ARTHUR MAGAZINE ARCHIVE

David
Hatcher Childress

“Rogue adventurer and maverick
archaeologist, David Hatcher Childress,takes the reader on unforgettable
journeys deep into deadly jungles, windswept mountains and scorching deserts
in search of lost civilizations and ancient mysteries. Travel with David
and explore stone cities high in mountain forests and fantastic tales of
Inca treasure, living dinosaurs, and a mysterious tunnel system. Whether
he is hopping freight trains, searching for secret cities, or just dealing
with the daily problems, of food, money, and romance, the author keeps
the reader spellbound. Includes both early and current maps, photos, and
illustrations, and plenty of advice for the explorer planning his or her
own journey of discovery.

    
“At the age of 19 David Hatcher Childress left the United States on a six
year research and adventure odyssey.

    
“Childress would study firsthand the ancient civilizations of Africa, the
Middle East and China; along with journeying into dangerous territory occasionally,
like Uganda during the overthrow of Idi Amin.

    
“Further expeditions to South America, Africa and remote Pacific Islands,
along with his books and media attention certified Childress as the Real
Life Indiana Jones. 

    “From
Childress further 20 years of global search for lost cities, ancient mysteries
and clues of humankind’s origins, The LOST CITIES SERIES of 8 titles has
come about.

    “The
style of this author is an entertaining blend of his personal experiences
with people and legend along the way coupled with well researched facts
that can give both the armchair adventurer and hardened Skeptic somewhere
to hang their hat. “

John McLaughlin’s new LP
was 12 years in the making. Meditation kept him sane, he tells Martin Longley

26 February 2004 The
Independent

 

The career of John McLaughlin
is full of extreme musical contrasts. When his guitar was electric – as
with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tony Williams’s Lifetime – he gave us
frenetic runs at awesome speeds, cloaked in murderous feedback. But when
he moves to an acoustic guitar, he is one of the most delicately sensitive
players, exploring Indian classical music with Shakti, or reinventing flamenco
with Paco de Lucia.

    
The Yorkshire-born McLaughlin flew to New York in 1969; two days later,
he was playing with Miles Davis on the sessions for In a Silent Way. McLaughlin
stayed in Manhattan for 15 years, but has now lived in Monaco for the past
20. When we meet, his thumbs are encased in sticking plasters. Has he been
playing too much vigorous axe, fast and intricately picked? Er, no: he
hurt them during a spell of DIY.

    McLaughlin
recently released Thieves and Poets, an ambitious work for orchestra and
improvised guitar that was 12 yearsin the making. McLaughlin considers
it a monumental effort. “That was without doubt my magnum opus,” he says.
“I never worked so hard on a recording.”

    Improvisation
lies at the heart of McLaughlin’s playing. “I’m improvising a lot. I’m
not a classical player. I don’t want to be a classical player. I love to
improvise, because things happen that never happen anywhere else.”

    The standards
on the album are all identified with jazz pianists. “I started off as a
piano-player,” McLaughlin says. “I was 11 when I started guitar. Blues
came, and I was blown away by that. And then, in the space of four years,
flamenco, jazz and Indian music. By the time I was 16, I was already under
the influence.” All those are improvising forms, of course.

    
In the late Sixties, McLaughlin and the Wolverhampton-born bassist Dave
Holland shared a flat in London, before both were discovered by Miles Davis.
“Can you get more lucky than that, for a European jazz musician? We were
sitting in this club, and Miles turned round and said, ‘It’s time you formed
your own band.’ This is the most honest man I ever met. Brutally honest.”

    In 1997,
Zakir Hussain was invited to tour by the Asian Music Circuit and given
free rein to choose his musicians. The tabla-player met McLaughlin and
suggested a Shakti revival. “I’m hooked again,” McLaughlin says. “Shakti
are phenomenal players. I have a great affection for Indian culture and
music. They’re delightful people just to be with – there’s a wonderful
atmosphere in the group.”

