from:"res...@comcast.net"

Carlos Montes and the Security State: A Cautionary Tale

by Mike Rose, truthdig.com
July 10th 2011

By Chris Hedges

On May 17 at 5 in the morning the Chicano activist Carlos Montes got a wake-up
call at his home in California from Barack Obama’s security state. The Los
Angeles County sheriff’s SWAT team, armed with assault rifles and wearing
bulletproof vests, as well as being accompanied by FBI agents, kicked down his
door, burst into his house with their weapons drawn, handcuffed him in his
pajamas and hauled him off to jail. Montes, one of tens of thousands of
Americans who have experienced this terrifying form of military-style assault
and arrest, was one of the organizers of the demonstrations outside the 2008
Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., and he faces trial along
with 23 other anti-war activists from Minnesota, as well as possible charges by
a federal grand jury.

The widening use of militarized police units effectively nullifies the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the armed forces for civilian
policing. City police forces have in the last few decades amassed small strike
forces that employ high-powered assault rifles, armored personnel carriers,
tanks, elaborate command and control centers and attack helicopters. Poor urban
neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of the estimated 40,000 SWAT team assaults
that take place every year, have already learned what is only dimly being
understood by the rest of us—in the eyes of the state we are increasingly no
longer citizens with constitutional rights but enemy combatants. And that is
exactly how Montes was treated. There is little daylight now between raiding a
home in the middle of the night in Iraq and raiding one in Alhambra, Calif.

Montes is a longtime activist. He helped lead the student high school walkouts
in East Los Angeles and anti-war protests in the 1960s and later demonstrations
against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was one of the founding members of
the Brown Berets, a Chicano group that in the 1960s styled itself after the
Black Panthers. In the 1970s he evaded authorities while he lived in Mexico and
he went on to organize garment workers in El Paso, Texas. He and the subpoenaed
activists are reminders that in Barack Obama’s America, being a dissident is a
crime.

“It was an FBI action, as I recall,” Sgt. Jim Scully told reporters of the
Pasadena Star-News. “We assisted them.”

Montes was arrested ostensibly because he bought a firearm although a felony
conviction 42 years ago prohibited him from doing so. The 1969 felony
conviction was for throwing a can of Coke at a police officer during a
demonstration. The registered shotgun in his closet, bought last year at a
sporting goods shop, became the excuse to ransack his home, charge him and
schedule him for trial in August. It became the excuse to seize his computer,
two cellphones and files and records of his activism on behalf of workers,
immigrants, the Chicano community and opposition to wars. Prosecutors said
Montes should have disclosed his four-decade-old felony charge when he bought
the shotgun at Big 5 Sporting Goods. Because he neglected to do this he will
face six felony charges. The case is to be tried in Los Angeles.

“The gun issue was clearly a pretext to investigate my political activities,”
he said when I reached him at his Alhambra home. “It is about my anti-war
activities and my links to the RNC demonstrations. It is also about my activism
denouncing the U.S. policy of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, their support for
Israel and the Colombian government. I have been to Colombia twice.”

“I thought someone is breaking in, somebody is trying to jack me up,” he said.
“I was a victim of an armed robbery in December of 2009 in my home. I do have a
gun in my bedroom for self-defense. I was startled. I jumped out of bed. I saw
lights coming from the front-door area. They looked like flashlights. I saw men
with helmets and rifles. I gravitated towards the front door. I didn’t take my
gun. I could have done that. I have it there. It is a good thing I didn’t pick
anything up and put it in my hand.”

“I yelled, ‘Who is it?’ ” he said. “They said, ‘The police. Carlos Montes, come
out’ or ‘come forward,’ something like that. I approached the entryway. They
rushed in. They grabbed my hands. They turned me around. There were two police
officers on each arm. They brought me out holding my arms. I have a little
patio. They handcuffed me and patted me down. I am on a little hill. I looked
down the street and [it was]

San Francisco Hosts Porn History Film Series





San Francisco Hosts Porn History Film Series

by Bob Johnso, newswire.xbiz.com
July 12th 2011 5:00 PM  

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Think the San Fernando Valley gave birth to porn? Think again.

In 1969 San Francisco was the first city in the U.S. to legalize hardcore 
(explicitly depicting penetration), and is debuting a series of film shorts and 
documentaries called Smut Capital of America at the Yerba Buena Center for 
the Arts that chronicles the early days of late '60s and '70's San Francisco 
porn.

The series will kick off with director Michael Stabile's film of the same name, 
Smut Capital of America. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco 
birthed this entire industry.

Home to porn pioneers like the Mitchell brothers, Lowell Pickett and Alex de 
Renzy — who made more story-driven, highbrow films — San Francisco’s libertine 
history dating back to the hedonism of the Barbary Coast, coupled with its red 
light Tenderloin District made it the perfect breeding ground for porn.

The city also supplied adult filmmakers with plenty of independent labs that 
had no problem pumping out porn films.

Although hardcore porn was available in adult theaters in the ‘60s, there was 
always the specter of being busted by the cops for obscenity.

But things changed in 1969 when San Francisco director de Renzy's explicit 
documentary film Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach won a landmark court 
case where the judge found the hardcore movie had “redeeming social value” in 
keeping with the Supreme Court’s stand on what separates free speech and 
obscenity.

The low-budget ($15,000) film went on to gross $22 million, according to the 
Chronicle.

In the free love atmosphere of the '60s, San Francisco became a hotbed of 
available model talent and cops rarely busted productions. It became like a 
Gold Rush. I think that San Francisco in 1970 was probably sort of like how San 
Francisco was for tech in 1996, Stabile said.

With the advent of VHS and home distribution, porn producers realized that 
viewers would fast forward to the sex and were no longer tied to making 
script-driven theater films. They packed up and moved to Los Angeles where real 
estate and production was cheaper.

But the city's film series highlights porn's golden era.

Amateur vintage porn historian Joe Rubin has a collection of San Francisco porn 
shorts from 1969-1981 that will also be shown during the event.

This really has been my life's work, Rubin said.

For more information and tickets for the series contact the Yerba Buena Center 
for the Arts at (415) 978-2787 or click here.





Original Page: http://newswire.xbiz.com/view.php?id=136152

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The Triumph and Tragedy of Counter-Cultural Judaism





The Triumph and Tragedy of Counter-Cultural Judaism – The Jewish Daily Forward

by Shaul Magi, m.forward.com
July 13th 2011  

 

STRUMMIN’ RABBI: Counter-culture Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach shares song with author 
Aryae Coopersmith.

Aryae Coopersmith was a 22-year-old college student when he encountered a group 
of like-minded Jewish (and non-Jewish) hippies in the Haight-Ashbury 
neighborhood of San Francisco who had been “turned on” by a young rabbi from 
the East Coast named Shlomo Carlebach. Most, like Coopersmith, were stumbled 
upon by members of this fledgling scene or stumbled upon it themselves by 
accident. That was the way this episode of the counter-culture took shape. It 
was a disorganized ensemble of committed (mostly middle-class) nonconformists. 
Little did they know that in the smoky haze of the Haight, in the free love and 
be-ins of Golden Gate Park, American Judaism would be forever changed. Or would 
it?

“Holy Beggars” is not a history of the House of Love and Prayer. It is 
Coopersmith’s honest spiritual memoir about a successful businessman who, in 
his 60s, set out to make sense of his counter-cultural past. That life, both 
its joys and unfulfilled dreams, happens to be inextricably intertwined with an 
explosive moment in American Judaism when post-Holocaust Judaism met the baby 
boomers on acid. The book is written by an insider, one who nevertheless views 
himself as marginalized, someone who thinks he failed to live Carlebach’s 
dream. It is true that Coopersmith did not follow the close circle of 
Carlebach’s early followers into Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in 
Jerusalem or in Brooklyn. He opted for a largely secular life in the Bay Area. 
But Coopersmith’s unwillingness to step through the rainbow matrix into the 
black-and-white world of Haredi Judaism is less of a failure than he thinks.

“Holy Beggars” is an entertaining, sometimes rambling account of Coopersmith’s 
early life with Carlebach and the reunion with his old friends in Israel more 
than 30 years later. Included are the mad-cap adventures of Carlebach’s “holy 
hippielech,” (a term that Carlebach often used to describe his hippie 
followers), those searching souls who stepped through the Looking Glass into 
the romantic Hasidic world that Carlebach created in his stories, teachings, 
and songs. The book shows how much these young men and women wanted to be 
changed by Carlebach’s vision. What they knew less about was how much he was 
changed by them and how much he wanted them to change Judaism.

The story “Holy Beggars” tells is fascinating, heart wrenching, and 
provocative. It raises a set of issues worth investigating in order to 
ascertain the successes and failures of this counter-cultural experiment. The 
book makes clear that though Carlebach was a genius at making Judaism a 
compelling option for spiritual seekers, he had no idea what to do next. He 
could create worlds in a story or a song but had no personal capacity nor 
trusted follower to bring that new vision into a sustained religious community. 
The fact that many in Coopersmith’s book found a home in the Haredi Judaism 
that Carlebach romanticized yet ultimately rejected (both personally and 
ideologically) tells us a lot about the ways in which Carlebach’s followers 
selectively heard his message.

Coopersmith recounts a significant anecdote about a discussion in The House 
regarding a mechitza, a physical barrier separating men and women during 
prayer. He asked Carlebach if The House should have such a barrier. “Shlomo 
[Carlebach] laughed and said, ‘There are enough walls in this world between 
people. What we’re here to do is tear them down.’” Not only does this subvert 
Orthodox practice, but it also arguably undermines normative halachic Judaism 
as presently construed. Solidly rooted in a halachic tradition he was deeply 
ambivalent about, Carlebach knew exactly what he was saying. But when his holy 
hippielech, most of whom did not have deep roots in the tradition, made their 
way into the world of Haredi Judaism, Carlebach’s critique was lost in the 
rigidity of the Orthodox establishment.

Herein lies the tragedy of the revolution. Carlebach saw what was wrong with 
the Haredi world to which he provided an entrée. He wanted to open up the 
Hasidic world to something new. But he didn’t know how, and just ended up 
opening it up to receive, and subsume, a lost group of holy hippielech — 
sandals, rainbow prayer shawls and all.

When Coopersmith and his friends were running The House, students were taking 
over the campus in Berkeley across the bay, contemporaries

Did this wooden box trigger the sexual revolution?





Did this wooden box trigger the sexual revolution?

by Tony Rennell, dailymail.co.uk
July 15th 2011  

 

James Bond tried one. So, too, did writers Jack (On The Road) Kerouac and J.D. 
(Catcher In The Rye) Salinger.

The artist who created Shrek swore by his, and spent half an hour inside it at 
least once a day.

They were all devotees of the original love machine, invented in the Fifties by 
psycho-analyst and therapist Dr Wilhelm Reich as a pathway to a better, if not 
the best ever, sexual experience.

In some ways, you can't help feeling sorry for Austrian-born Reich — a disciple 
of Sigmund Freud in Vienna — who escaped from Hitler to the U.S. just before 
World War II.

There he was, a prophet for the health- giving power of the guilt-free sexual 
climax. He coined the phrase 'sexual revolution' and devoted his life as a 
psycho-analyst to freeing us all from our repressive Victorian selves.

Then, on the verge of the Swinging Sixties, with society about to hitch up its 
skirts and go sex mad, he died, and missed out on the supposed pleasure of his 
own Utopia.

But his invention — later spoofed in a Woody Allen film as an 'Orgasmatron' — 
lived on, with its promise of delivering what he called 'orgastic potency', 
despite being little more than a plain wooden cupboard lined with metal. No 
wheels, no whistles, no ticklers or teasers, no bells. It was just a box.

Yet, according to author Christopher Turner in a new biography of Reich, Sean 
Connery had one at the height of his James Bond fame.

But whether sitting in the box delivered what its designer promised is another 
matter. If Connery was shaken or stirred, he never said. William Steig, author 
of the original Shrek comic book, revealed his gave him 'an inner vibration, a 
little bit like an orgasmic feeling' — which is a long way from blowing your 
socks off.

American author Norman Mailer, who desperately searched for what he called the 
'apocalyptic' sexual experience, admitted just before he died that he never 
achieved it with his version.

Perhaps they were all just bonkers, you may think. But there was method — of a 
sort — in Reich's madness. More importantly, his theories had a lasting impact 
on our society, and not for the better.

There is a direct link from his sanctification of free love and instant sex to 
the excesses of today's permissive society.

At the beginning, however, Reich was a star turn in developing the discipline 
of psycho-analysis in the early years of the 20th century. As a shrink, he 
believed people needed to be freed from their inhibitions. But then he went out 
on a limb of his own with a radical theory.

The release that came with sexual climax, he declared, was the key to a healthy 
mind and healthy body — and, indeed, as the scope of his vision expanded, to a 
healthy world.

It would not only cure neurotics of their fears, but war-mongering fascists of 
their odious beliefs. 'Make love not war' was his belief long before it became 
a Sixties slogan.

But his ambition didn't stop there. Reich was convinced he had discovered the 
very essence of life, a universal and eternal force that he named 'orgone' — 
hence the official name of his wooden box: the 'Orgone Energy Accumulator'.

Orgone was not unlike the concept of the 'libido' his old teacher Freud had 
identified — except Reich insisted his life force had a physical presence, 
which manifested itself in glowing microscopic particles of matter he called 
'bions'.

It was the physical harvesting and harnessing of 'orgone' from the atmosphere 
that was the purpose of his sex machine — which was best used, he said, in 
direct sunlight, in open country and well away from electricity power lines.

The wood in its construction absorbed the free-flying 'orgone' from the skies, 
while layers of metal kept it insulated inside.

By concentrating the life force in this 'accumulator', he claimed, its users 
were charged up, much like a car battery plugged into the mains, and then 
experienced the sexual ecstasy that would free their minds and bodies.

That the box heated up, he claimed, was proof of its ability to attract natural 
energy. Sceptics, however, suggested that confining someone inside an insulated 
container on a hot day was bound to lead to raised temperatures, but not 
necessarily anything else.

Reich was undaunted. The potential of his contraption was, he maintained, 
limitless. It could heal the sick and even eliminate cancer tumours. It was the 
panacea the world had been waiting for. 'I am the discoverer of life energy,' 
he maintained confidently.

So convinced was he that he

Cheese Board Collective: 40 years in the Gourmet Ghetto





Cheese Board Collective: 40 years in the Gourmet Ghetto

by Sarah Henry, berkeleyside.com
July 8th 2011 11:00 AM  

 

A recent afternoon of bread, cheese, and baking at The Cheese Board Collective. 
All photos: Christina Diaz

Exploring alternative ways to work in the food industry is a hot topic. Last 
week in San Francisco a sold out Kitchen Table Talks, a monthly panel 
showcasing local food folk, featured a discussion about successful edible 
enterprises that haven’t started the conventional route.

Two of the four panelists hailed from Berkeley. Three Stone Hearth‘s Jessica 
Prentice, previously profiled on Berkeleyside, talked about her cooperative 
kitchen model. Cathy Goldsmith represented The Cheese Board Collective.

Beyond the obvious culinary connection, each business is unique. What they have 
in common? A desire to build community — of workers, artisans, and customers — 
around their real food ventures.

Case in point: The Cheese Board Collective, which has served as a beloved 
anchor institution in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto for more than 40 years.

Goldsmith, who has a restaurant background, has been a worker-owner at The 
Cheese Board for 16 years. She likes to say that the collective got going “back 
in the day” and people who work there do  everything “from soup to nuts.” What 
that means is the 52-year-old finds herself serving cheese one day, rolling out 
dough the next, dealing with health insurance and other human resource issues 
on another, along with stocking bread bags, sweeping floors, and scrubbing 
toilets.

Goldsmith also tends to do the collective’s media outreach, though she declined 
to be photographed for this story because, perhaps fittingly for a collective 
owner-worker, she wanted the spotlight to be on the group — which numbers more 
than 45 — not on any one individual.

The Cheese Board opened in 1967, when revolution was in the air, in the slip of 
a space that now houses The Juice Bar Collective. On the first day of business, 
original owners Sahag and Elizabeth Avedisian grossed less than a hundred bucks 
after an initial investment of just a few hundred dollars on cheese. The couple 
began selling a selection of high-quality cheeses in stark contrast to the 
massive orange blocks wrapped in plastic that passed for American cheese then.

How times have changed. And we’re not just referring to the fact that 
worker-owners no longer streak naked across the median strip (as they did, 
legend has it, “back in the day.”)  Today, the store sells 300 to 400 goat, 
sheep, and cow milk cheeses from all over the world, including many artisan 
American offerings. The store also sells its trademark sourdough baguette and 
baked goods, such as scones, muffins, cookies, and chocolate things, as well as 
focaccia, rolls, challah, and other breads.

