Show image: Jason Leinwand “Accepting Fear Rather Than Trying to Understand It”

VISION QUEST – A Group Show of Neo-Shamanic Art
Opening:  Saturday, January 16th, 2010    7–10pm
On View:  January 17th–February 21st, 2010
Hours:  Thursdays & Fridays 3–6pm; Saturdays & Sundays 12–6pm

Brooklyn, NY -  OBSERVATORY and Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman are proud to kick off 2010 with VISION QUEST, a group show of neo-shamanic art, on view from January 16th through February 21st.

A healer, a medicine (wo)man, a guide:  the shaman is a figure who interfaces with nature magic and the invisible world at large, for the betterment of the tribe.  Fluent in the language of symbols, and a perennial student of plant wisdom, the shaman is also a translator – bringing back messages from a place veiled thick with leaves, bones, smoke, ghosts.

This journey to the other side – to the innerside – is not just a flowery promenade of song and trance; of friendly animal spirits and ancestral reunions.  For while this land is rife with vibrant, variegated beauty, it can also be a danger zone.  Images of decapitation and dismemberment abound – though ultimately act as portents for personal transformation and rebirth.  This shadowy terrain is trod only by those brave enough to encounter whatever may be found along the way, as each sojourn is mysterious, thoroughly unpredictable, and entirely individual.  However, the results of the trip often prove invaluable, as the traveler returns armed with knowledge that will in turn illuminate and repair the community, and fortify his or her own soul.

While the role of the shaman has traditionally been fulfilled by experienced elders in indigenous groups spanning culture and time, VISION QUEST posits that our artists fit the bill as well.  Today, with more of us living in an urban jungle rather than a real one, it has become all the more important to figure out ways to internalize the lessons of nature: its growth, its brilliant bloom, its death.  And in an age of digitization and distraction, of wire vines and humming screens, it’s no wonder we long for deeper, more sensory experiences of self – with all of its darkness and divinity.

As such, each piece in VISION QUEST explores the archetype of the shamanic voyage, using the tools of paint, pencil, or paper in lieu of fire, flower, feather.  Taken together this work represents a full spectrum of what it means to go underground and out of body; to go there and come back again, perhaps just a little bit wiser or, at the very least, more wide awake.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Jesse Bransford • William Crump • Scott Gursky • Juliet Jacobsen • Ashley Lande • Adela Leibowitz • Jason Leinwand • Christopher Mir • Joe Newton • Herbert Pfostl • Christopher Reiger • Christine Shields • Erika Somogyi • Jessie Rose Vala

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Pam Grossman is the creator and editor of Phantasmaphile, the premiere online destination for art aficionados with a passion for the surreal and the fantastical.  An internationally beloved art and culture web log, it features daily spotlights on artists and events, as well as interviews with such visual luminaries as Thomas Woodruff, Nils Karsten, and Richard A. Kirk.  Phantasmaphile was written up two years in a row on the Manhattan User’s Guide Top 400 New York Sites list, and Grossman’s previous show, “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists,” was featured by myriad taste-making outlets including Juxtapoz, Arthur, Upper Playground, and Neil Gaiman’s Twitter page.  “VISION QUEST” is her latest curatorial effort, and she is proud to have it hanging at OBSERVATORY, the art and events space she co-founded.

ABOUT THE GALLERY
OBSERVATORY is an art and events space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  Founded in February 2009 and run by a group of seven artists and bloggers, the space seeks to present programming inspired by the 18th century notion of “rational amusement” and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature.  The space hosts screenings, lectures, classes, and exhibitions, and is part of the Proteus Gowanus art complex.  It is located at 543 Union Street (at Nevins), and is accessed through Proteus Gowanus Gallery’s entrance.  OBSERVATORY’s gallery hours are 3-6pm on Thursdays and Fridays; and 12-6pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

For press and media inquiries, please contact Pam Grossman:  phantasmaphile [at] gmail.com

Er…gawsh…

Forty years after the uproarious heyday of the alternative press, writer Alan Moore is launching the 21st century’s first underground magazine from his hometown of Northampton, a community that is right at the geographical, political and economic heart of the country; one which has half its high street boarded up and is at present dying on its arse, just like everywhere else.

Drawing upon an overlooked and energetic pool of local talent as well as numerous friends and co-conspirators from comic books, the arts or entertainment, Dodgem Logic sets out to provide a splash of subterranean exotica in a bleached-out cultural and social landscape. Published every other month by counter-culture veterans KNOCKABOUT, Dodgem Logic is a forty page full-colour spectacle that, in addition, has an eight-page local section in each issue, thus inviting other areas to publish regional editions by providing their own inserts.

As cheap and beautiful as a heartbreaking teenage prostitute, Dodgem Logic has a cover price of £2.50, with its content similarly tailored to the fiscal toilet-bowl that we are currently engaged in sliding down. Regular columnists provide delicious, inexpensive recipes, wide-ranging medical advice, simple instructions for creating stylish clothing and accessories from next to nothing, guides to growing your own dinner by becoming a guerrilla gardener, and, in the first of Dave (The Self-Sufficient-ish Bible) Hamilton’s environmental columns, a bold experiment in living with no money. The same approach to helping readers deal with socio-economic meltdown and a blitz of repossessions is there in upcoming features on the present-day resurgence of the squatters’ movement, or in our communiqués from the Steampunk/ Post-Civilisation gang on how to start rebuilding culture and society before those things have broken down completely and our children are reduced to battering each other to a bloody pulp with their now-useless X-Boxes in a dispute over the last tub of pot noodles.

Not only seeking to give practical advice on getting through a rough stretch, Dodgem Logic is also committed to alleviating the attendant sense of anguish and despair by brightening the world with the astonishing cartoon-work of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s sublime Kevin O’Neill or that of underground legend Savage Pencil; the musings of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Book’s own Graham Linehan or of the nation’s sweetheart, the implacably positive Josie Long; even a delirious commemoration of the lunar landing’s anniversary by the masterful Steve Aylett. In addition to a variously-hosted women’s column launched by Lost Girls co-creator and erstwhile underground cartoon artist Melinda Gebbie, Mr. Moore will himself be contributing a lead feature on the history of underground subversive publishing from its origins in the thirteenth century, along with various illustrations and words of advice. All these and many other sterling features, including a free CD of magnificent home-grown Northampton music over fifty years, will be contained in the historic premiere issue, sporting an hallucinatory  front cover by digital artist Tamara Rogers and debuting this November. Wake up and smell the fairground ozone! No ramming!

Via Moore & Reppion.

Dear LGBT authors:

The Board of Directors of the Lambda Literary Foundation and Ed Hermance, owner of Giovanni’s Room, would like to invite you to read at our first “Read-a-thon”. The event, to be held at 7:30pm on Saturday November 21, 2009, at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, will be a benefit for both the Foundation and the bookstore. We’d like to invite LGBT authors to read from a recent or classic book and answer questions for approximately 15 minutes each. 100% of the proceeds from the event will go to the two beneficiaries. We will be serving donated wine and snacks during the marathon reading. While the foundation and the bookstore can’t offset any expenses authors might incur participating in this benefit, we can possibly arrange housing in local homes. Both the Foundation and Giovanni’s Room will be very grateful for your help in these trying economic times. While this is a fundraising event, we’re hoping it will be a lot of fun for a community of people who treasure our words and writers.

The Lambda Literary Foundation is dedicated to raising the status of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people throughout society by rewarding and promoting excellence among LGBT writers who use their work to explore LGBT lives. The Foundation sponsors the annual Lambda Literary Awards and held its first Writer’s Retreat in 2007.

Giovanni’s Room, located at 12th & Pine in Center City Philadelphia, is the oldest LGBT bookstore in the USA. The store is faced with a financial challenge as their front wall of their historic structure is being replaced. The queer community of Philadelphia, rather than lose their cherished bookstore, is organizing fund-raising events through the fall to ensure the store’s survival.

We hope that we’ve enticed you to participate at this, sure to be wonderful, event. If you would like to read, or have any questions/comments/suggestions, please contact Scott Cranin at scranin@tlavideo.com.

A poster by by Sonia Sanchez for the 2009 NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) Conference.

NORML is a nonprofit lobbying organization working to end marijuana prohibition and stop arrests of smokers. The NORML Foundation sponsors educational, research, and legal programs about the costs of marijuana prohibition and alternatives.

So far as Obama and co. is concerned, for now his “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, peddles the same undeviating line as his predecessors: “Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine.”

Related: Furor Over an Obama Puff Piece

“…a labyrinthine, Kafka-esque halfworld of chambers and baroque, macabre characters, all connected by a central staircase.”

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of L’Ange, it managed to stay off my Cinema of the Weird radar for decades. The emergence on DVD of Patrick Bokanowkski’s extraordinary feature film should go some way towards raising its profile among those who know that cinema as an artform doesn’t begin or end with Hollywood. Anyone excited by the early work of David Lynch, or the hermetic visions of the Brothers Quay, needs to see this.

Available via mail order (PayPal accepted) from British Animation Awards who also have an additional disc for sale, Bokanowski: Short Films/Courts metrages.

“A 2001 produced under the same conditions as Eraserhead”—Cahiers du Cinema

“A prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique. That its elements are not constructed in a traditional way should not be a barrier to those who wish to cross the bridge to what Jean-Luc Godard proposed as the real story of the cinema—real in the sense of being made of images and sounds rather than texts and illustrations.”— Keith Griffiths, film producer

“Magisterial images seething in the amber of transcendent soundscapes. Drink in these films through eyes and ears.”—The Brothers Quay

In which a representative from Corwood Industries made a cramped appearance last week at the HMV store in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Yes, dear friends, the corporate monolith will happily clasp even its most wayward constituents to its cold and unyielding bosom. (Thanks to Gav for the pics!)

Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot
(a personal narrative by Jesse Bransford)

Date: Friday, July 17th
Time: 7:30pm
UPDATE: Please note, that due to popular demand, a second time slot for this event has been added. Jesse will be giving this talk at 7:30pm and again at 9:00pm on Friday, July 17th. Seating is first come, first served.
Admission: Free

A deck given to his brother by his mother in 1986 sat in Jesse Bransford’s childhood bedroom from the early 90’s until recently, delivering itself into Bransford’s possession at an opportune moment…

The Tarot in general and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in particular represent a miasmic confluence of image and thought into a single structure that is both liberating and overwhelming in its scope. In creating the deck, Crowley (in collaboration with painter Lady Frieda Harris) sought to integrate the mythological structures of the major mystical systems of both Western and Eastern occult traditions and to bring them into line with contemporary scientific thinking. The symbolism of the cards blends Kabbalah, Alchemy, Astrology, Egyptian mythology, quantum physics and even the I-Ching in ways that are at the same time clear and utterly confounding.

In an image-soaked personal narration Bransford, whose research-based artwork has delved into many of the territories Crowley sought to unify, will discuss some of the basic concepts of Tarot symbolism, returning to Crowley’s deck as among the most total example of the cards’ syncretism and as the most controversial.

Jesse Bransford is a Brooklyn/Queens-based artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. He received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research, a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, both in 1996, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2000. He is currently a Master Teacher with the post of Undergraduate Director at New York University where he has been teaching since 2001, as well as a member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.  His work is represented by Feature Inc. in New York, Kevin Bruk Gallery in Miami, Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Köln, and Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland. Images of his work, a complete bio and related articles can be seen at www.sevenseven.com, a website he has continuously maintained since 1997.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Directions:  ***PLEASE USE NEW ENTRANCE (see below)***

Observatory is located at 543 Union Street at Nevins.

Please enter Observatory via doorway on 543 Union St.

R or M train to Union Street in Brooklyn: Walk two long blocks on Union (towards the Gowanus Canal) to Nevins Street. 543 Union Street is the large red brick building on right.

F or G train to Carroll Street: Walk one block to Union. Turn right, walk two long blocks on Union towards the Gowanus Canal, cross the bridge. 543 Union Street is the large red brick building on the left.

For more information, see observatoryroom.org

Via Phantasmaphile.

One of the great blues voices of the 1960s. And she was in Wild at Heart!

In today’s WTF news, Alan Moore scholar Pádraig Ó Méalóid unveils Xerox copies of Big Numbers #3, the unpublished issue of Alan’s abandoned comic book series begun in collaboration with Bill Sienkiewicz in 1989. Artist Al Columbia took over when Sienkiewicz dropped out after the first two issues. Pádraig says:

…everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn’t believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn’t have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.

See the whole thing (!) here.

Dissociation of Ideas, #5

Distinguish between wealth, illth, and money.

Wealth is best conceived as all the changes in the “natural” (prehuman) environment that are to the benefit of humanity and/or other life forms. A bridge that gets you across the river without your having to stop and build a raft is wealth in this sense. So is an airport. So is the furniture in your house. Think of ten other examples.

Illth, a term coined by John Ruskin, can be conceived as all the changes in the environment that are detrimental to humanity and/or to life itself. Weaponry, then, should be classed as illth, not wealth. Think of ten other examples.

Money is neither wealth nor illth but merely tickets for the transfer of wealth or illth.

Proof: if all the money disappeared overnight, the national standard of living would not change (whatever happened to individuals in the interim); things would be back to normal as soon as the Treasury printed more tickets. But if all the real wealth and illths—all the industrial plants, natural resources, roads, communications, and “real capital” generally—were to disappear, we would be plunged back into the Stone Ages and no issue of currency would improve the situation.

Note also that for all the “real capital” to disappear, all the technical knowhow in human heads would have to vanish. No economist, to my knowledge, has tried to calculate how much of our “real capital” consists of ideas in human heads (brain power) and/or of canned ideas stored in libraries or on tape. A reasonable guess is that 90 per cent of our wealth and illth consists of such brain creations.

The Illuminati Papers is still in print and it’s filled with real wealth.

And so say all of us!

Related: What Crisis? The story of the poster from the past with contemporary appeal.

Exhibition opening at Dabora, Brooklyn, NYC ( Map ) on Saturday, March 14th, 8pm-11pm. Complimentary absinthe so arrive early! Pam says “If you can’t make it to the opening, I will be at the gallery most weekends, so be sure to stop in and say hello. The artwork is stunning, and Dabora is a gallery like no other, with its opulent, gothic interior. Divine.”

Dabora Gallery and Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman are proud to usher in the spring season with the group show “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists,” on view from March 14th through April 12th, 2009.

In literal terms, a fata morgana is a mirage or illusion, a waking reverie, a shimmering of the mind. Named for the enchantress Morgan le Fay, these tricks of perception conjure up a sense of glimpsing into another world, whether it be the expanses of an ethereal terrain, or the twilit depths of the psyche. The artists of “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists” deftly utilize the semiotics of mysticism, fantasy, and the subconscious in their work, thereby guiding the viewer through heretofore uncharted realms – alternately shadowy or luminous, but always inventive.

Yoko Ono recently said, “I think all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being.” Each artist in this show is a sorceress in her own right. Endowed with fecund imaginations and masterful craftsmanship, their work transforms the viewer: we become spellbound, bearing witness to their attempts to reconcile the desire for a diurnal beauty with the lure of a lush and riotous inner wilderness. The fantastical is counterpoint to the ferocious, the monstrous to the marvelous. Allusions to myth and metamorphosis abound, as these works channel their own heroine spirits and tell their own secret tales. Here, frame is magic threshold, bidding us to take a breath, and cross over.

A quite incredible 360º panorama by Australian photographer Peter Murphy of an equally incredible mirror room, Fireflies on the Water, by the great Yayoi Kusama. Anyone in Sydney, Australia, can see this work at the Museum of Contemporary Art until June 8th. For the rest of us, this panorama is the next best thing.

Platform21’s Repair Manifesto opposes throwaway culture and celebrates repair as the new recycling.

With our new project, Platform21 = Repairing, we seek to make repairing cool again – with your help. Let the manifesto inspire you, comment on it or add to it. Rediscover the joy of fixing things and share your most ingenious repair, your tips and your tricks. You could present them in person later, or see them on our website or in the exhibition that opens on Friday 13 March.

This project is about sharing knowledge and skills. Together we can start a movement, one that isn’t new per se but has been forgotten. So if you know a way to save a product, let us know by emailing info [at] platform21.com.

Via Core77.

Science fiction pioneer Philip José Farmer died today. Farmer was the man who introduced sex to sf with his first published story, ‘The Lovers’, in 1953. Decades before The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen there was the Wold Newton Universe. Hugely prolific, he was one of the few authors capable of writing Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan in the style of William Burroughs (‘Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod’). Audacity and intelligence are always in short supply; he’ll be missed.

We all know that Michael Phelps was on something. But perhaps he was also onto something. Three recent polls show that Americans are more sympathetic to the idea of legalizing marijuana than ever before.

The first poll, conducted last week by Rasmussen Reports, has 40 percent of Americans in support of legalizing the drug and 46 percent opposed. The second, conducted in January by CBS News, has 41 percent in favor of legalization and 52 percent against. And a third poll, conducted by Zogby on behalf of the marijuana-rights advocacy group NORML, has 44 percent of Americans in support of legalized pot and 52 percent opposed.

That all three polls show support for legalization passing through the 40 percent barrier may be significant. I compiled a database of every past poll I could find on this subject, including a series of Gallup polls and results from the General Social Survey, and could never before find more than 36 percent of the population (Gallup in October, 2005) stating a position in favor of legalization. (More.)

And speaking of Michael Phelps, how’s this for a business headline? Dumping Phelps Over Bong Rip Damages Kellogg’s Brand Reputation.

Out of the 5,600 company reputations Vanno monitors, Kellogg ranked ninth before it booted Phelps. Now it’s ranked 83. Not even an industry-wide peanut scare inflicted as much damage on the food company’s reputation. (More.)

The Independent, Friday, 20 February 2009

Nobody bothers about civil liberties until they’ve gone. As the old country song warns: “You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.”

We are letting the well run dry, allowing little bits of our civil freedoms to be chipped away by paranoiac governments who assure us we can trust them – and consistently betray that trust.

We are gradually sacrificing what has taken hundreds of years of civilisation to achieve, which is a condition of some kind of liberty. It may not be evident to everyone yet, but we have lost so much freedom in the past 10 years. When the Government passed its “anti-terror” laws, it reassured those who campaigned against them that they would only ever be used in the most extreme circumstances.

But these are completely vague laws which enable a government to arrest almost anybody for almost everything.

Within a couple of years they had been used to eject an 80-year-old heckler from a Labour Party conference, to arrest a woman for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, and to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks in England. This is the problem with vague legislation of this type: it invariably gets called into use whenever anybody does anything that the Government finds embarrassing or the police find inconvenient.

It criminalises the behaviour of concerned citizens and thereby encourages disengagement and apathy. By preventing people from taking part in critiques of governance it increases the gap between rulers and ruled: it is fundamentally anti-democratic.

I worry about initiatives like identity cards and computer databases because they could be a step towards a police state, with completely innocent people being held in custody because of software malfunctions.

It is incredibly sad that these moves towards a police state should have happened under a Labour government. Gordon Brown should think about the serious problems that need to be solved – such as climate change – and direct his government’s efforts towards that.

Related:
• Revealed: the full extent of Labour’s curbs on civil liberties
• Liberty in Britain is facing death by a thousand cuts. We can fight back

Christian psychopath Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church turned up at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas, last week, hoping to spend a day with his hate-addled family harassing the populace with their wretched slogans. The Phelps’s are used to receiving a vigorous response at many of their assemblies, especially when they try and picket the funerals of soldiers killed overseas. But even they must have been surprised when the entire school turned out with their own placards and slogans repudiating the anti-gay venom which is the only message the Westboro Baptist Church has to give to the world.

Their message didn’t sit well with many students at the high school where, according to student Jake Davidson, there is a Gay and Straight Alliance at the school and students elected a homecoming king in 2007 who was openly gay.

“Everyone is equal whether you’re gay or straight,” said Davidson, a 16-year-old junior from Leawood and an organizer of the student protest.

“It’s really cool that everyone wants to be involved and take a stand against this. It doesn’t surprise me that everyone wants to help out.” (More.)

See that, Fred? That’s the future, and it’s laughing at you because you look ridiculous.

Small Hours at Reading University, 1978.

Certain Surprise, Rockpalast, Germany, 1978.

I’d Rather be the Devil, Old Grey Whistle Test, 1973 (crap video but a great performance).

(Software is throwing a fit back here so embedding is screwed. Go and browse for his clips. He was great.)

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of the TV adventure series with both hands and subverted the expectations of the audience and the people who were paying for it. Best because it dared to do this at a time when there was little precedent for experiment in a medium that was barely a decade old. Best because it had something important to say while still being entertaining. And best because it had Patrick McGoohan in the central role at the peak of his acting career.

Fiction can be anything but to look at what we’re offered by TV studios you wouldn’t know it. Cop shows, hospital shows, detective shows and soap operas proliferate, ad infinitum. The Prisoner came out of Danger Man, an immensely successful post-James Bond spy series which may have been popular but, McGoohan’s presence aside, has little to recommend it today. It lacked the camp bravura of The Avengers and couldn’t compete with the budgets of the Bond films. But it’s fair to say that without it McGoohan wouldn’t have had the chance to do something radical. ITC’s Lew Grade thought he was getting Danger Man 2 with better production values; what he received—to his eventual dismay—was the kind of television one would expect if the staff of Michael Moorcock’s speculative fiction magazine New Worlds had been given a fat budget and free reign. Like New Worlds, The Prisoner seized familiar genre themes but took them as a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The series borrowed from science fiction and spy thrillers—brainwashing and mind control, Cold War paranoia, the limitless surveillance and duplicity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—and used a drama format to say something direct and personal to its audience about individual freedom, the limits and excesses of the state and the importance of being able to say “No” when the world insists that you capitulate.

Number Six by Roland Topor.

McGoohan was the driving force as well as the star. His own company, Everyman Films, produced the series for ITC, he planned the series with the writers, wrote three episodes and directed five of them himself. The Prisoner only lasted for a season and a half—cut short after Grade lost his patience—but the form was potentially endless, able to present a familiar Cold War spy story on the one hand, while having an entire episode play as a Western, on the other. In one of the later episodes McGoohan is largely absent when his mind is transferred to another man’s body and he finds himself living a new life, ostensibly a free man. (But freedom in The Prisoner is always circumscribed.) The last three episodes collapse everything that’s preceded them into intense and increasingly surreal psychodrama. Like Moorcock’s fluid character Jerry Cornelius, whose exploits were running in New Worlds while The Prisoner was being broadcast, McGoohan had found a vehicle to say what he wanted about the world using popular culture. It’s a coincidence but I’ve always found it apt that the cover illustration for Moorcock’s novella The Deep Fix (1966) included a figure obviously modelled on McGoohan’s Danger Man. The book’s tagline “Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist” could be a description of a later Prisoner episode. Apt too that the first novel based on the series in 1969 was by New Worlds regular Thomas M Disch.

(James Colvin was a Moorcock nom-de-plume.)

The Prisoner was produced in the era of the social dramas of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today yet it remains relevant in a way its worthier contemporaries could scarcely manage. Social realism dates as quickly as yesterday’s news but allegory stays fresh. And it’s a dismal truth that the world of infinite surveillance has crept closer in a way that few would have imagined possible in 1968. The cameras which follow McGoohan’s Number Six everywhere are a familiar sight on Britain’s streets; a headline in yesterday’s Independent newspaper read: “Big Brother database a ‘terrifying’ assault on traditional freedoms“. McGoohan was raised in Ireland and would have appreciated the adherence of another Irishman, James Joyce, to the Luciferian cry of disobedience in Ulysses, “Non serviam!”—I will not serve. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus defies God and his family; McGoohan’s Number Six defies everything else. That example, of the man who can “make putting on his dressing gown appear as an act of defiance”, is something we need as much now as we did in 1968. Hollywood is currently threatening a big screen version but why wait for more compromised studio product when you can go to the source. Get yourself a deep fix—it’s a masterpiece.

John Coulthart

Cross-posted from { feuilleton }.

Go thou here.

Via.

New poster by Shepard Fairey. Via Towleroad.

“Last Tuesday night was a bitter-sweet celebration. We came together to witness the first black man who will become our president, yet watched in sadness as Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, and California all voted down equal rights for all citizens.

“This is not a four-state issue. This is an issue of equality across America. Stand up and make your voice heard! Visit the main www.jointheimpact.com to learn more, or read our mission statement.”

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

Via 3quarksdaily.

Reason 1 by Chaz Maviyane-Davies.

30 reasons a day until November 4th. PDFs available to download and print.

Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity

“In centuries gone, they had called him a myth, a creature formed of stone and clay and the blood of a people’s oppression – a moving monolith who rose before the voice of tyranny – shattered it in his monumental fists – then vanished into the sands of time – there to be almost forgotten – until today! Now, once more, he rises – summoned from his eons-long sleep to protect those he loves. Now for the first time in untold decades – there walks the Golem!”

More.

Design For Obama. Download high-res posters or upload your own design.

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.

The 60-minute film was first released in 2006 and shown during the mid-term elections on Fox News. Since then it has received top billing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness’ week on American campuses, at Christian-Zionist conferences and at events organised by Republican politicians in Florida. It has found a powerful backer in the real estate magnate Sheldon Adelson, who describes himself as ‘the world’s richest Jew’. The Endowment for Middle East Truth, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC which recently hosted a series of seminars named after Adelson and his wife, arranged distribution of ‘Obsession’, at a cost in the tens of millions.

The makers of the film, like their subjects, are soldiers of God. Almost everyone associated with it or with Clarion has worked for Aish HaTorah, an ‘education’ group with offices in East Jerusalem and strong links to the settler movement. Clarion was incorporated in Delaware to the New York offices of Aish HaTorah and Rabbi Shore was the director, as well as the founder of its media organisation, Honest Reporting, which campaigns against a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. It’s illegal in the US for nonprofit organisations, or for foreign nationals, to try to influence the outcome of an election.

The film’s chief claim is that 2008 is like 1938, only worse, since there are more Muslims than Germans and they’re more spread out geographically: ‘They’re not outside our borders, they are here.’ Violent raptures and spectacular carnage unfold in slick montages set to throbbing Middle Eastern music: Pakistanis deliriously burning the American flag, Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks, Hizbullah chanting ‘death to America’, clerics praising the ‘magnificent 19’ and the murder of unbelievers, children training to become suicide bombers, the planes crashing into the towers. These images are interspersed with footage of Nazi rallies and Hitler’s speeches. A chapter – narrated by Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s biographer – is devoted to the Mufti’s collaboration with Hitler.

