McCain Touts his own Connection to Ayers
McCain Trumpets Endorsement From Figure Of Foundation That Established Ayers Board http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/08/mccains-trumpets-endorsem_n_132954.html October 8, 2008 by Seth Colter Walls On Wednesday morning, John McCain's campaign released a list of 100 former ambassadors endorsing the GOP presidential nominee. Second on the list, though her name is misspelled, is Leonore Annenberg, currently the president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation and widow of ambassador and philanthropist Walter Annenberg. Ms. Annenberg was herself the "chief of protocol" at the State Department under President Reagan. If the last name sounds familiar, it's because it also graces the name of the Chicago education board where Barack Obama and William Ayers sat in the room six times together. In recent days, the McCain-Palin ticket (and particularly Palin) has faulted Obama for having served on that board with Ayers, who was a founding member of the radical 60's Weather Underground group when Obama was in grade school. Since then, however, Ayers has been rehabilitated in Chicago society, carving out a niche in education circles. As a former Republican representative in Illinois told NPR on Monday, smearing Obama for his board association with Ayers is "nonsensical." "It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier ... It's ridiculous," Republican Rep. Diana Nelson said. "There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It's nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It's so silly." Separate calls to the Pennsylvania and California offices of the Annenberg Foundation were not immediately returned Wednesday morning. UPDATE: An Annenberg official called the Huffington Post back on Wednesday afternoon. "You wanted to speak to Ms. Annenberg? She's very elderly; she doesn't do press interviews." . --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Inside The Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies
Sacred Intentions http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16826 Inside The Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies 10/8/2008 By Michael M. Hughes Sandy Lundahl lies on a couch, her eyes covered with a dark cloth mask. She's listening to classical music through enormous headphones: Brahms' Symphony No. 2, the "Kyrie" from Bach's Mass in B Minor, Barber's Adagio for Strings. An hour earlier, she had swallowed two blue capsules containing close to 30 milligrams of psilocybin, the primary active chemical in Psilocybe cubensis and other "magic" mushrooms, and she's already well on her way on a trip into the hidden spaces of her psyche. Lundahl, a 55-year-old self-described skeptic and health educator from Bowie, is looking for God. Two experienced guides are with her in the room, monitoring her: Mary Cosimano, a clinical social worker, and William "Bill" Richards, a white-haired, 68-year-old psychiatrist and scholar of comparative religion. He's sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the couch, ready to help Lundahl--to talk her out of any negative trips, to help her remain focused on the scenes unfolding behind the mask, to offer a drink or some fruit or escort her to the bathroom. The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines. This isn't a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl's first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the "psilocybin room." She's taking part in the first study of its kind since the early '70s--a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences. The study, which took place from 2001 to 2005, and was published in 2006 in the journal Psychopharmacology with a follow-up in 2008 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, made news around the globe and was greeted by nearly unanimous praise by both the scientific community and the mainstream press. Flying in the face of both government policy and conventional wisdom, its conclusion--that psychedelic drugs offer the potential for profound, transformative, and long-lasting positive changes in properly prepared individuals--may herald a revival in the study of altered states of consciousness. Nonetheless, Lundahl, for one, wasn't initially impressed by the vibrant imagery behind her closed eyelids. "Nothing had ever been that vivid," she says four years later sitting in her suburban living room. "There was this grid on top of everything, all these colors. And I don't know how long, as I was mesmerized by it, and then I started thinking, Oh, no...am I going to be looking at this for six hours? Oh, no, no. It was interesting for about five minutes--maybe not even. I started thinking, Oh, what a waste of time. I said, `Bill [Richards]...Bill, this was a big mistake.' "There was a silence, and then Bill said, `Don't second-guess your decision.' And I realized I had made the decision to participate in this experiment because it was a lark, because it made me look good, and it gave me a story to tell my friends. And I thought, Now look what happened. I'm stuck here for six hours looking at this stuff! "And I made a vow," she says. "I'm never going to make an inauthentic decision again. Never again. And as soon as I said that to myself it was like--whooosh--the colors were gone. And I felt like I was being whisked...whoa, boy...and then I went to all these other places." Bill Richards reclines in a chair in his home office in West Baltimore, bordering Leakin Park. He's warm and affable, with an exuberant, almost goofy laugh. It's easy to see why the study participants interviewed for this story speak so fondly of him. But he becomes quiet and serious when he discusses his work. He has conducted close to 500 psychedelic therapy sessions since the early '60s, and there's a distinct pattern to most of them, including Lundahl's. "First, it's sensory and aesthetic," he says. "People experience colors, patterns, intriguing bodily sensations--what most people think of when they think of the effects of a psychedel