The Avedisians, who had worked on a kibbutz in Israel, wanted to run a 
democratic shop where all the workers were owners and shared the wealth. So in 
1971 the couple converted  the business to a collective, bringing their six 
employees into the fold as equal partners. To this day, a new employee earns 
the same hourly pay as one who has been with the cooperative since the 
beginning. Elizabeth Avedisian, now in her 80s, still does two shifts a week at 
the store, without fanfare. Her ex-husband Sahag, who left the collective and 
the Bay Area years ago, passed away in 2007.

Over time, batches of freshly baked bread were added to the shop’s repertoire, 
followed by pizza in 1985. The store moved from its original location on Vine 
Street to its current Shattuck Avenue spot in 1975. It has expanded twice since 
then. In 1986 the collective acquired the space vacated by Pig-by-the-Tail 
Charcuterie, which now houses the pizzeria. In 1990 the group expanded when the 
fish market next door went out of business.

The Cheese Board Pizza Collective operates as its own business, though the 
pizzeria and the cheese store operate under the same corporate by-laws. Wholly 
owned by its members, the business is incorporated for tax and liability 
reasons. All members have equal say in business decisions and are eligible for 
the same benefits. Profits are used to buy new equipment or maintain existing 
infrastructure, raise wages, and contribute to retirement funds. In keeping 
with the collective’s left-wing, pro-labor politics, the store is closed on May 
1st,  International Workers’ Day. The collective with a social justice 
conscience routinely donates food to places that feed the needy — including 
Food Not Bombs – and hands out free sandwiches to the homeless.

Goldsmith

The making of Geronimo ji Jaga





The making of Geronimo ji Jaga

by Jaga, sfbayview.com
July 15th 2011  

 

by Russell “Maroon” Shoats/z

To fight off the Dutch slavers, Queen Nzinga turned to the fierce Jaga people. 
Long addicted to senseless warfare with neighboring Afrikans, the queen won 
them over by marrying their leader. Thereafter, the Jaga were in the forefront 
of the fight against slavery from Afrika to the Americas. 

For hundreds of years, the Apache scourged the European invaders. Their last 
great war leader’s name is known the world over: Geronimo!

In the Louisiana bayou, a descendent of slaves was born into the Pratt clan. 
His parents named him Elmer Pratt and his entire community suffered under the 
racial apartheid that afflicted the United States at the time. Since Pratt was 
a strong and thoughtful boy, his community encouraged him to shoulder the task 
of working to help defend the downtrodden who surrounded him.

Unable to discover a better way to acquire the skills needed to fulfill that 
task, Pratt joined the U.S. military and subsequently served in two tours of 
duty as an airborne soldier in Vietnam, earning rank and becoming wounded in 
battle.

But once back in the U.S., Pratt immediately placed his hard earned skills at 
the disposal of the Black Panther Party, who were being attacked and killed by 
the FBI and local police for daring to defend the Black community.

Thereafter, Pratt’s training and influence reshaped the Panthers until later 
raids by their oppressors were met with stiff and well organized resistance, 
which fought the police and FBI to standstills from coast to coast.

Russell Maroon Shoatz Pratt was so successful in his efforts that everyone 
began to call him Geronimo! An early Black Liberation Army member, Geronimo 
carried on the struggle underground until his guerrilla unit was betrayed and 
captured. 

Falsely convicted of an unrelated, senseless crime, he had been neutralized 
forever, the FBI and police thought. Yet, while serving 27 long, harsh years in 
prison, Geronimo became a powerful source of inspiration to those who continued 
the fight against oppression. Thus, in his maturity, he joined with his 
ancestors to continue the fight as Geronimo ji Jaga!

After a titanic struggle, he finally escaped the clutches of his tormentors 
and, coming full circle, he returned to Mother Afrika to continue his efforts 
there, while raising a family. His death and transition were a shock to 
everyone, yet his legacy remains to both inspire and energize us and 
generations to come with the spirit of his Jaga ancestors and his namesake, 
Geronimo.

Russell Maroon Shoats is a founding member of the Black Unity Council, which 
merged with the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1969, and a 
soldier in the Black Liberation Army serving multiple life sentences for the 
killing of a police officer. He has been in prison since 1972 except for two 
escapes, in 1977 and 1980, that won him brief periods of freedom. He has been 
in solitary confinement at SCI Greene, the same prison where Mumia Abu-Jamal is 
held, since 1991. Send our brothers some love and light: Russell Maroon Shoats, 
AF-3855, SCI Greene, 175 Progress Drive, Waynesburg, PA 15370.

For a series of videos that bring Geronimo back to this life, go to 
FreedomArchives.org/Geronimo.





Original Page: http://sfbayview.com/2011/the-making-of-geronimo-ji-jaga/

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How the drugs of the 60s changed art






How the drugs of the 60s changed art

by Emanuella Grinberg, cnn.com 			 			 			 			   

(CNN) -- The words psychedelic and art likely conjure images of acid  
rock posters, fluorescent mushrooms and tie-dyed ... stuff.


But New York Times art critic Ken Johnson wants to expand your mind.

In Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern  
Art, Johnson combines interviews and analysis with his own experiences as a  
stoned art lover to explore psychedelic culture's impact on fine art.


Johnson spoke with CNN about R. Crumb, tripping on the steps of the New  
Hampshire capitol, and why the term psychedelic tends to turn off people  
in both mainstream and high art circles.


This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

CNN: Your book asks would art have developed as it did in the past 50 years  
if psychedelic culture had not been so popular. What did you find out?


Ken Johnson: In the '60s, a lot of people were experimenting with  
hallucinogenic drugs including marijuana, LSD and everything in between. You  
had acid rock posters in San Francisco associated with the Grateful Dead and  
Jefferson Airplane and groups like that.


But my theory is that there were probably a lot of artists that didn't  
necessarily want to do psychedelic-style art that were still influenced by  
the experience and created works that don't necessarily look psychedelic in  
the stereotypical way, but may be conceptually psychedelic or have a kind of  
philosophical way of looking at the world.


If you look at a lot of different styles in art of the past 50 years, you  
can see the influence of psychedelics, ranging from sculpture that looks  
very minimal like Richard Serra's giant, spiral, mazelike structures, to  
something like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, there's an interest in  
having art be experiential...


CNN: Can you elaborate on some features or elements of what you describe of  
as being conceptually psychedelic?


Johnson: I think the main thing is the idea that in psychedelic experience,  
people start thinking about their own perceptions.


They don't take their perceptions for granted, but they start thinking about  
how our perceptions work and how interesting it is the way we think about  
the world, so we think about our thinking.


CNN: Are you suggesting that you have to be stoned or high to create art or  
appreciate modern art?


Johnson: No, I don't think being high or stoned makes anybody more creative.  
If it did, there would be a lot of stoners out there making great art... I  
don't think you have to be high to look at it.


I think what it does do, I think any work of art encourages you to imagine  
your way into a state of consciousness that may not be your normal state, so  
you kind of suspend disbelief and allow yourself to be imaginatively seduced  
into a different way of relating to the world so that you study things more  
carefully, you think about how things are affecting you.


CNN: One might assume that this area of art criticism has been pretty  
thoroughly addressed. What do you hope to bring to the discussion that's  
new?


Johnson: People have commented on it here and there, but to my knowledge,  
nobody's made the claim as extensive as the one I'm making: that psychedelic  
culture had a really central impact on art beginning in the '60s and really  
changed the direction of art.


Before this, what I call the psychedelic revolution, people tended to  
think of art as something you looked at in a fairly normal state of  
consciousness, where you looked at art in a museum and you appreciated it  
and maybe you got excited by it or loved it or hated it, or whatever, but  
all within sort of normal range of what we think of as consciousness.


Psychedelic culture had a really central impact on art beginning in the '60s  
and really changed the direction of art.
--Ken Johnson, art critic and author 

Basically, people made judgments about art based on whether it was  
aesthetically good or not... after the '60s making those kinds of  
distinctions between good and bad art became less interesting, and the  
standard had more to do with How does it alter your consciousness? How does  
it change you and your relationship to the world?


It's common to take note of it in pop music... Bob Dylan's music changed in  
the mid-60s and The Beatles changed, and many of them have publicly  
acknowledged that they were changed by sampling marijuana and LSD. But very  
few artists in the fine art world that we associate with the Museum of  
Modern Art and the Whitney Museum and high end galleries in New York,  
artists in that world have not really acknowledged that so much.


CNN: Were you able to get anyone on the record making that claim for this  
book?

Meet Rock Med: the Guardian Angels of Concertgoers





Meet Rock Med: the Guardian Angels of Concertgoers

by Caroline Chen, blogs.sfweekly.com
July 13th 2011 6:00 AM  

 They might be the greatest concert buffs of all time. This 
year, they plan to attend 700 concerts. Last month alone, they saw an 
astounding 60-odd shows, including Iron  Wine, Britney Spears, U2, Panic! At 
the Disco, and the Yellow Magic Orchestra. And they're intent on continuing at 
the same two or more concerts a night pace for the rest of the summer. 

But they're more than just a bunch of music nerds. They've been called 
life-savers and rightly so. They're the volunteers of Rock Medicine, a division 
of Haight Ashbury Free Clinics dedicated to providing free health care at 
concerts year-round.

Rock Med was started in 1973 when rock promoter Bill Graham came to Haight 
Ashbury Free Clinics asking for help. He was very unhappy with the way his 
patrons were being treated, Rock Med Director Wes Fifield tells S.F. Weekly. 
Ticket buyers were considered dirty hippies, and he wondered if they could be 
treated on-site so they wouldn't impact the community. And so Rock Med was 
born, staffing shows from the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead. 

Since then, Rock Med has become the go-to concert health provider in the Bay 
Area, with over 1,000 volunteers. The group is particularly attractive to 
recent medical graduates who need work experience before they can get a job. 
Fifield laughs when asked what sort of experience Rock Med provides. Working 
Rock Med is the closest you're going to get to battlefield experience, he 
says. You get to see the whole gamut.

On an average night, Rock Med staff might see 10-20 patients, but that number 
jumps into the hundreds at weekend outdoor shows. At any given concert, 
alcohol's the number one issue -- always has been, always will be, says 
Fifield. If you're talking about country-western concerts, then Jack Daniels 
is king. Nine-year Rock Med veteran Darrin Brown adds, At Phish and the Dead 
concerts, you get more psychedelic drugs. We just talk to them and try to get 
down to their level and let them know that they're safe.

Alcohol is just the start. Rock Med handles almost everything, including 
cardiac problems and head lacerations. I can't imagine you'll tell me anything 
I've not seen in the time I've been here, says Fifield. The only thing I 
haven't seen done is births. Many mothers in labor approach us, but we've 
always been able to get them in an ambulance. 

Rock Med operates under the motto of Haight Ashbury Free Clinics: Health Care 
is a Right, Not a Privilege. Their tents are comparable with any ER, and 
Fifield says that they are prepared to take care of everything on site other 
than X-rays and bone casting. Why should you pay $1,500 for an ambulance ride 
when we can take care of you on-site? he says.

With such extensive care on offer, more than just concertgoers seek out Rock 
Med for help. Fifield says that the homeless population at Golden Gate Park is 
always eager for them to return, as many see Rock Med as their primary health 
care provider.

Despite the thousands of people and enormous range of ailments they treat each 
month, in its 38 years of operation, Rock Med has, miraculously, never seen a 
lawsuit. We're very particular about paperwork, and if someone goes to an 
E.R., we will fill out a patient care report like you'll find in any hospital, 
says Fifield.

As the summer concert season goes into full swing, Fifield advises 
concertgoers to stay hydrated and eat, please! He says many people forget to 
eat because they're too excited for the concert, then after a couple of drinks 
and hours standing in a packed venues, they end up in the Rock Med tent. A 
little preventative maintenance goes a long way, he says. 

So if you're going to a concert this summer (as we hope you are!), keep 
Fifield's advice in mind to ensure you have a good time. But it's also good to 
know that the Rock Medicine angels will be waiting in the wings, just in case.


Follow us on Twitter @SFAllShookDown, and like us at 
Facebook.com/SFAllShookDown.





Original Page: 
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2011/07/meet_rock_med_guardian_angels.php

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Customer first is Boomer business ethic, while no rip-offs or tech wanted





Customer first is Boomer business ethic, while no rip-offs or tech wanted

by Dave Masko, huliq.com
July 9th 2011   

 

VENETA, Ore. -- David Thormahlen, a musical instruments vendor at the “Oregon 
Country Fair” shows a young boy the fine points of making a guitar by hand; 
meanwhile, other craftsmen – at this annual retro-hippie event that features 
over 1,000 artists and crafters selling stuff – note that good business means 
“the customer first, no rip-offs and no need for technology.”

Social networking -- here in a deep wooded outdoors Woodstock looking annual 
festival known as the “Oregon Country Fair” – “means talking to people, 
face-to-face, and with joy in your voice. There’s no hustle because we simply 
want to share our goods and, yes make a profit, but in a good way. The way my 
dad used to at his hardware store up in the Seattle area. It was all about your 
word and your hand-shake,” says Scott, a hand-made jewelry salesman who “does 
the Fair each year” and a “circuit” of like businesses up and down the West 
coast, from British Columbia to San Diego. “We’re on that crafters, Renaissance 
and fringe circuit of outdoor summer time events where we can do business our 
way,” adds Scott who doesn’t take credit cards, doesn’t use the Internet and 
doesn’t think technology works for his type of business.

In fact, there are tens of thousands of other “Baby Boomer” business men and 
women just like Scott who work on the fringe of U.S. business doing it their 
way.

For instance, Scott calls his mode of business “personal,” where he “connects 
to customers” who like his jewelry as an art form, and are willing to spend 
hundreds for a necklace woven from deer hair with a bone carving hanging at the 
end.

In general, the view from these summer festival circuit crafters and business 
people is to “market” their goods without the Internet.

Baby Boomers selling their goods the old fashion way

“Technology is everywhere. It’s in your face! It’s too much, and our customer 
base of Boomers and others, are just tired of someone giving them a dot com to 
go to. I tell them to go to me, man, to and see me at the Oregon Country Fair 
or a Renaissance Fair down in Frisco or wherever. That’s our niche, no tech, no 
need because we’re doing just fine without it,” explains Oregon Country Fair 
shoe maker Jarvis who, along with his wife Brenda, decided to pack it in after 
retiring from 30 years in the retail clothing business down in nearby Medford, 
Oregon.

At the same time, Brenda admits that “life is short,” and who wants to rip 
customers off for that legal tender. Who cares if you make another 10 grand 
this year? I mean really, how many pairs of pants or expensive bottles of wine 
do we need? I think people are turning away from consumerism due to this weak 
economy. There’s looking for a better way, and that doesn’t mean kneeling down 
to praise the almighty Internet.

Internet’s impact exaggerated, while washing machine does more for people

When it comes to all the hype about the Net and using tech-gadgets to market 
stuff, the view from a Nobel Prize nominee Ha-Joon Chang -- one of the leading 
economic advisors to the United Nations -- that “the washing machine has 
changed society more than the Internet.

Such a view has not raised eyebrows here at the annual Oregon Country Fair 
outside Eugene -- and linked with the University of Oregon’s famed “Wearable 
Computing Lab” -- that was founded in 1995 at the dawn of the information-era 
when people were able to transfer information more freely. Members of the 
University of Oregon's brain trust take a weekend break during this 42nd 
edition of the famed hippie Fair in nearby Veneta to enjoy what can be done 
without the aid of a computer.

At the same time, University of Oregon Fair volunteers play a huge role, say 
Oregon Country Fair organizers, in helping with the Energy Park exhibits that 
feature -- among other things -- a washing machine that runs on bike pedal 
energy. The Fair's Energy Park also features other non-modern tech displays 
that remind visitors that there was life before the Internet, says one Fair 
volunteer who's a retired professor.

Still, there are still those digital-age fans here at the Fair and nearby 
University of Oregon who view the Internet as revolutionizing just about 
everything.

“Not so,” states Ha-Joon Chang, a University of Cambridge, England, economist 
who presents his views on the washing machine in the spring edition of Ode 
magazine. Chang argues that the Internet’s revolutionary is pretty harmless, 
noting that “Instead of reading a paper,

Oregon Country Fair 2011 Kicks Off





Oregon Country Fair 2011 Kicks Off

by Jessica Debbas, kezi.com
July 8th 2011   

 

VENETA, Ore. -- It's a Eugene tradition stretching back more than 40 years.  
Friday is the first day of the three day Oregon Country Fair, an event that 
attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.

Each summer the deep dark woods in Veneta are transformed into a place full of 
energy and creativity, a showcase of live music, elaborate homemade costumes 
and animated participants.  It gives this fair a unique northwest flavor.

