

The University also boasts its own student-run critical theory department: Social, Thought and Political Economy. Its insignia is the Red Star: terrifying. And the University is also home to a number of cooperatively-run student businesses whose goals, at times, seem to be anything but turning profits.

Even graduate students at the University have a history of social justice activism and radical action. The massive student strike that occupied the bunker-like Whitmore Administration Building during the late fall of 2007 demanded a lowering of student fees, more financial support for graduate students with families and a general increase in student voice. The police presence that ultimately brought the sit-in to a dramatic close, however, served to illustrate the state of contemporary student action here at UMass and in college cultures at large.

After occupying the building for over an hour, Massachusetts State Police officers in full riot gear came knocking at the front door. They offered an ultimatum: get out or get arrested. Unless my understanding of the issue is misinformed, isn't the definition of civil disobedience to knowingly break the law of your own volition as an expression of social, political or economic dissent? Isn't arrest a common reaction to meaningful protest in the contemporary police state?

The old stories of police action against steadfast civil rights and campus activists during the Vietnam War are, at this point, ingrained in the American psyche. But, much to my surprise, rather than embrace the purest tradition of civil disobedience and accept institutional punishment for unabashed expression of citizen grievance, protest organizers in the aforementioned 2007 Whitmore demonstration decided that the sit-in got the point across and that arrest just wasn't worth it – better to show flexibility than fanaticism.

In the end, many of the demands were met and the protest was a success in terms of its immediate goals but I was still left with a pang of doubt. Why hadn't anyone been willing to give blood, metaphorically, for the cause? This giving of blood in the name of some "noble goal" is an honorable tradition of civil disobedience. Why was it not honored that day in Whitmore?

Max Calloway is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at mcallowa@student.umass.edu.

Bob Weir at SF MusicTech Summit

2011-09-19T02:01:00.001-07:00

Bob Weir at SF MusicTech Summit: TRI takes sight & sound beyond 'Furthur'

http://www.examiner.com/culture-events-in-national/bob-weir-at-sf-musictech-summit-tri-takes-sight-sound-beyond-furthur

Rick Marianetti

September 13, 2011

The future of Internet sound and visual technology took the stage yesterday at the 9th biannual MusicTech Summit in San Francisco.

Besides experimental instrument demos and panels covering everything from music apps to navigating the legal conundrums of new-tech, the scene was energized by three generations of indie rock stars: Miles Doughty and Kyle McDonald of Slightly Stoopid, Jack Conte of Pomplamoose, Joe Satriani, and Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir of Furthur.

Weir appeared with CNN's Laurie Segall to talk about his Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI) in San Rafael. He began the conversation recounting the beginnings of the Grateful Dead's famed technical and acoustical finesse.

In 1965, Stanley Owsley met Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions -- soon-to-be the Warlocks, Ken Kesey's house band -- before morphing into the Grateful Dead.

"Owsley was known to be an LSD king, a genius. He made a lot of money selling what was not illegal at the time," Weir said. Owsley was not only a chemist and psychedelic marketeer, but a brilliant sound engineer as well.

"He was a dog on the bone of the future of music – and a quality freak," according to Weir.

Owsley set up the band with McIntosh amps and theater speakers. He developed an amplification system that became known as the "wall of sound," a label appropriated from Phil Spector. While Spector became famous for his audio-mixes of layered vocal harmonics and lush orchestration created for the monophonic sound systems of his day, Owsley focused on perfecting the acoustics of electronic instruments in live performance.

To achieve the sonically undistorted effect he was looking for, he built 45-foot tall towers of stacked amplifiers that mutually propagated each other's sound. The whole system took an entire day to set up, so one-night stands were logistically and financially impossible. Owsley died in a car crash in Australia in March.

TRI

Flash forward to today. "The Internet will Furthur influence music," Weir said, tongue not visibly in check. "It started about four years ago. At first, it was just a rehearsal space."

Then API Audio Products offered to equip the studio with a high-end system in exchange for a performance by Weir.

They couldn't make enough money to make the business model work, so he brought in Dennis "The Wiz" Leonard and John Cutler, who had produced several Grateful Dead records and mixed sound for their live shows.

They installed a Meyer Sound Constellation System that includes 20 mikes installed in the ceiling that can make musicians sound like they're in Carnegie Hall, a cathedral, or hockey arena at the touch of a button.

"You can bring the listener inside the band," Weir said.

Tonight Slightly Stoopid will perform two sets starting at 6:00 p.m. PDT. The world-wide Internet broadcast will be accessible to mobile devices, Internet-ready HDTV home theaters, and everything in between.

Featured guests include Karl Denson (Greyboy Allstars, Tiny Universe), Ian Neville (Dumpstaphunk, Funky Meters), Don Carlos (Black Uhuru) and surprises galore. Slighty Stoopid members will do a live Q&A via Facebook and Twitter between sets.