Torture porn, made beautiful
Torture porn, made beautiful http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/10/08/salo/index.html Oct. 8, 2008 by Andrew O'Hehir A year or so before he was murdered in 1975, the Italian Marxist poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini declared that the time had come when "artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support … works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new state." It sounds like a noble and/or foolhardy statement of artistic radicalism at first, and when you read it again it also presents an irresolvable contradiction. Broad-minded people must support works that even the broadest-minded people find unacceptable. Between that public pronouncement and his death in a squalid Roman suburb apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute Pasolini put this impossible principle into practice in his final film, "Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom," one of the most notorious works in the medium's history. Certainly the European art-film tradition, with its tendency toward elegant, ironic, highly aestheticized appreciations of human life, has produced nothing so dry and bitter, so viciously sarcastic, so nihilistic, so beautifully made and so well-nigh unwatchable. "Salò" takes place in that art-film universe of country houses, beautiful gowns and modern art, of chamber music and fine furniture and daring philosophy. All of it, Pasolini suggests, is a cynical con, a thin veneer of culture that sets the powerful free to rape and torture and kill the powerless. "Salò" is now available in a lovingly-packaged two-disc set from the Criterion Collection, complete with three accompanying documentaries and a book of brainiac essays that's art-directed up the wazoo. (A 1998 Criterion release, later withdrawn due to copyright problems, attained fetish-object status on eBay, reputedly drawing bids as high as $1,000.) I suspect Pasolini would have loathed this development, which suggests that his film has been detached from the shock and horror that attended its original release and embalmed as a masterpiece. Then again, he might have cackled at the various levels of cruel irony involved, and mordantly pleased to learn that in the age of worldwide nonstop consumerism and media overload, of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the deepening nightmare of "Salò" has a strange new resonance. At least officially, "Salò" is set in northern Italy in 1944 (the time and place of Pasolini's early adulthood), where Mussolini and his supporters had fled the advancing Allies and set up a short-lived Nazi puppet state informally known as the Republic of Salò, for the lakefront town where it was based. Various atrocities and outrages reportedly did occur under the Salò regime, but Pasolini imports into this setting the basic fictional elements of the Marquis de Sade's infamous "novel" it may be too grand a word "The 120 Days of Sodom," an interminable and monotonous saga of aristocratic cruelty and perversity, all conducted in the name of freedom from bourgeois morality. On top of that is a structure borrowed from Dante's "Inferno"; as the film progresses, Pasolini's physically and morally impotent fascists a duke, a bishop, a bank president and a magistrate lead themselves and their victims on an allegorical descent into hell. What you see on screen in "Salò" is certainly bad enough, as the four aristocrats, unable to find any genuine pleasure in their depravity, urge each other to commit ever-worse atrocities upon a group of abducted children. But aficionados of films like "Hostel" and the far edges of Japanese horror have definitely seen worse. Pasolini always maintained that he abhorred the film's scenes of violence, but that they were necessary as the logical fulfillment of the social system he was excoriating that is, both the system of the literal fascist era and that of the homogenized, consumerist state he saw emerging in mid-'70s Italy, which for him were two sides of the same coin. It might be more accurate to say that Pasolini saw fascism and consumerism as two aspects of the powerful and evil urge to dominate inherent in human nature; as Marxist atheist homosexuals go, he was always an ardent Roman Catholic. What remains profoundly upsetting and unsettling about "Salò" after 33 years is that the pornographic and scatological and violent images it depicts if you want a list of the specific outrages, find it somewhere else emerge in a context of such rigorous formal beauty. With lavish production design by Dante Ferretti (later a collaborator with Fellini and Scorsese), costumes by Danilo Donati, music by Ennio Morricone, settings in spectacularly decaying Italian villas and the most austere, gorgeous camerawork of Pasolini's career, "Salò" captures the Italian film industry at its postwar aesthetic height. Most of Pasolini's other films rely on naturalistic performances from pr
The Poop on Co-ops