I've been to festies all over the United States and there's nowhere like this 
place.  It's a mystical land, said Trenton Brown, attendee.

Hundreds of food and craft vendors set up shop.  And best of all, the crafts 
are hand-made and one of a kind.  But what also makes this fair unique is that 
anyone can entertain.

Can't go wrong with florescent pom poms and a glue gun, said Randy Feldhaus, 
attendee.

Whether it's showing up in costume or organizing your own parade, interactive 
participation is encouraged.

The people, the love, it's  just everyone coming together, as one people, one 
mind, said B.

The Oregon Country Fair is about fun and community, but it's also about 
sustainability and finding energy efficient ways to live your life.

It's an umbrella solar cooker and a parabolic papazon chair that can boil 
water, bake cookies and stir fry, said Bart Orlando, renewable energy educator.

Inside the fairgrounds, you'll find an energy park that spotlights green 
gadgets.  Like a human-powered machine to blend your own smoothie.  But no 
matter where you decide to put your passion, everyone's here to have a good 
time and continue a beloved summer tradition.

Definitely just a welcoming atmosphere, said Karren Feldhaus, attendee.

Everybody here is awesome. it's just a good release from the monotony of 
life, Brown said.





Original Page: http://kezi.com/news/local/217537

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‘Altamont Augie ’ and the War for a Generation ’s Soul





‘Altamont Augie’ and the War for a Generation’s Soul

by Mark Tapso, frontpagemag.com
July 7th 2011   

 

Altamont Augie
by Richard Barager
Interloper Press, 300 pgs.

“If you can remember the sixties,” quipped Timothy Leary, “you weren’t there.” 
Well, for those who can’t remember, or weren’t ever there, Richard Barager’s 
new novel Altamont Augie thrusts the reader into the torrent of that tumultuous 
era more successfully, and from a more unique perspective, than any I’ve read.

The book’s quirky title holds twofold significance. For anyone who does 
remember the sixties, “Altamont” is somber shorthand for the Altamont Speedway 
Free Festival, a rock concert in late 1969 attended by hundreds of thousands 
and featuring powerhouse bands of the day like the Jefferson Airplane and the 
Rolling Stones, who headlined the show. The concert is most notorious for its 
degeneration into increasing crowd violence, culminating in the stabbing death 
of a drug-fueled, gun-wielding concertgoer by a member of the Hells Angels 
motorcycle gang, whom the Stones had hired for security – all captured on film 
for the documentary Gimme Shelter. Long forgotten is another death at that 
concert – a man was found drowned in an irrigation canal. The victim’s name 
remains unknown, and the mystery of his identity lies at the heart of this 
novel.

“Augie” is a nod to the Saul Bellow classic of American literature, The 
Adventures of Augie March, featuring a character who, in the words of critic 
Norman Podhoretz, “stands for the American dream of the inviolable individual 
who has the courage to resist his culture.” Author Barager’s Augie is David 
Noble, a young man so repulsed by his generation’s descent into a violent, 
irrational anti-Americanism that he impulsively enlists in the Marines to do 
his patriotic part to ensure American victory in the Vietnam War. Little does 
he realize what a trial-by-fire boot camp will be, and that he will find 
himself in a vision of hell to rival the nightmarish work of Hieronymus Bosch, 
at the 1968 battle of Khe Sanh.

After his stint in Vietnam, David returns to his girlfriend Jackie, who runs 
with the radical anti-war crowd, the Marxist-inspired members of the Students 
for a Democratic Society. The SDS strove to tear down America’s democratic 
institutions and support her defeat on the battlefields of Vietnam. David Noble 
now finds himself fighting a war at home as well:

SDS had to be confronted – even if it meant pissing Jackie off. Vietnam was 
being lost not on the battlefield, where the NVA had yet to win a major 
engagement, but at home, on college campuses. Nixon may have won the election, 
but the New Left was winning the fight for public opinion, the drumbeat for 
peace at the expense of victory growing louder by the day. What good was peace 
born from a self-inflicted loss harming national honor? These things matter…

Indeed they do. Just as they still matter now, forty years later, when the 
progressive Left, after waging a similar anti-war crusade against former 
President George W. Bush and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has 
succeeded in putting a fellow Alinskyite in the White House.

But back to the book. Liberated but conflicted girlfriend Jackie is sharing 
herself with David’s nemesis Kyle, a subversive SDS ideologue whose 
revolutionary fervor gives her the bravado to challenge her parents’ 
contemptible middle-class existence during dinner one night:

“Kyle and I renounced our white skin privilege,” she blurted out during 
blueberry pie à la mode.

Her father’s hand froze in midair, his fork never making his mouth. “You 
renounced what? What kind of privilege?”

“White…skin…privilege. What you and I benefit from, socio-economic advantage 
because of the color of our skin.”

Her mother bowed her head and made the sign of the cross. Her father put his 
fork down and glared. “The only socio-economic advantage I ever enjoyed was my 
willingness to work the night shift at Great Northern Railroad to put myself 
through college. And the only socio-economic advantage you enjoy is my 
willingness to work sixty hours a week at a law firm to put you through 
college. Trust me, tuition doesn’t come with a white-skin discount.”

Undaunted by this rebuttal, Jackie follows radical Kyle cross-country to the 
San Francisco Bay Area, where they become involved with the violent Weathermen 
and Black Panthers. David Noble pursues them both, and the tension in this 
passionate love triangle, as well as the ideological struggle between David and 
Kyle, climax in tragedy and redemption at the Altamont

Red Vic Movie House in San Francisco to close






Red Vic Movie House in San Francisco to close

sfgate.com | Jul 7th 2011 			 			 			 			   

The already endangered repertory movie scene in San Francisco is taking yet  
another hit.


Later this month, 31 years to the day after it became an instant landmark in  
the Haight-Ashbury, the Red Vic Movie House will close.


Our closure is 100 percent certain at this point, co-owner Claudia Lehan  
said. On July 25, our birthday screening of 'Harold and Maude' will be our  
last, I'm sad to say.


The Red Vic opened on July 25, 1980, at Haight and Belvedere streets. Its  
first film was the 1977 Canadian indie Outrageous! about the friendship  
between a gay hairdresser and pregnant mental patient, which set the tone  
for three decades of eclectic repertory and second-run fare.


The theater was created and operated by a six-member employee-owned  
collective that rented space for 80 seats, including its signature worn  
couches, from the Red Victorian Bed  Breakfast.


In 1991, the Red Vic moved a block west to its current location at 1727  
Haight St., renovating the former Full Moon Saloon and expanding to 143  
seats - this time padded benches and theater seats - and a concession stand  
featuring organic treats. Danny Glover was a regular, bringing his own green  
bucket to handle the gourmet popcorn.


Glover, who once introduced Places in the Heart, was merely one of many  
celebrities and industry professionals who showed up in person for QAs.  
Legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs presented Easy Rider, and more  
recently Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the Oscar-winning musicians and  
stars of the film Once, performed after a screening of the film. Of the  
original six collective members, only Jack Rix is currently involved. Lehan  
has been in the collective since 1998; the other current members are Susie  
Bell and Sam Sharkey.


We had various benefits, and individual donors contributed via PayPal,  
Lehan said Tuesday night by phone as she was working a shift at the theater.  
We had some support, but not enough to make it sustainable.


Instead, the modern factors that have taken down many independently owned  
theaters - home video, HD cable and on-demand TV and movies, and streaming  
video from websites such as Netflix - appear to have finally doomed the Red  
Vic.


The liquidation process has begun. A movie poster and collectibles sale is  
scheduled for Saturday afternoon (We have sooo many posters, it's really  
out of control, Lehan said).


The theater's lobby area will be absorbed by its next-door neighbor, the  
Alembic Bar, which plans to expand, according to general manager Daniel  
Hyatt. There are no plans for the auditorium itself.


The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation estimates about 25 to 30  
neighborhood theaters have closed in the past 30 years. Among repertory  
houses, only the Castro and Roxie theaters remain. The Roxie has remade  
itself as a nonprofit.


But there is a new kid on the block: The San Francisco Film Society recently  
reached an agreement to operate the New People Cinema in Japantown beginning  
in September. Repertory programming is part of its mission.


The Red Vic was a true original with a vibe that was perfect Haight-Ashbury.  
Movies remaining on the schedule include the Talking Heads concert film  
Stop Making Sense, the Orson Welles classic Touch of Evil and a few Bay  
Area-filmed movies, such as The Last Waltz, What's Up, Doc? and of  
course Harold and Maude, which had become the theater's annual birthday  
movie.


It's a sad thing, Lehan said. We held on for a long time. I'm so grateful  
to have been a part of it. A really great gig. Love it.






Original Page:  
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/07/MN4O1K6O74.DTL


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Alhambra resident, Chicano activist pleads not guilty to six felonies






Alhambra resident, Chicano activist pleads not guilty to six felonies

by ADOLFO FLORES, pasadenastarnews.com
July 6th 2011 10:16 AM 			 			 			 			   Read the search warrant and  
felony complaint (PDFs)


Search warrant 


Felony complaint

ALHAMBRA - An anti-war protestor and Chicano activist Wednesday plead not  
guilty to six felony counts at an arraignment in Alhambra Superior Court.


Carlos Montes, 63, of Alhambra faces one count of possession of a firearm by  
a felon, one count possession of ammunition and four counts of perjury for  
lying on gun registration paperwork and saying he had never been convicted  
of a felony.


Montes unlawfully possessed, purchased, received and had custody and  
control of a 12-gauge shotgun, said Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the  
D.A.'s office. It's substantial state prison time, over five years.


Outside the courthouse and joined by about 35 supporters Montes said the  
charges have less to do with the possession of the shotgun and more to do  
with his political activities.


Our view is that this is a political attack because of my views denouncing  
the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and denouncing U.S. policy support of  
Israel denying the Palestinian people their rights, Montes said Wednesday .


This is not about having a gun or buying a gun it's about my political  
views and political activity.


Montes said he was awakened on May 17 by members of a Los Angeles County  
Sheriff's Department's SWAT Team, who rushed in with a search warrant. He  
was subsequently arrested.


They came in with guns on their shoulders, yelling, I was shocked, Montes  
said of his arrest. I thought let me close my eyes so I can go to sleep


and see if I wake up from this nightmare. 

Montes said authorities looked through his files and rifled through pictures  
of his anti-war organizing. Some of the documents detailed trips to Columbia  
others included immigration rights paperwork.


While he was waiting in the back of a patrol car Montes said he was  
approached by an FBI agent in plain clothes who asked him about the Freedom  
Road Socialist Organization, a Marxist-Lenninst group with a post office box  
in Chicago.


He believes the FBI was investigating him after he participated in a  
anti-war demonstration at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint  
Paul, Minnesota.


Montes is named in an October 2010 search warrant for the committee's  
offices which were linked to the Freedom Road group.


FBI spokeswoman Ari Dekofsky would not confirm that Montes was being  
investigated by the FBI.


Los Angeles County sheriff's Sgt. Miguel Mejia said Montes was booked in  
East Los Angeles, but the investigation into his activities was led by  
either the Sheriff's terrorist unit or the emergency operations bureau,  
working with the FBI.


It was an FBI action as I recall, said Sgt. Jim Sully. We assisted them.

The Brown Beret co-founder and an organizer of the East Los Angeles walkouts  
of 1968 said he plans on denouncing the 1969 charge of assaulting an  
officer.


Jorge Gonzalez, Montes' attorney questioned the timing of the raid.

They're pulling a 40-year-old conviction, something is behind this, but  
it's early in the game, he said.






Original Page: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18422863

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HOLIDAY IN BIG SUR





HOLIDAY IN BIG SUR

janefonda.com | Jul 7th 2011

 

I have long had a relationship with Big Sur. When I was 22 years old, and had a 
week-long break from filming “Sunday In New York,” I learned to drive so that I 
could go to Big Sur to find Henry Miller. I had just read a pamphlet he wrote 
called, “To Paint is to Love Again” (Miller once gave me a painting he did and 
signed it, “To Miss Jane herself.”) and felt I had to meet him and talk to him. 
I didn’t find him that first trip. He’d gone to L.A. Later, I saw him on 
several occasions. He wrote a poem for me, about me, comparing me to a fish (he 
meant it as a compliment) but I lost it.

I drove all day until I got to Big Sur and was exhausted. When I saw a sign 
saying Big Sur Hot Springs Lodge, I pulled down the steep driveway and spent 6 
days there. This was my first encounter with hippies. I was tempted to stay 
forever, so awed was I by the natural beauty, the inaccessibility of the place, 
the unusualness of the people. I became close with the man who ran the place, 
Dick Price. The Hot Springs Lodge became the Esalen Institute and Dick ran that 
as well until his death in the 80s. I frequently returned to Big Sur to stay 
with Dick till I moved to France and married my first husband.

My second husband, Tom Hayden, and I went there from time to time. We would 
visit Dick, take him to dinner at the newly built Ventana “hotel.”

My 3rd husband, Ted Turner, has a lovely cabin there where we spent many a 
happy weekend. And now, I went back with Richard and new friends of mine, the 
Somers , and stayed at Post Ranch which is relatively new and stupendous. So 
many memories and emotions kept flooding back over the 5 days. Happiness and 
also sadness. I think the latter was due to the unavoidable sense of time 
passing, things from the past that will be no more. But happiness prevailed.

I took my first Tai Chi class and enjoyed it enough to want to do it more and 
regularly. Enjoy the photos.

Tags: Big Sur, Esalen Institute, friendship, Henry Miller, Spirit, ted turner, 
The Hot Springs Lodge, tom hayden





Original Page: http://janefonda.com/holiday-in-big-sur/

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Woman dies from apparent drug overdose at Rainbow Family Gathering





Woman dies from apparent drug overdose at Rainbow Family Gathering

by Zachary Kaufman, columbian.com
July 7th 2011   

 

Community guidelines

Please keep our community guidelines in mind when commenting on sensitive 
stories. Be respectful and refrain from speculating on the cause of death. You 
may review the full set of community guidelines here: community guidelines.

A 25-year-old California woman was found dead from a suspected drug overdose 
Wednesday morning at the Rainbow Family Gathering in Gifford Pinchot National 
Forest, Skamania County officials said.

An autopsy will be performed in Clark County on Amber Kellar of Weed, Calif., 
to determine her official cause of death, Skamania County Sheriff Dave Brown 
said. It was unclear what drug or drugs might have triggered the woman’s death, 
he added.

Reports of drug use have been frequent during the weeklong Rainbow Family 
Gathering, Brown said.

On June 24, a man who was helping set up the gathering died, Brown said. 
Stephen Pierce, 50, was from Fort Bragg, Calif., the sheriff said. Brown said 
officials do not yet know how Pierce died. Pierce’s body was sent to the Clark 
County Medical Examiner’s Office, officials said.

Officials estimated around 20,000 outdoors enthusiasts, peace activists and 
spiritual seekers attended this year’s Rainbow Family Gathering. The Rainbow 
Family Gathering started in 1972. Since then, events bearing the nonprofit 
organization’s name have been held across America and in other countries. The 
organization has no official leaders or members.

Campers from across America and Canada converged on Gifford Pinchot National 
Forest to leave behind the constraints of capitalism and modern technology, 
pray for world peace and enjoy nature’s beauty.

Since the event began Friday, there have been reports of assaults, traffic 
collisions and marijuana, heroin, psychedelic mushroom and acid use, Brown 
said. He said a man on Sunday was badly hurt in a motorcycle accident on Curly 
Creek Road about four miles from the gathering. He said another man was hurt in 
a car crash on Saturday on state Highway 14, east of Stevenson. He said he 
believed both men are at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center.

He did not have official numbers on citations, arrests or towed vehicles 
related to the event. However, Brown said he believed the number of citations 
and arrests will top 300.

Brown said he was disappointed about what he believed was “fairly rampant” drug 
use at Skookum Meadows.

The gathering officially ends today, although a small cadre of campers are 
expected to remain on site to clean the campgrounds. There are no reports yet 
about the condition of the grounds.

“It’s a little premature until we get out there and do some type of 
assessment,” said Ken Sandusky, an assistant spokesman with Gifford Pinchot 
National Forest.

Campers began filing out en masse Monday, Brown said. He estimated more than 
8,000 people remained in Skookum Meadows Tuesday, but that number was expected 
to drop rapidly.

Brown expressed concerns prior to the gathering about how the event could 
negatively affect Skamania County’s jail population and court docket. He said 
his jail holds 50 persons and there were 43 in the jail on Monday. Some were 
related to the gathering but Brown said he will not tabulate exact numbers for 
at least a week.

“We were able to weather the storm,” he said. He noted many people detained on 
active warrants were brought to Clark County to ensure Skamania County’s jail 
did not suffer overcrowding.