    That
wasn’t the case with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Between 1980 and 1985, McLaughlin
tried to re-form the original band because it had ended in such acrimony.
“This really pissed me off, because music’s not about that – it’s not about
your ego. It’s about joyful experience or moving experience. We were together
only two years. I think we had too much success too quickly. I’d just finished
this Love Devotion Surrender tour with [Carlos] Santana. All was not well.
Jan [Hammer] and Jerry [Goodman] would not talk to me any more, which was
very weird. We went on stage for the first concert and they still weren’t
talking to me. We had a break and I said, ‘I don’t care if I’m the worst
sonofabitch in the world, but spit it out! I don’t want to play with people
who don’t speak to me.’

    
But they just turned round and walked out of the room. Next time I saw
them I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I don’t want to
live like this. If you don’t want to talk to me, then we’ll fold the band
and you do what you want, and that’ll be the end of that.’ They went their
own way and formed their own band, but they were soon at each other’s throats.
Human nature!

    “It was
a great band. Jerry came to me some time later and said that he couldn’t
believe he was responsible for the break-up. He regretted it deeply.”

    McLaughlin
gave up trying to re-form the original Mahavishnu Orchestra. John and Jerry
renewed their friendship, but Jan never called. “I must have been a little
weird at that time,” McLaughlin says. “I was studying meditation with Sri
Chinmoy and had a spiritual name. Maybe that got up their noses, I don’t
know. I didn’t ask them to meditate with me, or pray. I don’t care, they
could have as many girls as they want, do drugs. Everyone’s got to live
the way they want to.”

    McLaughlin’s
spiritual quest is central to him. “I have a profound affection for
Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism’s particular ways of meditating. This is the
way I want to live, because it makes me feel good. I’m an old hippie: I
did a lot of acid, a lot of grass, a lot of other things. By
the end of the Sixties it was clear to me that to have an altered state
of consciousness is very important, for sanity’s sake. For
my own sanity, let’s say. I can only speak for myself. I didn’t want
to have an altered state of consciousness by ingesting chemicals, or mushrooms,
or stuff like that. This became part of my life by the end of the Sixties.
I will do it until I’m gone. I’m convinced that it helps me not just mentally,
intellectually or spiritually, but physically.” He must be right, judging
by his trim, youthful appearance.

    
Shakti will tour again this summer, probably in a double bill with Jeff
Beck. “My old comrade-in-arms, another one who’s about as deaf as me. Listen,
when you put everything up to 11, your ears pay for it eventually…”

    The two
toured together regularly in the 1970s, and McLaughlin says Beck is his
favourite guitarist. “He’s looking for new formats, and I identify totally
with that. My next record’s going to be completely bonkers. I want to go
more underground. I think the jazz critics will really crucify me this
time.”

    All McLaughlin’s
musical incarnations are brought together on a new box set of live recordings
made at the Montreux Jazz Festival between 1974 and 1999. McLaughlin hadn’t
heard that music since it was played. “It was very emotional for me, to
hear this music, these bands. I don’t have time to listen much to what
I do. It was so powerful, very nostalgic.”

     
McLaughlin is also recording a DVD guitar tutorial, documenting the content
of his masterclasses. “Teaching is a very strange thing. I believe that
all we can do is show how we do what we do, starting with the basics. How
to master improvisation, exercises, development of phrases.

    “I’m
62 years old. I’ve got a lot of stuff in my head and I don’t know when
I’m going to go. Jazz musicians are not known for their longevity. I want
to get it down, so people have access to it.”

 

‘Thieves and Poets’ is
out now on Emarcy; Verve is reissuing his 1992 album ‘Que Alegria’; and
the 17-disc box set ‘The John McLaughlin Montreux Concerts’, is available
through Warner Jazz 

A former intelligence officer
walked free from the Old Bailey today after an accusation of disclosing
information in the run-up to the Iraq war was dramatically dropped. 

   The Crown Prosecution
Service refused to go into the reasons why, after nearly a year, it had
decided to offer no evidence against Katharine Gun. 