The Poop on Co-ops http://independent.com/news/2008/oct/07/poop-coops/ Nicki Arnold Investigates Cooperative Living in Isla Vista Tuesday, October 7, 2008 By Nicki Arnold The people who live in the housing co-ops in Isla Vista make up 0.4 percent of the community's population. So why are they so deserving of so much attention? Despite their small numbers, the co-opers are a veritable force in Isla Vista, and have been making rumbles in the community since their incorporation in 1976. In recognition of National Cooperative Month, I chatted with some of the owners of the four cooperative houses in I.V. in an effort to find out what makes them such a unique bunch. First, some statistics on what the Santa Barbara Student Housing Cooperative (SBSHC) is. There are four houses in Isla VistaNewman, Manley, Biko, and Dashain and the 75 co-op members, who must be affiliated with UCSB, live in one of these houses. Every resident is also an owner of the co-ops, which means they're collectively responsible for such chores as fixing leaks, replacing broken screens, making sure mortgages get paid. Margaret Prest, the executive director, and Tony Serrano, member service coordinator, have been hired to take care of paperwork and organizing finances. The co-ops are ultimately a nonprofit organization with a $400,000 annual budget, and the students are in charge of what happens with the business. Prest said the co-op lifestyle in which the people who live in the co-ops are also the owners and people who get to call the shots business-wise is quite beneficial and can be more inspiring than any class. Each of the houses has its own personality. Dashain, which was remodeled over the summer, is the vegan and vegetarian house. Not a single food with a face is allowed in the kitchen. Biko, named after founder of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa Stephen Bantu Biko, is the "people of color" house and is inclusive of all types of people. Manley is still in the process of defining itself since its 2005 remodel, Prest said. Newman, which is the only house made up of apartments, has the feel of dorms; everyone has their own space, but the doors are almost always open. I've long been fascinated by the housing co-ops. From the outside, they look just like the cliché you're probably picturing in your head. Most of them are painted wacky colors and have remnants of tenants past in the front and backyard in the form of leftover couches, pieces of art, and dying sunflowers. People walk out of the front door barefoot, in dreadlocks, or with tattoos, or perhaps a combination of all three. Until a recent remodeling, Dashain had a huge golden sun painted on the front of the house. My hippie side itched to just hang out at a co-op and see what it was like, so I did just that. On a sunny Friday afternoon, my friend Cameron took me up to the porch of Manley, where we talked about the ups and downs of co-op living. Cameron said the best thing about co-op living is easily the close-knit, community aspect of living in a house with so many people who share similar interests. In the past year and a half that he has been living in Manley, his 17 housemates have become a family to him. He might even cry when he has to graduate and leave at the end of the year which is a big deal for a non-crier like him. Prest, who lives in Newman, also talked about how close the owners grow to each other. They all pile into an apartment together to watch a debate or whatever is on TV at the moment. Another obvious plus of living in the co-ops in I.V. is the cost. A double room including rent, utilities, and food runs about $500 per month. For some perspective, a shared room on the ocean side of Del Playa Drive can be more than $700 per monthand that's just for rent. The co-opers are able to keep prices down by doing everything themselves. Because they don't have a landlord to report to which is a great thing, according to Cameron they fix everything on their own, only calling in professional, outside help as a last resort. Each person in each house is required to complete about three to five hours of chores each week, which can be anything from cleaning the bathroom to cooking meals for everyone in the house. They also complete service projects that help promote and beautify the co-ops, like planting a garden or becoming resident barber or seamstress or editor. In addition to being involved in their own houses and in the SBSHC, many of the members are also active in the community, holding weekly meetings about the I.V. Master Plan and making plans to replace the recently torn down Lath House at Little Acorn Park. Living with so many people has to result in big blow-out fights, right? I asked both Cameron and Prest. Putting that many people together is asking for trouble. Both of them said that while it's impossible to be best friends with everyone, disputes are usua
It was a very weird year: 1968
It was a very weird year
1968
http://sacurrent.com/arts/story.asp?id=69399
10/8/2008
By Steven G. Kellman
Out of the thousands of years of recorded time, very few dates stand
out as more than merely random digits. 1066, 1492, 1776, 1789, 1848,
1989, 2001 each was an annus mirabilis, a wondrous year of
extraordinary events. (A few world historical jerks stand out as
anus mirabilis, but that is another matter). It might require
centuries to take the full measure of one year's impact, but another
date that thus far at least seems indelibly imprinted in the
collective memory is 1968. That fitful, fateful year of
assassinations, instigations, and much else – is being commemorated
and interrogated in Austin, the city that manages to function
uncomfortably as both the capital of a belligerently red state and a
theme park for what came to be known as "the 60s." To "keep Austin
weird" means to keep it less like the rest of Texas than like
Berkeley, Boulder, and Madison, other towns in which the spirit of
antic opposition lives on.