The number of people in the Skamania County court has fluctuated over recent 
days, but that is not necessarily because of Rainbow Family attendees, a court 
official said.

“It would be wrong of me to say the tickets are from the Rainbow festival 
because I don’t know that’s what they’re for,” said Karen Wyninger, court 
administrator for Skamania County.

Some people arrested were taken to Tacoma to stand before a federal judge, 
Brown said.

No arrests were made on the “three or four” assaults reported during the 
gathering because victims did not know their attackers and most campers refused 
to speak with investigators, Brown said.

“The investigative effort is very difficult,” he said.

Dave Kern contributed to this report.

Ray Legendre: 360-735-4517, 
ray.legen...@columbian.com//www.facebook.com/raylegend//www.twitter.com/col_smallcities

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“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention ” by Manning Marable

“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” by Manning Marable

by Manning Marable, washingtoninformer.com
June 23rd 2011

You are many people.

To your friends, you’re supportive, funny, and solid. Your boss sees you as
someone who gets the job done. Your kids think you’re authoritative, with a
wallet. And your family knows the you with warts.

You’re a person with many faces; some public, some private, but never the same.
In the new book “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” by Manning Marable, you’ll
get a (supposed) peek at a complex man with several personas.

Born in 1925 in Omaha, Neb., Malcolm Little was raised with the notion that
blacks were “a mighty race.” Both his parents were fierce supporters of
Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, whose “Pan-African perspective… would become…
crucial for Malcolm later in life.”

Malcolm was smart, but a drop out, and his siblings remember him as lazy, with
a streak of leadership. He “drifted through a series” of girlfriends and
“menial jobs” as a young man, but couldn’t stay out of trouble.

In jail, he was intrigued to learn about Allah, and it wasn’t long before he
joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) and converted. In his single-minded zeal,
Malcolm wrote daily letters to Elijah Muhammad – NOI’s leader - and Muhammad
soon accepted the earnest young man into his inner circle.

Malcolm, who changed his surname to X, to reflect NOI beliefs, quickly rose
within the organization’s ranks. In less than a year, he was a full-fledged
minister in the Nation of Islam, and one of the movement’s most influential
figures.

But it didn’t last.

While on a trip to Egypt and a hajj to Mecca, Malcolm observed that Muslims
overseas were “colorblind,” which surprised him and made him question the
teachings of Muhammad and the NOI. Following an internal scandal that rocked
the Nation of Islam, Malcolm bluntly defied Muhammad’s orders and was banned
from the NOI.

“By the fall of 1964,” says Marable, “rage against Malcolm infected every part
of the Nation…”

In February, 1965, that rage spilled over...

“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” is a doorstop of a book, more scholarly than
not. If you’re willing to endure a long slog through its pages, though, you’ll
be rewarded with some gasp-worthy (albeit inflammatory and contentious) moments.

Author Manning Marable challenges X’s Autobiography and he claims that X was
under surveillance more than X knew. His work also upends some scandalous
stones in this biography, indicating that Malcolm X was not entirely the man
followers thought he was, and suggesting that the men arrested for his murder
might not have been the killers.

Accusations have, of course, been denied, but the main subjects – X, Betty
Shabazz and, indeed, the author of the book – are dead and unable to comment,
which leaves things in a curious and uncomfortable state of unfinished.

Can I recommend “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”?

Not really, but it depends on what you want from it: X devotees will be
outraged, X detractors will wonder what’s true, and readers just looking for
something light will want to X it off their reading list.

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Expensive rents leave Haight lying low





Expensive rents leave Haight lying low

sfgate.com | Jul 7th 2011   

 

Haight Street is in transition. And not entirely in a good way.

The encouraging news is that self-described gutter punks are off the 
sidewalks. They've moved down the block to a containment patch of Golden Gate 
Park. There, near Alvord Lake, they lounge on backpacks with their intimidating 
dogs and glower at tourists.

We could probably muster outrage, but c'mon, it's the Haight. These types are 
always going to cycle through. The cops keep an eye on them and as long as they 
aren't shaking anybody down for spare change, I'm good with that.

Basically, the street is looking great right now, said Kent Uyehara, owner of 
FTC Skate Shop. Sunshine, tourists, city folks revisiting the neighborhood and 
not one person blocking any sidewalk.

But all is not peace, love and ringing cash registers. There's still a 
community of chronic drunks who ride the city ambulances to S.F. General 
Hospital almost daily, costing the city big bucks.

And shops continue to have an alarmingly difficult time of making a go of it, 
even if the corner of Haight and Ashbury is still on every tourist's must-visit 
list.

Uyehara is among a group of merchants who have formed the Haight Ashbury 
Merchants Association. They've reached out to the San Francisco Travel 
Association to aggressively market the area and are considering street lighting 
and flower planters to dress up the street.

But none of that is going to matter as long as Haight landlords continue to 
burden the corridor with unreasonable rents. Many are longtime owners who are 
stuck in the mind-set of the days before the economic downturn.

As it is now, Haight Street rents are more comparable to downtown/Fisherman's 
Wharf rates, Uyehara says. The savvy, experienced retailer chooses other 
neighborhoods to open in and the first-time, inexperienced retailer signs onto 
Haight Street. Once those 10-year leases are signed, you either go broke or try 
to last it out. More money goes to rent and less to inventory and renovations 
to keep stores looking clean, attractive and inviting.

A rent-reset - Uyehara says some landlords have agreed to restructure some 
leases - would encourage a variety of shops and stores on the street. As it is, 
the large, landmark Hibernia Bank building has lost its tenant, the Villain's 
Vault clothing store, which is reportedly downsizing to a smaller space.

The neighborhood is also losing (although not to high rent) the retro-cool Red 
Vic Movie House. With organic popcorn and movies like the unintentionally 
hilarious 1967 news documentary, The Hippie Temptation, the Vic is the kind 
of place that gives the Haight character. Unless a benefactor is found, it will 
close July 25 after 31 years.

A character the neighborhood would prefer not to preserve is someone like 
chronic inebriate Jason Luna. Luna is passed out drunk in the Haight nearly 
every day and requires an ambulance ride to the hospital. There he sobers up in 
medical care and is released to come back and do it again the next day, his arm 
decorated with hospital bracelets.

In March, District Attorney George Gascón's office announced a program to 
target the frequent fliers, and get them into court. But getting the courts, 
police and other agencies on the same page has proved to be a challenge.

It is intended to be a very targeted tool, said Cristine DeBerry, the DA's 
chief of staff. We are working on the criteria to identify the issues for that 
group, rather than have them take ambulance ride after ambulance ride.

So far it has been a slow process.

But that's kind of the nature of Haight. Nobody expects it to turn into a 
gentrified Chestnut Street. It's gritty, smoky and old school. The chronic 
drunks and the vacant storefronts need to go, but it's not a quick fix.

If we've learned anything it is that Haight is not a destination. It's a trip.





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Mick Jagger bio 'Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue' excerpt revealed





Mick Jagger bio 'Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue' excerpt revealed

by official Facebook page, m.examiner.com
September 8th 2011  

 

Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger is the subject of yet another 
unauthorized biography: Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue. This book 
promises to be the answer to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards' 
critically acclaimed best-selling memoir Life, which made headlines in 2010 
for Richards' insults about Jagger. (Richards also praised Jagger in Life, 
but of course the insults got more media attention.)

Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue, written by Marc Spitz and published 
by Gotham Books .

Here is a description of Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue from the 
book's official website :

For decades, Rolling Stones’ fans and critics have debated Mick Jagger’s 
commitment to rock-and-roll.





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Woodstock, the reprise, under way in 2011 at Oregon Country Fair





Woodstock, the reprise, under way in 2011 at Oregon Country Fair

by Dave Masko, huliq.com
July 9th 2011   

 

VENETA, Ore. –Even before the music began yesterday at the opening of the 42nd 
annual “Oregon Country Fair” there were “flashbacks” to Woodstock and calls for 
love, peace and “compassion for all beings,” said modern day hippie couple Lee 
and Pam who are part of the Dalai Lama’s 2011 “Kalachakra for World Peace” 
movement that’s also going on this weekend in Washington. D.C.

You can’t help but notice the modern day hippie couple Lee and Pam as they 
strolled through the massive crowds at the “Oregon Country Fair” here outside 
of Eugene, Oregon, on a plot of land that’s as big as New York’s Central Park 
and just as wooded and interesting. “We feel at peace. We’re here now, and we 
enjoy feeling the love that’s around us. It’s a tonic for our spirits, our 
souls. Let’s face it, the world sucks right now with pain, suffering, war and 
millions starving,” explained Pam in what sounded like tears and laughter in 
her voice.

Meanwhile, Lee noted that “although we can’t be with the Dalai Lama – whose 
spoke about peace and love in Washington, D.C., today – we know that the 2011 
Kalachakra for World Peace movement will help wake people up to the need to 
stop the madness is our world.”

Oregon Country Fair features no alcohol, no drugs but lots of love

“Enjoy!” “Welcome home.” “Oregon Country Fair friends, this isn’t a pause for 
world peace and love, it’s a lifestyle,” noted some of the public comments as 
more than 20,000 Fairgoers convened here in Woodstock looking fields where the 
only gridlock was young and old hugging and kissing each other along the 
elaborate network of trails and medieval looking structures specially built on 
this 100 plus acre site to provide access to the stages, campsites and 
concession stands for over 1,000 artists and crafters for what the Fair 
organizers call “a celebration of creativity in all its many forms.”

Throughout this first day of the “Fair” – as it’s known to locals here in the 
Eugene area – local police noted that “it was peaceful” and the main Highway 
126 lead to the site was “also relatively clear,” added the cops who reported 
no busts for drugs or trouble.

“We want to send a message to the world that we can have peace and love just 
like the Dalai Lama is advocating. Funny, but where are our lawmakers when it 
comes to peace and love. Does it hurt so much to ask that we love one another, 
or that the U.S. wants peace in the world? We’re saying it here today, and 
we’re saying it loud,” says Nick a “Baby Boomer” who says he “served in Nam,” 
and “doesn’t remember too much of the Sixties,” but notes with a big laugh, “I 
was there.”

Fair is an homage to hippies and the Sixties now in 2011

Groping for a sense of the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) that was the Sixties, 
modern day “hippies” -- and those who survived that period of American culture 
when one would tune-in, turn-on and drop-out – now return to this ancient plot 
of land in Western Oregon for another “gathering of the tribes” for this year’s 
42nd anniversary of the “Oregon Country Fair,” July 8 – 10.

“We are entering the time of the tribal dance, as we do to live in tepees, 
celebrate our joys together and learn to survive. We go to a virgin forest with 
no need for the previously expensive media of electronic technology. The energy 
we perceive within ourselves is beyond electric: it is atomic, it is cosmic, it 
is bliss,” write one member of the “Family” back in 1969 when preparing for the 
first “Oregon Country Fair” that, at the time, was another “gathering of the 
hippie tribes” after the successful Woodstock concert.

“It was a sort of non-descript post-Woodstock in Nov. 1 and 2, 1969, because we 
were more interested in keeping those good vibrations going than naming what 
was to become our beloved Oregon Country Fair,” explains Johnny, a former 
hippie and member of the “Family Commune” that thrived in this region of Oregon 
back in the Sixties.

Oregon Country Fair all about Sixties lore

Yea, Bob Dylan dropped by, and so did John Lennon. Grace Slick of the 
Jefferson Airplane was a big Fair fan and locals remember her dancing and 
singing in the long train of hippies that form a human train and move 
throughout the Fairgrounds each day. The famed local Sixties writer Ken Kesey 
has his own stage at the Fair, and the famed anthropologist and “Don Juan” 
author Carlos Castaneda said he liked to “walk the fair to be with humanity 
again,” during the early 1970s.

In fact, a University of Oregon (in nearby

National Rainbow Gathering 2011 Part 1






National Rainbow Gathering 2011 Part 1

m.examiner.com | Jun 23rd 2011 7:53 PM 			 			 			 			  As the  
sun sets north of Portland tonight travelers from around the globe are all  
flowing into the small town of Woodland, WA to begin their final trek to the  
National Rainbow Gathering being held in the Gifford Pinchot National  
Forest. Many do not know how to take this unexpected rise in visitors in  
this small town. When it comes to a Rainbow Gathering though, it is safe to  
say that no one has ever seen anything like this before, and no one really  
knows how to take it. Every gathering is its own and different experience.  
There is virtually no schedule, no competition, no cell phones, no reason to  
worry about anything but the present. The first best thing to do if you plan  
on attending is to bring an open mind. The next best thing to do if you are  
planning to attend the gathering is come prepared with a little extra. There  
is still snow at the site and there are some who arrived with little  
resources and only the clothes on their back. Travelers are using such  
resources as www.craigslist.com and www.facebook.com to connect and organize  
carpools, For more information on the history of the Rainbow Gathering and  
directions to the gathering visit http://www.welcomehome.org . Positive  
Vibes Only Please!





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ull=true#display


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National Rainbow Gathering 2011 Part 2

National Rainbow Gathering 2011 Part 2

m.examiner.com | Jun 24th 2011 10:14 PM

This
evening in the town of Cougar, WA local residents met with unofficial
representatives of the Rainbow Family to discuss their concerns and vent their
frustrations about the impending gathering. While much of the concerns were put
to rest many still fear the impact the gathering will have on the land. Others
voiced concerns of unruly travelers panhandling at local businesses and
addressed the groups reputation for drug use. Representatives for the gathering
refused to downplay the seriousness of such behavior and expressed to the
community their same concerns for the “sick spirits” that come to be healed at
the gathering. Even though the official start to the gathering is days away
members of the Rainbow family have been in the Gifford Pinchot National Forrest
preparing the land and meeting with local officials for well over a month.
Local law enforcement guaranteed the community they will be following “all laws
without discretion” to insure the safety of the community. The federal
government has also deployed 64 federal agents to the gathering site. While
many are excited to venture into the woods for their annual “family” gathering,
travelers must be advised of unusually harsh weather conditions for this time
of year. Parking is not completely organized and there is still a considerable
amount of snow on the ground once you reach the site. Travelers are being urged
to wait a few more days to make their journey until the last of these wrinkles
can be ironed out. If you or someone you know plans on attending the gathering
be sure to come prepared! The cold weather has caught many off guard leading
them back into town to gather more supplies. Volunteer shuttles have been going
back and forth to help travelers reach their destination, but those are few and
far between. While the impact may seem great on these small communities
surrounding the gathering there is only one thing that is for sure; they’ve
only just begun.

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National Rainbow Gathering 2011 Part 4 : Rainbow Family Friendly Businesses

Portland OR : National Rainbow Gathering 2011 Part 4 : Rainbow Family Friendly
Businesses

m.examiner.com | Jun 29th 2011 6:51 PM

The success of
a Rainbow Gathering lies not only on those who gather, but the support and
kindness of local businesses dealing with this unusual influx of counter
culture. Every year, because of their remote locations, Rainbow Gatherings
bring a significant boost to the local economy. Two very Rainbow Family
friendly businesses are now working together to make sure that when it comes to
basic supplies that everyone has access to what they need. Tressie Burhop,
along with her husband own the Cougar Store in Cougar, WA. The Cougar Store is
essentially the last stop for gas and goodies before you reach the gathering.
Over the past few weeks as travelers have been trickling in the Cougar store
has been sure to adjust inventory demands accordingly. “We have been the ones
dealing with a great majority of these travelers and we love it! They have been
great,” she explained. “We are loving them and all the business they are
bringing our way.” Stocking the shelves with plenty of American Spirit
cigarettes as well as offering low priced Red Hook rolling tobacco for just
$2.00 the Burhop’s have also teamed up with Gateway Produce in Woodland, WA to
set up a produce stand at the Cougar Store specifically due to the increased
demand. This will be great as travelers will not have to go as far to get what
they need. Employees at Gateway Produce in Woodland, WA have been dealing with
the increased demand for fresh fruits and veggies in stride. At first many did
not know what to expect from the Rainbow Family, but their business and
kindness have shown these local employees that the Rainbow Gathering is good
for all. Before heading out of town to the Rainbow Gathering travelers may also
want to consider getting a great burger and brew at The Merwin Tap located in
downtown Woodland, WA. The moment you walk through the door you will know you
are in a Rainbow Family friendly establishment. While interviewing some
travelers that had come to town for supplies the consensus of the 2011
gathering has been absolutely positive. “The police have been really great.
There have been no helicopters and it really seems like they are here to help
us have a safe and positive gathering,” noted one traveler.

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Inside the rainbow: Love, mud and smoke welcome members home





Inside the rainbow: Love, mud and smoke welcome members home

m.tdn.com | Jun 30th 2011 10:00 PM  

 

GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST — It’s unnerving the first time you hear it: A 
stranger smiles big and says, Welcome home. I love you.