    But both
Ms Gun, 29, and her legal representatives demanded explanations of the
circumstances leading up to today’s about-turn. 

    Her counsel,
Ben Emmerson QC, said: “Katharine Gun is entitled to know – and, perhaps
more importantly, the public is entitled to know.” 

    Ms
Gun, 29, of Moor End Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, had been accused
of leaking a memo on an alleged American “dirty tricks” campaign. 

    She
was arrested in March last year and in June she was sacked from her job
as a translator at the Government Communications Headquarters, the security
service’s main monitoring centre. 

    In November
she was charged under the Official Secrets Act, accused of disclosing security
and intelligence information. 

    But another
three months passed before the CPS finally informed her lawyers yesterday
that the case was to be dropped. 

   
She had been accused of disclosing a request allegedly from a US National
Security Agency official requesting help from British intelligence to tap
the telephones of UN Security Council delegates in the run-up to the war
in Iraq. 

   
Ms Gun said at the time: “Any disclosures were justified because they exposed
illegality by the US, who tried to subvert our security services.” 

    
She left court today saying “I have no regrets and I would do it again.” 

    She had
no idea why the charge had been dropped. “But I would like to know why,”
she added. 

    Ms Gun’s
solicitor John Welch added: “It is quite appalling that a whistleblower
who had acted in good conscience should have been threatened with two years’
imprisonment for exposing that the American Government had asked our Government
to do something which was illegal and would have undermined the deliberations
of the United Nations.” 

    
But the Crown refused to give a fuller explanation of why it had changed
its mind ˆ in spite of being continually pressed to do so in court by Ms
Gun’s barrister. 

    
After the judge formally entered a not guilty verdict, Mr Emmerson said
he was “bound to raise issues about the way this case has been conducted
by the Crown Prosecution Service. 

    He said:
“Katharine Gun was arrested on March 5 last year following the publication
in The Observer newspaper of the contents of an e-mail which she admits
having disclosed, having received it through her employment at GCHQ. 

    
“After that, eight months passed during which consideration was given by
the Attorney General whether she should be prosecuted.” 

    
He went on: “On November 13 she was charged. Her first appearance was in
magistrates’ court on November 27. It is her first appearance here today.
Last Friday, an article appeared in The Guardian newspaper indicating that
the case was to be dropped today. 

    “Apparently,
it was sourced to sources close to the prosecution. Those who instruct
me rang the CPS and were told it was not possible to confirm that was the
Crown’s intention. 

    “Yesterday,
on February 24, the defence served on the prosecution a document setting
out her defence and making requests for disclosure certain diplomatic communications
and certain items of Government legal advice. 

    
“A call was received yesterday afternoon from the CPS indicating a decision
had been taken to drop the case. There are two issues requiring serious
examination.” 

    Mr Emmerson
told the judge the first issue requiring examination was “whether, by whom
and why the decision was leaked to The Guardian six days before it was
communicated to the defence. 

    “If a
decision was made last Friday, why was it not communicated to the defence
and if it had not been taken last Friday, what has happened in between?” 

     
He pointed out that eight months had elapsed between Ms Gun’s arrest and
the decision to charge her, and another three months since she was actually
charged. 

    Mr Ellison
refused to be drawn, apart from saying: “You will understand that consideration
had been given to what is appropriate for the Crown to say. It is not appropriate
to give further reasons. 

    “I am
reluctant to go further than that unless the court requires I do.” 

    
The Recorder of London, Judge Michael Hyam, asked whether there was “any
form of inquiry which I would be entitled to make?” 

    He was
told by Mr Ellison that apart from making an order for the defence costs,
there was not – as the Crown had offered no evidence. 

    The judge
freed Ms Gun from the dock where she had spent less than 30 minutes after
months of waiting. 

    As she
left court, wearing a grey trouser suit and pink top, she said: “I am absolutely
delighted and extremely relieved.” 