On October 7 and 10-12, the University of Texas at Austin will host
an interdisciplinary conference titled "1968: A Global Perspective."
(For complete information, consult www.1968conf.org). Calibrating
that global perspective will be prominent scholars such as Kristin
Ross of NYU, Michael Hardt of Duke University, and Diana Sorensen of
Harvard University. But likely to draw the largest and liveliest
audiences will be separate public talks by Daniel Ellsberg and
Kathleen Cleaver. In 1968, Ellsberg, now 77, possessed a high-level
security clearance as an analyst for the RAND Corporation.
Disillusioned with American policy in Vietnam, on which as an
official in the Pentagon and then the State Department, he had become
an expert, he leaked to the New York Times 7,000 pages of classified
documents that exposed callousness, cynicism, and duplicity by those
committing American lives and treasure to combat in Southeast Asia.
Known as the Pentagon Papers, they helped turn public opinion against
the war and the Nixon administration. In 1968, Cleaver was the
spokesperson for the militant Black Panthers and married to Eldridge
Cleaver, a Panther leader who was then running for president as
nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party. After a shootout with police,
the Cleavers fled California for Algeria. Eventually, Kathleen
Cleaver returned to the United States, went back to school, divorced
Eldridge, and became a legal scholar. She currently serves on the
faculty of the Emory University School of Law.
Complementing the conference is "Celluloid for Social Justice," a
series of nonfiction films about the 1960s. In addition, UT's Blanton
Museum is mounting two related exhibitions: "Reimagining Space: The
Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York" and "The New York Graphic
Workshop: 1965-1970." And an exhibition called "To the Moon: The
American Space Program in the 1960s" can be seen at the LBJ Library
and Museum. Furthermore, exhibitions of period Texas poster art and
about the SDS are running at the UT Center for American History.
The median age of the American population is 36.7, which means that
personal memories of 1968 are, like lava lamps, specialized
possessions, quaint curios that arouse scant curiosity in anyone but
another collector. In 1968, few cared to listen to ancients
blathering about Rudy Vallee, Al Smith, Clara Bow, and other relics
of 1928. And today, nostalgic rhapsodies on the themes of Tiny Tim,
Don Drysdale, and Tuesday Weld seem just as quaint. Much ado is being
made of 1968 merely because 40 years have now passed. Though a 40th
(ruby) anniversary is less precious than a 50th (gold), it would be
risky to ask some of the aging survivors to wait another ten years.
But our numerical system, based on decimals, is arbitrary. If we
happened to count in units of twelve instead of ten, 48 would be the
new 40, and 60 would be more golden than 50.
Yet for all the whimsy of anniversaration, we all have much to learn
from 1968. Baby Boomers need to free themselves from narcissistic
memory loops and meet history with honesty. Everyone needs to study
the past in order to cease repeating the mistakes of the past.
Consider the striking parallels and continuities between 1968 and
2008. A widely reviled Texan sitting in the White House. A secretive
vice presidential candidate, exploiting fears of chaos, condoning
repressive tactics ("Confronted with the choice," declared Spiro
Agnew, later forced to resign in disgrace, "the American people would
choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb"). The
United States mired in a long, costly, unnecessary war. Russian
troops invading a sovereign state. The United States and North Korea
growling at each other in a tense diplomatic stand-off.