It’s a kind sentiment, to be sure. But then you realize you’re expected to say 
it in return. And, well, telling strangers you love them doesn’t come easy for 
the uninitiated.

Dozens of people greeted me, my wife, Shawna, and Daily News photographer Bill 
Wagner this way as we hiked into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest Wednesday 
to camp with the Rainbow Family of Living Light.

The family welcomes everyone to one of America’s national forests each year to 
eat, dance, sing and pray.

Welcome home, they tell each other as they settle in for this time of simply 
being together.

Lovin’ you! they call out in camp, again with the big smiles. Very few use 
their true or full names.

The event officially begins Friday and climaxes Monday when attendees will 
meditate and pray for peace in Skookum Meadow. As many as 20,000 are expected 
to camp here before the event officially ends next Thursday.

It’s impossible to say how many had already arrived at the meadow Wednesday. 
One Rainbow elder put the number at between 5,000 and 7,000.

Calling this a camp-out for hippies doesn’t quite do it justice. Think of it as 
how the survivors of a societal meltdown — fuel supply collapse, apocalyptic 
economic crash, nuclear attack — might give civilization one last shot.

Cars from just about every state line the forest road for miles. It’s a 
two-mile hike to the main camp, where trees give way to an open meadow speckled 
with tents and teepees. More tents are tucked among the evergreens, near thick 
and wet snowdrifts. Smoke rises in plumes from cooking fires. Branches and 
carefully cut logs serve as foot bridges across a clear mountain stream that 
snakes through the camp.

There is no money here. People cook fresh vegetables, stew, oatmeal and rice in 
giant, dented pots over roaring fires. The masses wander along muddy trails 
with cups, bowls and spoons, lining up to eat for free.

Others pass glass marijuana pipes and joints, the skunky smell blowing over the 
camps.

Many barter. As I strolled into camp, a woman offered me chocolate for pot.

There’s a different feel in each part of the gathering. In the western meadow, 
the older traditional hippie-types and professionals with kids have set up 
camp. To the east, just beyond a grove of trees, are the Dirty Kids and 
gutter punks — the young and homeless, who wear mostly black. Some have 
tattooed faces and pierced cheeks. The mood here is aggressive, loud and brash.

Dogs, mostly puppies, run everywhere. They occasionally growl and lunge at each 
other.

Every adult is his or her own show: dreadlocked, barefoot, bearded, 
long-haired, sunken-cheeked, wild-eyed, leather-clad, haunted and staring, 
joyous and grinning — all happy refugees from the normal world.

A young woman dances through camp naked. Two guys gyrate at the roadside while 
they sing a punk-rock song in Spanish. A couple stop for a lengthy make-out 
session in the middle of a busy trail. A group of kids stand in a circle, palms 
hovering over each other’s palms to pray. Love is true! a man says over and 
over.

It all feels primitive, tribal and at least slightly off-kilter.

We chose to make camp with the street kids. We pitched two tents — unknown to 
us at the time — about 30 feet from latrines, which are shallow trenches cut 
into the soil. A few wet, brown-stained clumps of toilet paper had been tossed 
into the dirt not far from our tent.

Down the hill, young men set up a kitchen named Shut Up and Eat It. They tore 
into logs with chain saws and hustled the wood to their fire pits.

The old hippie tribes began congregating for these gatherings 39 years ago with 
a message of peace and love. But these days the event also attracts a different 
counterculture group, known amongst the Rainbows as Dirty Kids. Most are 
homeless and wander from city to city, some hopping freight trains.

They don’t do well in town, said Karin Zirk, a 50-year-old database 
administrator and graduate student from of San Diego who has been coming to 
Rainbow gatherings for decades.

But here in the woods, Zirk said, these street kids are equal members of the 
community and the world, and what they have to offer is valued.

A lot of them would say, ‘This is home. This is the only time I feel like I 
have a home,’  she said.

Maybe that’s why some of the toughest-looking kids — the ones who you feel

Thousands flock to Rainbow Family Gathering





UPDATE: Thousands flock to Rainbow Family Gathering

by Zachary Kaufman, columbian.com
July 3rd 2011   

 

Photo Gallery

Rainbow Family Gathering

GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST — After negotiating miles of serpentine roads 
through these remote woods, participants in the annual Rainbow Family Gathering 
were rewarded with a simple, unique greeting at their long-sought campgrounds 
Friday morning.

“Welcome home,” the glowing strangers said.

To the world, the thousands who gathered in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest 
in Skamania County for the first day of the national Rainbow Family Gathering 
event were homeless misfits, delusional dreamers and dirt-covered hippies. 
Inside these all-inclusive grounds where the outside world mattered little, 
they were brothers and sisters, one and all.

Since 1972, the Rainbow Family has held events in national forests across 
America during July. The nonprofit group is unique in that it has no official 
leaders or members. This year’s event in Washington runs until Thursday.

Attendees said the event is an opportunity to leave behind their daily grind, 
pray for world peace and bask in nature’s beauty. The gathering included 
outdoor enthusiasts, counterculture activists and spiritual seekers from across 
the continental United States and Canada.

“This is like paradise for me,” remarked Gabe Hampton, a 32-year-old from Ocean 
Beach, Calif. “People are just doing things out of love.”

Participants danced, sang and took nude mud baths inside the swampy Skookum 
Meadows area. After parking their vehicles, attendees walked as far as four 
miles with their personal belongings before reaching the main campgrounds.

Officials with Gifford Pinchot National Forest said they expected more than 
10,000 people to attend the gathering.

Underneath a canopy of magnificently tall trees, Hampton and his girlfriend, 
Rose LaChance, sat around a midday campfire surrounded by friends new and old, 
listening to acoustic guitars and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Most of the 
40 or so people in their “O.B. Grateful” section hailed from Ocean Beach or San 
Diego.

They had plenty of food, several bands’ worth of musicians and the joy of 
friendship. The cares of the outside world could wait.

LaChance marveled at the selflessness exhibited by her fellow Rainbow Family 
attendees. She and Hampton had been on the campgrounds for seven days, well 
before the gathering officially began.

“A lot of people don’t work much in real life, but out here they’re digging and 
hauling wood,” said the 38-year-old caretaker from California. “They get a new 
sense of self.”

Campers dug trenches for bathroom facilities. The trenches will be covered in 
dirt when they fill with waste. LaChance and others noted they believe the 
Rainbow Family will leave the campgrounds cleaner than they found it.

Everyone gets “more courteous” when they realize how much they need those 
around them to survive in the woods, she added.

Not that affection or respect were lacking on the campgrounds.

Harmony Cohen-Wolff, 40, of San Diego, greeted LaChance with the enthusiastic 
embrace of reunited friends long ago separated. Cohen-Wolff, a holistic health 
practitioner, came to Washington looking to free herself of modern life’s 
trappings, namely technology.

“Even though those things create advancements, they also create separation from 
the Earth,” she said. “There is so much sadness, war and darkness on this 
planet. We’re able to raise the frequency and heal some things on the planet.”

Participants barter with each other for goods. Cigarettes are a hot commodity. 
So is food. Most dishes are vegetarian.

Jeff Sanchez, 25, hitchhiked from Florida over the past month and a half before 
arriving at the Rainbow Family event. Clad in a hat, scarf and overalls, he 
declared, “This is like my church.”

“You can take so many ideas from so many people,” he said, noting that he had 
floated from kitchen to kitchen and camp to camp.

He disagreed with outside perceptions that the festival is merely an excuse to 
get high in the woods.

Illegal drugs are available on the camp site, Rainbow Family gatherers said. 
But attendees cautioned that drugs, other than marijuana, play a small role in 
the gathering. Some use psychedelics in hopes of attaining a higher plain of 
consciousness. Cocaine, heroin and alcohol are mostly shunned on the grounds, 
attendees said.

There were rumors that federal marshals would sweep the area. Groups alerted 
each other by shouting “guns in the woods” or “six up,” denoting the number of 
lights on a police unit.

Across a

Rainbows, locals bemoan Forest Service presence





Rainbows, locals bemoan Forest Service presence

seattlepi.com | Jun 21st 2011   

 

GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST, Wash. (AP) — Lights flash in the dusk as 
police cars surround a blue school bus painted with colorful hearts and 
flowers. Several youthful hippies watch while officers search their bags and a 
police dog sniffs for drugs.

They were pulled over for failing to use a turn signal on a remote forest road. 
Minutes later, two pose for mug shots after the search turns up marijuana.

It's a scene likely to be played out again in the next week as thousands 
descend on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwest Washington for the 
40th annual gathering of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a group of peace 
activists borne out of the '60s counterculture movement.

Brought in to keep their own peace: 30 U.S. Forest service law enforcement 
personnel from around the country, working 24-7 on three rotating shifts.

The Forest Service says the sheer number of people warrants the heavy police 
presence. Critics call it overkill in a remote forest that could be easily 
policed — or at least managed — by local law enforcement.

There's no accountability, said Paul Pearce, local Skamania County 
commissioner.

Said Gary Stubbs, a decades-long Rainbow gatherer from Marysville, Calif., 
They treat us like terrorists.

As many as 20,000 people have turned out for annual gatherings of the Rainbow 
Family, which has no formal structure or leaders. An informal council decides 
each year where the gathering will be held. For years, the decisions have 
sparked court battles with the Forest Service over the group's right to gather 
without a permit.

Those battles culminated in 2008, when Forest Service officers fired pepper 
balls at gatherers in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming.

This year, for the first time, the Rainbow Family advertised public meetings 
with local residents to ease concerns about increased traffic, drug use and 
crime. Local law enforcement and fire officials, state lands officials and 
local shopkeepers attended.

At the first meeting, in Stevenson, Wash., no one from the Forest Service 
showed.

The absence highlights fears that the federal government doesn't share the 
concerns of local residents, Pearce said.

Pearce is a member of the National Association of Counties, which has sponsored 
a resolution urging Congress to restore law enforcement management to local 
forest supervisors. Currently, the Forest Service's law enforcement incident 
management teams report to Washington D.C. headquarters.

Surrounded by hippies with assorted piercings, tattoos and dreadlocks, Pearce 
seems an odd pairing with the Rainbow Family. A retired police officer of 30 
years, he stands a burly 6-feet in shiny black cowboy boots. But a glance at 
his hip — where one anticipates a gun — reveals a cell phone.

If you're law enforcement in my community, you have to take your kids to the 
same school as those people you arrest, Pearce said. You're forced to police 
people with respect, and if you police people with respect, you will have fewer 
problems.

Corey Rhyne, 32, of Hickory, N.C., echoed that sentiment after getting pulled 
over in the blue school bus for failing to use a turn signal. He and a friend 
were scheduled court appearances after a subsequent search of their belongings 
turned up marijuana.

It was ridiculous fascism, he said. I just feel like my constitutional 
rights were violated.

Last year in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, authorities recorded 
more than 370 incidents due to the Rainbow Family gathering.

Christy Covington, a Forest Service spokeswoman brought in with the incident 
management team, said the agency manages Rainbow Family gatherings similar to 
how it manages natural disasters, such as hurricanes or wildfires. National law 
enforcement teams often are called in for those situations.

It's an incident command system. It's a very organized, tried-and-true system 
that works, she said, adding that the local forest supervisor and local law 
enforcement have unified with the national team to manage the gathering.

As family members began assembling, depending on where they started, they were 
hiking in as many as four miles, carrying sleeping bags, tents, tarps and 
musical instruments to a meadow tucked in the woods not far from Mount St. 
Helens

In the woods, it wasn't all disagreements.

Nineteen-year-old Michael Kesinger of Elk Grove, Calif. bummed a cigarette from 
a Forest Service law enforcement officer — who confirmed his age first — after 
hitching rides to his

Acid tests

2011-06-29 Thread res...@comcast.net





Acid tests

economist.com | Jun 23rd 2011   

 

THE psychedelic era of the 1960s is remembered for its music, its art and, of 
course, its drugs. Its science is somewhat further down the list. But before 
the rise of the counterculture, researchers had been studying LSD as a 
treatment for everything from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder 
(OCD), with promising results.

Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard University, was one of the best-known 
workers in the field, but it was also he who was widely blamed for discrediting 
it, by his unconventional research methods and his lax handling of drugs. Now, 
the details of Leary’s research will be made public, with the recent purchase 
of his papers by the New York Public Library. These papers will be interesting 
not only culturally, but also scientifically, as they reflect what happened 
between the early medical promise of hallucinogens and their subsequent 
blacklisting by authorities around the world.

American researchers began experimenting with LSD in 1949, at first using it to 
simulate mental illness. Once its psychedelic effects were realised, they then 
tried it in psychotherapy and as a treatment for alcoholism, for which it 
became known at the time as a miracle cure.

By 1965 over 1,000 papers had been published describing positive results for 
LSD therapy. It, and its close chemical relative psilocybin, isolated from 
hallucinogenic mushrooms, were reported as having potential for treating 
anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, bereavement and even sexual dysfunction. 
Unfortunately, most of the studies that came to these conclusions were flawed: 
many results were anecdotal, and control groups were not established to take 
account of the placebo effect.

Still, the field was ripe for further study. But alongside growing public fear 
of LSD, Leary’s leadership had become a liability. He was seen less and less as 
a disinterested researcher, and more and more as a propagandist. In 1962, amid 
wide publicity, the Harvard Psilocybin Project was shut down. Leary took his 
research to an estate in upstate New York, where he also hosted a stream of 
drug parties. Eventually both LSD and psilocybin were proscribed.

Which was a pity because, like many other drugs the authorities have taken 
against as a result of their recreational uses, hallucinogens have medical 
applications as well. But time heals all wounds and now, cautiously, study of 
the medical use of hallucinogens is returning.

Psilocybin has shown promise in treating forms of OCD that are resistant to 
other therapies, in relieving cluster headaches (a common form of chronic 
headache) and in alleviating the anxiety experienced by terminally ill cancer 
patients. The first clinical study of LSD in over 35 years, also on terminally 
ill patients, is expected to finish this summer. Peter Gasser, the Swiss doctor 
leading the experiment, says that a combination of LSD and psychotherapy 
reduced anxiety levels of all 12 participants in the study, though the 
statistical significance of the data has yet to be analysed.

Research into LSD is not confined to medicine. Franz Vollenweider, of the 
Heffter Research Institute in Zurich, for example, is scanning people’s brains 
to try to understand how hallucinogenic drugs cause changes in consciousness.

And biotechnology may lead to a new generation of hallucinogenic drugs. Edwin 
Wintermute and his colleagues at Harvard have engineered yeast cells to carry 
out two of six steps in the pathway needed to make lysergic acid, the precursor 
of LSD. They hope to add the other four shortly. Once the pathway has been 
created, it can be tweaked. That might result in LSD-like drugs that are better 
than the original.

Even if that does not happen, making lysergic acid in yeast is still a good 
idea. The chemical is used as the starting point for other drugs, including 
nicergoline, a treatment for senile dementia. The current process for 
manufacturing it is a rather messy one involving ergot, a parasite of rye.

It may, of course, be that LSD has no clinical uses. Even when no stigma 
attaches to the drugs involved, most clinical trials end in failure. But it is 
worth seeing whether LSD might fulfil its early promise. And if the publication 
of Leary’s archive speeds that process up by exorcising a ghost that still 
haunts LSD research, then the New York Public Library will have done the world 
a service.

LSD Alleviates 'Suicide Headaches'

LSD Alleviates 'Suicide Headaches'

by Kai Kupferschmidt, news.sciencemag.org
June 27th 2011 12:38 PM

BERLIN—Patients suffering from the agony of cluster headaches will take
anything to dull the pain, even LSD, it turns out. Results from a pilot study
presented here on Saturday at the International Headache Congress reveal that
six patients treated with 2-bromo-LSD, a nonhallucinogenic analog of LSD,
showed a significant reduction in cluster headaches per day; some were free of
the attacks for weeks or months.

Some of these patients are still reporting significant relief more than a year
after they were treated with the compound, says John Halpern, a psychiatrist
at Harvard Medical School in Boston and one of the investigators involved in
the study. Nobody has ever reported these kinds of results.

Cluster headaches, sometimes referred to as suicide headaches because of the
almost unbearable pain they cause sufferers, usually involve just one side of
the face; patients often liken the pain to someone trying to pull their eye out
for hours. They can occur in bouts lasting many weeks, with several attacks a
day.

What causes these attacks is still not clear, says Peter Goadsby, a headache
expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who is not connected
with the research. But recent studies suggest that changes in the structure of
the hypothalamus are involved. Because that part of the brain is responsible
for, among other things, circadian rhythms, the daily cycle of our body that
dictates when we sleep but also regulates body temperature and blood pressure,
it could explain the periodicity of attacks and why they seem to occur
particularly often around the solstices.