Scary Muslims are everywhere, and the umma stands more united than ever, driven by hatred of infidels and Jews and determined to conquer the West, a civilisation gone soft, weakened by self-doubt, political correctness bordering on treason, and, worst of all, a ‘culture of denial’. Gilbert spells it out:

In the 1930s, the danger of Nazism was there . . . but people thought, well, this is a German problem, it’s a limited problem . . . And I think the same is true today . . . They don’t see that Islamic fundamentalism is a global network and a global problem . . .because if you come to that conclusion – and I’m sure it’s the true conclusion – then you have to do something about it.

‘Obsession’ doesn’t say what we should do – except steer well clear of dialogue and negotiation.

Although there are interviews with the usual ‘terrorism experts’ – Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz et al – the film’s portrayal of the region is mostly left to native informants like Nonie Darwish (a leader of Arabs for Israel and the daughter of a slain fighter from Gaza), Brigitte Gabriel (the Lebanese-Christian author of They Must Be Stopped) and Walid Shoebat, a ‘former PLO terrorist’ who operates under a pseudonym – for security reasons, of course. Shoebat runs the Walid Shoebat Foundation, described on its website as an ‘organisation that cries out for the Justice of Israel and the Jewish people’. He’s made a career of recounting his journey from Islamic terror to Christian Zionism before audiences at Evangelical gatherings and the US Air Force Academy. It’s not clear, though, that he ever laid a hand on anyone. According to a relative, ‘the biggest act of terror he ever committed was to glue Palestinian flags on street posts.’ What is very clear is that, for the makers of ‘Obsession’, having once hated Jews gives you privileged access to the Muslim mind, and not only if you’re an ex-Muslim. Among the film’s authorities on radical Islam is a former leader of the Hitler Youth, Alfons Heck, who says that ‘what the Muslims do to their own children is even worse’ than the things the Nazis did to young Germans – as only a Nazi could know.

If you didn’t receive ‘Obsession’ with your paper, you can watch it on YouTube. It’s been posted by a former Muslim whose screen identity is ‘fuckmohammad’.

Adam Shatz is an editor at the London Review.

The Rick Wright strip from the comic book-styled Pink Floyd tour programme, 1975. Art by Joe Petagno.

http://www.pdnpulse.com/2008/09/how-jill-greenb.html

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.

She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election).

Warned that the image is just the kind of thing that will stir up the anti-media vitriol in the conservative blogosphere, Greenberg said, “Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.”

That said, she goes on to explain that she’s thought about replacing McCain’s mouth with bloody shark teeth and displaying the image on a billboard with the message that the candidate is a bloodthirsty war monger.

Given her strong feelings about John McCain, we asked whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment in the first place.

“I didn’t,” she says. “It’s definitely exciting to shoot someone who is in the limelight like that. I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.”

“Mimicking terrestrial mammals, the structural system is a quadrupedal fuselage.

“This allows for foundation-less ‘footings’ that can adjust to the contours of the natural landscape. The house adjusts to the land. The land need not be disfigured for the house.”

More.

The great Steve Bell at The Guardian:

A Texas army recruiter was recently suspended for telling a teenager he would be sent to jail if he chose college over the military.

Amy Goodman: As the wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is increasingly desperate to get recruits. A story involving an Army recruiter in Texas last week has now led to a bipartisan call for an investigation.

The recruiter from the Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston was suspended last week after a recording of his threats aired on a local CBS affiliate, KHOU. The recruiter, Sergeant Glenn Marquette, warned 18-year-old Irving Gonzalez that he would be sent to jail if he decided to go to college instead of joining the military, even though Gonzalez had signed a non-binding contract that left him free to change his mind before basic training.

Republican Congress member Ted Poe told the CBS affiliate that “We don’t want the government, military, the Army, deceiving American citizens” and suggested that Congress might have to get involved if the Army did not react to the incident.

Last year, Irving Gonzalez and Eric Martinez signed up for the non-binding delayed enlistment program in high school. But earlier this summer, when 17-year-old Eric Martinez told his recruiters he had decided to go to college instead of the military, his mother was told Eric had no choice and could face jail time if he resisted joining. Irving Gonzalez helped get Eric out of enlistment hours before he was to be shipped out of Houston for training. He knew he was next in line. He decided to record his next conversation with his recruiters. This is a part of what Sergeant Marquette told Irving Gonzalez in that recorded conversation.

Irving Gonzalez: The main thing is, I want out. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want to go to the Army.

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Well, you need to talk to my company commander.

Irving Gonzalez: To your company commander?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Mm-hmm. You need to come in here, and I need to bring you to my company commander.

Irving Gonzalez: But is there a way out? Is there a way for me to get out, because I don’t want to go in there if you are just going to like…

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: No, there is not a way out. You signed a binding contract.

Irving Gonzalez: There’s no way out?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: No. When you sign a contract…

Irving Gonzalez: But I’d probably be able to get scholarships.

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: You need a full ride scholarship, full ride, to a state university — UT, AM. Full ride. That means everything is paid for — classes, books, you know, lodging, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner — all paid for, not no partial scholarship, not no FAA scholarship, not no First Citizen Bank scholarship. No, we’re talking full ride scholarship, because there ain’t no partial scholarship out there that even comes close to what the Army’s giving you for college. It’s forty-plus thousand dollars.

Irving Gonzalez: Yeah, I know, but, I mean, it’s kind of like a family thing, too. I’d rather just stay here. What if I just don’t show up?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Then, guess what. You’re AWOL, absent without leave, punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 86: Deserter. It’s in your contract. Read it. It’s clear as day. So then, guess what happens.

Irving Gonzalez: What’s that?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Guess what happens to you, I’ll tell you what happens to you, OK? This is what will happen. You want to go to school? You will not get no loans, because all college loans are federal and government loans. So you’ll be black-marked from that. As soon as you get pulled over for a speeding ticket or anything with the law, they’re gonna see that you’re a deserter. Then they’re going to apprehend you, take you to jail. They’re going to call up the military police, the nearest military installation, and they will come down there, correctional officers, 31-series in the Army, pick you up, detain you, put you on a plane and take you to Fort [inaudible], Missouri, where you will do your time, as you deserve. So guess what. All that lovey-dovey “I want to go to college” and all this? Guess what. You just threw it out the window, because you just screwed your life. There’s a right way to do things, and there’s a wrong way to do things.

Irving Gonzalez: OK. Well, I mean, [inaudible] —

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: If you get into basic training and you don’t like it, tell the chaplain you don’t like it. That’s the right way to get out of the Army. Then they’ll process you out of the Army, and they’ll tell you to adapt, and there’s nothing against your record.

Irving Gonzalez: That would be the right way to do it?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Yeah, and you can come back home and do your thing. And then, also, guess what. If you do it that way, if you do it that way, maybe they’ll even want you in the future. You may say, “Well, damn, I’m coming to join the Army this time.” Then, guess what. You can. You can join then, because you got out of the Army the right way. You at least got to go to basic training and try it.

Amy Goodman: U.S. Army recruiter Sergeant Glenn Marquette, threatening 18-year-old Irving Gonzalez. Gonzalez and Eric Martinez now are joining us from Houston, Texas. We’re also joined in Houston by Democratic Congress member Gene Green, who is calling on the Department of Defense to look into the incident, and by community organizer Maureen Haver. She is the founder of Not Even One, a website to disseminate information and take action against illegal military recruiting practices. Douglas Smith is also on the phone with us. He’s the public affairs officer at the U.S. Military Recruiting Command, joining us on the phone from Louisville, Kentucky.

Irving Gonzalez, I’d like to start with you. You had this conversation with the Army recruiter. Explain how this all came about, beginning actually with Eric being threatened.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Irving Gonzalez, I’d like to start with you. You had this conversation with the Army recruiter. Explain how this all came about, beginning actually with Eric being threatened.

Irving Gonzalez: Well, it started around a year before — a year ago. I was still 17, and when I got in, Eric was already thinking about it before I was. But, you know, right after I got in, like two weeks later, he decided to go ahead and join the DEP program, too. And from there, that’s how it started. And, I mean, we didn’t think it was going to get this far, but they started — for a while, whenever we were thinking upon not joining, they started calling us and telling us that we didn’t have a choice, you know, that we could say all we want, we don’t have a choice to go or not, if we want to or not.

Amy Goodman: Eric, if you could explain how far this went; how did you meet the military recruiter? Talk about what you understood, what you signed, and how, eventually, you end up basically escaping from a hotel.

Eric Martinez: Well, I met her at Irving’s house, because the day he went to go enlist for the DEP, I was at his house. And I talked to her and told her I was interested in the military. And then, she says, like, “Well, what branch?” And I wasn’t too sure yet. And she talked to me about it. And I was like, “OK, well, let me get back to you on that.” And it took me about two weeks before I decided to actually join the DEP. And –

Amy Goodman: DEP means delayed enlistment program?

Eric Martinez: Yes. And from what I understood, is that it’s just there so you can save a spot, so, you know, you can have the job you want as soon as you get there and so you won’t have a problem with it later on. And then, as things went further, I decided not to go. And when I told her that, she said I had no choice and that I had to go. So I believed her, and I went to the hotel. They took me to the hotel. And that’s whenever Irving’s little brother contacted me. And then I told him I was leaving –

Amy Goodman: The hotel was preparing to leave?

Eric Martinez: Well, they keep you at the hotel until the morning. And from the — in the morning, you go down to the office, and you do a few more tests. And then from there, you leave to the fort you’re supposed to go to.

Amy Goodman: Did they approach your family, like your mother?

Eric Martinez: Well, yeah. Whenever I didn’t want to go, my mom’s like, “OK, well, then just go stay at your sister’s house, and we’ll tell them you left to San Antonio.” And I was like, OK. We did that. And my shipment date came, and my recruiter went to my house, and my mom says, like, “Well, he left to San Antonio.” And he’s all, like, well — she’s all, like, “Well, you’ve got to tell us where. Give us an address, so we can go pick him up.” And my mom’s like, “Well, he don’t want to go. What don’t you understand about that?” And then she told her that I signed a binding contract and that I had to go. So, my mom was like, “Well, let’s go talk to your boss. I’ll meet you down at your office.”

So my mom went, and she talked to Sergeant Marquette and told him that I didn’t want to go, and that’s it. And Marquette said that I had to go, and if I didn’t, that I’d have a warrant for my arrest and I wouldn’t be able to get no government loans or nothing like that. So, my mom doesn’t really know anything about it, so she believed it, and she told me. And I believed it, too, because I didn’t know much about it either. So they extended my time until that Friday. And then, Thursday, they went to get me, so I can go to the hotel.

Amy Goodman: Irving Gonzalez, once Eric went to the hotel, how did your little brother get involved?

Irving Gonzalez: Well, I talked to Eric on the Wednesday before, before anything happened, and I told him that he wasn’t going to have to go, but I didn’t keep in contact with him that morning or that afternoon. And around nighttime, like around 10:00 or 11:00, I told my brother, “Call Eric. See what he’s doing.” And when he called him, Eric just seemed like really low-pitch voice. He didn’t say — it took him a while until he finally told us that he was already at the hotel, and he didn’t want to tell nobody bye, because he was just going to get sad. So, we’re like, “You’re at the hotel?” And we’re like, “You don’t have to go. I don’t know why you think you need to go. You don’t need to go.” And Eric was like, “No, I need to go, and you’re going to need to go, too. They’re going to go get you, too. This isn’t a game. You can’t play with them.” And I was like, “Well, just hold on. I’ll call you back.”

And that’s when I decided to call Maureen and Dwight, and I told them about the situation. And they started helping us by contacting anti-recruiters from Washington and people that know more information about it to talk to Eric, because he was kind of like in a state of not knowing who to trust. And we put him on three-way, and we talked to him. And finally, we were able to get everything straight, you know, where it will be good, and we should go get him and stuff.

So, Eric was like, “OK, come pick me up.” But Eric didn’t know where he was at. They just dropped him off at a — he just knew he was at a hotel. He looks out the window. He said all he saw was an Olive Garden. So, I mean, that’s the only thing we knew where to look for him at. And he finally called downstairs, the main office, and they told him the address. And it was like an hour away from our house, to an area I had never been to in Houston. But finally, we went down there.

And when we went down there, we saw that there was security going around the hotel, plus there was maybe like ten recruiters in the main office downstairs. And he was in the second floor, because when we got there, he was already on the balcony looking at us. It took us a while thinking about how we were going to get him out, because I was actually thinking of just walking in, just walking in and seeing what would happen. But it was just too many recruiters. I was like, no, we’re going to have to find another way, because they’re going to ask me questions. And it took us a while, and, I mean, the elevator didn’t want to go down. They had it programmed to where, like, if you were on the second floor, you couldn’t go down unless someone came up to get you. And he was actually thinking about jumping out the window. He actually climbed down to the first floor, and he was going to jump from there, but there was two beams sticking up, and it was just not going to be safe. That was like the last resort or something.

And my friend Junior, he was with us. It was me, my brother Ivan and Junior, and we were in the car. And he just decided to say, “Well, what about if I just walk in and try to get him out?” And he put on his iPod, and he walked in. And they were trying to catch his attention. They were screaming, screaming, trying to see who we was, like, “Eh, come here!” And he just kept walking, and he walked straight into the elevator, and when he got to the second floor, he held the door open so Eric could go in. And Eric was hiding on the second floor, because there was recruiters and security walking around the second floor also. So, when he got in the elevator, they went down, and they went out through the back exit, where we met them at.

And that’s when we’re like, “OK, he’s out. Let’s go home.” But we were completely lost. It took us a while to get home. But he was like an hour away, maybe less than an hour, from them actually taking him to the office to get everything taken care of. It was like 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, to where we actually got everything done and got him out of there.

Amy Goodman: Eric Martinez, were you scared?

Eric Martinez: Yeah, because they put you in a place where you’re doing something you don’t want to, and you just start thinking about everything that’s over there and everything you hear on the news. So, yeah, I was scared.

Amy Goodman: Why did you change your mind?

Eric Martinez: It’s just mostly like, what I want to do, I know that I don’t have to go to the Army to do it. And I don’t know. It’s just the stuff on the news, and I have people that we know that have been there, people who, like — people we know that have relatives or people that have gone there that just come back really messed up, either physically or emotionally.

Amy Goodman: I’d like to go to Democratic Congress member Gene Green. You represent Houston in the U.S. Congress. What Irving and Eric are describing, it sounds like they’re escaping from kidnappers. But this is the U.S. military. What is the legality of this? Eric is 17 years old. He is a kid. He’s a minor.

Rep. Gene Green: Well, you know, this is not something that, as a member of Congress, I want to hear about, because it’s not something that should be done. I represent the area where these young men went to high school. My children went to that high school, and my wife taught there for many years. Texas and Harris County has a great recruitment record.

I would hope we could recruit these young men and women without having to play games on them, keep them in some type of solitary confinement while we’re waiting to ship them off to somewhere. You know, the non-binding contract is a bottom line. If they signed with the ability to change their mind later on, that should be the bottom line, not that they play games with them. And that’s not what the military or the U.S. government should be proud of doing.

And this is the second time something like this has happened at that particular recruiting station. And I have an office right close to that station. And I’d like the Department of Defense to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s do recruiting honestly.” Hopefully this is not happening in other parts of the country. But if it isn’t, then why is it happening at this one location?

This is a partial transcript. For the rest of the interview, visit Democracy Now.com.

IGGY AND THE STOOGES
EQUIPMENT STOLEN ON AUGUST 4, 2008
OUTSIDE THE EMBASSY SUITES HOTEL
208 SAINT ANTOINE OUEST,
MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA

all equipment was in a rented penske 15 foot yellow truck
with u.s. (michigan) license plate number AC46493
parked immediately outside the hotel, the theft had to have happened in the morning, between 6:30 and 7:30 am…

pictures of some of the stolen stuff

Item Country of Origin Serial Number

Red roadcase containing:
Red Gibson 1963 EB-3 bass (this is mike watt’s bass!) USA No serial number

Black roadcase containing:r
Reverend Flying V guitar – Volcano black USA #08001

Black roadcase containing:
Reverend Orange guitar USA 03416 ZSL7

Black fibre case containg:
Gibson red SG short scale bass USA No serial number

Black roadcase containing:
Marshall Vintage/Modern Amplifier UK M-2007-07-0926-2 RoHS

Black roadcase containing:
Marshall Vintage/Modern Amplifier UK M-2007-07-0927-2 RoHS

4x Marshall 4×12 Cabinets (with Tuki cover) UK #1 Slant: M-2007-05-0149-0

4x Marshall 4×12 Cabinets (with Tuki cover) UK #2 Straight: M-2006-49-0380-0

4x Marshall 4×12 Cabinets (with Tuki cover) UK #3 Slant: M-2007-05-0150-0

4x Marshall 4×12 Cabinets (with Tuki cover) UK #4 Straight: M-2006-49-0381-0

Orange Calzone road case containing:
Guitar pedal board and pedals USA/Japan No serial number
Assorted leads USA/UK No serial number
2x mic stands Germany No serial number
Assorted strings and spares USA No serial number
plus:
2x Boss TU2 Chromatic Tuner
Boss CH1 Super Chorus
Fulltone OCD Overdrive
Crybaby Wah
Peterson Strobo-Stomp Tuner Pedal
Whirlwind A/B Boxes
Whirlwind Cable Tester
and many many istrument cables
various tools ( screwdrivers, soldering iron, pliers, etc… )
tambourine and maracas

Cardboard box containing:
Assorted replacement drum heads USA No serial number

Gretsch Silver Sparkle Catalina drum kit USA No serial number
26″ Kick Drum No serial number
13″ Rack Tom No serial number
18″ Floor Tom No serial number
4x Cymbal Stands No serial number
1x Snare Stand No serial number
1x Hi Hat Stand No serial number
1x Drum Throne No serial number

Eden D810 Bass cabinet USA D810RP4 0703E5001

Eden D810 Bass cabinet USA D810RP4 0703E5002

Cardboard box containg:
Eden VT300 Bass amplifier USA 0601E5115

Cardboard box containg:
Eden VT300 Bass amplifier USA 0507E5033

Floor Fan CHINA No serial number

Floor Fan CHINA No serial number

Green clamshell suitcase containing:
Yamaha snare drum JAPAN No serial number
Yahama kick pedal JAPAN No serial number
Zildjian Mega Bell cymbal USA No serial number
Zildjian 15″ Hi-Hats USA No serial number
3x Zildjian 18″ 19″ 20″ crash medium cymbals USA No serial number

Brown Epiphone guitar case:
Black Epiphone EB3 short scale bass KOREA F300503

1 x Wheeled Black Pelican case (50cm x 28cm x 20cm) containing :
A selection of microphones and microphone accessories, most of which are in separately labeled black pouches. All of the microphones are of Shure manufacture, also a BSS DI box. Inside the Pelican case there is also a Ferrari pencil case containing an iPod, iPod accessories, various small cables and adaptors, a Leatherman Charge, a Stooges AAA tour laminate, some pain killers, some sharpies, some electrical tape, some business cards (Mr Rik Hart). Within the case there is also a big pair of Sony headphones (model MDR7506) with a long curly cable and three very long XLR to XLR mic cables. Here’s a more specific list of the microphones :
2 x SM91
5 x SM98
2 x B98
2 x SM81
2 x KSM32
1 x KSM27
2 x B52
3 x SM57
8 x SM58
1 x BSS AR-133 DI Box
(all manufactured by shure)

http://www.hootpage.com/stoogesstolenstuff/stoogesstolenstuff.html

mike watt’s hoot page

Iggy and The Stooges are in the middle of a huge tour and this is a disaster – not to mention some rare kit gone forever. Please help if you can.

Thanks.

WHAT: The Hippodrome Transformed, an art competition inspired by the lures of old Main Street and Downtown LA
WHEN: Artists’ designs accepted through 9/26; newly painted Hippodrome debuts 10/9 during downtown LA Art Walk
BASICS: Entries judged by historic LA bloggers of OnBunkerHill.org; Two winning artists each paint a side of the Hippodrome bus; Honorarium includes Esotouric bus tour tickets and gift certificates from popular downtown bars and restaurants
INFO: http://www.esotouric.com/transform, 323-223-2767

LOS ANGELES- The Downtown L.A. Art Walk, held every second Thursday year round, is one of the great success stories of the neighborhood’s revival. Launched in 2004 by a small group of independent gallery owners in what was then the western edge of Skid Row, the event now draws upwards of 4000 people, and includes live music, a thriving bar and restaurant scene, book signings, and of course art exhibits.

No Art Walk would be complete without making a circuit on Esotouric’s curated salon and shuttle bus, The Hippodrome, a custom vintage school bus transformed into a unique free entertainment venue starring magicians, musicians, fortune tellers, freak show performers and poets. But this fall, the Hippodrome will be transformed anew when two artists win the Hippodrome Transformed competition, each earning the right to paint one side of the bus with their own images inspired by Downtown LA’s astonishing history.

For the first half of the Twentieth Century, Downtown LA teemed with the most exciting and bizarre entertainment imaginable. Silent movie stars filmed chase scenes, burlesque babes shimmied, vaudeville acts got big laughs, B-Girls hustled drinks and cash, anarchists preached revolution, and great writers like Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski sought inspiration among the rabble. It’s scenes like these which will illustrate the sides of the Hippodrome shuttle when the winning designs are unveiled at the October 9 Art Walk.

Entries will be accepted until September 26 and judged by the writers of OnBunkerHill.org (formerly 1947project.com), the alternative history website that explores the incredible lost neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Two winners will be announced on September 30, and will immediately begin painting the Hippodrome for its transformed debut on the October 9 Art Walk.

The honorarium for the winning artists includes: four seats on upcoming Esotouric bus adventures, a post-Art Walk party aboard the Hippodrome to any place in Los Angeles they desire, and $50 gift certificates from Cafe Metropol, Daily Grill, one of Cedd Moses’ many downtown watering holes, and Takami Sushi & Robata Restaurant, with more sponsors and prizes to be announced.

For a full call for entries, please see:
http://www.esotouric.com/transform

For historic resources about old Los Angeles, please see:
http://esotouric.com/resourcetransform

Link for general Hippodrome info, including August 14 performer schedule:
http://www.esotouric.com/hippodrome

Via Bert Green Fine Art.

Wow. Just wow. In-fucking-credible. Tell me this is a joke and not what passes for political discussion in America. In the Wall Street Journal, no less. Tell me it’s an Onion sketch. Wait a minute, they already did their own version.

That abrasive, whirring sound you can hear is the ghosts of Mark Twain, HL Mencken and Bill Hicks spinning in their graves.

Mea Culpa by Brian Eno & David Byrne. A film by Bruce Conner.

Mongoloid by Devo. A film by Bruce Conner.

Bruce Conner, a San Francisco artist renowned for working fluently across media, died at his home of natural causes on Monday. He was 74.

Mr. Conner was one of the last survivors of the Bay Area Beat era art scene that included Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), Wallace Berman (1926-1976), and Wally Hedrick (1928-2003).

“We were all anonymous artists here in the ’50s,” Mr. Conner told The Chronicle in 2000, shortly before the opening of his retrospective “2000 BC The Bruce Conner Story, Part II,” at the de Young Museum.

Despite an enviably long record of gallery and museum exhibitions, Mr. Conner met with little recognition outside the worlds of contemporary art and independent film. More.

Thoughts on Democracy by Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B).

The Thoughts on Democracy exhibition is comprised of posters created by sixty leading contemporary artists and designers, invited by The Wolfsonian to create a new graphic design inspired by American illustrator Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” posters of 1943, which were recently gifted to the museum by Leonard A. Lauder.

The Wolfsonian-FIU is a museum, library, and research center that uses objects to illustrate the persuasive power of art and design, to explore what it means to be modern, and to tell the story of social, historical, and technological changes that have transformed our world. The collections comprise approximately 120,000 objects from the period of 1885 to 1945 – the height of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the Second World War – in a variety of media including furniture; industrial-design objects; works in glass, ceramics, and metal; rare books; periodicals; ephemera; works on paper; paintings; textiles; and medals.

The Wolfsonian is located at:
1001 Washington Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33139
P: 305.531.1001
www.wolfsonian.org

It was thirty years ago today that Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag made its first appearance in a gay pride march for the 1978 Gay Freedom Parade in San Francisco. The stripes in Baker’s original design signified (from top to bottom) sexuality, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity and spirit. The hot pink stripe was dropped due to manufacturing difficulties when the flag was being mass-produced and it lost the turquoise so that an even number of stripes would be visible when hung from lamp posts. The six stripe version is now used worldwide as a gay pride symbol. Gilbert Baker talked to The Independent about the flag’s legacy.

Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment

by Gore Vidal

Jun 11, 2008

On June 9, 2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.

I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment—he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials—we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress. We all know how the self-described “war hero,” Mr. John McCain, likes to snigger at France, while the notion that he is a hero of any kind is what we should be sniggering at. It is Le Monde, a French newspaper, that told a story the next day hardly touched by The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or, in fact, any other major American media outlet.

As for TV? Well, there wasn’t much—you see, we dare not be divisive because it upsets our masters who know that this is a perfect country, and the fact that so many in it don’t like it means that they have been terribly spoiled by the greatest health service on Earth, the greatest justice system, the greatest number of occupied prisons—two and a half million Americans are prisoners—what a great tribute to our penal passions!

Naturally, I do not want to sound hard, but let me point out that even a banana Republican would be distressed to discover how much of our nation’s treasury has been siphoned off by our vice president in the interest of his Cosa Nostra company, Halliburton, the lawless gang of mercenaries set loose by this administration in the Middle East.

But there it was on the first page of Le Monde. The House of Representatives, which was intended to be the democratic chamber, at last was alert to its function, and the bravest of its members set in motion the articles of impeachment of the most dangerous president in our history. Rep Kucinich listed some 30-odd articles describing impeachable offenses committed by the president and vice president, neither of whom had ever been the clear choice of our sleeping polity for any office.

Some months ago, Kucinich had made the case against Dick Cheney. Now he had the principal malefactor in his view under the title “Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush”! “Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.” The purpose of the resolve is that he be duly tried by the Senate, and if found guilty, be removed from office. At this point, Rep. Kucinich presented his 35 articles detailing various high crimes and misdemeanors for which removal from office was demanded by the framers of the Constitution.

Update: On Wednesday, the House voted by 251 to 166 to send Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to a committee which probably won’t get to the matter before Bush leaves office, a strategy that is “often used to kill legislation,” as the Associated Press noted later that day.

Bo with the Bo-ettes…pure rock’n'roll genius.

Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Updated: 9:32 AM ET May 6, 2008

Michael Sheehan is on a one-man mission to put terrorist threats into perspective, which is a place they’ve rarely or ever been before. Already you can see it’s going to be a hard slog. Fighting the inflated menace of Osama bin Laden has become big business, generating hundreds of billions of dollars for government agencies and contractors in what one friend of mine in the Washington policy-making stratosphere calls “the counterterrorist-industrial complex.”