JON HASSELL

Official  biography:
1999

CURRENTLY LIVING IN Los Angeles
after many years in New York, composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary
creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious,
unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised,
Eastern and Western.

    After
composition studies and university degrees in the USA, he went to Europe
to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Several
years later, he returned to New York where his first recordings were made
with minimalist masters La Monte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he
met the Hindustani raga master, Pandit Pran Nath, and embarked on a lifelong
quest to transmute his teacher’s kirana vocal mastery into a new trumpet
sound and style.

    
Since 1977 he has recorded 10 highly influential, category-defeating solo
albums which have, over the years, been so widely appropriated that many
of their innovations have become woven anonymously into the texture of
contemporary music high and low.

    While
the liner notes for his 1983 record Aka-Darbari-Java describe a technology-tradition
balance resulting in a “‘coffee-colored’ classical music of the future”,
it was innovators in the field of pop such as Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel
who˜after collaborations with Hassell˜steered the Fourth World idea into
the avant-pop sphere where it has since morphed into myriad forms (“Asian
Underground”, for example).

    Notable
concert appearances have included The Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music, Serious Fun at Lincoln Center, La Foret Museum in Tokyo, the
Berlin Jazz Festival, the Paris Biennale, a Japan tour with Farafina, a
traditional group of drummers and dancers from Burkina Faso and a spectacular
appearance with eight Moroccan tribal groups at Expo 92 in Seville to celebrate
Moroccan Independence Day. A European tour in November 1997 included sold-out
performances at L’Opera de Nice and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

   Theatrical
scores include Sulla Strada, created for the Venice Biennale, and Zangezi,
directed by Peter Sellars. He has collaborated on presentations by fashion
avant-gardists Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo and for choreographic works
by Merce Cunningham and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. The Kronos Quartet
commissioned and recorded his ‘Pano da Costa’. In 1996 The Netherlands
Dance Theater commissioned Lurch ˜a major, evening-length piece choreographed
by dance maverick Gideon Obarzanek to the music of Jon Hassell, arranged
and remixed for performance by two onstage DJs.

   Fascinoma,
an all-acoustic, audiophile album produced by Ry Cooder, opens a surprising
new chapter with microscopic focus on Jon’s completely unique trumpet sound
and style, with jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson, classical Indian flutist
Ronu Majumdar and Ry’s unmistakeable guitar.

     
The director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) has cast Jon Hassell in his
new film The Million Dollar Hotel in which he will play both an onscreen
and offscreen musical role. Bono is co-producer and U2 will provide some
new songs for the soundtrack record to be supervised/produced by Eno and
Daniel Lanois. (Re-uniting these two frequent collaborators with Jon Hassell
in the same project for the first time since Hassell’s 1989 Flash of the
Spirit.)

    
This year Jon Hassell continues work on a book exploring the possibilities
of an imaginative extrapolation of the Fourth World musical paradigm into
the wider context of culture and psychology.

    Other
Activity: A remix with Björk and producer Guy Sigsworth. Television
appearances and recording with a variety of pop artists such as Howie B,
Seal, K D Lang, Ani DiFranco. Featured artist in new films and soundtrack
records such as Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors, Wim Wenders’ The End of Violence
(both Ry Cooder scores), Richard Kwietniowski’s Love and Death in Long
Island . The ABC television drama series, The Practice, for which Jon co-wrote
the theme, recently won the Emmy Award.

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

Hello Sunshine

The voices at the beginning
are a sample of Wendy and Bonnie. There’s a sense of loss in the sample:
a sense of longing. I suppose it’s a courting ballad with a ‘been so down
looks like up to me’ mentality. It’s easy to wallow in misery, it’s the
most comfortable place to be. But it’s always worth trying to get out of
it.