Although there is no cure, patients can sometimes cure the headache by inhaling
pure oxygen at the onset of an attack. Other treatments include blocking
calcium channels with the drug verapamil—which is used for cardiac
arrhythmia—or taking triptans, also used for migraines. Some patients have also
reported finding relief in hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin.

Those reports intrigued Torsten Passie, a psychiatrist at the Hannover Medical
School in Germany and an expert on LSD. So he, Halpern, and colleagues decided
to test 2-bromo-LSD (BOL), which was developed by Sandoz, the Swiss company
that discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD and marketed it as a drug for
some time, as a kind of placebo compound in LSD trials.

At the conference, Halpern and Passie presented the data of six patients with
severe cluster headache who were given BOL once every 5 days for a total of
three doses. All patients reported a reduction in frequency of attacks, and
five patients reported having no attacks for months afterward.

There seems to be a long-term prophylactic effect that we cannot explain,
Halpern says. The team has since treated a seventh patient with similar
results. Compared to what these headache sufferers currently have available to
them, this is quite remarkable. It could lead to a near-cure-like treatment,
Halpern says. He and Passie have founded a company called Entheogen Corp. to
fund further research and are hoping to start a phase II clinical trial with 50
patients later this year.

Goadsby points to shortcomings in the research, however. These are just a few
patients in a completely unblinded study; you would certainly expect some
placebo effect, he says. Indeed, Goadsby has done a double-blind study
comparing pure oxygen and air in the treatment of cluster headache. Twenty
percent of the patients treated with air, the placebo, reported pain reduction.
Because cluster headaches can occur in episodes and then vanish again for
months or years, it is also difficult to distinguish a drug's long-term effect
from normal attack patterns, Goadsby cautions. Still, he says, this is an
interesting study, and it certainly warrants further investigation.

Original Page:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/lsd-alleviates-suicide-headaches.html?ref=hp

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The Nation’s Tom Hayden falsifies Obama ’s Afghanistan plan





The Nation’s Tom Hayden falsifies Obama’s Afghanistan plan

by David Walsh, wsws.org
June 27th 2011  

 

On the Nation web site June 23, Tom Hayden, veteran of the 1960s protest 
movements and longtime Democratic Party operative, posted a dishonest and 
contemptible article about President Barack Obama’s speech the night before on 
the war in Afghanistan.

Hayden makes entirely unwarranted claims about the so-called withdrawal plan 
and then attributes the “de-escalation” to pressure from a “peace movement” 
that is largely the product of his imagination.

Obama made his deceitful speech last Wednesday in the hope of assuaging and 
diverting growing opposition to the war, at least through the November 2012 
elections, with his claims that the “tide of war is receding” and “the light of 
a secure peace can be seen in the distance.”

In reality, by the end of 2012, assuming Obama makes good on his promises, 
there will be twice the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan as there were 
when Obama took office. His administration has escalated the war, sharply 
increasing the levels of violence and misery as well as the bitter Afghan 
resistance.

No one should be fooled for an instant. The US military plans to drown the 
Afghan insurgency against the neocolonial occupation in rivers of blood.

Tom Hayden has a political history that now spans half a century. Born in 
Detroit in 1939 and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Hayden, while not 
precisely one of those individuals who is “famous for being famous,” acquired a 
reputation decades ago for radicalism that is undeserved and which has hung 
about him far too long. In reality, if one examines Hayden’s opinions and 
actions, he clearly belongs to the moderate flank of the Democratic Party.

He was a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a 
principal author of the “Port Huron Statement” in June 1962, the organization’s 
initiating manifesto. No doubt the document reflected the increasing 
restiveness of students after the pervasive conformism and official 
anticommunism of the 1950s. However, its political impact was limited at the 
time; the statement’s significance emerged more in historical retrospect, in 
the light of the student radicalization later in the decade.

A mix of influences can be found in the manifesto, which placed considerable 
emphasis on personal alienation and dissatisfaction, including existentialism 
and the left sociology of the C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) variety. 
Hayden also articulated concerns similar to those outlined in Herbert Marcuse’s 
One-Dimensional Man (1964) about the impossibility of resistance in America, 
claiming that “the dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds 
of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or 
entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human 
expectancies.”

The 1962 statement might be considered one of the founding documents of 
identity politics. Inevitably linked to that was its insistence on the need to 
orient toward the Democratic Party. It called on “publicly disinherited 
groups”—which the document enumerated as “Negroes, peace protesters, labor 
unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals”—“to demand a Democratic 
Party responsible to their interests.”

The anticommunist Walter Reuther leadership of the United Auto Workers 
collaborated closely with Hayden and the other SDS founders, funding a range of 
activities, including the 1962 conference, held at the UAW summer camp in Port 
Huron, Michigan.

“SDS leaders, in return, did their best to shape a program that they believed 
would please the UAW. SDS’s 1962 ‘Port Huron Statement,’ for example, clearly 
reflected the UAW’s influence.” (The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 
1945-1968, Kevin Boyle)

The subsequent leftward turn of SDS (with the rise to prominence of Maoist and 
anarchist elements), as mass antiwar protests erupted in the late 1960s, went 
very much against Hayden’s wishes. He was reluctantly drawn into the protest 
movement, eventually becoming one of the Chicago Seven, famously charged with 
conspiracy related to violence outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention.

Hayden returned to his natural home, Democratic Party electoral politics, in 
the mid-1970s, as the wave of radicalization subsided. After unsuccessfully 
contesting the 1976 Democratic primary in California against the sitting US 
senator, John Tunney, Hayden ran for and won a seat as a Democrat in the 
California State Assembly (1982-92) and later the

Commemorations of the 40th Anniversary of Jim Morrison's death





Commemorations of the 40th Anniversary of Jim Morrison's death

m.examiner.com | Jun 25th 2011 10:08 AM 

 

One week until the 40th anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death and fans worldwide 
have found ways to commemorate the occasion, and you don’t even have to be in 
Paris!

July 2nd

Stoned Immaculate , a German Doors tribute band will be playing at The Lezard 
King Bar in Paris.

The American Night , from Seattle, WA, will be playing shows on both July 2nd 
and 3rd, see The American Night Facebook page or The American Night’s website 
for more information.

July 3rd

The Doors Examiner will be doing articles from Paris that will include 
interviews, reviews and whatever happens!

I’ve been looking forward to this one, the Jim Morrison Project opens its 
virtual doors July 3rd. Full Story 





Original Page: 
http://m.examiner.com/examiner/pm_60823/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=hI8H41rN

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Why Prescription Ecstasy or LSD Could Happen Much Sooner Than You Think






Why Prescription Ecstasy or LSD Could Happen Much Sooner Than You Think

by Anneli Rufus, alternet.org
June 24th 2011 			 			 			 			   

Let's say an abuse-ridden childhood has left you with PTSD that sparks panic  
whenever you hear shouts, even on TV. Or let's say a bad accident has  
saddled you with crippling anxiety and chronic pain. Now let's say that you  
could ease -- or even cure -- these woes with prescription psiloscybin.  
Prescription ecstasy. Prescription LSD.


If a growing phalanx of scientists get their way, those prescriptions could  
be yours within 10 years. Research into the medical benefits of psychedelic  
drugs is booming. An April conference on the subject at Great Britain's  
University of Kent featured lectures on such topics as Ketamine  
Psychotherapy and Ayahuasca in the Contemporary World.


Leading this wave is the Boston-based Multidisciplinary Association for  
Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), whose executive director Rick Doblin spoke at  
that conference. MAPS researchers have spent 15 years conducting  
international clinical trials whose results indicate that LSD and psilocybin  
counteract depression and anxiety and are effective pain-management tools  
while MDMA (ecstasy) conquers fear. Just this month, the Israeli Ministry of  
Health approved a new MAPS study using MDMA to treat PTSD.


Time is on our side, Doblin says. The world is full of aging baby boomers  
who are looking forward to psychedelic retirement and psychedelic hospice.


They had psychedelic experiences in their youth that were useful to them.  
They gave up the drugs for family and career. Now they're thinking back to  
those valuable experiences and they want to get re-engaged.


But this isn't about ex-hippies seeking free highs. Rather, it's about  
mainstreaming these drugs, which MAPS does by focusing on medical uses,  
which in our culture is the most likely way to create new legal contexts,  
because there is a love affair with medicine in this culture. There's a  
constant interest in whatever's the latest from the scientific lab.


It's not about money. Costing nearly nothing to manufacture, these aren't  
the kind of drugs that you need to take every day for the rest of your  
life. Instead, it's about using cutting-edge technology to prove what  
millions around the world have been saying for thousands of years: This  
stuff gets to your head.


As a teenager in the early 1970s, Doblin first learned that psychedelics  
were being used to enhance art, spirituality and psychology.


Then it all got shut down.

Those damn hippie freaks.

People using psychedelics had accidents and did stupid things and ended up  
dying or going nuts. A bunch of famous people had extremely idealistic views  
that weren't particularly practical and weren't particularly patient.  
Timothy Leary and his ilk were making exaggerated claims, saying that if you  
do psychedelics you're more enlightened than others; if you do psychedelics  
you're better than others. One of that era's biggest mistakes was Leary  
saying turn on, tune in, drop out.


Richard Nixon called Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. Hello,  
backlash. Hello, War on Drugs.


The government came out with its own exaggerated claims, saying that if you  
took these drugs you'd have deformed babies and brain-cell death. We now  
know that it isn't true, but back then it launched this huge cultural clash.  
You might say society had a really bad trip.


Research to the rescue. High-tech brain scans reveal that psilocybin  
inhibits blood flow in parts of the brain that regulate sensory input. Less  
blood flow means less regulation. Flooded with perceptions, a psilocybinized  
brain can help PTSD patients reprogram their fears, Doblin says. New tools  
also provide new insight into LSD's ego-dissolving catharsis effect. And  
the ecstasy chemistry: MDMA reduces blood flow in the fear-processing  
amygdala while increasing blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, which  
facilitates our ability to put things into context.


With MDMA, the fear circuitry is reduced, Doblin explains. This helps PTSD  
patients remember and re-examine long-buried aspects of their traumas. Aided  
by MDMA, these memories don't immediately go straight to fear. Say you  
were traumatized by a bat-wielding, red-hatted assailant. Under MDMA, the  
neural pathways connecting bats, red hats and fear are not so strong.  
Recontextualized in an MDMA-activated prefrontal cortex, triggers lose their  
power -- sometimes forever, he says.


Under the influence of MDMA, people can make emotional changes that persist  
after the MDMA is out of their systems. On MDMA, you operate on this much  
smoother level, and then you lose it -- but not all of it.

Why feminists should listen to sex workers





Why feminists should listen to sex workers

thescavenger.net | Jun 11th 2011

 

Sex workers face deep-seated stigmas which mean that if we don’t disclose our 
stories of tragedy and the demeaning experiences we have faced we run the risk 
of not being believed by many in the feminist movement. This has to stop, 
because we don’t want to perform our ‘tragedy porn’ for you, writes Elena 
Jeffreys.

This is an edited version of a talk given by Elena Jeffreys, national president 
of Scarlet Alliance, at the Feminist Futures conference in Melbourne, Australia 
28-29 May 2011 on the panel Why Feminism Matters.

Scarlet Alliance is a national peak body of Australian sex workers and sex 
worker organisations, with membership open to all sex workers, past and 
present. Scarlet Alliance embodies over two decades’ history of formal sex 
worker peer organising in Australia by the funded and unfunded sex worker 
groups across the country.

Those groups do outreach, community development, health promotion, STI and HIV 
prevention, support for people affected by anti-trafficking policies, 
industrial relations advocacy, financial and economic justice advocacy, 
housing, welfare, legal and police referrals, health and human rights policy, 
over 20,000 occasions of direct hands on service delivery to sex workers in 
Australia in any given year, and participate in their national peak body to 
ensure that all of this information is turned into strong messages of 
representation at a national level. Such as here.

We take our sex worker peer education, sex worker organising, activism and 
politics very seriously. This is not a joke. This is not an academic 
indulgence. Sex worker activism is not a career path. It’s a Saturday: no one 
is paying us to be here. We are not here to further our careers and we are not 
trying to salvage the whore stigma in our lives and professionalise our CV by 
doing sex worker activism.

Activism is not a cop out from the day-to-day discrimination we face as sex 
workers. Our sex worker activism could also be called labour organising, and 
without it we wouldn’t have any rights.

Everything that sex workers have won in terms of work conditions, dignity, 
health and access to services, we have won because we have fought for it 
ourselves.

Do you believe me?

I have the responsibility, as the national president of the Australian Sex 
Workers Association, to be able to tell you what the advocacy message of sex 
workers is.

Some within feminist movement have labelled those of us who do the advocacy in 
the sex worker rights movement as “privileged” and “happy hookers” who are 
unable to understand the hardships that sex workers who are not “us” face. ‘

Do not assume anything about the sex workers you are meeting at the Scarlet 
Alliance conference this weekend. Do not assume anything about the sex workers 
you meet on Facebook, who you see in the media, who you see doing advocacy.

Do not assume we have not been victims of assault, discrimination, family 
breakdown, abuse, violence, bad work conditions, domestic violence, poverty, 
police corruption or crime. We are people, just like you, who have faced 
everything in a life that any human being faces.

But as sex workers we also face deep-seated stigmas which mean that if we don’t 
disclose to you our stories of tragedy and the demeaning experiences we have 
faced we run the risk of not being believed by you.

This is what we call “tragedy porn”: A desire in the feminist movement to hear 
tragic stories of hardship from sex workers, and when we don’t tell them, we 
face the accusation that we are covering up the “truth” about sex work.

For example when we speak about the lack of incidents of trafficking in the sex 
industry, we are accused of being in denial about migrant sex workers' lives.

Or when we present actual statistics about drug use in the sex industry, we are 
told that we are ignoring or lying about drug use in sex work.

We are expected to ‘perform’ stereotypical tragedy porn for feminist audiences 
and when we don’t we are disbelieved.

Well I am going to tell you something that you may not have considered.

We don’t want to perform for you.

We shouldn’t have to use arenas such as this as a public counselling or debrief 
space for the difficulties of our lives just so that you will believe us when 
we say we want human rights.

And we don’t want the feminist community to expect, reward, or clap a person 
when they break down describing all the negative experiences they have had in 
their lives.

People who need counselling and support to work through

A Bookseller In The City





A Bookseller In The City

undiepress.com | Sep 15th 2010  

 

Confessions of an Indie Bookstore Clerk

by Karen Lillis. Updated monthly.

* * *

From age 27 (the age that rock stars die) to age 35 (the age that women stop 
stating their real age), I had the privilege of working in St Mark’s Bookshop 
in Manhattan’s East Village. Books had always mattered to me and still matter 
to me, but it was never more true than during those years. During my 
near-decade as a bookstore clerk (1997-2005), books were the stuff of my daily 
life, and not only because of the obvious over-the-counter transactions. My 
friends were bookshop employees and bookstore hounds, and my friendships 
revolved around the books we recommended to each other, enthused about, lent 
out, insisted be read, threw across the room, and gave each other with 
heartfelt inscriptions. When I was in the red, I looked for ways to sell books 
on the side of my dayjob as a bookseller. My therapy sessions usually started 
with, “So, I’m reading this new book….” My retirement account was a pile of 
stowed-away books which I hoped would increase in value. Days off were often 
spent at used bookstores. Weeks off were spent in the bookstores of other 
cities: A cross-country reading tour with my self-published novel, or the time 
that I slept in a famous European bookstore for eight nights. My 29th year was 
spent assembling my novel with gluestick and paper and staples, over and over. 
My 30th birthday was spent in a room full of a certain bookseller’s favorite 
first editions. To travel at Christmas was to take a cab to Penn Station with 
a large suitcase filled with gift-wrapped books and a small backpack of 
clothes. My most steady companion during those years was a seldom-employed 
poet who spent almost as much time browsing in bookstores as I did working in 
one, and had a knack for befriending bookstore clerks like me.

The application at St Mark’s was very simple. The front desk clerk handed you a 
xeroxed page, which you could fill out in the store or at home. One side asked 
for your contact information, education, references, and any prior bookstore 
experience you’d had. Then it asked you to make two lists on the blank 
backside: A list of your 10 favorite books, and a list of 10 books you thought 
a good bookstore should have. Seemingly easy and innocuous, these lists were 
the first line of weeding, and showed the owners how well you understood what 
they were selling.