But Sheehan’s got the kind of credentials that ought to make us stop and listen. He was a U.S. Army Green Beret fighting guerrillas in Central America in the 1980s, he served on the National Security Council staff under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, and he held the post of ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism from 1998 to 2000.

In those days Sheehan was among that persistent, relentless and finally shrill chorus of voices trying to warn the Clinton administration that Osama bin Laden and his boys represented a horrific danger to the United States and its interests. Days after the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors, experienced analysts like Sheehan at the State Department and Richard A. Clarke at the White House were certain Al Qaeda was behind it, but there was no support for retaliation among the Clintonistas or, even less, the Pentagon.

Clarke later wrote vividly about Sheehan’s reaction after the military brass begged off. “Who the s— do they think attacked the Cole, f—in’ Martians?” Sheehan asked Clarke. “Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

We all know the answer to that question, of course. But what’s interesting is not that Sheehan was so right, for all the good it did, or that President Bill Clinton and then President George W. Bush were so wrong not to pay attention. What’s interesting is Sheehan’s argument now that Al Qaeda just isn’t the existential-twilight-struggle threat it’s often cracked up to be. Hence the subtitle of his new book, “Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves” (Crown, 2008).

The ideas Sheehan puts forth in a text as easy to read as a Power Point should be central to every security debate in the current presidential campaign. But given the personality politics that have dominated the race so far, that seems unlikely. Once again it’s up to the public to figure these things out for itself.

“I want people to understand what the real threat is and what’s a bunch of bull,” Sheehan told me when I tracked him down a few days ago in one of those Middle Eastern hotel lobbies where you sip orange juice and lemonade at cocktail time. (He asked me not to say where, precisely, since the government he’s now advising on policing and terrorism puts a high premium on discretion.)

Before September 11, said Sheehan, the United States was “asleep at the switch” while Al Qaeda was barreling down the track. “If you don’t pay attention to these guys,” said Sheehan, “they will kill you in big numbers.” So bin Laden’s minions hit U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, they hit the Cole in 2000, and they hit New York and Washington in 2001—three major attacks on American targets in the space of 37 months. Since then, not one. And not for want of trying on their part.

What changed? The difference is purely and simply that intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the military have focused their attention on the threat, crushed the operational cells they could find—which were in fact the key ones plotting and executing major attacks—and put enormous pressure on all the rest.

“I reject the notion that Al Qaeda is waiting for ‘the big one’ or holding back an attack,” Sheehan writes. “A terrorist cell capable of attacking doesn’t sit and wait for some more opportune moment. It’s not their style, nor is it in the best interest of their operational security. Delaying an attack gives law enforcement more time to detect a plot or penetrate the organization.”

Terrorism is not about standing armies, mass movements, riots in the streets or even palace coups. It’s about tiny groups that want to make a big bang. So you keep tracking cells and potential cells, and when you find them you destroy them. After Spanish police cornered leading members of the group that attacked trains in Madrid in 2004, they blew themselves up. The threat in Spain declined dramatically.

Indonesia is another case Sheehan and I talked about. Several high-profile associates of bin Laden were nailed there in the two years after 9/11, then sent off to secret CIA prisons for interrogation. The suspects are now at Guantánamo. But suicide bombings continued until police using forensic evidence—pieces of car bombs and pieces of the suicide bombers—tracked down Dr. Azahari bin Husin, “the Demolition Man,” and the little group around him. In a November 2005 shootout the cops killed Dr. Azahari and crushed his cell. After that such attacks in Indonesia stopped.

The drive to obliterate the remaining hives of Al Qaeda training activity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and those that developed in some corners of Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 needs to continue, says Sheehan. It’s especially important to keep wanna-be jihadists in the West from joining with more experienced fighters who can give them hands-on weapons and explosives training. When left to their own devices, as it were, most homegrown terrorists can’t cut it. For example, on July 7, 2005, four bombers blew themselves up on public transport in London, killing 56 people. Two of those bombers had trained in Pakistan. Another cell tried to do the same thing two weeks later, but its members had less foreign training, or none. All the bombs were duds.

Sheehan’s perspective is clearly influenced by the three years he spent, from 2003 to 2006, as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism at the New York City Police Department. There, working with Commissioner Ray Kelly and David Cohen, the former CIA operations chief who heads the NYPD’s intelligence division, Sheehan helped build what’s regarded as one of the most effective terrorist-fighting organizations in the United States. Radicals and crazies of many different stripes have targeted the city repeatedly over the last century, from alleged Reds to Black Blocs, from Puerto Rican nationalists and a “mad bomber” to Al Qaeda’s aspiring martyrs. But the police have limited resources, so they’ve learned the art of terrorist triage, focusing on what’s real and wasting little time and money on what’s merely imagined.

“Even in 2003, less than two years after 9/11, I told Kelly and Cohen that I thought Al Qaeda was simply not very good,” Sheehan writes in his book. Bin Laden’s acolytes “were a small and determined group of killers, but under the withering heat of the post-9/11 environment, they were simply not getting it done … I said what nobody else was saying: we underestimated Al Qaeda’s capabilities before 9/11 and overestimated them after. This seemed to catch both Kelly and Cohen a bit by surprise, and I agreed not to discuss my feelings in public. The likelihood for misinterpretation was much too high.”

It still is. At the Global Leadership Forum co-sponsored by NEWSWEEK at the Royal United Services Institute in London last week, the experts and dignitaries didn’t want to risk dissing Al Qaeda, even when their learned presentations came to much the same conclusions as Sheehan.

The British Tories’ shadow security minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, dismissed overblown American rhetoric: “We don’t use the language of the Global War on Terror,” said the baroness. “We actively eschew it.” The American security expert Ashton Carter agreed. “It’s not a war,” said the former assistant secretary of defense, who is now an important Hillary Clinton supporter. “It’s a matter of law enforcement and intelligence, of Homeland Security hardening the target.” The military focus, he suggested, should be on special ops.

Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy. Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, “leads naturally to a risk management approach, which is very different from what we’ve heard from Washington these last few years, which is to ‘eliminate the threat’.”

Yet when I asked the panelists at the forum if Al Qaeda has been overrated, suggesting as Sheehan does that most of its recruits are bunglers, all shook their heads. Nobody wants to say such a thing on the record, in case there’s another attack tomorrow and their remarks get quoted back to them.

That’s part of what makes Sheehan so refreshing. He knows there’s a big risk that he’ll be misinterpreted; he’ll be called soft on terror by ass-covering bureaucrats, breathless reporters and fear-peddling politicians. And yet he charges ahead. He expects another attack sometime, somewhere. He hopes it won’t be made to seem more apocalyptic than it is. “Don’t overhype it, because that’s what Al Qaeda wants you to do. Terrorism is about psychology.” In the meantime, said Sheehan, finishing his fruit juice, “the relentless 24/7 job for people like me is to find and crush those guys.”

As I headed into the parking lot, watching a storm blow in off the desert, it occurred to me that one day in the not too distant future the inability of these terrorist groups to act effectively will discredit them and the movement they claim to represent. If they did succeed with a new attack and the public and media brushed it off after a couple of news cycles, that would discredit them still more. The psychological victory would be ours for a change, and not only in our own societies but very likely in theirs. Or, to paraphrase an old Army dictum, if you crush the cells, the hearts and minds will follow.

In a similar vein (and way back in 2004): The Power of Nightmares.

“He was so good I couldn’t have really competed with him.”
Sir Peter Blake

Reasons To Be Cheerful is a celebration of the life and work of one of the greatest designers of recent times: Barney Bubbles.

Bubbles—real name Colin Fulcher—was a giant of graphic design whose prodigious output is revered by musicians, artists, fellow designers and music and pop culture fans.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is published November 2008 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the artist’s death. Author Paul Gorman is also curating a companion exhibition with Sir Paul Smith.

Space Ritual by Hawkwind (1973).

Barney Bubbles’ body of work included early posters for the Rolling Stones, brand and product design for Sir Terence Conran, psychedelic art with poster maestro Stanley Mouse, layouts for underground magazines OZ and Friends and collaborations with many bands and performers, from counter-culture collective Hawkwind to new wave stars Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, The Damned and Billy Bragg.

left: Doremi Fasol Latido by Hawkwind (1972).
right: Ian Dury & the Blockheads logo design (late 70s).

Bubbles links the colourful underground optimism of the 60s to the sardonic and manipulative art which accompanied punk’s explosion from 1976 onwards, and influenced a generation of design talent including Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville.

Music For Pleasure by The Damned (1977).

The lavishly illustrated Reasons To Be Cheerful will contain hundreds of images and many full-colour plates.

About the Author
Paul Gorman is a popular culture historian and author of The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion, and the top ten bestselling Straight with Boy George.

Okay, so Tony Stark came first but, ya know…yarbles to Marvel Comics (TM). The Sabs on Beat Club, May 1970.

Albert Hofmann by Dean Chamberlain.

‘Father of LSD’ dies aged 102.

Mike Barnes
Friday April 25, 2008
The Guardian

When Firmin Gémier, the actor playing Père Ubu, uttered the opening line of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi at its Paris premiere in 1896, its author gained instant notoriety. Although consisting of just one made-up word, “merdre” – for which one English translation is “shittr” – it was enough to cause 15 minutes of uproar in the audience. When the play continued, its mix of absurd humour and obscenity provoked heckling, and scuffles broke out. in the auditorium. Nobody had seen anything like it. A perplexed WB Yeats, who attended the performance, famously said: “What more is possible? After us, the Savage God.”

The Savage God sounds suspiciously like a rock band, and Jarry managed, in fact, to create one of music’s odder distributaries, thanks to the concept of ‘pataphysics. Jarry’s school physics teacher – nicknamed Père Hébé by his pupils – managed to influence his charge in ways he never intended. As well as providing the seed of Père Ubu’s name, Hébé’s bungling manner, disastrous experiments and inability to control a class led Jarry to the creation of the spoof science of ‘pataphysics, in which contradictions are embraced, with all possible viewpoints having equal validity. (The apostrophe was apparently necessary to “avoid a simple pun”, although what that pun was has never been explained.)

To the extent that people are familiar in any way with ‘pataphysics, it would probably be through the Beatles. Paul McCartney heard a radio production of Jarry’s play Ubu Coco (Ubu Cuckolded) and was inspired to mention ‘pataphysics in song. Unfortunately, he dropped it into Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, one of his very worst. But, that disaster notwithstanding, ‘pataphysics has a curious place in music, a place that will be marked tonight at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, with a musical production, Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi, featuring the veteran US avant-rock band Pere Ubu, which will be preceded by a free ‘Pataphysics in Sound concert in the venue’s foyer.

Put into a brief idiot’s guide – which, one assumes, would be as ‘pataphysically valid as any other guide – ‘pataphysics is, in Jarry’s words, “the science of imaginary solutions” and “the law governing exceptions”. In it, science’s apparently immutable laws are scoffed at. To Jarry, they are merely “the correlation of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones … which reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality”. ‘Pataphysics was, he said, “the greatest of all sciences”.

Jarry claimed that “talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind and falsifies the memory, but the absurd exercises the mind and makes the memory work”. He was a singular artist who aimed to live life as a total hallucination. To this end, he drank formidable quantities of wine and absinthe, which precipitated his demise at the age of 34 in 1907.

Jarry’s legacy was formalised posthumously in 1948 by the founding of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in Paris. Its constitution asserts that all people are ‘pataphysicians whether they know it or not, but paid-up Collège members have included artists Asger Jorn, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, and the Marx Brothers. And its precepts have produced music more interesting and challenging than Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

Duchamp created a number of musical compositions, many purely conceptual. But when Stephane Ginsburgh recorded Duchamp’s 1913 opus Erratum Musical a few years back, he took into account Duchamp’s observation that ‘pataphysics involved “canned chance” and ensured all the piece’s 88 piano notes were picked out in a random order with no emphasis on any one in particular. In 1960, Jean Dubuffet, who originated the term Art Brut, taped a series of improvisations with Asger Jorn, choosing from his collection of more than 50 instruments, few of which he could play to any recognised standard. These energetic, chaotic recordings were released as Expériences Musicales in 1961. And in 1975, the English composer Gavin Bryars – a member of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique – wrote Ponukélian Melody, a slow piece for wheezing organ, parping tuba, cello and bells. It was his musical response to Raymond Roussel’s novel Impressions d’Afrique, which was set in an imaginary African country.

But ‘pataphysics first truly overlapped with rock music in 1967, when Soft Machine – a psychedelic pop group with a penchant for improvisation – performed a live soundtrack to Jarry’s play Ubu Enchainé (Ubu Enchained) at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh during that year’s Fringe festival. Early in the band’s career, drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt’s whimsical, absurdist lyrics were often described as Dadaist. But were they, more accurately, ‘pataphysical?

“I wasn’t drawn to Jarry and ‘pataphysics from reading about it,” Wyatt explains. “I think we were chosen to be ‘pataphysicians before I knew what it was. Later, we were playing in Paris, and some representatives of the College of ‘Pataphysics came to the concert. A venerable old member of their group heard it for about five minutes, thought we played the most incomprehensible and appalling music he had ever heard, gave us his blessing and gave us certificates. So we are officially Petits Fils Ubu – Ubu’s grandchildren – and in our case it gives us the right to lead the marching band at the front of the victory parade of the ‘pataphysical movement. But nobody who gave it to us thought to explain it any more than you would explain a football match to a teddy bear mascot.”

For Soft Machine Volume Two, recorded in 1968, Wyatt wrote A ‘Pataphysical Introduction and A Concise British Alphabet. The latter is in two parts: he sings the alphabet forwards in the first, backwards in the second. This followed in the footsteps of Luc Etienne’s 1957 composition L’Apres-Midi d’Un Magnétophone: Palindromes Phonétiques, which has a similarly palindromic form – a recording of speech played normally, then with the tape running backwards . This emphasised that, ‘pataphyscially speaking, it meant as much, or as little, either way around, and ‘pataphysicians would describe the relationship of Etienne’s composition to Wyatt’s as an example of “plagiarism by anticipation”.

Was Wyatt guided by any of these concepts? “I don’t think I was guided by any thought at all,” he admits. “But I just decided that singing the alphabet backwards was a ‘pataphysical activity. Some people get upset by art that doesn’t make sense to them – I never had that problem. I never saw what was the sense that modern art wasn’t making. I was always at home with the science of imaginary solutions.”

Tonight’s performance of Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi is just the latest in a long line of different treatments of Ubu Roi, from Jan Lenica’s 1977 cartoon version to a 1991 opera by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Jarry had an interest in the notion of “horrible beauty” in which an aesthetic appreciation of the monstrous was allowable and discordant elements could be counterbalanced by humour. Pere Ubu’s singer, David Thomas, agrees that this is a pretty good description of the band’s music, which is surmounted by squalling, untempered synthesiser and his own squawking vocals. But apart from their name and the fact that the title track of their 1977 debut album, The Modern Dance, includes the refrain “Merdre, merdre”, was Jarry an influence on Pere Ubu’s music?

‘The thing that impressed me over the time of immersing myself in Jarry in high school and the point at which I formed Pere Ubu, was Jarry’s theatrical production ideas,” Thomas explains. “It seemed to me that his method called for the engaging of the audience’s imaginations in the creative process, with his use of placards, ‘pataphysical notions, and anti-naturalism. As synthesised, concrète and abstract sound techniques and technology developed, and were integrated into rock music, then pure sound as a powerful narrative voice in its own right came into play.

“The object was the same as Jarry’s seemed to be, to engage the imagination of the audience in the creative process. To confound, illuminate, generate chaos for its own sake, to overlay intentions with counter-intentions, self-doubt, fear and hope, to create an art that, as accurately as possible in a three-minute song, mimics the human condition.”

Thomas has edited the play to concentrate on the two main characters. He has also added elements that he feels are in “the spirit of the original, particularly in the area that originally interested me in this project – the notion that the Politico-Media-Industrial Complex is filled with characters far more grotesque than Jarry’s characters could have ever been.”

Jarry wrote The Song of Disembraining for Ubu Roi, but Thomas has decided not to use it. “It’s not really a very good song,” he says. “The title is great but it meanders on and on forever.” He has instead translated parts of the plot into original song structures “where elegant to do so”, for which he is unabashed. “We are a rock band. We are Americans. We’re not going to pretend to be something we’re not,” he says. “The justification is that we’re the only band in the world which has for more than 30 years followed a Jarry-esque, or even ‘pataphysical course in rock music. We got a right to do what we want. The play is about ideas. The clothes you put on ideas are fashions that come and go. The ideas are what count and what survive.”

Where ladies float in chiffon wispiness, all landscapes recede to an infinite Dalí-esque point, and parrots are, er…parrots.

La porte monumentale.

Was the Paris Exposition of 1900 the most gloriously excessive of them all? Judging by these photos it certainly looks it. The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 exposition (and was famously intended to be a temporary structure) but became the centrepiece of the 1900 fair. Wikipedia has a large plan of the entire layout and two of the halls, the Grand and Petit Palais, are still in existence and used as exhibition spaces.

Le palais des illusions.

La salle des fêtes.

The Palais du Trocadéro was designed by Gabriel Davioud for the 1878 World’s Fair and until its demolition in the 1930s faced the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. The 1900 Exposition included the Trocadéro among its buildings which makes it one of the more unusual exposition structures, having survived several of these events and seen off many of the temporary buildings that were raised around it.

The Trocadéro was something of a heavy-handed confection, ostensibly “Moorish” in that Orientalist fashion favoured by 19th century architects. The numerous photographs of the place give it the same quality of ghostly grandeur that so many these long-demolished buildings possess; we’re able to look at a very real place which has now vanished utterly. The bridge in the picture below still stands, however, and the balcony of the Trocadéro’s replacement, the Palais de Chaillot, gives great views of the Eiffel Tower and the river.

Globe terrestre by Louis Bonnier.

The Exposition Universelle would have been more grand/fabulous/excessive (delete as appropriate) if architect Louis Bonnier had been given free reign. The building above was intended to stand before the Palais du Trocadéro and house a huge globe which visitors could peruse from surrounding galleries. Bonnier also designed a series of kiosks (below) for different exhibitors which look more like over-sized Art Nouveau ornaments than pieces of architecture.

Three of these pictures are scanned from a book; the only site I found with examples of Bonnier’s work was this one which unfortunately spoils the pictures with enormous watermarks.

Exposition kiosks.

The Palais Lumineux.

And lastly, a piece of pastiche that looks like Satine’s boudoir on the back of the elephant in Moulin Rouge. The Palais Lumineux was a work of period Chinoiserie built for the Exposition in the Champ de Mars close to the Eiffel Tower. I forget where I found this tinted view but Wikipedia has what appears to be the same photograph coloured so as to resemble a night scene.

Music by Justice, visuals by So-Me, Yorgo Tloupas and Machine Molle.

New Worlds #1 (July 1946). Originally a science fiction fanzine founded by Ted Carnell, Arthur C Clarke and John Wyndham in the 1930s. The magazine was edited by Ted Carnell from 1946 to 1963 when Michael Moorcock took over and transformed it into the most important literary magazine of the 1960s.

Michael Moorcock
Saturday March 22, 2008
The Guardian

Michael Moorcock fondly remembers his friend Arthur C Clarke, the Ego, visionary and gentleman

I was a very young journalist of 17 or so when Arthur C Clarke invited me to celebrate his birthday before he returned to Ceylon, where he had recently settled. The party was scheduled for November 5 in north London. Flattered to be asked, I gave up plans to get drunk and do exciting things with explosives and set off into the terra incognita of Tottenham where Arthur’s brother Fred lived a modest and respectable life. A bottle in my pocket, I knocked at the door to be greeted by Fred. “It’s round the corner,” he said. “I’m just off there myself.” He turned a thoughtful eye on the bottle. “I don’t think you’ll need that.”

Promising, I thought. Ego (Arthur’s nickname since youth) has laid every-thing on. I let Fred place the bottle on the hallstand and followed him for a few hundred yards through misty streets, determinedly reenacting the Blitz with Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, until we arrived at a church and one of those featureless halls of the kind where the Scouts held their regular meetings. Sure enough, inside was a group of mostly stunned friends and acquaintances holding what appeared to be teacups, one of which was shoved into my hand as I was greeted by Arthur in that Somerset-American acent that was all his own. “Welcome,” he said. “Got everything you want?”

“Um,” I stammered. “Is there only tea ?”

“Of course not!” beamed the mighty intelligence, who had already published the whole concept of satellite communications on which our modern world is based. “There’s orange juice, too.” He indicated a serving hatch. “But you’d better hurry, Mike. The film show’s starting soon.” I saw that ladies of the kind who help out at church socials were organising chairs. I strolled up to Ted Carnell who, in the 1930s, had founded New Worlds with Arthur and John Wyndham when it was still a mimeographed fanzine.

Ted had the air of melancholy satisfaction I’d spotted on the faces of boys at school as they saw you turn up beside them on the headmaster’s carpet. It read “Caught you, too, did he?”

Once we were seated, Fred downed the lights and the real ordeal began. Arthur’s early home movies of the Great Barrier Reef. The projector breaking down was the high point. When it did, the relief was tangible.

In spite of it all, my liking for Arthur continued. Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I’d go out drinking with his boyfriend. We met his proteges, western and eastern, and their families: people who had only the most generous praise for his kindness. Self-absorbed he might be, and a teetotaller, but an impeccable gent through and through.

He had absolutely unshakeable (and why not?) faith in his own visions. After all, SatCom was by no means his only accurate prediction. He retained a faith in the power of reason and science to cure our ills. At one point, when the Tamil Tigers emerged on the Sri Lankan political scene, I asked if he wasn’t worried. He assured me that it was all a misunderstanding and that the Tigers, who subsequently became expert terrorists, were basically sound chaps who’d soon give up their wild ideas.

His view of our world, rather like PG Wodehouse’s (whom he resembled physically) didn’t include much room for the Four Horsemen galloping through his rhododendrons. His preferred future was extremely Wellsian, full of brainy people sitting about in togas swapping theorems.

And he was unflappably The Ego. After we watched the preview of 2001, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard and I all admitted it had left us a bit cold in the visionary department. He took our poor response with his usual amused forgiveness reserved for lesser mortals and told us how many millions the movie had already made in America.

Around that time, I was able to introduce Arthur to William Burroughs. Everyone invited to my party expected the master of optimistic hard SF and the master of satirical inner space to get on about as well as Attila the Hun and Pope Leo. In fact, they spent the entire evening deep in animated conversation, pausing only to sip their OJ and complain about the rock ‘n’ roll music on the hifi. At the end of the evening both were warm in their gratitude for the introduction.

I scarcely read a word of his, apart from a few classic short stories, though I came to publish him occasionally in New Worlds, and he knew I was broadly unfamiliar with his work.

He understood this to be my loss. And, as he became a massive bestseller, partly because of 2001 but perhaps even more because of his TV series investigating the paranormal, he didn’t change. He would still turn up in the pub to show us brochures for his latest ventures and mention casually all the famous people who admired him, including Rupert Murdoch and Richard Nixon, showing us 10×8 glossies of himself with the world’s movers and shakers.

He still understood that we would rather watch his home movies than enjoy a drunken evening playing with rockets whose only technical secrets lay in the length of their blue touch-paper. But, I have to admit, I became much warier of accepting his “party” invitations.

Angus Wilson once returned from Sri Lanka exasperatedly describing Arthur as the most egocentric person he had ever met. Yet somehow, in spite of everything, Arthur remained a beloved friend of whom I retain only the fondest memories. He was a sweet-natured optimist in a world of grief. I’m really going to miss him.

Giles Fraser
The Guardian, Saturday March 22 2008

Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm. He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you fucking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.

Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ’s passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of.

Two weeks ago, the most powerful Christian in the world vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding on detainees. “We need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists,” said George Bush in a passable impersonation of Pontius Pilate. “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

Throughout his time in office, the president has frequently been photographed in front of the cross. Yet as his support for torture demonstrates, he has understood little of its meaning. For the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is supremely a moral story about God’s identification with victims.

The French anthropologist René Girard is the modern voice that has done most to explain the nature of this moral change. Human societies, he argues, are often held together by scapegoating. From the playground to the boardroom, we pick on the weak, the weird or the different as a way of securing communal solidarity. At times of tension or division, there is nothing quite as uniting as the “discovery” of someone to blame – often someone perfectly innocent. For generations of Europeans, the Jews were cast in the role; in the same way women have been accused of being witches, homosexuals derided as unnatural, and Muslims dismissed as terrorists.

The crucifixion turns this world on its head. For it is the story of a God who deliberately takes the place of the despised and rejected so as to expose the moral degeneracy of a society that purchases its own togetherness at the cost of innocent suffering. The new society he called forth – something he dubbed the kingdom of God – was to be a society without scapegoating, without the blood of the victim. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, “on earth as it is in heaven”.

Yet, for all his years in office, it is hard to think that President Bush has done anything much to make this kingdom more of a reality. Instead he has given us rendition, so-called specialised interrogation procedures, and the blood of many thousand innocent Iraqis. Given all this, what can it possibly mean for George Bush to call himself a Christian?

Easter is not all about going to heaven. Still less some nasty evangelical death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God. The crucifixion reveals human death-dealing at its worst. In contrast, the resurrection offers a new start, the foundation of a very different sort of community that refuses the logic of scapegoating. The kingdom is a place of shocking, almost amoral, inclusion. All are welcome, especially the rejected. At least, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, very few of us Christians are any good at it.

Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney, London.

The great science fiction writer and futurist appeared in the very first issue of Arthur.

Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry.

Now here’s a marriage made in heaven (or hell, depending on your point of view): Pere Ubu plus the Brothers Quay presenting Alfred Jarry’s 1896 classic of proto-surrealist theatre, Ubu Roi. I hope someone’s filming this given that there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to get down there to see it. Pere Ubu’s David Thomas has this to say about collaborations:

Well, it’s pretty simple. If someone wants to work with me then they have the right stuff. Working with me is guaranteed career endangerment, not to be undertaken lightly. I had no idea of who the Quays were. Everybody else seems to know but I don’t watch films, tv or video unless a space ship or baseball is involved. The Quays don’t involve themselves with either. So how am I supposed to know? I don’t make the Rules. I obey. We met. We talked. We immediately understood each other and the project and how it all would fit together. I don’t trust visual information of any kind. The Quays were clearly men who were capable of taming the Eye Beast. I told them I’d be delighted to stay out of their way and let them get on with doing what they feel most. They sent me pictures. They were, as I knew they must be, perfect. No space ships. Or baseball. But perfect nevertheless. Only people who don’t understand need to talk. We have no need of talking. Talking is for the weak, the uncertain… and girls. Ha-ha! (I mean it.) We are men who stand in the moment and can deliver the goods. So down to the process: Only work with people who are Masters, and who Understand. If you choose to work with such people then don’t get in their way unless they appear to be set on a course that will break The Rules. Don’t make up the Rules. Don’t work with people who feel the need to talk to you. Don’t work with children or animals. Don’t run into the furniture.