History vanishes into caricature. The "Roaring Twenties" did not roar
always and for everyone. For all its prudery
Nebraska COINTELPRO case
Nebraska Supreme Court hears voice of policeman's killer that J. Edgar Hoover kept from jury in COINTELPRO case http://www.opednews.com/articles/Nebraska-Supreme-Court-hea-by-Michael-Richardson-081003-616.html by Michael Richardson October 3, 2008 A hush filled the packed chambers of the Nebraska Supreme Court as attorney Robert Bartle played a chilling 50-second tape recording of the emergency call that lured Omaha police officer Larry Minard to his 1970 ambush-bombing death. A man's deep gritty voice could be heard making a report about a woman screaming at a vacant house. The Omaha World-Herald described the killer's voice as "deep and drawling." Attorney Bartle told the justices, "That isn't the voice of a 15-year old. That is not the voice of Duane Peak." Duane Peak was a teenager who confessed to planting the bomb and making the deadly phone call. Peak also implicated Black Panther leaders Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) in exchange for his own lenient treatment and became the state's murderous star witness against the two Panthers. However, if Peak did not make the call as he claimed, the case against Poindexter and Langa unravels leaving an unidentified killer on the loose. The scratchy tape, never heard by the jury that convicted the Panther leaders, has a long, troubling history and was kept under wraps by order of J. Edgar Hoover, then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover had declared a secret war against the Black Panther Party and other domestic political groups code-named Operation COINTELPRO. The "no holds barred" tactics of COINTELPRO directed at the Panthers had a lethal ferocity with false arrests and convictions as one of the techniques. Hoover's agents had already targeted Poindexter and Langa when the August bombing claimed Minard's life. The FBI arrived at the crime scene soon after the blast and helped direct the investigation. The Omaha Special-Agent-in-Charge worked directly with Asst. Chief of Police Glen W. Gates who led the murder investigation. While uniformed officers began a massive sweep of Omaha's Near-Northside neighborhood arresting dozens of people and technicians sifted through blast debris looking for clues, Gates met with the FBI and agreed to send the tape recording of the killer's voice to the FBI crime laboratory in Washington, D.C. to identify the caller. The Omaha World-Herald headline told the public "Voiceprint in Bombing to FBI Lab". A police spokesman told the paper the tape would be a "good investigative tool". But the tape was sent to the FBI lab with unusual instructions to not issue a formal report and instead orally inform the Omaha FBI office of the results of analysis. The COINTELPRO hidden agenda was not to catch the actual killers of Minard but instead make a case against Poindexter and Langa. When Ivan Willard Conrad, director of the crime lab, got the memo requesting a secret report on the tape he spoke with Hoover by phone two days after the bombing. Before Minard's body was buried, Hoover gave the command to withhold an official report thus limiting the search for the policeman's killer. Conrad scrawled on his copy of the COINTELPRO memo, "Dir advised telephonically & said OK to do" followed by his initials and date. Conrad followed Hoover's orders and issued no formal findings on the identity of the unknown caller. However, the Omaha Special-Agent-in-Charge sent another COINTELPRO memo to Hoover two months later in October. "Assistant COP GLENN GATES, Omaha PD, advised that he feels any use of this call might be prejudicial to the police murder trial against two accomplices of PEAK and, therefore, has advised that he wishes no use of this tape until after the murder trials of PEAK and the two accomplices have been completed." The hearing was in the austere chambers of the state high court located in the Nebraska Capitol and was filled with supporters of Poindexter and Langa, many wearing T-shirts indentifying the 'Omaha Two' as political prisoners. Questions from the bench focused on the custody of the tape and who was to blame for withholding the recording from the jury. Assistant Attorney General James Smith argued everyone knew there was a tape and failure of the defense attorneys to introduce the tape at trial was a tactical decision by lawyers for the two Panthers. Bartle's argument is that the prosecution should have provided the tape to defense attorneys as a part of discovery. Regardless of who was at fault for the jury not getting to hear the killer's voice Bartle said, "The whole point to Poindexter is that he was still deprived of the use of the tape." Smith countered that Frank Morrison, a former-Nebraska governor and Poindexter's court-appointed lawyer, made a tactical decision and Poindexter had to live with it. However, not long before his death Morrison gave a deposition in 2003 about his role
Tookie Williams: A martyr for the struggle