So what were they selling? One time a customer, a middle-aged lady who seemed 
bright but possibly from out of town, walked around the shop in bewilderment 
for a while before asking me, “What is the theme of this bookstore?” Not 
wanting to hesitate, I quickly came up with, “Basically, post-chaos theory.” I 
came to think of St Mark’s (which opened in 1977) as one of the two beacon 
bookstores of counter culture America, the other being San Francisco’s City 
Lights. They were like two bookends, holding up the literary revolution that 
the Beats had started in the 1950s and Grove Press had continued in the ‘60s. 
In addition to lefty non-fiction, edgy novels, and French philosophers we 
couldn’t restock fast enough, St Mark’s had a formidable paperback poetry 
section, which took up something like seven cases of five shelves each, not 
including anthologies or new titles. But in the front of the store, they 
featured a display of coffee-table sized photography and design books, 
including the popular Taschen art porn titles like New York Girls and Tokyo 
Lucky Hole. At seventy-five dollars and up, they allowed the store a decent 
profit—in a retail sector that offered far less of a profit margin than most. 
Sometimes Diana the magazine buyer, who’d been at the store for many years, 
likened the store’s business model to the corner magazine shops that dotted the 
New York landscape: “They pay their rent with cigarettes and porn mags, and 
after that they can sell whatever else they want to.”

Pornography in support of poetry. This was the successful model that Barney 
Rosset of Grove Press had seized upon, after watching the Howl trial of 1957 
and seeing it win not only a victory for freedom of speech, but a victory of 
sales and advertising for publisher City Lights. Rosset proceeded to 
systematically take to trial Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked 
Lunch, and others–winning their right to be published and largely putting 
literary censorship in America to an end. Concurrently, Rosset’s Grove Press 
and Evergreen Review (not to mention the Beats themselves) created a taste for 
the sensational

A voice for change - the 60s, the civil rights movement and today





A voice for change - the 60s, the civil rights movement and today *UPDATED

by Tim Loc, alhambrasource.org  

 

Activist Carlos Montes, a familiar face in the 1960s Chicano Movement, moved to 
Alhambra 20 years ago because he saw it as a peaceful enclave that was close to 
his homebase of East Los Angeles. He had a rude awakening on May 17 when the 
FBI and deputies from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department executed a search 
warrant on his home. He was arrested after the search turned up a firearm. 
Montes speaks to The Alhambra Source on his history with activism, and what he 
alleges is the FBI’s agenda of targeting activists like him.

You were a co-founder of the Brown Berets. How did it begin?

It started as a civic youth group. It became the Young Chicanos for Community 
Action, and then it got more involved in direct grassroots organizing. Then it 
became the Brown Berets, and we dealt with the issues of education and police 
brutality. It started small, but once it took on a broader view of the 
political situation it grew really fast. It became part of the movement of the 
60s. I grew up in East LA, so I saw the police mistreating the youth. We’d 
cruise down Whittier Boulevard with the music on in the car and we would be 
harassed by the sheriffs. And in the schools the students were mistreated and 
the classes were overcrowded.

You were among the leaders of the school walkouts in 68. When you look at the 
quality of education today, in particular for Hispanic and Latino students, do 
you think anything has changed?

We’ve made some gains, but it looks like recently we’ve been losing ground. The 
original demands of the walkouts was that we wanted ethnic studies and 
bilingual education. We wanted teachers and administrators that reflected our 
backgrounds. We’ve gotten a lot of that, but still have the issue that public 
education is underfunded. It’s under attack by those who want to privatize it. 
And there’s also the dropout rates, and the wide achievement gaps. The 
Mexican-American youths, the Latino youths, and the Chicano youths – they’re 
still behind in reading and math. And with college admissions…well, back then 
it was even worse. I mean we weren’t even going to college. We were being 
channeled into certain trades and into the military.

Activism must be so different these days. People have so much more access to 
information.

It’s absolutely true. There’s more information. I can only remember one book 
from back then that dealt with our history – Carey McWilliams’ “North From 
Mexico.” Now we have hundreds of books, magazines and websites. And there’s 
Facebook and Myspace. The youths and organizers using Facebook and email have 
been able to get more people involved, and faster. Back then we didn’t have 
cell-phones [laughs]. We organized by getting into a car and driving to each 
community. But you know what, the best organizing is done face-to-face.

The Committee to Stop FBI Repression alleges that search warrants have been 
executed for you and similar activists. What led to this?

The motive is political persecution. Twenty-plus activists, back in September, 
had their homes raided by the FBI. They had their computers and documents 
confiscated. It dealt with their involvement with Palestine and Colombia. And 
of course they all refused and got lawyers and organized the committee. I was 
listed in one of the search warrants that was presented at a raid at the 
anti-war committee in Minneapolis. That’s how I got hooked into this thing.

How does Palestine and Colombia figure into this?

Activists were openly denouncing US policies, starting with Iraq and 
Afghanistan. We also looked at the US support for Israel and its treatment of 
the Palestinian people. One of the groups we formed – it was in Chicago – was 
called the Palestine Solidarity Group. It organizes tours for people to go to 
Palestine and come back to the US to speak about it in forums and newspapers. I 
myself went to Colombia and did the same thing. I met with human rights 
activists and labor activists. When I came back to LA I organized several 
forums. We denounced the US policy of – specifically in Colombia – supporting 
what they call Plan Colombia, where they give a billion dollars a year to the 
Colombian government under the guise of fighting the drug war. In reality, 
however, the money is going to the Colombian military, which is using it to 
fight its own people. Human rights activists are being kidnapped and 
assassinated.

The FBI is using the pretext of our solidarity work in Palestine or Colombia to 
persecute us. They say

50 years later, youth and elders keep the spirit of the Freedom Rides alive






50 years later, youth and elders keep the spirit of the Freedom Rides alive

by Bridge the Gulf, southernstudies.org
June 20th 2011 11:05 AM 			 			 			 			   By Rosana Cruz, Bridge the  
Gulf 

In the dim light of a projector, rapt faces took in the solemn image of a  
bus in flames. On screen, a multiracial group of youth crawled in the grass,  
coughing and choking from the smoke of the blaze behind them. This was just  
the first in a series of attacks that the Freedom Riders of 1961 faced as  
they made their way through the South. Fifty years later, at the RAE House  
in New Orleans, the lessons and struggles of these youth came alive to a  
multi-generational, multi-racial audience carrying on the current-day fight  
for justice.


Back then they would sic dogs on you and you couldn't ride on those buses  
but today we have the school-to-prison pipeline, says Briana O'Neal after  
the viewing of Freedom Riders, a new Firelight Media documentary directed  
by Stanley Nelson. The viewing was co-hosted by Voice of the Ex-offender  
(VOTE, where I am associate director) and Fyre Youth Squad. VOTE and FYS  
invited a multigenerational audience to share their reflections after the  
viewing the powerful documentary. This dialogue was critical for us because  
we wanted to go beyond remembering history, and explore how lessons from the  
Freedom Rides inform our work today.


What were the Freedom Rides really?

The Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement is a story that has survived  
over the decades, but the details have faded with time. Many viewers, even  
those alive at the time of the original Freedom Rides, said that they did  
not know the true depth and scope and the extreme terror brought against  
these brave young Riders.


The film describes the Freedom Rides as six months in 1961 that changed  
America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white  
Americans risked their lives -- and many endured savage beatings and  
imprisonment -- for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they  
journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the  
Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely  
testing their belief in nonviolent activism.


The documentary details the planning and execution of the trips (which were  
initially designed to last two weeks) and the ensuing campaign of terror  
that white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan and others, including  
government officials, waged against the swelling movement of riders. The  
original group was comprised of a few dozen youth from around the country.  
The more violence the Freedom Riders faced, thwarting the buses progress,  
the more young people put themselves in the line of fire. These youth took  
on a strong leadership role and, by continuing on with the dangerous rides,  
challenged the Kennedy brothers and even Rev. Dr. King himself, who urged a  
more moderate strategy. It is a story filled with inspiring moments as well  
as brilliant strategy.


I'd heard the Freedom Rider story but never heard the story told this way,  
shared Fyre Youth Squad member Debbie Carey. I appreciate this documentary  
because I felt like I was told the truth about the movement, about young  
people's contributions to the movement. I even experienced for the first  
time Dr. King being presented as human as the rest of us. Everyone I know  
made MLK seem like he was a supernatural hero, but in this documentary it  
revealed his fear and young people's courage.


And what now?

Perhaps what resonated most for audience members, young and old alike, was  
the sense that, especially in current day New Orleans, the need to stand up  
for justice is still so urgent. Back at the time of the Civil Rights  
struggle, we did a lot of stuff in New Orleans. We walked on Canal Street.  
We boycotted. We went into the white stores. Our teachers, our elders, they  
encouraged us to see ourselves, even though we were young black men at the  
time, just high school students, they taught us to see ourselves as full  
citizens, remembers Mr. Erroll Lewis, a member of VOTE. Young people are  
still facing the challenge of discrimination. We have a responsibility to  
make sure that message to stand up, to demand our rights, is alive today.


The Freedom Riders event was originally conceived to bring different age  
groups of activists and community members together to commemorate and  
discuss the historic rides. But on a deeper level, we wanted to ask each  
other, would you have gotten on that bus? said Norris Henderson, director  
of VOTE. We didn't know where the conversation was going to take us.


Briana O'Neal responded, I was asked at the end of the

Legend of a mind: The archives of Timothy Leary





Legend of a mind: The archives of Timothy Leary

by David Presti, blogs.berkeley.edu
June 23rd 2011  

 

Hooray for public libraries!  Last week the New York Public Library announced 
its acquisition of the personal archives of Timothy Leary (1920-1996) (1).  
While many students in college today do not know who he is, Timothy Leary is 
without a doubt one of UC Berkeley’s most famous graduates.  He received his 
PhD in psychology at Cal in 1950.  The title of his dissertation, which has 
gone missing from the shelves of the various UCB campus libraries, but can be 
requested from the UC library storage warehouse and perused in-house, is The 
social dimensions of personality: group process and structure.  It is a 
sophisticated analysis of interpersonal interactions during group psychotherapy 
sessions.  Following his doctorate, he taught psychology at Cal and other 
places for several years, before moving to become director of psychological 
research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in nearby Oakland, California.  
During this period he wrote a classic book on the quantitative measurement and 
modeling of personality, a subject in which he was a pioneer.  His 
accomplishments got him invited to teach at Harvard University, and in 1959 he 
returned to his native Massachusetts to assume a teaching and research position 
there.  What happened thereafter has become the stuff of legend.

In 1960 Leary encountered the powerful mind-altering properties of Psilocybe 
mushrooms, after the shamanic use of these mushrooms was revealed to 
contemporary society in a Life magazine article published in 1957.  The article 
had been written by Gordon Wasson, a New York City bank executive and mushroom 
scholar, after receiving knowledge of the therapeutic use of these mushrooms 
from Maria Sabina, a Mazatec healer from southern Mexico.  Being a psychologist 
interested in the nature of the human mind, Leary was, to say the least, 
impressed by his encounter with what was obviously a most powerful probe of the 
human psyche.  He decided to focus his research in this area and began a series 
of projects at Harvard investigating the effects and potential therapeutic 
benefits of psilocybin, the primary psychoactive chemical identified from 
Psilocybe psychedelic mushrooms.  Psilocybin had recently been identified by 
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who in 1943 discovered the powerful 
psychoactive effects of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide).  In those days, the 
use of such substances was not controlled by any laws, and LSD was already the 
subject of extensive and highly regarded clinical study in the nascent 
discipline of biological psychiatry.  Leary collaborated with others at Harvard 
to conduct and accomplish successful research, but the psychological complexity 
and turmoil precipitated by work with such powerful substances eventually led 
to Leary and his psychologist colleague Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) getting 
kicked out of the University in 1963.  Some of this era has been documented in 
two excellent recent books (2,3).

Unfettered by the etiquette of the Academy, Leary became a free agent and 
attracted a great deal of media attention with his flamboyant and provocative 
style.  He gave numerous public lectures promoting personal experimentation 
with psychedelic substances, as well as scientific and clinical research.   He 
developed close relationships with folks like Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, 
and John Lennon.  In 1968, The Moody Blues even recorded a song about him, 
entitled Legend of a Mind.  Arrested for possession of marijuana, he received a 
draconian jail sentence, appealed, had the conviction overturned, was arrested 
again for marijuana possession, jailed, escaped in 1970, left the country, was 
captured, brought back to the US, imprisoned again in 1973, and released in 
1976.  President Richard Nixon, so goes the legend, is said to have referred to 
him as the most dangerous man in America.  A wild ride, indeed!

Psychedelics are substances of great power.  Their effects can range from 
terrifying to ecstatic.  They may facilitate great psychological healing, but 
also trigger or exacerbate psychological problems.  Various sectors of human 
society have utilized them, in their plant or mushroom forms, for centuries at 
least, and quite possibly for millennia, for their healing potential.  This 
potential is conferred upon them by the power they have to open the human 
psyche, with all the risks that may come from delving deeply into the world of 
the mind.  In their use by indigenous shamans, be it Mazatec mushroom

A voice for change - the 60s, the civil rights movement and today





A voice for change - the 60s, the civil rights movement and today

by Tim Loc, alhambrasource.org  

 

Activist Carlos Montes, a familiar face in the 1960s Chicano Movement, moved to 
Alhambra 20 years ago because he saw it as a peaceful enclave that was close to 
his homebase of East Los Angeles. He had a rude awakening on May 17 when the 
FBI and deputies from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department executed a search 
warrant on his home. He was arrested after the search turned up a firearm. 
Montes speaks to The Alhambra Source on his history with activism, and what he 
alleges is the FBI’s agenda of targeting activists like him.

You were a co-founder of the Brown Berets. How did it begin?

It started as a civic youth group. It became the Young Chicanos for Community 
Action, and then it got more involved in direct grassroots organizing. Then it 
became the Brown Berets, and we dealt with the issues of education and police 
brutality. It started small, but once it took on a broader view of the 
political situation it grew really fast. It became part of the movement of the 
60s. I grew up in East LA, so I saw the police mistreating the youth. We’d 
cruise down Whittier Boulevard with the music on in the car and we would be 
harassed by the sheriffs. And in the schools the students were mistreated and 
the classes were overcrowded.

You were among the leaders of the school walkouts in 68. When you look at the 
quality of education today, in particular for Hispanic and Latino students, do 
you think anything has changed?

We’ve made some gains, but it looks like recently we’ve been losing ground. The 
original demands of the walkouts was that we wanted ethnic studies and 
bilingual education. We wanted teachers and administrators that reflected our 
backgrounds. We’ve gotten a lot of that, but still have the issue that public 
education is underfunded. It’s under attack by those who want to privatize it. 
And there’s also the dropout rates, and the wide achievement gaps. The 
Mexican-American youths, the Latino youths, and the Chicano youths – they’re 
still behind in reading and math. And with college admissions…well, back then 
it was even worse. I mean we weren’t even going to college. We were being 
channeled into certain trades and into the military.

Activism must be so different these days. People have so much more access to 
information.

It’s absolutely true. There’s more information. I can only remember one book 
from back then that dealt with our history – Carey McWilliams’ “North From 
Mexico.” Now we have hundreds of books, magazines and websites. And there’s 
Facebook and Myspace. The youths and organizers using Facebook and email have 
been able to get more people involved, and faster. Back then we didn’t have 
cell-phones [laughs]. We organized by getting into a car and driving to each 
community. But you know what, the best organizing is done face-to-face.

The Committee to Stop FBI Repression alleges that search warrants have been 
executed for you and similar activists. What led to this?

The motive is political persecution. Twenty-plus activists, back in September, 
had their homes raided by the FBI. They had their computers and documents 
confiscated. It dealt with their involvement with Palestine and Columbia. And 
of course they all refused and got lawyers and organized the committee. I was 
listed in one of the search warrants that was presented at a raid at the 
anti-war committee in Minneapolis. That’s how I got hooked into this thing.

How does Palestine and Columbia figure into this?

Activists were openly denouncing US policies, starting with Iraq and 
Afghanistan. We also looked at the US support for Israel and its treatment of 
the Palestinian people. One of the groups we formed – it was in Chicago – was 
called the Palestine Solidarity Group. It organizes tours for people to go to 
Palestine and come back to the US to speak about it in forums and newspapers. I 
myself went to Columbia and did the same thing. I met with human rights 
activists and labor activists. When I came back to LA I organized several 
forums. We denounced the US policy of – specifically in Columbia – supporting 
what they call Plan Columbia, where they give a billion dollars a year to the 
Columbian government under the guise of fighting the drug war. In reality, 
however, the money is going to the Columbian military, which is using it to 
fight its own people. Human rights activists are being kidnapped and 
assassinated.