Details from the press release follow and I feel the need to make a point of order: the famous first word of the play, “Merdre!”, doesn’t mean “shitter” as mentioned below. Rather, it’s an untranslatable combination of the French words for “shit” and “murder” which Cyril Connolly rendered unsatisfactorily as “Pschitt!” in his 1968 translation with Simon Watson Taylor.

Pere Ubu and the Brothers Quay present the WORLD PREMIERE of Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi

In two specially created performances for Southbank Centre’s ETHER 08 festival, expressionist avant-garage band Pere Ubu presents the world premiere of Bring Me The Head of Ubu Roi, an adaptation of Ubu Roi (King Ubu), Alfred Jarry’s landmark 1896 play that inspired the band’s name and is widely seen as the precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist art movements.

At the heart of Jarry’s original production was the use of various performance media, and Pere Ubu’s show reflects this with a unique visual staging by the enigmatic Brothers Quay, featuring intriguing stop-motion animation, projections and imaginative stage designs. Singer David Thomas will feature as Père Ubu, partnering Sarah-Jane Morris (ex-Communards) in the role of Mère Ubu, and the production includes an original music score by the band Pere Ubu and 10 new songs. Gagarin, aka London-based former Ludus, Nico and John Cale drummer Graham Dowdall, will contribute minimal electronic soundscapes.

The Brothers Quay.

With this part music, part spoken word, part animated production on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, David Thomas of Pere Ubu realises a dream he has had since being turned on to Alfred Jarry as a 16-year-old high school student in Cleveland, Ohio.

David Thomas said: “Jarry’s ideas resonated with feelings I had about the use of abstract, concrete and synthesised sound in the narrative architecture of rock music, all tools to engage the imagination of the listener when detailing the picture told by the music and lyrics.”

David Thomas.

Ubu Roi is a play for the mind and imagination. It is a drama of ideas and grotesqueries, and a fusion of several disparate and incongruous elements. It shocked early audiences with its blend of grotesque absurdity, wild humour and coarse language. At the premiere in 1896, the very first word of Ubu Roi (‘merdre’, translated as ‘shitter’) provoked a riot amongst the audience and fist fights broke out in the orchestra. Alfred Jarry’s plays in general were widely and wildly hated for their vulgarity, brutality, low comedy and complete lack of literary finish, and his work revealed a lack of respect for royalty, religion and society that prompted some to see his output as the theatrical equivalent of an anarchist bomb attack and an act of political subversion.

Alfred Jarry with his weapons and bicycles, somewhere in the 1890s.

Prior to the Friday performance, there’s a free event in the Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, entitled ‘Pataphysics in Sound. This specially curated musical journey through the history of ’pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, celebrates the genius of Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu Roi and literary madman, time-travelling, absinthe-drinking, pistol-toting, and cycling maniac.

Bring Me The Head of Ubu Roi is presented at the Southbank Centre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Thursday 24 and Friday 25 April 2008.

Via { feuilleton } par Monsieur Coulthart.

A promotional animation for the Spring 2008 Prada collection. Music by CocoRosie.

LINT by Arthur contributor Steve Aylett is on the shortlist for Spread the Word, a World Book Day poll to discover “The Book to Talk About, 2008″. Part of the poll includes online contributions. You can cast your vote here. (Not that we want to skew the results or anything…)

“I have received numerous emails and comments on this book, which doesn’t happen particularly often. All of them have said something along the lines of ‘I laughed aloud on the train’. Lint is ostensibly a biography of Jeff Lint, the best science fiction writer in the world. However, Jeff Lint is a figment of the author’s imagination. What Lint amounts to is a wry, comical parody of everything about pulp sci fi. Anyone who’s read any sci fi will find lots to laugh about. The book even features a plate section of Jeff Lint book covers – although, of course, these are fictional too. This is a rather unusual book in that it’s a fictional biography, and it has been described by SFX magazine thus in their 5 star review: “Lint is like manna from Mars, a jaw-to-the-floor comic masterpiece that will leave you giddy with excitement that it even exists… everyone holding this magazine should own two copies of Lint: one for themselves, one to fling in the face of their nearest foe.” I defy you to read a paragraph – any paragraph – and not laugh. Steve Aylett does things with words that bend your mind, and although this is comic fiction it is a rich and authoritative poke at pulp sci fi through the decades.”

Mothballed USAF aircraft at the Aerospace Maintenance and Recovery Center, Arizona.

The Worst Addiction of Them All
by Kurt Vonnegut
The Nation, December 31, 1983

What has been America’s most nurturing contribution to the culture of this planet so far? Many would say Jazz. I, who love jazz, will say this instead: Alcoholics Anonymous.

I am not an alcoholic. If I was, I would go before the nearest A.A. meeting and say, “My name is Kurt Vonnegut. I am an alcoholic.” God willing, that might be my first step down the long, hard road back to sobriety.

The A.A. scheme, which requires a confession like that, is the first to have any measurable success in dealing with the tendency of some human beings, perhaps 10 percent of any population sample anyone might care to choose, to become addicted to substances that give them brief spasms of pleasure but in the long term transmute their lives and the lives of those around them into ultimate ghastliness.

The A.A. scheme, which, again, can work only if the addicts regularly admit that this or that chemical is poisonous to them, is now proving its effectiveness with compulsive gamblers, who are not dependent on chemicals from a distillery or a pharmaceutical laboratory. This is no paradox. Gamblers, In effect, manufacture their own dangerous substances. God help them, they produce chemicals that elate them whenever they place a bet on simply anything.

If I was a compulsive gambler, which I am not, I would be well advised to stand up before the nearest meeting of Gamblers Anonymous and declare, “My name is Kurt Vonnegut. I am a compulsive gambler.”

Whether I was standing before a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous, I would be encouraged to testify as to how the chemicals I had generated within myself or swallowed had alienated my friends and relatives, cost me jobs and houses and deprived me of my last shred of self-respect.

Not every member of A.A. or G.A. has sunk quite that low, of course–but plenty have. Many, if not most, have done what they call “hitting bottom” before admitting what it is that has been ruining their lives.

I now wish to call attention to another form of addiction, which has not been previously identified. It is more like gambling than drinking, since the people afflicted are ravenous for situations that will cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams. I am persuaded that there are among us people who are tragically hooked on preparations for war.

Tell people with that disease that war is coming and we have to get ready for it, and for a few minutes there, they will be as happy as a drunk with his martini breakfast or a compulsive gambler with his paycheck bet on the Super Bowl.

Let us recognize how sick such people are. From now on, when a national leader, or even just a neighbor, starts talking about some new weapons system which is going to cost us a mere $29 billion, we should speak up. We should say something on the order of, “Honest to God, I couldn’t be sorrier for you if I’d seen you wash down a fistful of black beauties with a pint of Southern Comfort.”

I mean it. I am not joking. Compulsive preparers for World War III, in this country or any other, are as tragically and, yes, as repulsively addicted as any stockbroker passed out with his head in a toilet in the Port Authority bus terminal.

For an alcoholic to experience a little joy, he needs maybe three ounces of grain alcohol. Alcoholics, when they are close to hitting bottom, customarily can’t hold much alcohol.

If we know a compulsive gambler who is dead broke, we can probably make him happy with a dollar to bet on who can spit farther than someone else. For us to give a compulsive war-preparer a fleeting moment of happiness, we may have to buy him three Trident submarines and a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on choo-choo trains.

If Western Civilization were a person–

If Western Civilization, which blankets the world now, as far as I can tell, were a person–

If Western Civilization, which surely now includes the Soviet Union and China and India and Pakistan and on and on, were a person–

If Western Civilization were a person, we would be directing it to the nearest meeting of War-Preparers Anonymous. We would be telling it to stand up before the meeting and say, “My name is Western Civilization. I am a compulsive war-preparer. I have lost everything I ever cared about. I should have come here long ago. I first hit bottom in World War I.” Western Civilization cannot be represented by a single person, of course, but a single explanation for the catastrophic course it has followed during this bloody century is possible. We the people, because of our ignorance of the disease, have again and again entrusted power to people we did not know were sickies.

And let us not mock them now, any more than we would mock someone with syphilis or smallpox or leprosy or yaws or typhoid fever or any of the other diseases to which the flesh is heir. All we have to do is separate them from the levers of power, I think.

And then what? Western Civilization’s long, hard trip back to sobriety might begin.

A word about appeasement, something World War II, supposedly, taught us not to practice: I say to you that the world has been ruined by appeasement. Appeasement of whom? Of the Communists? Of the neo-Nazis? No! Appeasement of the compulsive war-preparers. I can scarcely name a nation that has not lost most of its freedom and wealth in attempts to appease its own addicts to preparations for war.

And there is no appeasing an addict for very long.

“I swear, man, just lay enough bread on me for twenty multiple re-entry vehicles and a fleet of B-1 bombers, and I’ll never bother you again.”

Most addictions start innocently enough in childhood, under agreeable, reputable auspices–a sip of champagne at a wedding, a game of poker for matchsticks on a rainy afternoon. Compulsive war-preparers may have been encouraged as infants to clap their hands with glee at a campfire or a Fourth of July parade.

Not every child gets hooked. Not every child so tempted grows up to be a drunk or a gambler or a babbler about knocking down the incoming missiles of the Evil Empire with laser beams. When I identify the war-preparers as addicts, I am not calling for the exclusion of children from all martial celebrations. I doubt that more than one child in a hundred, having seen fireworks, for example, will become an adult who wants us to stop squandering our substance on education and health and social justice and the arts and food and shelter and clothing for the needy, and so on–who wants us to blow it all on ammunition instead.

And please understand that the addiction I have identified is to preparations for war. I repeat: to preparations for war, addiction to the thrills of de-mothballing battleships and inventing weapons systems against which there cannot possibly be a defense, supposedly, and urging the citizenry to hate this part of humanity or that one, and knocking over little governments that might aid and abet an enemy someday, and so on. I am not talking about an addiction to war itself, which is a very different matter. A compulsive preparer for war wants to go to big-time war no more than an alcoholic stockbroker wants to pass out with his head in a toilet in the Port Authority bus terminal.

Should addicts of any sort hold high office in this or any other country? Absolutely not, for their first priority will always be to satisfy their addiction, no matter how terrible the consequences may be–even to themselves.

Suppose we had an alcoholic President who still had not hit bottom and whose chief companions were drunks like himself. And suppose it were a fact, made absolutely clear to him, that if he took just one more drink, the whole planet would blow up.

So he has all the liquor thrown out of the White House, including his Aqua-Velva shaving lotion. So late at night he is terribly restless, crazy for a drink but proud of not drinking. So he opens the White House refrigerator, looking for a Tab or a Diet Pepsi, he tells himself. And there, half-hidden by a family-size jar of French’s mustard, is an unopened can of Coors beer.

What do you think he’ll do?

Novelist and essayist Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), is the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions.

Copyright © 2008 The Nation

“A Charge to Keep” by W.H.D. Koerner (1916).

The Illustrated President
by Scott Horton

George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled “A Charge to Keep.” Bush was so taken by it, that he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about it:

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

So in Bush’s view (or perhaps I should say, faith) the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century.

Wilhelm Heinrich Dethlef Körner (you see why he used initials, though he later Anglicized this as William Henry Dethlef Koerner) was born in Germany and immigrated to a small town in Iowa as a young tot. He made his way over time to Chicago and worked as an illustrator for the Chicago Tribune. He married Lillian Lusk, a well-know graphic artist in her own right, and moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where he worked for Pilgrim Magazine. He and his wife scrimped and saved to finance a move to New York City. They were after more formal art training and to establish a position as artists in the heart of the publishing industry. They made it to New York in 1907, and they were very successful.

In fact, Koerner’s principal employer through the core of his career was Harper’s Magazine. Koerner published 43 feature illustrations in Harper’s, the first in 1910 and the last in 1925. You can view them here. Koerner was not exclusive to Harper’s, however, he also did important works for the Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s and Collier’s among other publications, and he did a brisk business for the book trade, again very heavily for Harpers Brothers, and he pioneered commercial illustration (Koerner did the first box artwork for C.W. Post’s Grapenuts, for instance). His serious work after 1907 focused heavily on the American West, and he clearly was one of the key “Golden Age” illustrators. His work is famous for dramatic images which for me are consonant with the age of Teddy Roosevelt—they suggest ruggedness, love for the outdoors, a strong sense of adventure and risk-taking. His paintings are packed with motion, and at times rather dramatic motion. I was not able to find much about Koerner and his sense of religion, through it is very clear that he did not engage in public displays of religious fervor and religious themes are absent entirely from his work.

So Bush’s description of “A Charge to Keep” struck me as very strange. In fact, I’d say highly improbable. Now, however, Jacob Weisberg has solved the mystery. He invested the time to track down the commission behind the art work and he gives us the full story in his forthcoming book on Bush, The Bush Tragedy:

[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

So Bush’s inspiring, prosyletizing Methodist is in fact a silver-tongued horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the Bush presidency. Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. But in fact he’s a wily criminal one step out in front of justice. It perfectly reflects Bush the man . . . and Bush the president.

(Simon Owens) decided to catalog the many ways in which MySpace had failed him:

1. You rarely log in to MySpace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.

2. You spend five minutes writing a wall post only to hit an error message when you try to post it because of all the website glitches.

3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the Middle East.

4. You visit someone’s MySpace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because MySpace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to myspace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

7. Your experience is hindered because of intrusive banner ads that either talk to you or try to reach out and block your view of what you’re trying to look at.

8. You read yet another news account about how some child predator using MySpace has abducted a little girl or that some hoax myspace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide.

9. You’re frustrated with the fact that MySpace doesn’t allow you to post your contact info, meaning to contact someone you can only use MySpace’s glitchy Instant Messenger, message/email system, or wall commenting.

10. You’re tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture.

More at Mashable.

Meanwhile UK charity for the disabled, AbilityNet, reports that social networking sites lock out disabled users.

Update: In other news, Wired reports that “A 17-gigabyte file purporting to contain more than half a million images lifted from private MySpace profiles has shown up on BitTorrent, potentially making it the biggest privacy breach yet on the top social networking site.”

Lapis (1966).

Yantra (1959).

YES! But they really need to be seen on a big screen…

By Noah Shachtman

It’s not completely surprising that the Army wants to hire a band to tour its bases in Afghanistan and Kuwait. The armed services get all kinds of folks, to entertain the troops. “But it’s the way that they solicit for rock bands that makes the whole thing hilarious,” Stephen Trimble notes.

First, a summary of what the Army is seeking:

Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band, group not to exceed seven people for tour of FOB’s [forward operating bases] in Kuwait and Afghanistan for February 4-13 2008. The band should be an active rock band, with a music genre consisting of Southern Rock, Pop Rock, Post-Grunge and Hard Rock. At least one member of the band should be recognizable as a professional celebrity. Protective military equipment, such as kevlar, body armour, eye and ear protection will be provided when the group is travelling on military rotary or fixed wing aircraft.

Then, there’s the highly-calibrated method the service will use to evaluate these Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band applicants. The contract will be awarded based on “Past Performance, Contractor Capability, Contractor’s Experience, Celebrity Status of the Proposed Artists, and Price. Contractor Capability, Experience, and Price. The celebrity status of the proposed artist is slightly more important than these 3 combined, and all 4 combined are slightly more important than Price.”

More at Wired.

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?”

From Revolutionary to Evolutionary by Brian Eno

Experimental art and experimental politics have traditionally been convivial bedfellows, though usually, in my opinion, with very little benefit to each other. George Bernard Shaw and his circle fervently supported Stalin against the mounting tide of evidence; the Mitfords supported Hitler, and numerous gifted Italian poets and artists were persuaded by Fascism. Similarly, in the late sixties and early seventies the avant garde art scene in London was overwhelmed with admiration for Chairman Mao.

As a young artist I was part of that scene, and though never a hardcore Maoist, I was impressed by some of his ideas: that intellectuals shouldn’t be separated off from workers, for example, and that art should somehow serve working class society. I was sick of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and the insularity of the English art-world. I liked too the idea that professors should spend a month each year farming, or that designers should find out how it feels to work in a steel foundry. It sounded so benign from a distance. I felt, like many people felt at the time, that my society was by comparison stagnant, class-bound, stuck in history, and I admired Mao and the Chinese for their courage in reinventing themselves so dramatically.

Of course, the Americans were saying how dreadful it all was, but I thought “Well they would, wouldn’t they?” In fact their criticism increased its credibility, for I believed America had gone fundamentally wrong, and her enemies must therefore be my friends. I assumed the US sensed the winds of change issuing from China, and was digging her heels in, resisting the future with all her might.

And then, bit by bit, I started to find out what had actually happened, what Maoism meant. I resisted for a while, but I had to admit it: I’d been willingly propagandised, just like Shaw and Mitford and d’Annunzio and countless others. I’d allowed my prejudices to dominate my reason. Those professors working in the countryside were being bludgeoned and humiliated. Those designers were put in the steel-foundries as ‘class enemies’ — for the workers to vent their frustrations upon. I started to realise what a monstrosity Maoism had been, and that it had failed in every sense.

Thus began for me a long process of re-evaluation. I had to accept that I was susceptible to propaganda, and that propaganda comes from all sides — not just the one I happen to dislike. I realised that I was not by any means a neutral observer, that I came with my own set of prejudices which could be easily tweaked.

I realised too that I had to learn to evaluate opinions separately from those who were giving them: the truth might sometimes come out of a mouth I disliked, but that didn’t automatically mean it wasn’t the truth.

Maoism, or my disappointment with it, also changed my feelings about how politics should be done. I went from revolutionary to evolutionary. I no longer wanted to see radical change dictated from the top — even if that top claimed to be the bottom, the ‘voice of the people’. I lost faith in the idea that there were quick solutions, that everyone would simultaneously see the light and things would suddenly flip over into a wonderful new reality. I started to believe it was always going to be slow, messy, compromised, unglamorous, bureaucratic, endlessly negotiated — or else extremely dangerous, chaotic and capricious. In fact I’ve lost faith in the idea of ideological politics altogether: I want instead to see politics as the articulation and management of a changing society in a changing world, trying to do a half-decent job for as many people as possible, trying to set things up a little better for the future.

Perhaps this is why I’ve increasingly come to regard the determinedly non-ideological, ecumenical EU as the signal political experiment of our time…

Brian Eno was interviewed by Kristine McKenna in Arthur #17. Arthur columnist Douglas Rushkoff also answers the Edge Question.

Peace: 50 Years of Protest – the anniversary book

It’s probably the most commonly used symbol of protest in the world, instantly recognised as everywhere as the universal sign for Peace – and in 2008 it will be 50 years old. The book tells the story of the enduring power of what was originally designed as the official sign for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England.

The symbol was first drawn on on home-made banners and badges in 1958, when CND was launched at a public meeting in London, but has since been apropriated by scores of different protest movements, from hippies in 1960s America – the first to use it to represent ‘peace’ – to feminists and anarchist punks. In 2008 just as it was 50 years earlier, the CND logo is re-created at anti-nuclear demonstrations the world over.

To celebrate this we are creating a book that tells the story of the creation of the original symbol and of how it has been used over the past five decades by peace activists around the world. This unique volume combines the written history of modern popular protest with a range of fantastic photographs of the diverse ways and places that the symbol has been used. The book will also include a number of hand-drawn cards from both prominent figures —musicians, actors, politicians, artists and businessmen etc.

Part of the proceeds from sales of our book will go to a number of charities dedicated to promoting peace around the world. It is intended that the original art works donated to the project will be auctioned, again with the proceeds going to charity. Both the publication of the book and auctioning of the Happy Birthday Peace cards will generate publicity for the 50th anniversary of the peace protest movement and focus attention on existing protests.

We hope that with your help, we can bring media and public attention to the ongoing struggle for peace throughout the world.

Some information on the book:
Publication (in the UK): Spring 2008
Recommended retail price: £25
Format: 254 x 225 mm (10 x 9 in)
Hardback with perforated postcard tip-in
Extent:288 pages
Text: 40,000 words
Illustrations: Over 200 colour illustrations

CONTENTS
Introduction
1957-1960 Ban The Bomb – CND is formed
1960-1975 Stop The War – The Hippies adopt the symbol
1970-1980 Sign Of The Times – other uses of the sign
1965-2005 Wear It Well – use in fashion, music, design
1980–2006 Anti-Nuclear Families – how it’s still in use

Happy Birthday Peace – original birthday cards from numerous famous contributors
To order your copy of Peace: 50 Years of Protest, click here.

The Resurrection of Santa Claus (2000) by Jimmy Bursenos.

The psychedelic secrets of Santa Claus
by Dana Larsen, Cannabis Culture Magazine (18 Dec, 2003)

Modern Christmas traditions are based on ancient mushroom-using shamans.

Although most people see Christmas as a Christian holiday, most of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are actually derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of pre-Christian Northern Europe.

The sacred mushroom of these people was the red and white amanita muscaria mushroom, also known as “fly agaric.” These mushrooms are now commonly seen in books of fairy tales, and are usually associated with magic and fairies. This is because they contain potent hallucinogenic compounds, and were used by ancient peoples for insight and transcendental experiences.

Most of the major elements of the modern Christmas celebration, such as Santa Claus, Christmas trees, magical reindeer and the giving of gifts, are originally based upon the traditions surrounding the harvest and consumption of these most sacred mushrooms.

The world tree

These ancient peoples, including the Lapps of modern-day Finland, and the Koyak tribes of the central Russian steppes, believed in the idea of a World Tree. The World Tree was seen as a kind of cosmic axis, onto which the planes of the universe are fixed. The roots of the World Tree stretch down into the underworld, its trunk is the “middle earth” of everyday existence, and its branches reach upwards into the heavenly realm.

The amanita muscaria mushrooms grow only under certain types of trees, mostly firs and evergreens. The mushroom caps are the fruit of the larger mycelium beneath the soil which exists in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the tree. To ancient people, these mushrooms were literally “the fruit of the tree.”

The North Star was also considered sacred, since all other stars in the sky revolved around its fixed point. They associated this “Pole Star” with the World Tree and the central axis of the universe. The top of the World Tree touched the North Star, and the spirit of the shaman would climb the metaphorical tree, thereby passing into the realm of the gods. This is the true meaning of the star on top of the modern Christmas tree, and also the reason that the super-shaman Santa makes his home at the North Pole.

Ancient peoples were amazed at how these magical mushrooms sprang from the earth without any visible seed. They considered this “virgin birth” to have been the result of the morning dew, which was seen as the semen of the deity. The silver tinsel we drape onto our modern Christmas tree represents this divine fluid.

Reindeer games

The active ingredients of the amanita mushrooms are not metabolized by the body, and so they remain active in the urine. In fact, it is safer to drink the urine of one who has consumed the mushrooms than to eat the mushrooms directly, as many of the toxic compounds are processed and eliminated on the first pass through the body.

It was common practice among ancient people to recycle the potent effects of the mushroom by drinking each other’s urine. The amanita’s ingredients can remain potent even after six passes through the human body. Some scholars argue that this is the origin of the phrase “to get pissed,” as this urine-drinking activity preceded alcohol by thousands of years.

Reindeer were the sacred animals of these semi-nomadic people, as the reindeer provided food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. Reindeer are also fond of eating the amanita mushrooms; they will seek them out, then prance about while under their influence. Often the urine of tripped-out reindeer would be consumed for its psychedelic effects.

This effect goes the other way too, as reindeer also enjoy the urine of a human, especially one who has consumed the mushrooms. In fact, reindeer will seek out human urine to drink, and some tribesmen carry sealskin containers of their own collected piss, which they use to attract stray reindeer back into the herd.

The effects of the amanita mushroom usually include sensations of size distortion and flying. The feeling of flying could account for the legends of flying reindeer, and legends of shamanic journeys included stories of winged reindeer, transporting their riders up to the highest branches of the World Tree.

Santa Claus, super shaman

Although the modern image of Santa Claus was created at least in part by the advertising department of Coca-Cola, in truth his appearance, clothing, mannerisms and companions all mark him as the reincarnation of these ancient mushroom-gathering shamans.

One of the side effects of eating amanita mushrooms is that the skin and facial features take on a flushed, ruddy glow. This is why Santa is always shown with glowing red cheeks and nose. Even Santa’s jolly “Ho, ho, ho!” is the euphoric laugh of one who has indulged in the magic fungus.

Santa also dresses like a mushroom gatherer. When it was time to go out and harvest the magical mushrooms, the ancient shamans would dress much like Santa, wearing red and white fur-trimmed coats and long black boots.

These peoples lived in dwellings made of birch and reindeer hide, called “yurts.” Somewhat similar to a teepee, the yurt’s central smokehole is often also used as an entrance. After gathering the mushrooms from under the sacred trees where they appeared, the shamans would fill their sacks and return home. Climbing down the chimney-entrances, they would share out the mushroom’s gifts with those within.

The amanita mushroom needs to be dried before being consumed; the drying process reduces the mushroom’s toxicity while increasing its potency. The shaman would guide the group in stringing the mushrooms and hanging them around the hearth-fire to dry. This tradition is echoed in the modern stringing of popcorn and other items.

The psychedelic journeys taken under the influence of the amanita were also symbolized by a stick reaching up through the smokehole in the top of the yurt. The smokehole was the portal where the spirit of the shaman exited the physical plane.

Santa’s famous magical journey, where his sleigh takes him around the whole planet in a single night, is developed from the “heavenly chariot,” used by the gods from whom Santa and other shamanic figures are descended. The chariot of Odin, Thor and even the Egyptian god Osiris is now known as the Big Dipper, which circles around the North Star in a 24-hour period.

In different versions of the ancient story, the chariot was pulled by reindeer or horses. As the animals grow exhausted, their mingled spit and blood falls to the ground, forming the amanita mushrooms.

St Nicholas and Old Nick

Saint Nicholas is a legendary figure who supposedly lived during the fourth Century. His cult spread quickly and Nicholas became the patron saint of many varied groups, including judges, pawnbrokers, criminals, merchants, sailors, bakers, travelers, the poor, and children.

Most religious historians agree that St Nicholas did not actually exist as a real person, and was instead a Christianized version of earlier Pagan gods. Nicholas’ legends were mainly created out of stories about the Teutonic god called Hold Nickar, known as Poseidon to the Greeks. This powerful sea god was known to gallop through the sky during the winter solstice, granting boons to his worshippers below.