Liberty Belle

For this I devised cartoon
characters called Liberty Belle and Memory Lane, and Liberty Belle I suppose
represents the bells of freedom and Memory Lane represents history’s harsh
lessons that Liberty Belle always forgets. Liberty Belle represents the
American Dream, which is all conquering and has no fear. She’s young, innocent
and carefree, skipping along. Memory Lane is the flipside, the one that’s
learnt from history’s harsh realities. It’s sung from the perspective of
a bird living almost in a parallel universe to humans, oblivious to the
gravity of the games which are being played around us. I think that’s how
I feel a lot of the time, and a lot of other people do too.

Golden Retriever

I listen to a lot of people
like Davey Graham, a lot of British folk and bluesmen and European acoustic
musicians from the 50s and 60s, and musically Golden Retriever has that
kind of feel. The lyrics are a blues parody – “I met the devil at the roundabout”.
I tried to update blues vocabulary, because I think that one of the things
that bothers me most about rock and roll music is that people keep regurgitating
the same words. I try to make my own clichés, you know? It also
coincided with passing my driving test a few years back, which had a great
affect on my life. In studying for my theory test I had to absorb a lot
of road sign and driving theory vocabulary, which has made its way into
songs like Golden Retriever and Valet Parking.

Sex, War & Robots

Bunf discovered the pedal
steel during the recording of the last album and he’s played it on Hello
Sunshine and Bleed Forever. On this one we got a pedal steel player from
Cardiff called John ‘Catfish’ Thomas for this track. There are a lot of
songs on this record about broken relationships and war, and I think they
go hand in hand, but always with a positive outlook to the future.

Piccolo Snare

Piccolo Snare is a song
about societies torn apart by war and the waste of human life for nothing,
pawns in a worthless game. A lot of the vocabulary for that song comes
from the Falklands War, the Malvinas War, whatever you want to call it:
‘Tumbledown’ and ‘Skyhawks’, etcetera. It could be about any war, but that
was a war I remembered from when I was a kid where people from my area
were dying, as the media tried to maintain some ridiculous degree of jingoism
Apart from using the vocabulary it’s generally a song about people’s misguided
belief in flags. All flags are tarnished; they were only invented so that
people wouldn’t shoot their own side in the war. It’s a song in at least
three parts. It starts off folk rock in feel, and builds up to a cosmic
funk coda!

Venus And Serena

It’s about a child, who
can’t communicate with his elders, growing up with two pet tortoises called
Venus and Serena. But he feels that the reptiles understand. I suppose
it’s similar to Liberty Belle in that sense, in that in this day and age
the turtle seems to take on an image of wisdom compared to the people elected
to governors. It uses tennis vocabulary to make the point. Venus and Serena
have beautiful names and they seem to have exemplary powers. I think it’s
about making pictures in people’s minds.

I’m trying to get into balladeering
and narrative in songs, but I don’t think I’ve perfected it by any means.
You can put this one down to my struggle with narrative! After a song like
Piccolo Snare you need a bit of light to make sure that people don’t go
out and jump off the nearest bridge. We feel we have some social responsibility
to uplift people. 

Father Father #1 and #2

These were in the DADDAD
tunings. I think it puts some breathing space in the album. They also help
to join songs together in mood, they help to bring the album down, or build
it up again and give it some kind of consistency. They were originally
the bookends of the song-cycle.

Bleed Forever

Bleed Forever is about the
radiation that descended all over North Wales after Chernobyl, and the
general proliferation of nuclear power stations in the area. There was
a huge increase in leukaemia in children and some livestock are still not
allowed to be sold on the market. There’s even a Geiger counter feel to
Cian’s synth on this song! This was recorded pretty much live. Often during
a live take I sing the wrong lyric, so the line about the skin care consultant
ended up staying in. I suppose we didn’t care necessarily if it was in
tune or not just as long as it sounded human. I suppose it’s about how
you don’t see radiation and how you don’t really know if it’s affecting
you or not. And how it could wipe whole cultures out. Another invisible,
or ‘phantom’, power source. 