Tookie Williams: A martyr for the struggle http://www.workers.org/2008/us/tookie_williams_1009/ Workers World book review By Larry Hales Published Oct 2, 2008 "My rage was nourished by the hate I saw and felt from mainstream society and white people, a hate based on my black skin and my historical place at the nadir of America's social caste. I was filled with hate for injustice. Yet my reaction to the hate was violence directed only toward blacks." -- Stanley Tookie Williams' "Blue Rage, Black Redemption" is a story of the seething rage within him and the heroic task he undertakes to understand that rage and place it in a historical context. He begins this process while on death row, where his life has been given an end date. And though he conveys that he knows the system has every intention to fulfill the barbaric sentence, while deepening his political understanding and self-actualization he gives the impression of always looking forward, beyond the conditions of prison, the hole and the death sentence hanging over him. By writing his memoirs, he intends for his life to be an example, a warning sign for other oppressed youth to not diverge down the same path that he took. In the introduction, Tookie says: "The title of this book represents two extreme phases of my life. 'Blue Rage' is a chronicle of my passage down a spiraling path of Crip rage in South Central Los Angeles. 'Black Redemption' depicts the stages of my redemptive awakening during my more than 23 years of imprisonment on California's death row. These memoirs of my evolution will, I hope, connect the reader to a deeper awareness of a social epidemic that is the unending nightmare of racial minorities in America and abroad as well. "Throughout my life I was hoodwinked by South Central's terminal conditions. ... From the beginning I was spoon-fed negative stereotypes that covertly positioned black people as genetic criminalsinferior, illiterate, shiftless, promiscuous. ... Having bought into the myth, I was shackled to the lowest socioeconomic rung where underprivileged citizens compete ruthlessly for morsels of the America piea pie theoretically served proportionately to all, based on their ambition, intelligence, and perseverance." Tookie begins the book at his birth on December 29, 1953, at New Orleans Charity Hospital, recounted for him by his mother, with the words, "I entered the world kicking and screaming in a caesarean ritual of blood and scalpels." He relates how his mother endured the ordeal without anesthetics, which were denied to her because she was Black, and that to try and dull the pain in her mind she sang the Christmas carol, "Silent Night," over and over again. His birth foreshadowed his life and death, because, though lethal injection is touted as being quick and painless, because of a botched procedure during his execution Tookie languished, struggling for life, for 30 minutes. In the epilogue, Barbara Becnel, Tookie's friend, advocate and co-author, who witnessed the horrifying ordeal, describes: "The midsection of Stan's body did not stay still. It began to contort, caving in to the point of distortionhis stomach appeared to have been sucked dry of all internal organs, as it sunk so low it nearly touched his spine. And his convulsing continued for a while. At the sight of Stan's monumental struggle to die, I thought that I heard an audible and collective gasp fill the room." But the recollection of the difficult conditions of his birth also portend his life, because it points to the toll racism takes on the Black soulthe real effects it has on everyday life, the damage it does to the Black psyche and the ramifications of a colonized mind. In "Black Skin, White Masks," Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Black revolutionary theorist, wrote: "A drama is played out every day in the colonized countries. How can we explain, for example, that a black guy who has passed his baccalaureate and arrives at the Sorbonne to study for his degree in philosophy is already on his guard before there is the sign of any conflict?" Of course, the situation depicted is different, but the meaning is that it is with great reservation and tenseness that an oppressed nationality steps out into the world, because of the history of wealth built off the backs of those of darker skin and the history of genocide, theft of land and slavery. The rage of the first half of the book comes from the conditions imposed upon oppressed Black youth in South Central and of the inferiority complex pressed upon them because of the whitewashed view of history taught to U.S. society. The rage, however, manifested in a self-hatred: "Unlike those ashamed to admit their motivation or too blind to recognize it, I forged through much of my life locked into a hostile intimacy with America's wrongness. Conditioned and brainwashed to hate myself, and my own race, other black people became my p
Danny Goldberg charts his music industry climb
Danny Goldberg charts his music industry climb http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081005/FEATURES05/810050308/1030 BY DAN SCHERAGA • ASSOCIATED PRESS • October 5, 2008 "Bumping Into Geniuses" is the Cinderella story of a kid starting at the bottom of the rock business and eventually conquering it as the leader of several of the industry's biggest labels. As a teenage rock fan in 1968, Danny Goldberg lucked his way into the music industry when he got an entry-level clerical job with the music trade magazine Billboard. From there, he received one lucky break after another, beginning with a news media trip to Woodstock after other staffers passed up the assignment. Over the following decades, he proves to be an able publicist and executive, handling public relations for Led Zeppelin [] , before moving on to other artists. Eventually, he is asked to lead Atlantic Records, and later he accepts similar roles at Warner Bros. Records and Mercury Records Group. There are at least as many faceless behind-the-scenes people in this book as actual rock stars, and their names will mean little to all but the most die-hard rock nerds. But the book is not without entertaining anecdotes. Like the time when Goldberg was on the receiving end of an impassioned discourse on rock by Gene Simmons -- the blood-spitting alpha-male mastermind of Kiss -- when Simmons' Jewish mother showed up unexpectedly, offering a plate of matzo and eggs. Goldberg's recollection of a terminally ill Warren Zevon recording his final album is particularly moving, as is his description of the aftermath of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Goldberg is unapologetic about some of his sneaky tricks, including lying to the news media, fabricating endorsements from local politicians and enticing a Billboard staffer to fudge sales chart figures. However, he appears to draw the line at suckering his own artists. For readers wanting a look behind the curtain, Goldberg offers valuable personal experience that only the music industry's elite are equipped to share. . --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Radical chic goes to the movies