When the Catholic Church created the character of St Nicholas, they took his name from “Nickar” and gave him Poseidon’s title of “the Sailor.” There are thousands of churches named in St Nicholas’ honor, most of which were converted from temples to Poseidon and Hold Nickar. (As the ancient pagan deities were demonized by the Christian church, Hold Nickar’s name also became associated with Satan, known as “Old Nick!”)

Local traditions were incorporated into the new Christian holidays to make them more acceptable to the new converts. To these early Christians, Saint Nicholas became a sort of “super-shaman” who was overlaid upon their own shamanic cultural practices. Many images of Saint Nicholas from these early times show him wearing red and white, or standing in front of a red background with white spots, the design of the amanita mushroom.

St Nicholas also adopted some of the qualities of the legendary “Grandmother Befana” from Italy, who filled children’s stockings with gifts. Her shrine at Bari, Italy, became a shrine to St Nicholas.

Modern world, ancient traditions

Some psychologists have discussed the “cognitive dissonance” which occurs when children are encouraged to believe in the literal existence of Santa Claus, only to have their parents’ lie revealed when they are older. By so deceiving our children we rob them of a richer heritage, for the actual origin of these ancient rituals is rooted deep in our history and our collective unconscious. By better understanding the truths within these popular celebrations, we can better understand the modern world, and our place in it.

Many people in the modern world have rejected Christmas as being too commercial, claiming that this ritual of giving is actually a celebration of materialism and greed. Yet the true spirit of this winter festival lies not in the exchange of plastic toys, but in celebrating a gift from the earth: the fruiting top of a magical mushroom, and the revelatory experiences it can provide.

Instead of perpetuating outdated and confusing holiday myths, it might be more fulfilling to return to the original source of these seasonal celebrations. How about getting back to basics and enjoying some magical mushrooms with your loved ones this solstice? What better gift can a family share than a little piece of love and enlightenment?

FURTHER LINKS AND REFERENCES:

• The Hidden Meanings of Christmas, Mushrooms and Mankind, by James Arthur
• Santa Claus & the Amanita Muscaria, by Jimmy Bursenos
• Who put the Fly Agaric into Christmas?, Seventh International Mycological Congress, December 1999, Fungus of the Month
• The Real Story of Santa, The Spore Print, Los Angeles Mycological Society, December 1998
• Santa and those Reindeer: The Hallucinogenic Connection, The Physics of Christmas, by Roger Highfield
• Fungi, Fairy Rings and Father Christmas, North West Fungus Group, 1998 Presidential Address, by Dr Sean Edwards
• Fly Agaric, Tom Volk’s Fungus of the Month for December 1999
• Father Christmas Flies on Toadstools, New Scientist, December 1986
• Psycho-mycological studies of amanita: From ancient sacrament to modern phobia, by Jonathan Ott, Journal of Psychedelic Drugs; 1976
• Santa is a Wildman, LA Times, Jeffrey Vallance

BOOKS WORTH READING:

• Mushrooms and Mankind, by James Arthur
• Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, by Gordon Wasson
• Mushrooms, Poisons and Panaceas, by Denis R. Benjamin

‘Rocket 88′: generally regarded as the first rock’n'roll single.

Worst Events of the Bush Years, Slogans of the Bush Years, Villains of the GOP, three posters created by Roy Sekoff for the Huffington Post. Buy one of these from HuffPo and you’ll help to have super-sized versions placed on billboards in New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

When I was first asked to write an article on the Led Zeppelin group, to be based on attending a concert and talking with Jimmy Page, I was not sure I could do it, not being sufficiently knowledgable about music to attempt anything in the way of musical criticism or even evaluation. I decided simply to attend the concert and talk with Jimmy Page and let the article develop. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

My first impression was of the audience. As we streamed through one security line after another–a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middle-class kid. The security guards seemed to be cool and well-trained, ushering gate-crashers out with a minimum of fuss. We were channelled smoothly into our seats in the thirteenth row. Over a relaxed dinner before the concert, a Crawdaddy companion had said he had a feeling that something bad could happen at this concert. I pointed out that it always can when you get that many people together–like bullfights where you buy a straw hat at the door to protect you from bottles and other missiles. I was displacing possible danger to a Mexican border town where the matador barely excaped with his life and several spectators were killed. It’s known as “clearing the path.”

So there we sat, I decline earplugs; I am used to loud drum and horn music from Morocco, and it always has, if skillfully performed, an exhilarating and energizing effect on me. As the performance got underway I experienced this musical exhilaration, which was all the more pleasant for being easily controlled, and I knew then that nothing bad was going to happen. This was a safe and friendly area–but at the same time highly charged. There was a palpable interchange of energy between the performers and the audience which was never frantic or jagged. The special effects were handled well and not overdone.

A few special effects are much better than too many. I can see the laser beams cutting dry ice smoke, which drew an appreciative cheer from the audience. Jimmy Page’s number with the broken guitar strings came across with a real impact, as did John Bonham’s drum solo and the lyrics delivered with unfailing vitality by Robert Plant. The performers were doing their best, and it was very good. The last number, “Stairway to Heaven”, where the audience lit matches and there was a scattering of sparklers here and there, found the audience well-behaved and joyous, creating the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play. All in all a good show; neither low nor insipid. Leaving the concert hall was like getting off a jet plane.

I summarized my impressions after the concert in a few notes to serve as a basis for my talk with Jimmy Page. “The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests, a theme that was treated in Peter Watkin’s film ‘Privilege’. In that film a rock star was manipulated by reactionary forces to set up a state religion; this scenario seems unlikely, I think a rock group singing political slogans would leave its audience at the door.

“The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”

THE INTERVIEW

I felt that these considerations could form the basis of my talk with Jimmy Page, which I hoped would not take the form of an interview. There is something just basically WRONG about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, “Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?” Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn’t going to be that way.

We started talking over a cup of tea and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page’s purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness; John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert; Donald Camel, who worked on ‘Performance’; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris. The subject of magic came up in connection with Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger’s film ‘Lucifer Rising’, for which Jimmy Page did the sound track.

Since the word “magic” tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by “magic” and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of ‘will’ as the primary moving force in this universe–the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self-evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the rooom is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy. Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time… “The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital…one must pretend an interest,” drawled the dandified Commandante, safe in the pages of my book; and as another rock star said to me, “YOU sit on your ass writing–I could be torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus.”

I found Jimmy Page equally aware of the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconcious. I took on a valence I learned years ago from two ‘Life-Time’ reporters–one keeps telling you these horrific stories: “Now old Burns was dragged out of the truck and skinned alive by the mob, and when we got there with the cameras the bloody thing was still squirming there like a worm…” while the other half of the team is snapping pictures CLICK CLICK CLICK to record your reactions–so over dinner at Mexican Gardens I told Jimmy the story of the big soccer riot in Lima, Peru in 1964.

We are ushered into the arena as VIPs, in the style made famous by ‘Triumph of the Will’. Martial music–long vistas–the statuesque police with their dogs on leads–the crowd surging in a sultry menacing electricity palpable in the air–grey clouds over Lima–people glance up uneasily… the last time it rained in Lima was the year of the great earthquake, when whole towns were swallowed by landslides. A cop is beating and kicking someone as he shoves him back towards the exit. Oh lucky man. The dogs growl ominously. The game is tense. Tied until the end of the last quarter, and then the stunning decision: a goal that would have won the game for Peru is disqualified by the Uruguayan referee. A howl of rage from the crowd, and then a huge black known as La Bomba, who has started three previous soccer riots and already has twenty-three notches on his bomb, vaults down into the arena. A wave of fans follows The Bomb–the Uruguayan referee scrambles off with the agility of a rat or an evil spirit–the police release tear gas and unleash their snarling dogs, hysterical with fear and rage and maddened by the tear gas. And then a sound like falling mountains, as a few drops of rain begin to fall.

“Yes, I’ve thought about that. We all have. The important thing is maintain a balance. The kids come to get far out with the music. It’s our job to see they have a good time and no trouble.”

And remember the rock group called Storm? Playing a dance hall in Switzerland…fire…exits locked…thirty-seven people dead including all the performers. Now any performer who has never thought about fire and panic just doesn’t think. The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time, and you can’t see it if you refuse to face the possibility. The bad vibes in that dance hall must have been really heavy. If the performers had been sensitive and alert, they would have checked to be sure the exits were unlocked.

Previously, over two fingers of whiskey in my Franklin Street digs, I had told Page about Major Bruce MacMannaway, a healer and psychic who lives in Scotland. The Major discovered his healing abilities in World War II when his regiment was cut off without medical supplies and the Major started laying on hands…”Well Major, I think it’s a load of bollocks but I’ll try anything.” And it turns out the Major is a walking hypo. His psychic abilities were so highly regarded by the Admiralty that he was called in to locate sunken submarines, and he never once missed.

I attended a group meditation seminar with the Major. It turned out to be the Indian rope trick. Before the session the Major told us something of the potential power in group meditation. He had seen it lift a six-hundred-pound church organ five feet in the air. I had no reason to doubt this, since he was obviously incapable of falsification. In the session, after some preliminary excercises, the Major asked us to see a column of light in the center of the room and then took us up through the light to a plateau where we met nice friendly people: the stairway to heaven in fact. I mean we were really THERE.

I turned to Jimmy Page: “Of course we are dealing here with meditation– the deliberate induction of a trance state in a few people under the hands of an old master. This would seem on the surface to have a little in common with a rock concert, but the underlying force is the same: human energy and its potential concentration.” I pointed out that the moment when the stairway to heaven becomes something actually POSSIBLE for the audience, would also be the moment of greatest danger. Jimmy expressed himself as well aware of the power in mass concentration, aware of the dangers involved, and of the skill and balance needed to avoid them…rather like driving a load of nitroglycerine.

“There IS a responsibility to the audience,” he said. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to these kids–we don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.” We talked about magic and Aleister Crowley. Jimmy said that Crowley has been maligned as a black magician, whereas magic is neither white nor black, good nor bad–it is simply alive with what it is: the real thing, what people really feel and want and are. I pointed out that this “either/or” straitjacket had been imposed by Christianity when all magic became black magic; that scientists took over from the Church, and Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as “the way things are.” Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.

Jimmy told me that Aleister Crowley’s house has very good vibes for anyone who is relaxed and receptive. At one time the house had also been the scene of a vast chicken swindle indirectly involving George Sanders, the movie actor, who was able to clear himself of any criminal charges, Sanders committed suicide in Barcelona, and we both remembered his farewell note to the world: “I leave you to this sweet cesspool.”

I told Jimmy he was lucky too have that house with a monster in the front yard. What about the Loch Ness monster? Jimmy Page thinks it exists. I wondered if it could find enough to eat, and thought this unlikely–it’s not the improbability but the upkeep on monsters that worries me. Did Aleister Crowley have opinions on the subject? He apparently had not expressed himself.

We talked about trance music. He had heard the Brian Jones record from recordings made at Joujouka. We discussed the possibility of synthesizing rock music with some of the older forms of trance music that have been developed over centuries to produce powerful, sometimes hypnotic effects on the audience. Such a synthesis would enable the older forms to escape from the mould of folk lore and provide new techniques to rock groups.

We talked about the special effects used in the concert. “Sure,” he said, “lights, lasers, dry ice are fine–but you have to keep some balance. The show must carry itself and not rely too heavily on special effects, however spectacular,” I brought up the subject of infra-sound, that is, sound pitched below 16 Hertz, the level of human hearing; as ultra-sound is above the level. Professer Gavreau of France developed infra-sound as a military weapon. A powerful infra-sound installation can, he claims, kill everyone in a five-mile radius, knock down walls and break windows. Infra-sound kills by setting up vibrations within the body so that, as Gavreau puts it, “You can feel all the organs in your body rubbing together.” The plans for this device can be obtained from the French Patent Office, and infra-sound generators constructed from inexpensive materials. Needless to say, one is not concerned with military applications however unlimited, but with more interesting and useful possibilities, reaching much further that five miles.

Infra-sound sets up vibrations in the body and nervous system. Need these vibrations necessarily be harmful or unpleasant? All music played at any volume sets up vibrations in the body and nervous system of the listener. That’s why people listen to it. Caruso as you wil remember could break a champagne glass across the room. Especially interesting is the possibility of rhythmic pulses of infra-sound; that is, MUSIC IN INFRA-SOUND. You can’t hear it, but you can feel it.

Jimmy was interested, and I gave him a copy of a newspaper article on infra-sound. It seems that the most deadly range is around 7 Hertz, and when this is turned on even at a low volume, anyone within range is affected. They feel anxious, ill, depressed, and finally exclaim with one voice, “I feel TERRIBLE!”…last thing you want at a rock concert. However, around the borders of infra-sound perhaps a safe range can be found. Buddhist mantras act by setting up vibrations in the body. Could this be done in a much more powerful yet safe manner by the use of infra-sound rhythms which could of course could be combined with audible music? Perhaps infra-sound could add a new dimension to rock music.

Could something be developed comparable to the sonar communication of dolphins, conveying an immediate sonar experience that requires no symbolic translation? I mentioned to Jimmy that I had talked with Dr. Truby, who worked with John Lilly recording dolphins. Dr. Truby is a specialist in inter-species communication, working on a grant from the government–so that when all our kids are born Venusians we will understand then when they start to talk. I suggested to him that ALL communication, as we know it, is actually inter-species communication, and that it is kept that way by the nature of verbal and symbolic communication, which must be indirect.

Do dolphins have a language? What is a language? I define a language as a communication system in which data are represented by verbal or written symbols–symbols that ARE NOT THE OBJECTS to which they refer. The word “chair” is not the object itself, the chair. So any such system of communication is always second-hand and symbolic, whereas we CAN conceive of a form of communication that would be immediate and direct, undercutting the need for symbols. And music certainly comes closer to such direct communication than language.

Could musical communication be rendered more precise with infra-sound, thus bringing the whole of music a second radical step forward? The first step was made when music came out of the dance halls, roadhouses, and night clubs, into Madison Square Garden and Shea Stadium. Rock music appeals to a mass audience, instead of being the province of a relatively few aficionados. Can rock music make another step forward, or is it a self-limiting form, confirmed by the demands of a mass audience? How much that is radically new can a mass audience safely absorb? We came back to the question of balance. How much new material will be accepted by a mass audience? Can rock music go forward without leaving its fans behind?

We talked about Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator, and I showed him plans for making this device, which were passed along to me by Reich’s daughter. Basically the device is very simple, consisting of iron or steel wool on the inside and organic material on the outside. I think this was highly important discovery. Recently a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced an “electrical cell” theory of cancer that is almost identical to Reich’s cancer theory put forth 25 years ago. He does not acknowledge any indebtedness to Reich. I showed Jimmy the orgone box I have here, and we agreed that orgone accumulators in pyramid form and/or using magnetized iron could be much more powerful.

We talked about the film ‘Performance’ and the use of cut-up techniques in this film. Now the cut-up method was applied to writing by Brion Gysin in 1959; he said that writing was fifty years behind painting, and applied the montage method to writing. Actually, montage is much closer to the facts of perception thatn representational painting. If for example you walked through Times Square, and then put on canvas what you had seen, the result would be a montage…half a person cut in two by a car, reflections from shop windows, fragments of street signs. Antony Balch and I collaborated on a film called ‘Cut-Ups’, in which the film was cut into segments and rearranged at random. Nicholas Roeg and Donald Camel saw a screening of the film not long before they made ‘Performance’.

Musical cut-ups have been used by Earl Browne and other modern composers. What distinguishes a cut-up from, say, an edited medley, is that the cut-up is at some point random. For example, if you made a medley by taking thirty seconds from a number of scores and assembling these arbitrary units–that would be a cut-up. Cut-ups often result in more succinct meanings, rather than nonsense. Here for example is a phrase taken from a cut-up of this article: “I can see the laser gate crashers with an appreciative cheer from the 13th row.” (Actually a gate crasher was extricated by security from the row in front of us; an incident I had forgoten until I saw this cut-up.)

Over dinner at the Mexican Gardens, I was suprised to hear that Jimmy Page had never heard of Petrillo, who started the first musicians’ union and perhaps did more than any other one man to improve the financial positioin of musicians by protecting copyrights. One wonders whether rock music could have gotten off the ground without Petrillo and the Union, which put musicians in the big money bracket, thereby attracting managers, publicity, and the mass audience.

Music, like all the arts, is magical and ceremonial in origin. Can rock music return to these ceremonial roots and take its fans with it? Can rock music use older forms like Moroccan trance music? There is at present a wide interest among young people in the occult and all means of expanding consciousness. Can rock music appeal directly to this interest? In short, there are a number of disparate tendencies waiting to be synthesized. Can rock music serve as a vehicle for this synthesis?

The broken guitar strings, John Bonham’s drum solo, vitality by Robert Plant–when you get that many people to get it, very good. Buy a straw hat at the door–the audience all light matches. Cool well-trained laser beams channelled the audience smoothly. A scattering of sparklers. Danger to a Mexican border town. We start talking over a cup of the mass unconscious–cut to a soccer riot photo in Lima. The Uruguayan referee as another rock star. Sound like falling mountains of the risks involved. It’s our job to see trouble and plateau the center of the room–remember the stairway to Switzerland? Fire really there. You can’t see it if you refuse–underlying force the same. I mean we were playing a dance hall in heaven at the moment when the stairway actually possible for the audience was unlocked.

WORD FOR WORD

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I really, really enjoyed the concert. I think it has quite a lot, really, in common with Moroccan trance music.

JIMMY PAGE: Yes, yes.

WB: I wondered if you consciously were using any of that….

JP: Well, yes, there is a little on that perticular track, “Kashmir”–a lead bass on that–even though none of us have been to Kashmir. It’s just that we’ve all been very involved in that sort of music. I’m very involved in ethnic music from all over the world.

WB: Have you been to Morocco?

JP: No. I haven’t, and it’s a very sad admission to make. I’ve only been to, you know, India and Bangkok and places like that through the Southeast.

WB: Well, I’ve never been east of Athens.

JP: Because during the period when everybody was going through trips over to, you know, Morocco, going down, way down, making their own journeys too Istanbul, I was at art college during that period and then I eventually went straight into music. So I really missed out on all that sort of traveling. But I know musicians that have gone there and actually sat in with the Arabs and played with them.

WB: Yeah, well they think of music entirely in magical terms.

JP: Yes.

WB: And their music is definitely used for magical purposes. For example, the Gnaoua music is to drive out evil spirits and Joujouka music is invoking the God Pan. Musicians there are all magicians, quite consciously.

———————————

WB: I was thinking of the concentration of mass energy that you get in a pop concert, and if that were, say, channeled in some magical way…a stairway too heaven…it could become quite actual.

JP: Yes, I know. One is so aware of the energies that you are going for, and you could so easily….I mean, for instance, the other night we played in the Philadelphia Spectrum, which really is a black hole as a concert hall….The security there is the most ugly of anywhere in the States. I saw this incident happen and I was almost physically sick. In fact, if I hadn’t been playing the guitar I was playing it would’ve been over somebody’s head. It was a double-neck, which is irreplaceable, really, unless you wait another nine months for them to make another one at Gibson’s.

What had happened, somebody came to the front of the stage to take a picture or something and obviously somebody said, “Be off with you.” And he wouldn’t go. And then one chap went over the barrier, and then another, and then another and then another, and they all piled on top of…you could see the fists coming out…on this one solitary person. And they dragged him by his hair and they were kicking him. It was just sickening. Now, what I’m saying is this….Our crowds, the people that come to see us are very orderly. It’s not the sort of Alice Cooper style, where you actually TRY to get them into a state where they’ve got to go like that, so that you can get reports of this, that and the other. And the wrong word said at that time could’ve just sparked off the whole thing.

WB: Yes, there’s sort of a balance to be maintained there.

JP: Yeah, that’s right.

WB: The audience the other night was very well behaved.

———————————-

WB: Have you used the lasers in all of the concerts?

JP: Over here, yes.

WB: Very effective.

JP: I think we should have more of them, don’t you? About thirty of them! Do you know they bounced that one off the moon. But it’s been condensed….it’s the very one that they used for the moon. I was quite impressed by that.

WB: That isn’t the kind of machine that would cause any damage….

JP: Uh, if you look straight into it, yes.

WB: Yes, but I mean…it doesn’t burn a hole in…

JP: No….it’s been taken right down. I’m just waiting for the day when you can get the holograms…get three-dimensional. The other thing I wanted to do was the Van de Graaff Generator. You used to see them in the old horror films….

WB: Oh yes…Frankenstein, and all that.

—————————————

JP: When we first came over here… when the draft was really hot and everything…if you stayed in the country for more than six months, you were eligible for it, they’d drag you straight into the draft.

WB: I didn’t realize that.

JP: Yeah.

WB: Oh, I thought you had to be an American citizen.

JP: Noo. No no. We almost overstayed our welcome. I was producing and having to work in studios here, and the days coming up to the six month period were just about…it was just about neck and neck. And I still had a couple more days left and a couple more days to work on this lp.

WB: Were they right there with the papers?

JP: Well, not quite, I mean obviously it would have taken some time, but somebody would’ve been there…You know, they do keep an eye on people.

————————————-

WB: Did you ever hear about something called infra-sound?

JP: Uh, carry on.

WB: Well, infra-sound is sound below the level of hearing. And it was developed by someone named Professor Gavreau in France as a military weapon. He had an infra-sound installation that he could turn on and kill everything within five miles. It can also knock down walls and break windows. But it kills by setting up vibrations within the body. Well, what I was wondering was, whether rhythmical music at sort of the borderline of infra-sound could be used to produce rhythms in the audience–because, of course, any music with volume will set up these vibrations. That is part of the way the effect is achieved.

JP: Hmm.

WB: It’s apparently…it’s not complicated to build these infra-sound things.

JP: I’ve heard of this, actually but not in such a detailed explanation. I’ve heard that certain frequencies can make you physically ill.

WB: Yes. Well, this can be fatal. That’s not what you’re looking for. But it could be used just to set up vibrations….

JP: Ah hah…A death ray machine! Of course, when radio first came out they were picketing all the radio stations, weren’t they, saying “We don’t want these poisonous rays” [laughter]….Yes, well…certain notes can break glasses. I mean, opera singers can break glasses with sound, this is true?

WB: That was one of Caruso’s tricks.

JP: But it is true?

WB: Of course.

JP: I’ve never seen it done.

WB: I’ve never seen it done, but I know that you can do it.

JP: I want laser NOTES, that’s what I’m after! Cut right through.

WB: Apparently you can make one of these things out of parts you can buy in a junk yard. It’s not a complicated machine to make. And actually the patent…it’s patented in France, and according to French law, you can obtain a copy of the patent. For a very small fee.

JP: Well, you see the thing is, it’s hard to know just exactly what is going on, from the stage to the audience…You can only…I mean I’ve never seen the group play, obviously. Because I’m part of it….I can only see it on celluloid, or hear it. But I know what I see. And this thing about rhythms within the audience. I would say yes. Yes, definitely. And it is…Music which involves riffs, anyway, will have a trance-like effect, and it’s really like a mantra….And we’ve been attacked for that.

WB: What a mantra does is set up certain vibrations within the body, and this, obviously does the same thing. Of course, it goes….it comes out too far. But I was wondering if on the borderline of infra-sound that possibly some interesting things could be done.

JP: Ah.

——————————————

JP: Last year we were playing [sets] for three hours solid, and physically that was a real…I mean, when I came back from the last tour I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know where I was going. We ended up in New York and the only thing that I could relate to was the instrument onstage. I just couldn’t….I was just totally and completely spaced out.

WB: How long was that you played recently? That was two hours and a half.

JP: That was two and a half hours, yes. It used to go for three hours.

WB: I’d hate to give a three-hour reading….

Veiled by Chris Anthony.

“? the War”, a one-off art show at the Corey Helford Gallery, 8522 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA.

One night only, Tuesday, December 4th, 5–10pm. The website says they have free posters of all the work in the show.

I arrived in New York on a beautiful spring day in April 1978. I’d intended to stay for a week but the visit stretched on and on and I ended up staying for about five years.

Those first few months in the city were a formative time for me. I didn’t know many people, and I had time on my hands, so I was open to things in a way that I might not have been in a more familiar landscape. I listened to a lot of live music and bought a heap of records. One of the most important was by a musician I’d never heard of – a trumpeter called Jon Hassell. It was called Vernal Equinox.

This record fascinated me. It was a dreamy, strange, meditative music that was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also seemed located in the lineage of tonal minimalism. It was a music I felt I’d been waiting for.

I discovered later, after I met and became friends with Jon, that he referred to his invention as Fourth World Music (which became the subtitle of the first album we made together: Possible Musics). I learned subsequently that Jon had studied at Darmstadt with Stockhausen (as indeed had Holger Czukay from Can, another occasional colleague), that he’d played on the first recording of Terry Riley’s seminal In C, and that he’d studied with the great Indian singer Pran Nath.

We had a lot to talk about. We had both come through experimental music traditions – the European one, as exemplified by Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew, and the American one of Cage and Terry Riley and LaMonte Young. At the same time, we were aware of the beauty and sophistication of all the music being made outside our culture – what is now called “world music”. And we were both intrigued by the possibilities of new musical technology.

But beyond these issues, there was a deeper idea: that music was a place where you conducted and displayed new social experiments. Jon’s experiment was to imagine a “coffee coloured” world – a globalised world constantly integrating and hybridising, where differences were celebrated and dignified – and to try to realise it in music.

His unusual articulacy – and the unexpected scope of his references – inspired me. In general, artists don’t talk much about how or why they make their work, especially “why”. Jon does. He is a theorist and a practitioner, and his theories are as elegant and as attractive as his music: because in fact his music is the embodiment of those theories.

We spent a lot of time together, time that changed my mind in many ways. We talked about music as embodied philosophy, for every music implies a philosophical position even when its creators aren’t conscious of it. And we talked about sex and sensuality, about trying to make a music that embraced the whole being and not just the bit above the neck (or just the bit below it).

It was in these conversations that, among other things, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which I made with David Byrne in 1981, was nurtured. All of us were interested in collage, in making musical particle colliders where we could crash different cultural forms with all their emotional baggage and see what came out of the collisions, what new worlds they suggested.

If I had to name one over-riding principle in Jon’s work it would be that of respect. He looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music. He sees dignity and beauty in all forms of the dance of life.

I owe a lot to Jon. Actually, a lot of people owe a lot to Jon. He has planted a strong and fertile seed whose fruits are still being gathered.

• Jon Hassell performs at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on November 17 as part of the London Jazz festival.

• Brian Eno was interviewed in Arthur #17; Jon Hassell was interviewed in Arthur #18.

I’d like to digress from my usual analysis of insurgent strategy and tactics to speak out on an issue of grave importance to Small Wars Journal readers. We, as a nation, are having a crisis of honor.