Out Of Control

It’s our most Iron Maiden
song. I think Golden Retriever is pretty heavy rock as well. I think it’s
pre-metal, if you want to get technical. ‘Ninja Jihad’ sounds like a ridiculous
cartoon character. They’re very flippant lyrics, they just regurgitate
what we see: everything seems out of control. It’s like an over-dramatic
theme to a current affairs programme! Again it’s in DADDAD. It balances
out the album musically it wakes it up when it could fall asleep. 

Cityscape Skybaby

When we went to Colombia
in 1997 we got invited to this Marxist village, they were having this five
day fiesta to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the murder of the local
landowner. It’s a song inspired by that, but moved to a Russian pre-Revolutionary
setting! We have such a derivative chorus at the end to counterbalance
lines like “she came in smelling of cabbages”. 

Valet Parking

The album builds up to an
uplifting ending, into an euphoric climax. I think Valet Parking lifts
it up a gear. It’s a song I actually wrote while driving, which I wouldn’t
recommend to anyone if they want to keep their license. We tried to recreate
a traffic jam in rural Monmouthshire we mic’d up four of our cars, and
revved them in time to the track. It’s about a road trip from Cardiff to
Vilnius. It’s a love song to the process, to the road. Apart from Autobahn
by Kraftwerk not enough songs have been written about the glories of pan-European
travel. The title is also a reference to the Brazilian songwriter Marcos
Valle, who this song is dedicated to.

The Undefeated

It’s about underdogs, and
over-dogs. It’s a real simple lyric. “Noise pollution solution”… It’s
a pop song with biblical references, and no specific issue or event in
mind, although I probably wrote it when the Welsh football team were going
through their worse period of results in their history. It just shows how
sometimes
your fantasies can come true, and now the song, apart from the title, doesn’t
fit at all. It’s about, even at your lowest, seeing a ray of light. 

Slow Life

It’s the most epic song
on the album it was either going to start it or finish it because it dwarfs
all the other songs. It starts off with an electro cop show style intro,
which we jammed on top of and Sean O’Hagan did some amazing strings the
lyrics are just regurgitating what we hear on the news, recycled, vomiting
them all back. I like the idea that even the mountains have memories and
that people don’t forget things easily.

 

“Speakers and microphones
work on phantom power, there’s no batteries and they’re not connected to
the mains, and yet they work. Similarly, as a band our make up is the same
as anybody else and yet we write songs and play music to people, and we
have no idea why. It’s a mysterious power source. I like the idea of it,
a phantom power that nobody understands.

“‘Phantom Power’ also sounds
like a sinister power source that controls the world from beyond people’s
comprehension. And a lot of the things that go on today seem completely
illogical and I think we watch the world go by with disbelief. We seem
to be living in such a heavy time. We’re just absorbing all the words thrown
at us from the TV and regurgitating them back.

“I suppose it’s almost unavoidable
that lyrics like that are coming out at this point when almost all our
entertainment is based around war. Musically as a band we tend to regurgitate
what we absorb from our record collections, and lyrically I suppose the
same goes, the topics of conversations over the last couple of years have
been based around violence more than usual. We’ve been put on high-paranoia
alert by the media! There are a lot of songs on this record about broken
relationships and war, and I think they go hand in hand. But always with
a positive outlook to the future.

“Phantom Power was recorded
in our own studio late at night in an office block in Cardiff. We’d erect
tents in the corridors at nights to record acoustic guitars and we’d have
to take them all down in the morning before other people our neighbours
came to work.

“There’s a dressmaker next
door, an interior designers the other side, on the floor above is No.Brake,
the people who do our website and have been producing the DVD, so we could
work on the visuals and the sound simultaneously. Our percussionist Kris
Jenkins has a studio downstairs and he was working on our remixes and the
dressmaker was made some balloons for one of the films. I think the whole
building was involved at some point.

“We didn’t really feel any
pressure to show off, we just wanted to impress ourselves. The last record
was the first for our new label, and we wanted to make a completely over
the top ambitious album because it might have been the only chance we’d
get to make the sort of album where we could hire engineers and expensive
studios for a crazy length of time. We took full advantage of it – that
was our brief to ourselves. It was a similar approach to our first album
where we were used to recording in Gorwel Owen’s house. We saw Fuzzy Logic
as an opportunity to spend six weeks in a residential studio with a Jacuzzi
and three meals a day. I think we would have made a better sounding album
back in our Gorwel Owen’s house. And we did with Radiator.