[3 articles] Radical chic goes to the movies http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/09/radical-chic-go.html Sep 29 2008 When it comes to movies with a radical political bent, all the talk for months has focused on Steven Soderbergh's "Che," which has been getting a rocky reception on the festival circuit for its somewhat gauzy-eyed portrayal of Che Guevera and his role in the origins of the Cuban revolution. Now it's time for the German version of "Che," which arrived in L.A. on Friday night with the premiere of "The Baader-Meinhof Complex," a new Uli Edel-directed film about the infamous West German terrorist group that emerged out of the student protest movement in the late 1960s. The film has sparked passionate debate in Germany, where it just opened last week. Although it doesn't have a U.S. distributor, "Baader Meinhof" will surely be getting more attention here in the coming months as Germany's submission for this year's Academy Awards. My colleague Mark Olsen, who was at the film's first American screening Friday night at the Aero Theatre, says the film pulls no punches. But is it a cold-eyed portrait of urban guerillas? Or just another example of Hollywood radical chic? Here's his report: "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" is directed by Uli Edel and produced and adapted by Bernd Eichinger from the book by Stefan Aust. (Edel and Eichinger previously collaborated on "Christine F." and "Last Exit to Brooklyn.") Here, they take on the complete tale of the Baader-Meinhof Group, the collection of middle-class intellectuals who took up armed, violent resistance to what they saw as the imperialist tyranny of the West German government as the good-vibes idealism of the 1960s gave way to the extended bum-trip of the 1970s. During their campaign of kidnappings, bombings and bank robberies, the group attained a certain countercultural cache and outlaw cool though, ultimately much of their leadership would die by suicide while in prison. The film is imperfect, compelling, meticulous, draining, unnerving and more than a little thrilling. The filmmakers have accomplished the remarkable feat of capturing the gang's glamorous sex appeal -- such details as the way a thigh pokes out of a mini-skirt while leaping over the counter during a bank robbery or the importance of just the right sunglasses -- while also getting at their failure and futility. In portraying a full 10 years of events, with complicated comings and goings and fast-changing times, the film suffers under the weight of its own ambitions, at times a prisoner to its own attention to historical accuracy. The three central performances by Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu and Johanna Wokalek as Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are nuanced and engaging, giving some sense of how these people became leaders and how their progressive ideals led to despicable deeds. Alongside certain stylistic tics such as the too-frequent use of jarring stock footage as establishing shots, one of the film's weakest spots is the shoehorning in of a character played by Bruno Ganz, a federal police officer assigned to track and capture the terrorist-revolutionaries. His scenes never feel integrated into the overall fabric of the story, and seem to exist to simply get Ganz -- who played Adolf Hitler with spectacular venality in "Downfall," also written and produced by Eichenger -- into the film. Following the screening at the Aero, Martin Moszkowicz, executive producer of the film, did a short Q&A. (Full disclosure: I moderated the Q&A but had neither seen the film nor met Moszkowicz until the event Friday night.) As to how the filmmakers dealt with the essential conundrum of how to portray what may have been genuinely radical, or at least groovy, about the Baader-Meinhof Group without condoning their actions, Moszkowicz replied, "The idea was not to judge what was done but just to show it. And just by showing that they were murderers and there were innocent people killed, we thought this would be strong enough to show there were no glories about it." At a moment when films interested in the historical reenactment of protest and revolutionary action such as "Che" and "Hunger" are working the festival circuit on their way to distribution, it will be interesting to see if anyone wants to put out "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" in America. It will also be worth watching whether it gets any traction out of the academy, where the nominating process for foreign language films has been undergoing some amount of retooling. While in the past a film as rigorous and brutal as "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" would have been a definite non-starter, this year there is a conceivable scenario whereby such violent and politically minded films as "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" as well as Italy's "Gomorrah" and Denmark's "Flame and Citron" could break into the race. German Film Transforms Terro