Last week the Attorney General nominee Judge Michael Mukasey refused to define waterboarding terror suspects as torture. On the same day MSNBC television pundit and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough quickly spoke out in its favor. On his morning television broadcast, he asserted, without any basis in fact, that the efficacy of the waterboard a viable tool to be used on Al Qaeda suspects.

Scarborough said, “For those who don’t know, waterboarding is what we did to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the Al Qaeda number two guy that planned 9/11. And he talked …” He then speculated that “If you ask Americans whether they think it’s okay for us to waterboard in a controlled environment … 90% of Americans will say ‘yes.’” Sensing that what he was saying sounded extreme, he then claimed he did not support torture but that waterboarding was debatable as a technique: “You know, that’s the debate. Is waterboarding torture? … I don’t want the United States to engage in the type of torture that [Senator] John McCain had to endure.”

In fact, waterboarding is just the type of torture then Lt. Commander John McCain had to endure at the hands of the North Vietnamese. As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.

The carnival-like he-said, she-said of the legality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has become a form of doublespeak worthy of Catch-22. Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

History’s Lessons Ignored

Before arriving for my assignment at SERE, I traveled to Cambodia to visit the torture camps of the Khmer Rouge. The country had just opened for tourism and the effect of the genocide was still heavy in the air. I wanted to know how real torturers and terror camp guards would behave and learn how to resist them from survivors of such horrors. I had previously visited the Nazi death camps Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. I had met and interviewed survivors of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Magdeburg when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. However, it was in the S-21 death camp known as Tuol Sleng, in downtown Phnom Penh, where I found a perfectly intact inclined waterboard. Next to it was the painting on how it was used. It was cruder than ours mainly because they used metal shackles to strap the victim down, and a tin flower pot sprinkler to regulate the water flow rate, but it was the same device I would be subjected to a few weeks later.

On a Mekong River trip, I met a 60-year-old man, happy to be alive and a cheerful travel companion, who survived the genocide and torture … he spoke openly about it and gave me a valuable lesson: “If you want to survive, you must learn that ‘walking through a low door means you have to be able to bow.’” He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French. He remembered “the Barrel” version of waterboarding quite well. Head first until the water filled the lungs, then you talk.

Once at SERE and tasked to rewrite the Navy SERE program for the first time since the Vietnam War, we incorporated interrogation and torture techniques from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia into the curriculum. In the process, I studied hundreds of classified written reports, dozens of personal memoirs of American captives from the French-Indian Wars and the American Revolution to the Argentinean ‘Dirty War’ and Bosnia. There were endless hours of videotaped debriefings from World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War POWs and interrogators. I devoured the hundreds of pages of debriefs and video reports including those of then Commander John McCain, Colonel Nick Rowe, Lt. Dieter Dengler and Admiral James Stockdale, the former Senior Ranking Officer of the Hanoi Hilton. All of them had been tortured by the Vietnamese, Pathet Lao or Cambodians. The minutiae of North Vietnamese torture techniques was discussed with our staff advisor and former Hanoi Hilton POW Doug Hegdahl as well as discussions with Admiral Stockdale himself. The waterboard was clearly one of the tools dictators and totalitarian regimes preferred.

There is No Debate Except for Torture Apologists

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.

Call it “Chinese Water Torture,” “the Barrel,” or “the Waterfall,” it is all the same. Whether the victim is allowed to comply or not is usually left up to the interrogator. Many waterboard team members, even in training, enjoy the sadistic power of making the victim suffer and often ask questions as an after thought. These people are dangerous and predictable and when left unshackled, unsupervised or undetected they bring us the murderous abuses seen at Abu Ghraieb, Baghram and Guantanamo. No doubt, to avoid human factors like fear and guilt someone has created a one-button version that probably looks like an MRI machine with high intensity waterjets.

3. If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives. The Small Wars Council had a spirited discussion about this earlier in the year, especially when former Marine Generals Krulak and Hoar rejected all arguments for torture.

Evan Wallach wrote a brilliant history of the use of waterboarding as a war crime and the open acceptance of it by the administration in an article for Columbia Journal for Transnational Law. In it he describes how the ideological Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo validated the current dilemma we find ourselves in by asserting that the President had powers above and beyond the Constitution and the Congress:

“Congress doesn’t have the power to tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique….It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.”

That is an astounding assertion. It reflects a basic disregard for the law of the United States, the Constitution and basic moral decency.

Another MSNBC commentator defended the administration and stated that waterboarding is “not a new phenomenon” and that it had “been pinned on President Bush … but this has been part of interrogation for years and years and years.” He is correct, but only partially. The Washington Post reported in 2006 that it was mainly America’s enemies that used it as a principal interrogation method. After World War 2, Japanese waterboard team members were tried for war crimes. In Vietnam, service members were placed under investigation when a photo of a field-expedient waterboarding became publicly known.

Torture in captivity simulation training reveals there are ways an enemy can inflict punishment which will render the subject wholly helpless and which will generally overcome his willpower. The torturer will trigger within the subject a survival instinct, in this case the ability to breathe, which makes the victim instantly pliable and ready to comply. It is purely and simply a tool by which to deprive a human being of his ability to resist through physical humiliation. The very concept of an American Torturer is an anathema to our values.

I concur strongly with the opinions of professional interrogators like Colonel Stewart Herrington, and victims of torture like Senator John McCain. If you want consistent, accurate and reliable intelligence, be inquisitive, analytical, patient but most of all professional, amiable and compassionate.

Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but “not all of it reliable.” Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.

A torture victim can be made to say anything by an evil nation that does not abide by humanity, morality, treaties or rule of law. Today we are on the verge of becoming that nation. Is it possible that September 11 hurt us so much that we have decided to gladly adopt the tools of KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi Gestapo, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Burmese Junta?

What next if the waterboarding on a critical the captive doesn’t work and you have a timetable to stop the “ticking bomb” scenario? Electric shock to the genitals? Taking a pregnant woman and electrocuting the fetus inside her? Executing a captive’s children in front of him? Dropping live people from an airplane over the ocean? It has all been done by governments seeking information. All claimed the same need to stop the ticking bomb. It is not a far leap from torture to murder, especially if the subject is defiant. Are we willing to trade our nation’s soul for tactical intelligence?

Is There a Place for the Waterboard?

Yes. The waterboard must go back to the realm of SERE training our operators, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. We must now double our efforts to prepare for its inevitable and uncontrolled use of by our future enemies.

Until recently, only a few countries considered it effective. Now American use of the waterboard as an interrogation tool has assuredly guaranteed that our service members and agents who are captured or detained by future enemies will be subject to it as part of the most routine interrogations. Forget threats, poor food, the occasional face slap and sexual assaults. This was not a dignified ‘taking off the gloves’; this was descending to the level of our opposition in an equally brutish and ugly way. Waterboarding will be one our future enemy’s go-to techniques because we took the gloves off to brutal interrogation. Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it.

There may never again be a chance that Americans will benefit from the shield of outrage and public opinion when our future enemy uses of torture. Brutal interrogation, flash murder and extreme humiliation of American citizens, agents and members of the armed forces may now be guaranteed because we have mindlessly, but happily, broken the seal on the Pandora’s box of indignity, cruelty and hatred in the name of protecting America. To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of by Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein.

Not A Fair Trade for America’s Honor

I have stated publicly and repeatedly that I would personally cut Bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic MRE spoon if we per chance meet on the battlefield. Yet, once captive I believe that the better angels of our nature and our nation’s core values would eventually convince any terrorist that they indeed have erred in their murderous ways. Once convicted in a fair, public tribunal, they would have the rest of their lives, however short the law makes it, to come to terms with their God and their acts.

This is not enough for our President. He apparently secretly ordered the core American values of fairness and justice to be thrown away in the name of security from terrorists. He somehow determined that the honor the military, the CIA and the nation itself was an acceptable trade for the superficial knowledge of the machinations of approximately 2,000 terrorists, most of whom are being decimated in Iraq or martyring themselves in Afghanistan. It is a short sighted and politically motivated trade that is simply disgraceful. There is no honor here.

It is outrageous that American officials, including the Attorney General and a legion of minions of lower rank have not only embraced this torture but have actually justified it, redefined it to a misdemeanor, brought it down to the level of a college prank and then bragged about it. The echo chamber that is the American media now views torture as a heroic and macho.

Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. In essence, our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual SERE school for terrorists.

Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle need to stand up for American values and clearly specify that coercive interrogation using the waterboard is torture and, except for limited examples of training our service members and intelligence officers, it should be stopped completely and finally –oh, and this time without a Presidential signing statement reinterpreting the law.

Malcolm W. Nance is a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies. 

Can I Get An Amen? (2004), recording on acetate, turntable, PA system, paper documents
total run time: 17 minutes, 46 seconds

Can I Get An Amen? (by Nate Harrison) is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’—it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Drumming up an absolute storm last night; my ears are still ringing. And I need a new camera…

“From young people, like I said. From their ability to organise. I believe the internet may have an even stronger influence than people have realised. Albert Einstein said that when you join an organisation – and that could be anti-war, anti-pollution, or pro the rights of lesbians and homosexuals – Einstein said that, once you join, you have more individuality, not less. Because you are another person who wants to count.”

Studs Terkel: The world’s greatest interviewer
He met everyone from Martin Luther King to Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams to Bob Dylan. He survived the McCarthy era to record a unique oral history of his country. Now in his nineties, the great US chronicler is still raging against George Bush, Hillary Clinton and the death of radical America

The Robert Chalmers interview
The Independent
Published: 21 October 2007

“You are God,” I tell Studs Terkel. “Re-create the world.” The writer says nothing for a couple of seconds, which is not like him. “As you seem to know,” he replies, “that’s a question I used to ask people. I think the best way I can respond is to tell you how one young kid answered it. He said: ‘I don’t want that job. That job is impossible.’”

“And these days, when you listen to the news, I imagine you can’t help thinking that boy was right. How does it feel when you’re 95 and almost every ideal you ever cherished is under threat; when your nation’s government has become less peaceful and more bloodthirsty; less equitable and more shamelessly driven by greed? What’s it like, towards the end of a lifetime devoted to civil-rights activism, to find your country led by a president more right-wing and nakedly acquisitive than any other in your memory?”

“It’s true what you say. I can’t deny it. At the same time, I once wrote a book called Hope Dies Last. I believe that. I might feel hopelessness, except for one thing: the young. I don’t mean the young as they’re portrayed in TV commercials: whores, bimbos and dummies. There are many who do not fall into those categories. The big problem is that there’s no memory of the past. Our hero is the free market. People forget how the free market fell on its face way back in the Depression. And how the nation pleaded with its government and got help. Today, all these fat CEOs say we don’t need government. And these fat boys get away with it, because of our collective Alzheimer’s, and the power of Rupert Murdoch and CNN. There is despair in this country, sure. At the same time, we are waiting.”

“For what?”

“For new voices.”

We are talking in the living-room of Terkel’s house in Chicago, near the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1996 he underwent a quadruple-bypass operation; three years ago he broke his neck when he tripped over a pile of his own books. He is physically frail to the point that the last of his beloved Romeo y Julieta cigars has long since been smoked. But age has not extinguished his mental alertness or mischievous energy. He is wearing the red-and-white gingham shirt and red cotton socks that have been his uniform since the 1950s. Terkel, who can manage a few steps using a cane, apologises repeatedly for not being strong enough to take me downtown for dry Martinis.

The word genius – grotesquely overused in most areas of the media – is not a term you hear disinterested observers use to describe an interviewer. But Terkel – a man with the wit, the longevity, but none of the compliant orthodoxy of an Alistair Cooke – has been the greatest American broadcaster of his, or any other, generation and he has done more than enough to earn it.

Over the years Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong and Dorothy Parker, among others, have sat where I am now, face to face with the best-loved figure in Chicago. Woody Guthrie used to stay in this house. True, that was in the days before you had to bellow at Terkel in the kind of voice that, given a calm night and a favourable wind, might be audible across the state line in Indiana. It’s ironic that a man who defines his role as “listening to what other people tell me” can’t work his hearing aids any better than he could his tape recorder, a device he could never be trusted to operate unaided.

“I realised very early on,” he says, “that the conventional way of approaching an interview was useless; that taking in a notebook full of questions, for instance, only made people feel interrogated.”

Terkel broadcast daily for the best part of 50 years on Chicago station WFMT; his last regular show was 10 years ago. He developed a discursive style of interviewing, his energies devoted to capturing the voices of what many radio presenters persist in referring to as “ordinary people”. One of his favourite films is Miracle in Milan by Vittorio de Sica, at the end of which a group of slum-dwellers suddenly levitate and soar into the clouds: it’s as good an image as any to represent Terkel’s life’s achievement.

“I set out,” he said, “to swallow the world.”

Unusually in his industry, there is, as someone said, “absolutely nothing in Studs of ‘The Big I Am’”. He has every quality he once attributed to his friend, the legendary British reporter James Cameron: “The heart of the innocent, the eye of the experienced and the style of the master.”

“I remember interviewing a woman at a housing project,” he tells me. “She was a light-skinned African-American. Three kids running around. She’s talking for the first time about her life. She stops and says: ‘Have you noticed that machine is not working?’ The tape isn’t moving. I’ve pressed the wrong button by mistake. She presses the right one. From that point on, she became not only my equal but my better. And that is important, because when you are interviewing a person, that person must count.”

At the end of their conversation, “the kids want to hear mummy’s voice. I play the tape back. She’d given the most eloquent account you could imagine of her life; a black person’s outing in a white world. It was so moving. When it finished there was a pause. She said: ‘My God – I never knew I felt that way.’ It can help,” he adds, “to be inept.”

Terkel, whose extraordinary memoir Touch and Go is published in the US on 1 November, is best known in Britain for his written collations of oral history, such as The Good War, Race, or Will the Circle be Unbroken? Reflections of Death and Rebirth. He began producing what he calls his “memory books” at the suggestion of English actor Eleanor Bron, and they are distinguished by the same qualities that resonate from his recordings: his remarkable capacity for empathy, and a unique ability to recognise lyricism in everyday conversation. Terkel exudes a benign inquisitiveness that encourages strangers to express themselves freely.

And so, over the years, a 10-year-old immigrant girl has found the courage to tell him “I may not live to grow up; my life was not promised to me.” Another interviewee has described being black in America as “like wearing ill-fitting shoes”. A US serviceman, speaking of Hiroshima, recalled: “We were sitting on the pier, sharpening our bayonets, when Harry dropped that beautiful bomb. The greatest thing that ever happened. Anybody sitting at the pier at that time would have agreed.”

Friends say he doubts his stature as a writer; a bizarre neurosis. This, after all, is a man who once described a visit to a Soho alcoholic with the lines: “Her flat is cold, yet it isn’t. There is no fireplace, yet it glows.”

That said, his greatest work, I suggest, is not a book but an audio recording: Born to Live, which won the Prix Italia in 1962, and edits together the voices of a Hiroshima survivor, playwright James Baldwin, singer Miriam Makeba, and many less celebrated voices, with no commentary. It’s one of the very few such recordings whose qualities are enhanced by repetition, like a great film or a symphony. WFMT still plays Born to Live every new year’s morning.

“I was strongly influenced by the British director Denis Mitchell, who made Morning in the Streets [the classic 1959 BBC documentary shot in working-class districts of Manchester and Liverpool, still periodically repeated on UK television]. That film is magnificent; probably the best documentary ever made. Denis taught me that you didn’t need a narrator. And that little things were important. That silence was important. And that…” Terkel pauses. “Those people on the streets… they just spoke poetry.”

The ashes of his wife Ida are preserved in an urn, across the room, next to a vase of yellow daisies. They were married for 60 years; Ida died in 1999 leaving him, as he says, bereft. “Nobody will ever know how much Ida underpins his life,” a friend said, some years before she died. “When she was in hospital for heart surgery, it almost destroyed him. The only sustenance he’d take was from a bottle of Scotch in his pocket. He’d stay by her bedside until he was absolutely zonked. Then they’d lift him into a wheelchair and take him home. One time, during all this, I called to ask how Ida was. I heard a strange sound, and he suddenly hung up. I realised he was crying.”

Terkel suffers from what he calls “disenfranchised grief. People say that because we had 60 wonderful years together, I shouldn’t grieve – but I do.” He still speaks to Ida, he says. He also debates, out loud, with himself – “about international diplomacy, dogs, socks: any subject” – a habit he developed in the 1970s.

“If you go in the WFMT bathroom and he’s in a cubicle, you’ll hear him talking to himself,” an unnamed source told the British oral historian Tony Parker, in his outstanding 1997 biography of Terkel. “You see this pair of feet, trousers round the ankles, and hear a voice saying, ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that Otello is a greater opera than Aida?’ I joined in once; he just continued the conversation, including me in it. As I left, he went back to talking to himself.”

“I’m known around the block as a writer and broadcaster,” Terkel tells me, “but also as that old guy who talks to himself. I never learnt to drive. Why should I have? The bus was there. So one day I’m on the corner alone, waiting for the 146. I’m talking to myself, finding the audience very appreciative. Then other people arrive; I talk to them too. This one couple ignore me completely. He’s wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She’s a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, ‘Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ‘ honour the unions.’ The guy gives me the kind of look Noël Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. ‘We despise unions.’ I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, ‘How many hours do you work a day?’ He tells me eight. ‘How come you don’t work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?’ He can’t answer that. ‘Because four men got hanged for you.’ I explain that I’m referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, ‘How many days a week do you work?’ He says five.”

Terkel laughs, and takes a sip of water. “I say: ‘Five – oh, really? How come you don’t work six and a half ?’ He isn’t sure. ‘Because of the Memorial Day Massacre. These battles were fought, all for you.’ I tell him about that massacre of workers, in Chicago, in 1937. He’s never heard of these things before. She drops her Vanity Fair. I pick it up, being gallant. I am giving it to them now: the past. Because, like James Baldwin said, without the past, there is no present. The bus arrives. They leap in. I never see them again. But I’ll bet… they live in an upscale condominium that faces the bus stop. I’ll bet she looks down every morning, from the 20th floor, and he says: ‘Is that old nut still down there?’ And can you blame them?”

Terkel, as unembedded a reporter as ever lived, once described himself as “a guerrilla journalist. I know my terrain. Like the colonials against the British. Like the Vietnamese against us.” In the time I spend with him, the only living reporter he commends with enthusiasm is Robert Fisk. He has no interest in celebrity for its own sake, and becomes especially waspish when discussing politicians.

“You try to shame them,” he complains, “but they are shameless.” He dismissed Ronald Reagan as “a mean-spirited prick” and castigated Margaret Thatcher for legitimising the basest of human instincts. (”It’s dog eat dog,” he said, in a classic Radio 4 documentary Under American Eyes, in 1987. “But we’re not dogs; that’s the problem.”) He caricatures Tony Blair as Jeeves to George W Bush’s Bertie Wooster, and speaks of Gordon Brown in terms of one of the dour agency butlers who torment Wooster when his regular man is on leave. When he wrote his 1995 book, Coming of Age, about people over 70, somebody suggested he call it Mellowing. “I said: ‘Mellowing? A lot of these people are god-damn furious… they’re doing what Dylan Thomas told them to: raging against the dying of the light. Did my mother mellow as she got older? Sure as hell, no. She got worse.’”

Louis (pronounced as in Carroll) Terkel was born in New York City in 1912, the youngest of four sons. His parents, Sam and Annie, were Russian Jews who fled to America in 1902. They moved to Chicago in 1921, and took over a working men’s hotel, the Wells Grand, in a poor district on the west side. Louis chose his nickname in his early twenties, in homage to Studs Lonigan, hero of James T Farrell’s Chicago-based crime novels. Asthmatic as a boy, he suffered from mastoiditis that permanently impaired his hearing. He shared a bed with his father who was incapacitated by chronic angina. They’d lie together, he recalls, and listen to radio broadcasts, the boy worrying about his father’s heart, taking comfort from the faint voices coming through the crystal set. When Louis was 19, he would find Sam Terkel, his glasses askew, dead from a heart attack.

His mother Annie was five foot one, but an unpredictable, sometimes violent, figure. “We never were a happy family. There were always problems with my mother. She was volatile and that’s putting it mildly… no one ever knew who she was going to turn on next. There was a wildness about her. She had such a readiness to hurt people. I could never understand it.” His mother was “very hard on my brothers and my father; shouting at them: she humiliated them”. Louis, the smallest and most vulnerable, was spared her aggression. “My brothers and my father,” he says, “were better people than I was.” “You’ve said that you more closely resemble your mother.” “I’m afraid so.” “Because you share what you’ve called her inner turbulence?” “Maybe. My father was more easygoing. I have many flaws.” “Such as?” “Speaking out of turn. Calling someone a name such as, er … craven toady. That kind of thing. My mother was very strange. A hooker arrived at the hotel one time, with her pimp. My mother and I heard him hitting the girl. My mother pounded him – she really beat and bloodied him. I remember she said: ‘Touch that girl again, and I’ll kill you.’”

His sensibility was permanently marked by the dysfunctional lives of the labourers who lived in and around the hotel: mostly honest workers, he says, humbled by the Depression. Touch and Go recalls the often deranged observations he heard from Wells Grand residents, and speakers at nearby “Bughouse Square”, then Chicago’s equivalent of Speaker’s Corner. One orator, Charlie Wendorf, had lost half an arm.

“He’d say: ‘Know where the rest of this is? In France. Somewhere in a trench near Château-Thierry. The French have it. Cholly Wendorf’s arm is enriching the soil that grows the grapes that bring you the best Cognac money can buy. I gave it them, free of charge. Coo-vah-seer. Reemy Martin. Three Star Hennessy. I drink nothing else.’”

Room C35 at the Wells Grand was occupied by a dishwasher known simply as Civilisation. “All of Civilisation’s time, and I mean all, was expended in letter-writing. He wrote to Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and Gandhi. None had the courtesy to reply.” Civilization “squandered on stamps as other men do on booze and women. He was a holy fire.” “It sounds like growing up in a novel.” “Everything I am,” he insists, “I owe to them.”

Terkel went through law school in Chicago but neverpractised, drifting instead into radio drama. “I’d be called Bullets, or Bugsy, and I’d be drowned, electrocuted or shot in act one.” His dying words tended to be: “Forgive me, mudder of… Oooaaawwow!”

His broadcast career proper began as a DJ in Chicago; by 1948 he was hosting his own TV show on NBC: Studs’ Place, set in a diner. Though it’s hard to imagine a man who is spiritually more distant from Chris Moyles or Howard Stern, certain aspects of his attitude in the studio were decades ahead of their time. Terkel was never, in his phrase, “just a moderator. I’d jump up and say: ‘Aw, you’re full of crap, Mike.’ Mike says: ‘Sit down, Studs – you’re smashed,’ and he’s right. A black guy says: ‘What do you mean by Utopia? A decent wage and a roof?’ I say: ‘Let’s have another beer.’ The black guy says: ‘I gotta go to the toilet.’ I say: ‘Go ahead, for Christ’s sake.’” ‘

An unflinching socialist from boyhood, his marriage to Ida, a social worker of fiercely philanthropic character, did nothing to temper his idealism. His friendships with Billie Holiday and the black opera singer Paul Robeson, among others, meant that when Senator McCarthy began blacklisting supposed subversives, it was only a matter of time before Terkel’s career was derailed. Studs’ Place was pulled by NBC; his column cancelled by the Chicago Sun Times.

When a network director demanded he take a loyalty oath, it was his mother’s voice that rose up in him. “As a porker takes to mud, so I take to disputatiousness. I’m like an alcoholic when there’s booze around. I suggested, gently and politely, that he fuck off.”

Once he’d refused to give names to the McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee, Terkel spent “a lot of time at home, reading”. Paul, his only son, was still an infant. The FBI would visit. “Always in pairs. I’d sit them down and ask: ‘Would you guys like a triple vodka?’ ‘No.’ ‘Double?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you sure? It’s domestic.’”

His library was highly un-McCarthyist. “This one time, the two FBI men arrive and sit down. I read them passages from Thomas Paine. I say: ‘Brothers, you’ve got to hear this.’ They get irritated. One of them’s taking notes. My son, who’s five, goes over to him and the guy shuts his book. I ask why, and he says: ‘I got my secrets.’ I say: ‘Why can’t the boy see them? Are they pornographic?’”

In 1953 he was approached by Red Quinlan, of WFMT, who asked him to present a show called Sound of the City. “I asked Red: ‘What about the blacklist?’ He said: ‘Piss on the blacklist.’”

Had it not been for Senator McCarthy, Terkel would most likely have wound up in Manhattan, presenting prime-time television. As it was, he bonded ever more closely with radio, and with Chicago. His blacklisting had other consequences: reinforcing his mutinous attitude to government, and intensifying his interest in life on the street. He admired the late James Cameron because, “I recognised a man who answered only to himself. His life made a mockery of the detached journalist.”

Terkel met Cameron in 1966, at a time when the British reporter was being vilified in the US, “because he had described some north Vietnamese as human beings”. The pair were Maced together, two years later, by Mayor Daley’s officers, at the Democratic Convention riots in Chicago. Most of their fellow victims were Vietnam War protesters.

“We were two middle-aged men,” Terkel said, “out looking for a Martini.” At the height of the violence, which saw 36 reporters hospitalised, Cameron squinted through the pepper spray and read from a roadside hoarding: “Six good reasons for visiting Chicago.”

These days, Terkel talks about the 1960s as a freak period of respite from unquestioning deference to the flag. Today, Terkel says, “We have a president who was elected fraudulently. Immigrants exploited in the worst jobs are made to feel guilty for accepting the work. It’s victim against victim. Outsourcing of labour – that’s back. Wire taps – they’re back. This is beyond Joe McCarthy. And still the Democrats act as if they lost the 2000 election. They didn’t lose. They won.”

“One question you’ve often addressed in relation to American foreign policy is whether, in order to understand terror, you must first have experienced it. And now, post-9/11, the United States has.”

“Our philosophy was: we can attack, but nobody dares attack us. After all, we beat Grenada. To attack is our right. The question that day was: how dare anybody attack us? That morning I had a meeting in a tall building in Chicago. Someone suggested we cancel. I said no. When I arrived, I was met by the sight of people running in the streets. On that day I saw refugees, right here in Chicago. American refugees, dressed in three-piece suits. All fleeing; all experiencing what it feels like to be attacked. That inverted the basis of the United States’ strength, which relies upon fear. And now, in Iraq, the Democrats are saying let’s get the hell out. Which raises another un-American question: how dare we lose?”

“Do you see any good ending to Bush’s war in Iraq?” “You say ‘Bush’s war’… I believe he is just an idiot. It’s more a matter of those who advised him, looking for oil.” “Is there a politician who could make a difference, at this point?” “That’s the big question. Hillary Clinton won’t. Al Gore I think could – if he ran. Barack Obama might. And I mean, might.”