“Similarly with this album
we didn’t feel any pressure to make a follow up to Rings Around The World
production-wise, we were able to follow our own noses and experiment with
engineering it ourselves. I think it’s warmer; we wanted to make a more
human record. The last one was made by scientists and a computer. To a
certain extent there’s less to talk about and more to listen to on this
album.”

He’s the world’s last super-hero?and
the last one you’d expect! 

SEAGUY

Award-winning writer Grant
Morrison (THE INVISIBLES, THE FILTH, New X-Men) kicks off the first of
three all-new VERTIGO mini-series with colorful heroes, sinister theme
parks, beautifully bearded women, and a cigar-smoking tuna fish. Only one
comic has it all: SEAGUY, a 3-issue tale with spectacular art by Cameron
Stewart (CATWOMAN) that begins with an extra-sized 40-page first issue
at no extra cost. Morrison himself calls SEAGUY “the true antidote to your
military-industrial realistic super-heroes!” 

    Morrison
charts new territory this adventure filled with charm and whimsy, set in
a haunting World Without Evil in which all the great battles have already
been won by yesterday’s champions. Accompanied by breathtaking art from
Stewart, fresh from his critically acclaimed run on CATWOMAN, SEAGUY is
a quirky yet heart-wrenching experience ultimately unlike anything even
Morrison’s iconoclastic imagination has unleashed upon comics readers. 

    A wistful,
would-be hero named Seaguy and his best pal – a floating, talking fish
named Chubby Da Choona – live listlessly in a world obsessed by sinister
brand names. From a rigged chess match against a skeletal, seafaring personification
of Death to being chased by malevolent theme-park armies, Seaguy and Chubby
undertake a fantastical, picaresque voyage through a post-Utopian world
filled with bizarre adventure…and terrible sacrifice. 

    This
project is supported with trade and house ads. 

SEAGUY is a 3-issue VERTIGO
miniseries edited by Karen Berger and is suggested for mature readers.
The 40-page issue #1 arrives in comic-book stores on May 19 with a cover
price of $2.95 U.S. 

High-octane martial arts
action that pulls no punches! 

LINK COURTESY OF D. BANHART!

The Bush administration has
deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service
of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear
weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists,
including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

   The sweeping
charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists
that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent
organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands
at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page
report today that it said detailed the accusations.

    Together,
the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and
suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees
with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that
provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific
expertise in some cases.

    “Other
administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so
systematically nor on so wide a front,” the statement from the scientists
said, adding that they believed the administration had “misrepresented
scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its
policies.”

    
A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today he had not seen the
text of the scientists’ accusations. “But I can assure you that this is
an administration that makes decisions based on the best available science,”
he said.

   Dr. Kurt Gottfried,
an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University who signed the statement
and spoke in the conference call, said the administration
had “engaged in practices that are in conflict with the spirit of science
and the scientific method.” Dr. Gottfried asserted that what
he called “the cavalier attitude toward science” could place at risk the
basis for the nation’s long-term prosperity, health and military prowess.

    The scientists
denied that they had political motives in releasing the documents as the
2004 presidential race began to take shape, with Howard Dean dropping out
a day after Senator John Kerry narrowly defeated Senator John Edwards on
the Wisconsin Democratic primary. The organization’s report, Dr. Gottfried
said, had taken a year to prepare ˜ much longer than originally planned
˜ and had been released as soon as it was ready.

    “I don’t
see it as a partisan issue at all,” said Russell Train, who served as administrator
of the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Richard M. Nixon
and Gerald R. Ford, and who spoke in the conference call in support of
the statement. “If it becomes that way I think it’s because the White House
chooses to make it a partisan issue,” Mr. Train said.