“So where is the hope that you talked about going to spring from?” “From young people, like I said. From their ability to organise. I believe the internet may have an even stronger influence than people have realised. Albert Einstein said that when you join an organisation – and that could be anti-war, anti-pollution, or pro the rights of lesbians and homosexuals – Einstein said that, once you join, you have more individuality, not less. Because you are another person who wants to count.”

How old would you think Terkel to be, if you encountered his thoughts only on paper, or via the internet. Seventeen? Twenty-five? As it is, after talking for two hours he’s beginning to show signs of tiring, though he’s too polite to say so.

There have been times during our conversation when he might have been aware of echoes from the days when he was asking the questions: notably a meeting he had in 1962 with Bertrand Russell at Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd.

“He can’t make out what I am saying,” Terkel wrote. “I have to shout.” “I am 90,” Russell told him. “In the course of nature, I will soon die. My young friends have the right to many fruitful years. Let them call me fanatic.”

And the more I see of Terkel, the more I’m reminded of a recording he once made of his friend, the English producer Joan Littlewood. She was talking about Brendan Behan, though the description fits the small man from Chicago as well, if not better. “He was not a tough man,” Littlewood said. “The old woman on the corner, the penniless tramp, the outcast, the prisoner; these were the people he made laugh. These were the people who would follow him to the grave. Not the rich and powerful, the politicians and the movie stars. I didn’t see them.”

He calls in JR, his friend and carer, and asks him to come back with a dry Martini for me, and water for himself. He expresses regret that he didn’t take more trouble to involve his son Paul in his work; it’s the only time he becomes visibly emotional. Paul, named after Robeson, changed his name to avoid constant association with the Terkel legend. He works in financial services, his father says, “and I am extremely proud of him”. Touch and Go is dedicated to Paul, under his adopted name of Dan.

The title comes from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: “And every evening at sun-down / I ask a blessing on the town / For whether we last the night or no / I’m sure it’s always touch and go.”

“Years before your wife died, your friends predicted you could never survive alone; at the same time you’ve often said that you’ve never been able to imagine calling a halt to your work. Do you still feel that way?”

“You’re asking a tough question. It’s been very, very different since Ida’s been gone. I’ve given instructions for my ashes to be scattered next to hers, in Bughouse Square. I was 91 when I had my last operation. They changed my artery. Afterwards, I open my eyes. The surgeon’s looking down at me with a rabbinical hat on. He said: ‘It’s all over, Studs.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m dead?’ He said: ‘No. You have four more years.’ I said, ‘You make me sound like Nixon.’ Then I realised there was only one other American as enamoured of the tape recorder as I was: Richard Nixon. The difference was our purpose.”

Terkel smiles, then stops. “I have felt now and then that… quite frankly, that I would like to call it a day. Call it quits. Hang up my cleats. Or, to mix a metaphor, hang up my gloves.”

“Don’t do that.” “I’ve sometimes felt I’d like to. But people say it would make them unhappy.” “And deprive us of at least one more great book.” “You sound like my publisher.” “When I come to write this,” I tell him, “I don’t expect to think of a better ending than the epitaph you once suggested for yourself: ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat.’”

“Well, that’s true,” says Terkel. “Curiosity didn’t kill him.” He pauses, then adds, with a look of acceptance, and no trace of self-pity: “But it didn’t save him, either.” •

‘Touch and Go’ (New Press, £15.99 / $24.95) is published in January

‘I was trapped into being alive’
Never one to shy away from confronting his inner demons, Robert Wyatt’s latest work is as poignant as ever. He talks to Dave Peschek

Dave Peschek
Thursday October 18, 2007
The Guardian

‘I’m a mine of misinformation,” says Robert Wyatt, wheeling his chair into the front room of the Georgian townhouse he shares with his wife, Alfreda Benge. “I’ll just invent something.”

Wyatt is eloquent, voluble, as mischievous as he is sincere. It is more than 40 years since he started making music: initially as part of the progressive Canterbury scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s; then with Soft Machine; then, nominally at least, solo. It is more than 30 years since he was rendered paraplegic after falling from a window at a party while drunk. In the meantime, he has become a national treasure. Each of his sporadic albums retains a singular sense of pop melody and the freedom and inflection of jazz; each is an event. Few musicians who have appeared on Top of the Pops (in his wheelchair) can also claim to have been profiled by the Spectator.

Before you meet Wyatt, you meet Alfie. She drives me from Market Rasen station to Louth, Lincolnshire – the first place they hit on a drive from London looking for an affordable property with a ground floor big enough to give Robert freedom of movement in his chair. Like Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, Robert and Alfie live in an artistic symbiosis. She often writes lyrics for him, and has provided beautifully strange and bright cover art for all his records since his solo debut in 1973. “Everyone,” says Wyatt, “should have an Alfie.”

She is fierce and warm, a Polish refugee who came to London after the war when she was seven with her mother, who now lives with them. When Wyatt met her, she was “a proper mod”, had “all the records you would expect a girl to have, but also all this hard bop jazz.” She was also, it is clear from the photos in Wyatt’s music room, luminously beautiful.

She has not had an easy time of it. Wyatt was incontinent after his paralysis – “hard to live with for a partner, that helplessness,” he says – and suffered from profound depression through the 1990s. “Me and Alfie became like strangers who just accommodated each other,” he recalls. He was “quite unable to sleep. Couldn’t lie still, revolving in the bed all night, and Alfie had to go upstairs to sleep. Wheeling up and down the corridor at 20 miles an hour, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t write. I lost my sight, I suddenly needed glasses. It felt like dying, but that would have been a release. Physically, as it turns out, I’m very resilient. I was trapped in having to be alive.” Counselling saved him, and, in 1997, he made one of his most cohesive records, Shleep.

Later in the day, Wyatt and I wander out with cups of tea to a spot where he likes to watch the world go by. He pulls out a handkerchief and unwraps two gingerbread men. We dunk. Suddenly he says: “I’ve been in AA for two months. You can put that in.” Later, Alfie tells me she finds his new album, Comicopera, impossible to listen to because it recalls such a painful time.

When I suggest that Wyatt is still more affected by his traumatic sacking from Soft Machine in 1971 than his paralysis, he agrees. He still has weekly nightmares about it, he says, adding with awful, melancholy force: “There is nothing worse than humiliation.”

His paralysis has inspired rather than inhibited his musicality. He had been a drummer but, refusing to be “not bad for a cripple”, he went through a long period where he barely played. His last album, Cuckooland, saw a glorious renaissance of his fluid, lush drumming style. “I’d been sitting in my room, listening to old jazz records, to how [the American jazz drummer] Billy Higgins keeps time. [He] interested me very much because he hardly used the hi-hat for the off-beat, and of course as a paraplegic I can’t use hi-hats or bass drums.”

Wyatt’s father introduced him to jazz through the movie Stormy Weather, which featured Fats Waller. “My dad was fascinated by that, being a pianist who’d listened up to that point to Mozart through to Ravel and Debussy. [Dad] was really important to me. He died when I was 18. He had two families; he joined ours when I was about six. He used to take me to museums and opera and ballet and things, and people would say there’s no point taking children to that stuff, it won’t sink in. I did fidget through Beethoven, but actually I’m really glad they packed it all in there – it made up for the fact I was crap at school, completely rubbish, and had to leave at 16. Then my big brother turned up, his other son. He had Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles Davis. And I was absolutely blown away. The extraordinary places music can go, the different changing textures, how you can thread ideas through different changes and still be coherent – you get used to that with classical, and jazz seemed to me to have that too.”

After a period in the late 70s during which he collaborated with some of the greats of the ECM jazz label – Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Jack de Johnette – Wyatt was “saved” by long-time fan Geoff Travis from the record company Rough Trade. Travis gave Wyatt free rein to combine music and politics in a series of singles, intended as a sort of “musical journalism”. Wyatt covered everything from Chic’s At Last I Am Free to Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding; the latter became a hit after extensive play from John Peel.

Wyatt is that rare thing: a musician without an overweening ego. If he feels he has something to say, he writes lyrics. If not, he is more than happy making a point with someone else’s words. Comicopera opens with a song by Anya Garbarek, daughter of the jazz saxophonist Jan, and continues with a song sung (in part) by Monica Vasconcelos. “I’m sort of in there somewhere, nudging the traffic,” Wyatt says. “Like being a producer or a film director. It’s always a collaborative effort, and I do the bits I can’t think of anybody else to do.”

He is his own genre: the records don’t sound like anything else. “No. But this is not deliberate. I can’t understand people being deliberately eccentric. The cutting edge always sounded really uncomfortable to me, like sitting on a razor blade. I want to take in the whole thing, what art can do.”

Wyatt is brutally modest about his voice. Described by Ryuichi Sakamoto as “the saddest sound in the world”, it is limber and beautiful – yet Wyatt once likened it to Jimmy Somerville on valium. “There’s no deliberate or conscious input into the way I sing,” he says. “It’s more like damage limitation.”

Cuckooland has a brief hiatus halfway through, where the listener is encouraged to take a break and make a cup of tea. Comicopera is split into three movements. The first section concerns “relationships, bereavement, misunderstanding”, and is called Lost in Noise, because “I seem to be hitting the cymbals so hard you can hardly hear anything. The songs all seem to be about remembering people in dreams who disappear when you wake up.”

Most of Lost in Noise’s lyrics are written by Alfie; the majority in part two, The Here and Now, are by Wyatt. He calls it “a bunch of stuff that’s mainly sardonic, me muttering my way through England, or provincialism in a way, going around in bemusement at council meetings, grumbling about not having a religion. It’s very nostalgic for me – sort of a composite picture of all I love about London.”

The section’s final songs are bleak and brutal, but gloriously so; extreme and committed songs born out of the specifics of the current troubles in the Middle East, but with wider reach. “I had this piece of music that was really busy; I hadn’t got words. Alfie came in in tears one day. She’d been watching television, the battering of Beirut. The poignancy and awfulness of it. The word ‘hate’ comes into it, which is a very hard word to sing – as is ‘love’ – but ‘hate’ is even harder. On a record, you hope it’s a transitory [state]. But bombing somewhere, waiting until the ambulances went in and then bombing that – fucking hell. It’s not anything about the specific politics of the region. It’s more about the horrible tangle that happens with the backwards and forwards of cycles of violence. I know it in myself. If someone’s nasty to me, I’ll be even nastier back, and then you’re off. War is imminent.”

Wyatt says his work is instinctive. “A French journalist asked if my music was spiritual, and I said, ‘Only in the original sense of spirit meaning breath.’ I am a breathing animal. If anything, I get lower, not higher, in art to work things out, relying on animal instincts to guide me through what sounds right. Beyond that, it’s unknowable, verbally inaccessible.” He adds, with characteristic self-effacement: “That’s why I work with musicians.”

Comicopera by Robert Wyatt is out now on Domino Records.

“Lady Jaye died suddenly on Tuesday 9th October 2007 at home in Brooklyn, New York from a previously undiagnosed heart condition which is thought to have been connected with her long-term battle with stomach cancer. Lady Jaye collapsed and died in the arms of her heartbroken “other half” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.”

Brian Eno
Saturday October 6, 2007
The Guardian

Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we “moved on” from Iraq. They don’t want to talk about it any more: it was a dreadful blunder, and reflects little credit on any of them. Presumably this is why the question has hardly been debated in parliament. Although the majority of the public were always against the war, this was not reflected by their elected representatives. The government behaved in a way that was transparently undemocratic but the Conservatives won’t call them on it, for without their almost unanimous support the whole project couldn’t have happened.

But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional political system that got us into this hole. If we don’t, we risk digging a series of ever deeper holes. The Iraq adventure was justified as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Not only did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined our democracy. Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision, George Bush and Tony Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that had taken centuries to evolve. They said these were necessary to ensure our security – a device used by authoritarian leaders since time immemorial.

Civil liberties never seem important until you need them. But by definition, that is the very time you won’t be able to get them, so they have to be in place in advance, like an insurance policy. In his book Defying Hitler, the historian Sebastian Hafner describes how Germany slid into nazism. At first people laughed at Hitler and played along with what seemed trivial changes in the law. For most Germans it was all rather abstract, and they were expecting things to return to normal when Hitler faded back into obscurity. Only he didn’t, and civil liberties were so compromised there was no way to stop him.

If we don’t stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the next steps in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism. Those will likely include an attack on Iran, a permanent force of occupation in Iraq (probably always the intention), the complete militarisation of the Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.

Stop the War Coalition planned a march from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square on Monday – the day parliament resumes – to draw attention to the fact that a lot of us are still thinking about Iraq and to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops. Using an archaic law (the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act), that demonstration has now been banned. Now why would that be? Stop the War Coalition has organised dozens of such demonstrations, and as far as I know not one person has been hurt. So it can’t be public safety that’s at stake.

No, it’s the elephant in the room. This government wants to show itself as clean and new, and doesn’t want attention drawn to the elephant and the mess it has left on the carpet. So it invokes an old law, to shave a little more off the arrangements by which citizens communicate their feelings to government (a process, by the way, called democracy).

It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: “This war was a catastrophe.” It would take even greater courage to admit that the seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception: it wasn’t a good idea badly done (the neocons’ last refuge – “Blame it all on Rumsfeld”), but a bad idea badly done. And it would take perhaps superhuman courage to say: “And now we should withdraw and pay reparations to this poor country.”

I don’t see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or not: on Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right to remind our representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off their agenda, it’s still on ours. Please join us.

• Brian Eno is a musician. Stopwar.org.uk

By Daniel Ellsberg
September 26, 2007 (Text of a speech delivered September 20, 2007)

Editor’s Note: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming war with Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at an American University symposium on Sept. 20.

Below is an edited transcript of Ellsberg’s remarkable speech:

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

Daniel Ellsberg is author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Vandal by Nick Walker.

Germaine Greer
Monday September 24, 2007
The Guardian

Thirty-five years ago I bought a dilapidated house in North Kensington, London. One of the reasons I bought it was that it sported a magnificent graffito. In those days, graffiti were usually texts, some of them, it was said, written by the poet Christopher Logue. This one spelt out, in foot-high block capitals, the undeniable truth that “Boredom is counter-revolutionary”. When the house was done up, the graffito disappeared. Over the years, the neighbourhood lost all its graffiti one by one, as the pestiferous warren of flats and bedsits was regentrified. The wall that had the one word “Scream” written its full length was repainted, and the grim prediction “This too will burn” was removed from a pillar under the Westway.

Aerosol art is not the same thing at all. Although Banksy is as likely to be arrested as the defacers of those days, what he does is jokey, wry, fundamentally civilised. In a message that’s been sloshed up by a couple of four-inch brushes loaded with red and black gloss paint rather than sprayed through a stencil, you see not good humour and self-deprecation, but honest-to-goodness grief and rage.

For months I thought about restoring my graffito, maybe cleaning the new cream stone-textured paint from off the letters or even painting them again; but eventually I realised that for the owner of a house to scribble on it is just pathetic and downright disrespectful, like Foxtons the estate agent having the name Foxtons painted on the side of its fleet of Minis in graffito script. You’ve got to be working full-tilt, hanging head downward off a motorway bridge with your mates holding you by the feet, writing . . . what? Probably your tag in blocky letters outlined in contrasting trim. Nearly all graffiti are just annoying, but you have to put up with the millions of naff ones if you want the occasional brilliant one. A great graffito is not simply an arresting design; it is a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence of work, place and space. Would anyone now dare to sandblast the murals of loyalists and republicans from the walls of Belfast? Now old IRA wall paintings are being touched up and recycled with messages in Arabic signifying solidarity for the Palestinians. And Banksy has done his best work on the West Bank Barrier.

Most aerosol art, like most other art, is feeble and bad. If bad art was a crime, some of our most respected citizens would have been banged up years ago. Wall art, whether brilliant or ordinary, is a crime so serious that it is to be treated with zero tolerance: fortunes are spent in tackling the graffiti scourge; in Berlin low-flying aircraft are used to scan the streets with infra-red cameras to catch the spray painters at work. Oceans of highly toxic solvents are being sluiced over walls and hoardings to wash the paint into the sewers and eventually into the water table. Wildly illiberal proposals are coming from all quarters: possession of spray paint and selling of spray paint will become crimes; taggers will have their driving licences withdrawn and be fined huge amounts on the spot. In England two young men known in art as Krek and Mers, who haven’t done a graffito in two years, have been sent to prison for 12 months and 15 months respectively – though one of them was due to start an art course at university, his mother had offered to pay for the damage, and 500 people signed a Facebook petition. Needless to say, making an example of them will be the opposite of a deterrent; tagging is now heroic protest. Expect to see the names Krek and Mers on every railway bridge.

Graffiti cost Londoners £100m a year, and the country as a whole more than a billion, we are told; what is actually costing is not the art, which is free, but its destruction. The engine driving this colossal expenditure is Encams, mastermind of the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, which implores us not to drop litter or chewing gum, dump cars or rubbish, make lots of noise, or leave our dogs’ shit on the pavement. Major mess-makers they leave well alone. Apparently graffiti and fly-posting can fill people with a feeling of unease or fear, because they associate both with crime. As fear of crime is already way out of proportion to the actual incidence of crime, loathing of graffiti must be equally, if not more irrational. We should not pander to it.

Walls don’t look much better after their graffiti have been washed off than they did before, so we might as well stop doing it. In environmental terms, the washing-off makes a worse mess than the painting ever did. The wall-painters themselves will paint over each other’s work, especially if they consider it feeble. A far less costly option is for us all to make our own stencils giving the defacers marks out of 10, to remind the artists that there are people out there who have eyes to see, and as much right to say what they think as the artists. The work then becomes a palimpsest, a dialogue between artists and public. Most tags deserve the single-word comment “prat”.

Whether at Lascaux 17,000 years ago or in Western Arnhem Land 50,000 years ago, art began on a wall. If the sandblasters had been around in either place, we would have lost a precious inheritance.

For a regular dose of great street art, check Wooster Collective.

Ed Pilkington
Saturday September 15, 2007
The Guardian

Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.

The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.

The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.

For Walt, the explosion of criticism after the LRB publication in March 2006 struck particularly close to home as two members of his own Harvard faculty turned on him. Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature, compared Walt and his University of Chicago co-author’s work to that of a notorious 19th-century German anti-semite. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard criminal law professor who represented OJ Simpson, charged them with culling some of their references from neo-Nazi websites.

Given the battering he has taken, Walt is remarkably upbeat. “We were surprised by how nasty it got,” says the Harvard professor. “The David Duke reference, the neo-Nazi websites – these were intended to smear us and swing attention on to us rather than to what we were saying. It wasn’t pleasant, but it never made me doubt what we had written or doubt myself.” Standing tall in the face of attack is one thing; to raise your head above the parapet for a second round is quite another. But that is what the Mearsheimer/Walt double act are doing: they have gone on the offensive with the publication of a book-length version of their original treatise.

As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte – and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears.

There is one obvious question to put to Walt: why do it to yourself? Wasn’t one stoning enough? “We did ask ourselves, did we want to go through this again?” he admits, but only to add: “It didn’t take us all that long to figure out we had more to say and it was our job to say it.”

By writing a 496-page book, as opposed to the original article’s mere 13,000 words, the authors hope to present a more nuanced version of their case. They have taken in new examples to support their thesis, notably the second Lebanon war, which broke out in the interim, and have sought to address some of the points raised by critics.

The book follows the structure of the original article fairly faithfully, and its argument can be summarised thus: in recent years the US government has given Israel unconditional support, showering it with $3bn a year irrespective of the human rights violations it inflicts on the Palestinians. It was not always this way – think of the Suez crisis of 1956 when America stepped in to frustrate Israel’s (and Britain’s) ambitions. But from the 1960s onwards the relationship deepened to the extent that today American and Israeli interests are deemed by many Americans to be essentially identical.

The authors ask why this is the case, and argue that strategically there is no reason for it. The end of the cold war removed a central justification for the special relationship, as Israel no longer provided the US with a barrier to communism in the region. Post 9/11, the US and Israel are presented as partners against terrorism, but America’s vulnerability to attack partly stems from its support for Israel, which has provoked hostility in the Muslim world. Nor is there a moral argument for indiscriminately backing Israel – as a towering military presence in the Middle East, Israel is no longer under existential threat.

So what explains this ongoing largesse? The authors conclude that the answer lies with the Israel lobby, a loose coalition of individuals and organisations that wants US leaders to treat Israel as though it were the 51st state. The lobby stifles debate, inhibits criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and maintains the special relationship despite the fact that it has become a liability both for the US and for Israel itself.

In its transition from literary journal essay to stand-alone book, the authors have made a few telling alterations of presentation and emphasis. The most vivid is that in the body of the text they have demoted lobby to lower case: the Israel Lobby has become the Israel lobby. Walt sees that as the most minor of changes, remarking that: “John and I don’t even remember how the capital L got used in the first place.”

More substantially, perhaps, they have used the extra space to make several robust disclaimers, insisting that they have never questioned the right of Israel to exist or the legitimacy of the Israel lobby itself. They have also filed down some of the more jagged edges of their argument, such as their position on the role the lobby played in the build-up to the Iraq war. They still maintain that the war would “almost certainly not have occurred” were it not for the Israel lobby, but they soften the claim by adding that America’s belligerent mood in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington also had much to do with it.

Such nuances make for a more sophisticated read, but they fall far short of the revisions – the authors would say capitulations – that would be needed to satisfy their detractors.

Foxman is one of the most vocal critics. His new book, timed specifically to counteract the arrival on bookshelves of The Israel Lobby, pulls no punches. Its title is representative of the tone of the book: The Deadliest Lies. “This is a big lie that the Jewish people have lived with throughout history,” he tells me from his New York office. “Up to now these anti-semitic canards have been heard on the fringes, but to have two respected academics repeat them legitimises the debate and penetrates the mainstream.”

More measured – though still forceful – criticism of the Mearsheimer and Walt book has come from those titans of US journalism, the New York Times and the New Yorker. The Times’ book critic William Grimes takes a swipe at the authors’ claim that it is time for the US to treat Israel as a normal country: “But it’s not. And America won’t. That’s realism.” David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, suggests none too flatteringly that the book is symptomatic of a polarised era in which Americans are searching for an explanation to the evils of the times.

In the swirl of debate, the squabbling parties keep coming back to the core concept of an Israel lobby, case notwithstanding. The authors have been meticulously careful in the book to stress that they see the lobby as a loose coalition. It is not a single, unified movement and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy. Yet no matter how profuse their disclaimers, they have not assuaged those antagonists for whom any lumping together of Jews or Jewish interest groups sets alarm bells ringing. “Visit any anti-semitic website and you’ll hear the same old themes: the Jews have too much power; they exercise political influence not as individual citizens but as a cabal,” writes Foxman. “Walt and Mearsheimer sound all the same notes, with a subtlety and pseudo-scholarly style that makes their poison all the more dangerous.”

In our conversation, Walt accepts the phrase “the lobby” is “an awkward term as many of the groups and people in it don’t operate on Capitol Hill. It’s shorthand – you could call it the pro-Israel movement”. One wonders why he and his co-author have stuck with it, then, when it has allowed their detractors to smear other more credible parts of their argument.

Take the slanging match over the causes of the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer rightly lay a large part of the blame for this disastrous escapade on the neoconservatives within the Bush administration, but they then go on to define those neocons as an integral part of the Israel lobby. Books have been written about the various motivations of the neocons. Sympathy for Israel is one, but there are many others – the desire to spread democracy, a belief in the positive uses of military intervention, denigration of international institutions. To suggest that the neocons and the Israel lobby are one and the same is a conflation too far.

But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.

Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.

So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out – it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”

In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.

Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.

The federal government is proposing regulations that would effectively kill adult social-networking sites. This is being done under the guise of fighting child pornography. You have until September 10 to object to these regulations. It’s easy to do and essential. A sample e-mail comment is at the bottom of this page. Please forward this information to your friends!

What’s the Deal?

The Department of Justice is proposing regulations to implement a federal law designed to combat child pornography, known as Section 2257. The law was first enacted in 1998 and was amended in 2006 and significantly expanded to include regulation of the Internet.

While many of the regulations pertain to companies that produce adult entertainment magazines and videos (and are extremely burdensome), they would also affect anyone who uses an adult social-networking site. Here’s how:

The regulations would require the people running a site to get and maintain personal information from every user (that means you) who posts a “sexually explicit” photo, including your photo ID (driver’s license, passport, or military ID).

• The regulations would allow the Attorney General to conduct warrantless searches at will on the sites’ records, including your personal information.

• There are few safeguards over what the FBI can do with the information it obtains.

• If a site operator fails to comply with the regulations, he or she would face a prison sentence of up to 5 years.

• Obviously, none of this has anything to do with child pornography. Instead, it is a blatant attempt to end the ability of consenting adults to use adult social-networking sites to meet other people for sex. Obviously, if these regulations go into effect, they will kill this industry.

What You Can Do

The Department of Justice has published these proposed regulations and the public has until September 10 to comment on them.

We need to generate thousands of comments objecting to the proposed regulations – and it’s easy to do via e-mail. Just follow the instructions below.

Why We’re Involved

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Inc. is involved in this fight because we believe sexual freedom is a fundamental human right and we don’t think the government has any place in relations between consenting adults. These regulations are part of our government’s hypocritical and punitive views about sex, sexuality, and reproductive rights. All of this – from abstinence-only sex education programs to the elimination of funding for accurate and explicit HIV prevention programs – fall hardest on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Take Action Now

Here is a sample letter with the e-mail address you need to send it to (Admin.ceos@usdoj.gov) and the subject you must include in the subject line of your e-mail (Section 2257 Docket No. CRM 104).

Sample Letter

To: Admin.ceos@usdoj.gov
Re: Section 2257 Docket No. CRM 104

To the U.S. Department of Justice:

I am writing to object to the proposed “Section 2257” regulations.

These regulations are complicated and burdensome on legitimate businesses, and have very little to do with protecting children and minors from pornography. Their reach — particularly into adult social-networking internet services — is overbroad, unnecessary, and would allow the federal government to search and seize personal records of adult consumers without a warrant; a clear violation privacy and constitutional rights.

Specifically, I object to the following provisions:

1. The regulations (18 § 2257(b)(1) and (c)) would force adult social-networking services to obtain and maintain personal information about their users, including the user’s photo ID (driver’s license, passport, or military ID). (I must note that the sites already require users to affirm that they are over 18 years of age.) Many sites have tens of thousands of users and it is simply not possible for them to do this. Moreover, many people who use these sites want to maintain their privacy, for any number of reasons, including the sad fact that they might face discrimination and/or violence if others found out they were using these sites. It is still legal in 31 states to discriminate against someone who is gay or bisexual, and in 41 states if the person is transgender. The combination of the recordkeeping requirements and many users’ fears about providing such information will kill the entire industry.

All of this is overkill given that adult social networking sites were not identified as a problem in the production, distribution and downloading of child pornography in the Department of Justice’s own report on “Child Pornography on the Internet” (May 2006).

2. The regulations (18 § 2257(g) and under 28 C.F.R. § 75.5) would allow the Attorney General to conduct unannounced warrantless searches at will on the sites’ records, including reviewing and presumably seizing the personal information on site users. This is an egregious abuse of government authority, an unwarranted invasion of privacy and, in my opinion, a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

3. The regulations (28 C.F.R. § 75.5(4)) provide insufficient safeguards over what the government can do with the information it obtains through its searches. This, by itself, has a chilling effect on the ability of people to engage in constitutionally protected activities. As noted above, this is particularly dangerous for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Let me be clear: I believe children need to be protected from coercion into pornography and it is important for the federal government to do all that it can to insure those protections. Sadly, many of the provisions of the proposed 2257 regulations do nothing to address child pornography, but instead are clearly aiming at destroying an industry and ending a legal and valuable way for adults to meet one another.

Sincerely,

(your name)

Members of the Gay Liberation Front picketing a
police station in Hollywood, California, 1971.

One of the more notable things about the fallout from Senator Larry Craig’s tap-dancing antics has been the way the affair put a spotlight on a world of clandestine liaisons which a small but often vocal portion of the American populace doesn’t want to know about and wishes would go away forever. What many news reports managed to miss amid the wailing and rending of garments was the significant point that the only societies whose members feel a persistent need for furtive sexual encounters are those that proscribe those encounters and make gay people feel ashamed–or afraid of the repercussions–of their actions.

A number of reports felt the need to explain for readers or viewers unskilled in cultural anthropology how men seeking sex communicate with each other in the restrooms of the nation. ABC News ran a story last week with the title, “Secret Signals: How Gay Men Cruise For Sex“, as though all gay men are the same and we’re all just counting the seconds until our next toilet encounter. (And I see today they’ve finally changed the title to “How Some Men Cruise For Sex”.) What this and other reports lacked in their elaboration of secret signals was any question as to why men would be compelled to go to these lengths in the first place.

Historically, all persecuted groups have sought a way to identify their members without drawing undue attention to themselves, and the lexicon of ambivalent loitering–toe-tapping or otherwise–was evolved by gay men out of necessity, not choice. When you’re part of a minority that outwardly resembles the majority, finding others like yourself presents a problem. When that majority wants to imprison you for loving the wrong gender, as was the case in Europe and the US until very recently–and is still the case in much of the Middle East, Africa and Asia–you can’t exactly walk around in a t-shirt saying “I’m not gay but my boyfriend is.” Hence the need for secret signals, sly glances and out-of-the-way trysts. In this at least, gay men have been no different to early Christians, or to the Catholics in Protestant England who were persecuted to such an extent that “priest holes” were built into many Catholic houses to give local priests a hiding place when fleeing angry Protestant mobs. (The irony of the persecuted becoming future persecutors needs no undue elaboration here.)

Marginal groups of any stripe bond through shared slang and identifying signals. Criminal gangs in 19th century London used “cant” and backslang so they could talk among themselves without fear of their schemes being revealed through eavesdropping. Tradespeople used similar cant expressions of their own and, sure enough, gay men in the capital evolved their own version of cant, partly so as to be able to gossip about other men in public but mostly as a means of extending mutual solidarity. Polari, as the slang was called, spread from gay haunts into the world of backstage theatre and eventually found its way into the wider culture, giving us terms such as “drag” (which originally meant any kind of clothing) and “rough trade”, trade in Polari being a term for sex. The word “naff” is now a commonly-used piece of English slang meaning “crap” or “useless”, common enough even for Princess Anne who once told photographers to “naff off”. I wonder if anyone informed her that “naff” was a Polari acronym for someone you wouldn’t want to have sex with: Not Available For Fucking.

Public toilets in Polari were known as tearooms or cottages, and the word “cottaging” is still a common one among British gay men. Senator Craig’s alleged tearoom encounter with a NAFF police officer lifted the lid for many appalled Republicans on a world which their own attitudes had helped create. In the days when gay sex was a crime or could have severe repercussions, anyone loitering in a public toilet was obviously there to do more than wash their hands, hence the popularity of such places for random encounters. So too with other all-male places such as saunas or bathhouses. As long as society made it difficult for men to have sex with men, gay men had to find their own spaces to meet. Senator Craig continues to protest his innocence but has he stopped to consider during the past few days that maybe–just maybe–the reason restrooms are policed has some connection with attitudes that push gay people to the margins of society, attitudes that his voting record has helped sustain?

Whether they know it or not, closeted men of Senator Craig’s generation who look for sex in toilets are living out an anachronism, acting as though it’s still the 1950s and they have to sneak around out of sight of wives or workmates or voters. This has never been a safe or convenient way of finding sex. John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, a 1977 study of cruising in Los Angeles in the early Seventies, recounts in detail a period within recent memory when police persecution of gay Americans was persistent and often violent. There was more cruising in those days because there were fewer bars and what bars there were often sustained harassing police raids. Away from the big cities, furtive and desperate loitering was all that many men would have known.

None of the young gay men I know today would dream of looking for sex in a public toilet; they meet new guys through MySpace or Facebook, on dating sites like Gay.com or via gay groups at university. If they’re old enough they can go to bars or clubs. Suggesting to a gay guy below a certain age that they ought to go looking for sex in a park or toilet would inspire the same bewildered reaction as you’d receive from a straight guy if you suggested he should go kerb-crawling for hookers at the weekend.

Some gay men do still enjoy cottaging, of course–ask George Michael–not least for the thrill of possibly being caught. The Spartacus International Gay Guide lists cruising sites for travellers and is updated every year; there are many online equivalents of this. For guys with a fetish for married bisexual men (more common than you might think) random sex in public places is a good way to meet the object of your desire. But that’s all it is today, a fetish, just like dressing in rubber or being peed on in a bathtub. Men of Senator Craig’s generation who were unable to fully acknowledge their sexuality find themselves repeating the impulses of a conflicted and miserable youth, often filled with shame and guilt but unable to prevent their actions all the same. It’s quite probable that in twenty years time this kind of activity in Europe and America will be increasingly rare, passing into history just as Polari has passed from use as the need for a secret slang diminished. There’ll still be guys wanting a quick random encounter but why do that in the uncomfortable confines of a toilet stall with a risk of arrest when you can relax in somebody’s home or hotel room?

The other striking feature of the Craig business has been the way it fits a pattern in which Republicans make all the mistakes that plagued the decadent later years of the last Conservative administration in Britain. Thatcher’s regime in the Eighties was just as intolerant as the current GOP (lesbian daughters or no) so the Conservatives looked equally foolish during the outing of Harvey Proctor, Tory MP for Basildon and a man happy to pander to racists and homophobes in his public pronouncements until he was revealed to enjoy spanking sessions with black rent boys.

When John Major was handed Thatcher’s poisoned chalice following her sacking as PM in 1990, he announced a half-baked “Back to Basics” morality campaign for the UK. His moral drive was undermined immediately by a series of scandals involving Conservative MPs who were either having adulterous affairs, siring illegitimate children or taking bribes from lobbyists. Worst of all was the case of Stephen Milligan MP, found dead from auto-erotic asphyxia while tied to his kitchen table dressed in woman’s stockings. The spectacle of the party of morality trying to dictate to the nation while its MPs were behaving like characters in a bed-hopping farce was too much; “Back to Basics” collapsed and the whole sorry episode did much to further reduce the government’s already seriously eroded credibility.

The Blair administration has suffered far less from this kind of sexual damage. Blair’s Labour Party was the first to have openly gay MPs and it was their example, and the consequent indifference of the public to their sexual orientation, which led the way for other MPs–Conservatives included–to declare themselves. It’s often said that where America leads, Britain follows, but this once-homophobic nation has managed to shed its public intolerance far quicker and with considerably less fuss than the United States.

The lesson for Republicans–if they’re capable of learning any lessons by this point–is that lawmakers who don’t have to live a lie are less likely to bring the party into disrepute in airport toilets. But the intractable problem is that it’s impossible to have a party with openly gay members who are then required to vote against the interests of people like themselves, assuming anyone in a Republican state would vote for an openly gay candidate in the first place. Conservatives in Britain recognise now that the homophobic debates of the past are over, the country has moved on and there are more pressing matters to attend to. Much of America is stuck at the place Britain was circa 1982, with those on the right in thrall to the tiny percentage of the population who find their moral precepts by cherry-picking Leviticus.

Senator Larry Craig exemplifies the dilemma: repeatedly accused of gay activity but unable to ever admit anything, especially after his anti-gay voting record. He claims his tearoom signals were misinterpreted and seems now to have changed his mind about his resignation. Maybe the quantum superposition he exists in–gay or not? resigned or not?–isn’t the dithering of a man in a state of panic, maybe he’s simply large, like Walt Whitman, and contains multitudes.

And speaking of America’s greatest gay poet, Whitman himself struggled with his sexuality for many years until he was able to write in Starting from Paumanok:

I will sing the song of companionship,
I will show what alone must finally compact these,
I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love,
indicating it in me,
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were
threatening to consume me,
I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires,
I will give them complete abandonment,
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

Not for the first time, politicians might learn something from poets.

The Vanishing City.

A Band Planet (1991).

-TATEISHI Tiger was born in Fukuoka in 1941.
-In 1963, he submitted a large collage to the 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, which received much attention. Subsequently he went on to be heavily influenced by Pop Art, which he aptly converted to address aspects of Japanese everyday life as well as the country’s current issues.
-From the mid 60ﾕs, he gradually began to draw cartoons.
-In 1969 he moved to Italy, where he worked for Olivetti typewriters as a designer, while finding time to exhibit his paintings at such places as Alexander Iolas gallery.
-From the mid 80’s his work began to feature epitomizing motifs of Japan, such as Mt. Fuji.
-In 1998, he passed away in Chiba prefecture.

From his inception as an artist in 1962, until 1967, TATEISHI Tiger was known by his birth name of TATEISHI Kouichi. But from 1968 until mid 1990, he developed, for its convenient catchiness, the moniker Tiger TATEISHI, which was not only written in ‘kana’, the phonetic notation reserved for non-Japanese words, but the order of first and last name was switched to mimic the Western manner. Although he continues to be remembered posthumously by the same moniker, the ‘kana’ has been converted to Chinese characters and the order of first and last name has been reverted to the original Japanese manner.

Via the essential Giornale Nuovo.

By Jennifer Gonnerman
August 20, 2007

Rob Santana awoke terrified. He’d had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit—his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense.

Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren’t electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn’t about to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring nightmare came from—not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America’s most controversial “behavior modification” facility.

In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a “special needs school,” takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school districts pick up the tab.

The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.

In Rob Santana’s case, he freely admits he was an out-of-control kid with “serious behavioral problems.” At birth he was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus; when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Rob was at the Rotenberg Center for about three and a half years. From the start, he cursed, hollered, fought with employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from his mother and a Massachusetts probate court to use electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack containing five two-pound, battery-operated devices, each connected to an electrode attached to his skin. “I felt humiliated,” he says. “You have a bunch of wires coming out of your shirt and pants.” Rob remained hooked up to the apparatus 24 hours a day. He wore it while jogging on the treadmill and playing basketball, though it wasn’t easy to sink a jump shot with a 10-pound backpack on. When he showered, a staff member would remove his electrodes, all except the one on his arm, which he had to hold outside the shower to keep it dry. At night, Rob slept with the backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance camera.

Employees shocked him for aggressive behavior, he says, but also for minor misdeeds, like yelling or cursing. Each shock lasts two seconds. “It hurts like hell,” Rob says. (The school’s staff claim it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at once. Two seconds never felt so long.) On several occasions, Rob was tied facedown to a four-point restraint board and shocked over and over again by a person he couldn’t see. The constant threat of being zapped did persuade him to act less aggressively, but at a high cost. “I thought of killing myself a few times,” he says.

Rob’s mother Jo-Anne deLeon had sent him to the Rotenberg Center at the suggestion of the special-ed committee at his school district in upstate New York, which, she says, told her that the program had everything Rob needed. She believed he would receive regular psychiatric counseling—though the school does not provide this.

As the months passed, Rob’s mother became increasingly unhappy. “My whole dispute with them was, ‘When is he going to get psychiatric treatment?’” she says. “I think they had to get to the root of his problems—like why was he so angry? Why was he so destructive? I really think they needed to go in his head somehow and figure this out.” She didn’t think the shocks were helping, and in 2002 she sent a furious fax demanding that Rob’s electrodes be removed before she came up for Parents’ Day. She says she got a call the next day from the executive director, Matthew Israel, who told her, “You don’t want to stick with our treatment plan? Pick him up.” (Israel says he doesn’t remember this conversation, but adds, “If a parent doesn’t want the use of the skin shock and wants psychiatric treatment, this isn’t the right program for them.”)

Rob’s mother is not the only parent angry at the Rotenberg Center. Last year, Evelyn Nicholson sued the facility after her 17-year-old son Antwone was shocked 79 times in 18 months. Nicholson says she decided to take action after Antwone called home and told her, “Mommy, you don’t love me anymore because you let them hurt me so bad.” Rob and Antwone don’t know each other (Rob left the facility before Antwone arrived), but in some ways their stories are similar. Antwone’s birth mother was a drug addict; he was burned on an electric hot plate as an infant. Evelyn took him in as a foster child and later adopted him. The lawsuit she filed against the Rotenberg Center set off a chain of events: investigations by multiple government agencies, emotional public hearings, scrutiny by the media. Legislation to restrict or ban the use of electric shocks in such facilities has been introduced in two state legislatures. Yet not much has changed.

Rob has paid little attention to the public debate over his alma mater, though he visits its website occasionally to see which of the kids he knew are still there. After he left the center he moved back in with his parents. At first glance, he seems like any other 21-year-old: baggy Rocawear jeans, black T-shirt, powder-blue Nikes. But when asked to recount his years at the Rotenberg Center, he speaks for nearly two hours in astonishing detail, recalling names and specific events from seven or eight years earlier. When he describes his recurring nightmares, he raises both arms and rubs his forehead with his palms.

Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-modification facility, Rob still has problems controlling his behavior. In 2005, he was arrested for attempted assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested again, for drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him plenty of time to reflect on his childhood, and he has gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg Center. “It’s worse than jail,” he told me. “That place is the worst place on earth.”

Long investigative piece continues here. Photo essay here.

In Jack Trevor Story’s excellent satirical novel, Screwrape Lettuce, the entire British police force is afflicted with permanent priapism after eating a powerful strain of aphrodisiac red lettuce. One might be forgiven for suspecting that a portion of the current Republican Party has been eating something similar when another story like the one following emerged this weekend:

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.

Craig’s arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8.

A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding,” and said the office would release a fuller statement later Monday afternoon.

After he was arrested, Craig, who is married, was taken to the Airport Police Operations Center to be interviewed about the lewd conduct incident, according to the police report. At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states.

Craig had been outed as gay last year by activist blogger Michael Rogers, shortly after the Mark “Page Pesterer” Foley scandal and shortly before the Ted “Muscles and Meth” Haggard scandal. (And while we’re on the subject of sex in toilets, let’s not forget the ongoing saga of State Representative Bob Allen and his fear of black men.) Craig’s office denied the allegations, of course; maybe the red lettuce or whatever it is they’re eating also causes these persistent lapses of Republican memory cells? Anyway, Michael Rogers issued a statement about Senator Craig earlier today:

“Larry Craig should stand up and be honest with the citizens of Idaho about who he is,” said Rogers, the country’s top gay activist blogger. “Tonight is a historic opportunity for Senator Craig to run for re-election as a proud gay American. What a great turning point for one of the most conservative states in the country to be represented by an openly gay Senator.”

“Senator Craig’s situation is exacerbated by the fact that he has a voting record that is counter to the interest of lesbian and gay Americans. All too often, closeted men like Senator Craig use their voting record to hide their truth from the American people. With this news now out in the open, I call upon Senator Craig to reevaluate his votes on issues like the Federal Marriage Amendment, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act.

“The Minnesota arrest is not a one-time occurrence,” Rogers added. “Last October, I reported on three other encounters that Senator Craig had with men – including one in a bathroom in Washington’s Union Station. What’s troubling about this is Larry Craig’s hypocrisy: he repeatedly votes against the gay community during his day job, while engaging in same-sex encounters as extra curricular activity. Now is a good time for Larry Craig to join millions of other Americans and be proud of who he is.”

On October 17, 2006, Rogers broke the story of Craig’s sexual encounters with men. Rogers independently interviewed three Craig sexual partners, two in the Pacific Northwest, and one who lives in Washington, D.C. The Washington source told Rogers that he and Sen. Craig had oral sex in two different bathrooms of Union Station, the train depot within sight of U.S. Senate Office Buildings.

Rogers said the sources each independently described something unique about the senator that could only be known to someone who had had sexual contact with him.

“Without a doubt in my mind, I am absolutely solid on the sources,” Rogers said in October. “I have come to the absolute conclusion based on multiple sourcing in multiple cities around the country. There is no doubt in my mind regarding this information.”

During debates in Congress last year about whether same-sex marriages should be legal, Sen. Craig said, “Marriage has always been defined as the union of a man and a woman, and I believe it should stay that way.”

Viewed from over the Atlantic, these occurrences are hilarious in a beyond-Daily-Show-parody kind of way and depressing in being indicative of the enormous problem much of America still has with different forms of sexuality, not least in its political class.

Here in the UK we have openly gay MPs in all parties now; they can form relationships with partners and live the way they want, they no longer have to cruise for sex in secret. More pertinently, no politician here would dream of using homophobia as a political weapon. We’re over that shit, and living like civilised human beings at last.

And really, we don’t need to invent any mysterious priapic salad to explain these recent scandals; the situation is an entirely self-created one. The problem all those little pink elephants have—and will continue to have—is that they’ve helped foster and sustain an atmosphere that makes it impossible for them to affirm their sexuality. They are—to coin a fine phrase—so far back in the closet, they’re in fucking Narnia. And as long as they stay there, they’ll keep getting caught out, in police stings and other scandals, because sexuality isn’t a choice, it’s what you are.

Bertrand Russell once said, “The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.” He might have added that sometimes those pleasures have a way of turning against the interferers. Keep eating the lettuce, guys.

The Business Reply Pamphlet from Packard Jennings’ Centennial Society is a sixteen-page booklet made to be placed inside postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Print off, seal inside the envelope then return to sender whereupon the envelope-openers will be encouraged to interact with their workplace in a manner they may not have considered before. Download individual pages here or see the whole series here. And while we’re at it Centennial does a nice line in stickers for Bibles warning of Creationist content. Via Boingboing.

Gary Younge
Monday August 13, 2007
The Guardian

Mom, I had another friend die today from a massive ied [improvised explosive device] and many more wounded with shattered bones and scrapes. We used to be in the same platoon. 1st platoon and the same squad when I first arrived at fort hood for a good 7 months or so. He was 17 then and barely a day over 19 now that he has passed away.

It’s tearing me up so badly inside. I just can’t stand it. I can’t get rid of the feeling that I probably won’t make it home from this war. I have this horrible feeling that his fate will soon become my own. I don’t want to die here Mom. Don’t tell Erin bc I know it will devastate her. But if somehow I don’t make it, I want you Mom and Dad and all the family and especially Erin to know I love you all so so much and appreciate everything you all have done for me in the thick and thin.

The most important thing I want you all to do, is to use all of your connections to do everything in your will to use my death as a tool with the media to end this pointless war. Contact Michael Moore or whomever it may be to get the word out about how disgusted with our government I am about forcing us to come here to wait for death to claim us. I want it to end. How many more friends, sons, daughters, mothers, and dads must die here before they say it’s enough? And if you don’t die, the worst part you have to live with is the guilt of surviving. Surviving this war and not dying like your buddies to your left and to your right in combat.

I love you all so so much.

love,
Zach

Wednesday August 8 2007, Baghdad

‘Death,” said Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, “has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

Zach Flory, 23, didn’t start his military career depressed. He enlisted full of idealism about the potential of American power. Raised in Clinton, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi, he came home on September 11 and asked his parents for permission to join the military. They refused. They wanted him to finish high school first. “He was a young man with a conscience,” said his mother, Marcia, who has always been opposed to the war. “He wanted to make things right.” They hoped he would change his mind. He didn’t. In February 2004 he enlisted in the first cavalry infantry division and signed a three-year contract. He did his time, serving in South Korea and Texas, and should have been discharged in June. Instead, the army forced him to extend his service by a year in what is known as the stop-loss programme – a form of indentured servitude that can keep soldiers working beyond the expiration of their contract for several years – and sent him to Iraq. Shortly before he left he married Erin, whom he has known since childhood. “Zach’s greatest fear is to have to shoot innocent civilians,” said Marcia shortly after he left. “What is this war doing to our fine young men and women?”

Even as Iraq has dominated America’s political stage it has occupied a parallel universe in mainstream society. Military families may listen intently to every news report and live in constant fear of a visit from two uniformed officers in the wee hours. But the rest of the nation is shopping. This is the only war in modern American history that has coincided with a tax cut. “People seem to think war is OK as long as it is someone else’s kid doing the fighting,” says Zach’s dad, Don.

Serving in it falls on the shoulders of the poor and the dark, who are over-represented in the military. And the casualties fall disproportionately on white men from small towns – like Donald Young, Zach’s recently departed teenage friend. Iraq remains the number one issue of political concern, but it is rarely the central topic of conversation.

Needless to say, Iraqi deaths barely feature at all. The US military, which ostensibly came to liberate Iraqis, does not even count their corpses. So their death toll is approximate – rounded up or down by the thousand rather than counted individually. We’ll never know what tender words an insurgent might send to a family member following the death of a fellow combatant, let alone the final farewell of an unsuspecting civilian slain by American troops or a car bombing. Perhaps if we did, it would help those with a limited imagination and compassion humanise the horrors of this war more easily.

Fortunately, this is not a competition. Unfortunately, there is enough misery to go around.

This is an American story. A tale of imperial overreach, military fatigue and political hubris as it affects a midwestern boy in a far away land who wants to get home. “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you,” wrote Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam war novel, The Things They Carried. “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.”

The army is “about broken”, said retired general Colin Powell last year – before Bush announced an escalation in troop numbers. British military standards dictate that a soldier should have two years at home for every six months deployed and that anything less than this 4:1 ratio could “break the army”. American troops currently serve 15 months followed by less than a year’s rest – a ratio of 4:5.

US military leaders deny the army is strained. But in recent years they have lowered standards and changed entry requirements in order to bolster flagging recruitment, including a push to attract non-citizens and to lift the upper age limit for new recruits. Since 2001 it has raised by half the rate at which it grants “moral waivers” to potential recruits who have committed misdemeanours and lowered the educational level required. Steven Green, the former soldier who now faces the death penalty on charges of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family in Mahmoudiya, entered the military on one such waiver.

On Friday the president’s new war adviser, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, said it was time to think about restoring the draft.

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” he said, suggesting that some soldiers’ families could soon reach breaking point themselves. “And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table.”

There is gruesome irony in the fact that such a possibility should come from an administration headed by a president who dodged the draft and a vice-president who “had other priorities” than serving in Vietnam. But American conservatives have a curious inability to put their children where their mouth is when it comes to the war. All of the main Republican contenders back it; none of their children are in it.

On the day that Zach sent his email home, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney addressed a town hall meeting 50 miles from his home town. Romney was asked why none of his children are serving in the military. “One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president,” he said.

Video: Zach Flory’s parents tell Gary Younge their views on the American military

MANIFESTO #01
PETER SAVILLE Designer
LONDON

Being a designer used to be like being on a crusade – we were fighters, evangelists. But in the last ten years, since the recession of the early Nineties, the situation has changed. Our establishment has suddenly “got it” and they want “creatives”. Creativity has become part of the business of social manipulation. The problem is that everybody got what they wanted.

Morals
The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

Meaningless design
Much of the work being done now lacks meaning and the designers know it. There’s a reasonable chair design once every five years and that’s usually the result of a new manufacturing or material innovation. We all see what’s happening at Milan – there are countless new chairs and they’re nearly all a waste of space.

Where are the NGOs?
Everyone does their best but you have to pay the rent. Even hospitals have to run to profit. You can’t avoid the issue merely by working for an NGO – even Amnesty and Greenpeace have to be “business facing”. The only bastion of free speech could be the art world, but even that is a preciously engineered marketplace with its own complexities.

Value finding
Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything – designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

Post-war socio-cultural democratisation
It’s a long term, but broken down it’s simple. Over the last 50 years culture has been disseminated to the wider public rather than being the domain of the privileged. There is an inevitable loss of substance in the process of becoming a culture of entertainment. If it’s not popular, it’s not happening.

Design as drugs
Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Dystopia
In the early 20th century designers envisaged utopia, they were optimistic and visionary people. We now acknowledge the dystopian reality.

The new cause
I was part of a system that wanted to change the look of the everyday world. That ideal, manifest through consumerism, doesn’t sit well with me now. I am not wealthy and completely understand how we all have to pay our way.

49 further Manifestos here.

Tony Wilson; NME 31 May 1986 (photo: A.J. Barratt).

Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda nightclub, TV presenter (who gave the Sex Pistols their first television appearance) and Manchester hero, died on Friday after a long battle with cancer. RIP.

Paul Morley in The Guardian:

Tony Wilson was furious when I left his beautiful north back in the late 1970 for a new life down south.

He felt this was a terrible betrayal of my responsibility to Manchester, a city he had definite plans for. He wanted to connect where the city was going with where it had been, with its radical, pioneering industrial past.

He wanted to work out how the 19th century visit to the city by Friedrich Engels led to the 1976 visits of the Sex Pistols. And his absurd, splendid solution, Factory Records, including the Hacienda nightclub, became an emblem of the city’s belief in progress.

Factory became the great Manchester label; it had Joy Division and Happy Mondays – but mostly it celebrated provocative northern imagination.

He was convinced I was the writer to chronicle the changes he knew would happen; he wanted me where he could see me. I left; it took years for him to forgive me. Eventually I accepted that his surreal mission to remake Manchester was not madness, and I have taken on the role he saw for me. I think he always knew I would.

We used to make fun of Wilson and the mantle of grandeur he often assumed, but we knew that in his idiosyncratic and subversive way he was a great and important figure. Good things happened because he was around. This flamboyant, infuriating, pushy hybrid of light entertainer and anarchic Situationist was so in love with life, with music, with ideas, that he infected you with his passion.

No matter how far from Manchester, you couldn’t escape his plans for a better, brighter and definitely stranger north.