The FBI is using the pretext of our solidarity work in Palestine or Columbia to 
persecute us. They say we’re

New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers





New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers

by PATRICIA COHEN, nytimes.com
June 15th 2011  

 

When the Harvard psychologist and psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary first met 
the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960, he welcomed Ginsberg’s participation in 
the drug experiments he was conducting at the university.

“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social 
setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his 
experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. 
At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then 
“Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great 
man.”

Ginsberg’s “session record,” composed for Leary’s research, was in one of the 
335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs and more that the New York Public 
Library is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary estate. 
The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a 
drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software 
designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.

The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 
months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, 
however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of 
the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s.

Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in 
California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand 
archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back 
then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”

Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was 
labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was 
present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of 
letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack 
Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. 
Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.

“How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent 
Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills,” Kerouac wrote Leary, referring to psilocybin. 
“Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a 
whole novel in a month.”

Denis Berry, a trustee of the Leary estate, said that the library paid $900,000 
for the collection, some of which is being donated back to finance the 
processing of the material. The rest will pay the estate’s caretakers and then 
be divided among Leary’s surviving children and grandchildren. Ms. Berry said 
the estate had been looking for a buyer for the archive for years.

William Stingone, curator of manuscripts at the library, predicted that the 
collection would help researchers get beyond the “myth making” around ’60s 
figures. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get to some of the truth of it here,” he 
said.

The complete documentation of Leary’s early experiments with psychotropic 
drugs, for example, can allow scholars to assess the importance of that work in 
light of current clinical research on LSD, Mr. Stingone said. Ms. Berry called 
the Harvard data “the missing link.”

The meeting between Ginsberg and Leary marked an anchor point in the history of 
the 1960s drug-soaked counterculture. Leary, the credentialed purveyor of 
hallucinatory drugs, was suddenly invited into the center of the artistic, 
social and sexual avant-garde. It was Ginsberg who helped convince Leary that 
he should bring the psychedelic revolution to the masses, rather than keep it 
among an elite group. Filling out one of Leary’s research questionnaires in May 
1962 the poet Charles Olson wrote that psilocybin “creates the love feast,” and 
“should be available to anyone.”

(Page 2 of 2)

Thomas Lannon, the library’s assistant curator for manuscripts and archives, 
explained that at the time these substances were not regulated by the 
government, and that Leary and his group did not consider them drugs but aids 
to reaching self-awareness.

Leary kept meticulous records at many points during his life. There are 
comprehensive research files, legal briefs, and budgets and memos about the 
many institutes and organizations he founded, but there are also notes and 
documents from when he was on the run after escaping from a California prison 
with help from the Weather Underground. A folder labeled as

Turn On, Tune In, Drop by the Archives: Timothy Leary at the N.Y.P.L.





Turn On, Tune In, Drop by the Archives: Timothy Leary at the N.Y.P.L.

by Scott Staton, m.newyorker.com
June 16th 2011  

 

The project’s lack of discretion and diminishing credibility aroused the ire of 
the Harvard faculty and student body, resulting in a dispute over its merits 
that wound up in the pages of the Harvard Crimson and then the national press. 
By the end of the year, the university had shuttered the project. Defiant, 
Leary and his chief collaborator, Richard Alpert, defended their work in a 
letter to the Crimson. “A major civil liberties issue of the next decade will 
be the control and expansion of consciousness,” they declared. “Who controls 
your cortex? Who decides on the range and limits of your awareness? If you want 
to research your own nervous system, expand your consciousness, who is to 
decide that you can't and why?” Both were soon out of a job, but Leary 
continued to pursue his idiosyncratic research with a large supply of L.S.D., 
most of it administered at a magnificent twenty-five-hundred-acre estate in 
Millbrook, upstate from New York City. By the mid-sixties, following numerous 
run-ins with the law, he had completed his metamorphosis from Ivy League 
academic to countercultural high priest, tirelessly espousing the gospel of 
mind expansion and the politics of ecstasy.

After a prison stint in the mid-seventies, Leary toured the lecture and club 
circuit as a “stand-up philosopher.” He even launched a show alongside 
Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who had plagued Leary in his Millbrook days 
as a Dutchess County assistant district attorney. The psychedelic era having 
dissipated entirely, Leary turned to futurism, advocating space migration and 
personal computing. He became an enthusiastic booster of the Internet and 
cyberculture. Years spent hobnobbing in Hollywood renewed his celebrity. But 
while his influence on pop culture is undeniable, it’s difficult to escape the 
impression of Leary during this period as a fading opportunist, trading on his 
sixties iconography as best he could before his death from prostate cancer in 
1996.

The Leary trove is immense, spanning his childhood to his death, comprising 
some three hundred and fifty boxes of correspondence, experimental data, legal 
records, and manuscripts, as well as several hundred hours of video and audio 
recordings. Robert Greenfield’s informative 2006 biography, reviewed for the 
magazine by Louis Menand, made extensive use of the archive, examining Leary’s 
mythos with a great deal of skepticism. Greenfield portrays Leary as a 
narcissistic professional whose willful intemperance and disaffection with 
middle-class life triggered his reinvention as a drug-fueled neurological 
religionist—a kind of radical illustration of the excesses of the American 
Dream.

Greenfield also catalogs the various casualties of Leary’s strange adventure, 
not least the suicides of his first wife and his daughter Susan, who was swept 
along with her brother Jack into a traumatic whirlwind of alternative living. 
He relates how Leary, facing a lengthy incarceration for possession of a small 
amount of cannabis and a 1970 prison escape, informed on former lawyers and 
associates in an effort to ingratiate himself to federal authorities and win 
his freedom. To aid their investigation during this period, the F.B.I. seized 
Leary’s papers from his longtime archivist, Michael Horowitz. (Leary was 
godfather to Horowitz’s daughter, Winona Ryder.) “Transgressors—both mercenary 
and conceptual—play a key role in the religious rituals of an electronic media 
culture,” Leary wrote in one particularly angry and self-pitying tirade from 
federal prison. “The ceremonies of hunting sinners, publicly trying them, and 
assigning retribution is the basic religious ceremony of domesticated 
primates.” Remarkably enough, this was published in the National Review in 
April, 1976. Shortly after the issue appeared on newsstands, Leary was granted 
federal parole. In a letter to his mother the following June, he wrote, “You 
may know that William Buckley was very helpful in getting my release from 
prison—and has published articles I've written in his magazine.”

Leary’s hucksterism and the insouciance with which he regarded scientific 
protocol undeniably imperiled the study of psychedelic drugs, about which he 
testified before the U.S. Senate in 1966. His widespread advocacy of 
hallucinogens helped give rise to the Summer of Love, but also helped ensure 
the criminalization of these substances. Only recently have scientists and 
psychologists been able to win regulatory

Far out: Magic mushrooms could have medical benefits, researchers say





Far out: Magic mushrooms could have medical benefits, researchers say

by Zachary Roth, news.yahoo.com
June 15th 2011 7:45 AM  

 

The hallucinogen in magic mushrooms may no longer just be for hippies seeking a 
trippy high.

Researchers at John Hopkins University School of Medicine have been studying 
the effects of psilocybin, a chemical found in some psychedelic mushrooms, 
that's credited with inducing transcendental states. Now, they say, they've 
zeroed in on the perfect dosage level to produce transformative mystical and 
spiritual experiences that offer long-lasting life-changing benefits, while 
carrying little risk of negative reactions.

The breakthrough could speed the day when doctors use psilocybin--long viewed 
skeptically for its association with 1960s countercultural thrill-seekers--for 
a range of valuable clinical functions, like easing the anxiety of terminally 
ill patients, treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and 
helping smokers quit. Already, studies in which depressed cancer patients were 
given the drug have reported positive results. I'm not afraid to die anymore 
one participant told The Lookout.

The John Hopkins study--whose results will be published this week in the 
journal Psychopharmacology--involved giving healthy volunteers varying doses of 
psilocybin in a controlled and supportive setting, over four separate sessions. 
Looking back more than a year later, 94 percent of participants rated it as one 
of the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lifetimes.

More important, 89 percent reported lasting, positive changes in their 
behavior--better relationships with others, for instance, or increased care for 
their own mental and physical well-being. Those assessments were corroborated 
by family members and others.

I think my heart is more open to all interactions with other people, one 
volunteer reported in a questionnaire given to participants 14-months after 
their session.

I feel that I relate better in my marriage, wrote another. There is more 
empathy -- a greater understanding of people, and understanding their 
difficulties, and less judgment.

Identifying the exact right dosage for hallucinogenic drugs is crucial, Roland 
Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins who led the study, 
explained to The Lookout. That's because a bad trip can trigger hazardous, 
self-destructive behavior, but low doses don't produce the kind of 
transformative experiences that can offer long-term benefits. By trying a range 
of doses, Griffiths said, researchers were able to find the sweet spot, where 
a high or intermediate dose can produce, fairly reliably, these mystical 
experiences, with very low probability of a significant fear reaction.

In the 1950s and '60s, scientists became interested in the potential effects of 
hallucinogens like psilocybin, mescaline, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) 
on both healthy and terminally ill people. Mexican Indians had, since ancient 
times, used psychedelic mushrooms with similar chemical structures to achieve 
intense spiritual experiences. But by the mid '60s, counterculture gurus like 
Dr. Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley were talking up mind-altering drugs as a 
way of expanding one's consciousness and rejecting mainstream society. Stories, 
perhaps apocryphal, circulated about people jumping out of windows while on 
LSD, and some heavy users were said to have suffered permanent psychological 
damage. By the early '70s, the Food and Drug Administration had essentially 
banned all hallucinogenic drugs.

But recent years have seen the beginning of a revival of mainstream scientific 
interest in mind-altering drugs, and particularly in the possibility of using 
them in a clinical setting to alleviate depression and anxiety. A 2004 study by 
the government of Holland (pdf)-- where hallucinogenic mushrooms are legal, as 
long as they're sold fresh--found psilocybin to have no significant negative 
effects.

Here in the United States, too, the climate may be shifting. In a statement 
accompanying the announcement of the Johns Hopkins findings, Jerome Jaffe, a 
former White House drug czar now at the University of Maryland School of 
Medicine, said the results raise the question of whether psilocybin could prove 
useful in dealing with the psychological distress experienced by some terminal 
patients?

The hope is that the long-lasting spiritual and transcendental experiences 
associated with psilocybin could--if conducted in a controlled and supportive 
setting, and with appropriate dosage levels--help ease patients'

Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now






Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now

opednews.com | Jun 14th 2011 			 			 			 			   


By Daniel Ellsberg

While we go on waging unwinnable wars on false premises, the Pentagon papers  
tell us we must not wait 40 years for the truth.




The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version  
of the Pentagon Papers -- the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US  
decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 -- comes 40 years after I gave it to 19  
newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which  
I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered  
what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly  
all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a  
government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but  
overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been  
available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes  
were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should  
have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)


In other words, today's declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40  
years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that  
this study gets attention and goes online just now. That's because we're  
mired again in wars -- especially in Afghanistan -- remarkably similar to  
the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don't have comparable documentation  
and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it's  
likely to go.


What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and  
Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We're not likely to get them;  
they probably don't yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier  
ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad  
substitute, definitely worth learning from.


Yes, the languages and ethnicities that we don't understand are different in  
the Middle East from those in Vietnam; the climate, terrain and types of  
ambushes are very different. But as the accounts in the Pentagon Papers  
explain, we face the same futile effort in Afghanistan to find and destroy  
nationalist guerrillas or to get them to quit fighting foreign invaders (now  
us) and the corrupt, ill-motivated, dope-dealing despots we support. As in  
Vietnam, the more troops we deploy and the more adversaries we kill (along  
with civilians), the quicker their losses are made good and the more their  
ranks grow, since it's our very presence, our operations and our support of  
a regime without legitimacy that is the prime basis for their recruiting.


As for Washington, the accounts of recurrent decisions to escalate in the  
Pentagon Papers read like an extended prequel to Bob Woodward's book,  
Obama's War, on the prolonged internal controversies that preceded the  
president's decisions to triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan.  
(Woodward's book, too, is based on top secret leaks. Unfortunately, these  
came out after the decisions had been made, and without accompanying  
documentation: which it is still not too late for Woodward or his sources to  
give to WikiLeaks.)


In accounts of wars 40 years and half a world apart, we read of the same  
irresponsible, self-serving presidential and congressional objectives in  
prolonging and escalating an unwinnable conflict: namely, the need not to be  
charged with weakness by political rivals, or with losing a war that a few  
feckless or ambitious generals foolishly claim can be won. Putting the  
policy-making and the field realities together, we see the same prospect of  
endless, bloody stalemate -- unless and until, under public pressure,  
Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the  
executive into a negotiated withdrawal.


To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential  
wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40  
years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further  
commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.


Yet, we're not likely to get these ever within the time frame they're  
needed. The WikiLeaks' unauthorised disclosures of the last year are the  
first in 40 years to approach the scale of the Pentagon Papers (and even  
surpass them in quantity and timeliness). But unfortunately, the courageous  
source of these secret, field-level reports -- Private Bradley Manning is  
the one accused, though that remains to be proven in court -- did not have  
access to top secret, high-level recommendations, estimates and decisions.


Very, very few of those who do have such access are willing to risk their  
clearances

A young journalist witnesses history with Pentagon Papers






A young journalist witnesses history with Pentagon Papers

centerforinvestigativereporting.org | Jun 13th 2011 			 			 			 			   
 




Robert Rosenthal worked with The New York Times team on the Pentagon Papers
series in 1971. Image courtesy Ariane Wu/Center for Investigative Reporting

When the phone rang at the The New York Times on a Saturday afternoon 40  
years ago, I picked it up after a couple of rings.


Foreign desk, I said.

There was an excited, agitated man on the other end: I need to speak to  
Neil Sheehan, I need him right away, and it's urgent. I have to talk to  
him.


I was on the periphery to one of journalism's most important moments. The  
Times was a few hours away from printing the first installment of the  
Pentagon Papers in the edition of June 13, 1971.


And for weeks, I had been part of the team secretly cloistered at the Hilton  
Hotel. I knew where Sheehan, the lead reporter on the project, was, but I  
wasn't about to say where.


Who is this, please? I asked.

This is Daniel Ellsberg, and I need Sheehan. It's urgent.

At that moment, I had no idea who Ellsberg was, but I knew he was very  
agitated, and I thought it might be important. Times editors were huddled  
around a desk a few feet away from me. There was an intense air of  
excitement and anticipation around all of us. No newspaper had ever done  
what The Times was about to do: publish a multi-part series based on  
still-classified top secret documents.


I interrupted the editors.

There's a guy on the phone who's incredibly excited and he says he has to  
talk to Sheehan, and he said his name is Daniel Ellsberg, I said.


Two of the editors took a step back and began waving their arms in a  
circular motion, saying, No. No. No. I saw one of them mouth, It's the  
source.


I remember thinking, Holy shit.

Tell him you don't know where he is and hang up, one of them said.

A few hours later, I watched as a team of foremen in the pressroom wheeled  
in the pages of type that had been set secretly for the Sunday edition's  
first installment.


When the papers came off the press, I grabbed a few, took a cab from the  
West 43rd Street Times building and went to the Hilton on 6th Avenue. I was  
so excited I could barely breathe as I knocked on the door of a room where  
Sheehan and other reporters and editors on the project were waiting for the  
bulldog edition.


They all grabbed at the A section as I tossed them on a bed. They all read  
quietly, shaking their heads. Months of work were in their hands. They were  
looking for typos, checking out the headlines, reading work they all almost  
knew by heart.


By Sunday night, there was almost zero reaction to the first day's  
installment. The mood was fairly grim at the Hilton. Monday's installment  
with the headline, Vietnam Archive: A Consensus to Bomb Developed Before  
'64 Election, Study Says, also did not generate much reaction.


But from the Nixon White House, a reaction was coming.

Late on the afternoon of June 14, a telegram was sent to The Times. I was in  
the third-floor wire room of The Times newsroom. This was where all the  
stories came in from the wire services and from Times correspondents around  
the nation and world. The room chattered with clacking keys, and sheets of  
paper spewed from dozens of machines.


The Times may have been told a telegram was coming from Attorney General  
John Mitchell. For some reason, I was right there and watched as the type  
came pounding across the page addressed to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger,  
president and publisher of The Times.


The telegram said The Times on June 13 and 14 had published information  
relating to the national defense of the United States and bears a top secret  
classification. As such, publication of this information is directly  
prohibited by the provisions of the Espionage Law. ...


The telegram concluded:

Accordingly, I respectfully request that you publish no further information  
of this character and advise me that you have made arrangements for the  
return of these documents to the Department of Defense.


This was another holy shit moment. I tore the telegram off the machine and  
ran to the foreign desk and handed it to Jim Greenfield, foreign editor of  
The Times.


Sulzberger was on his way to London. Within a few minutes, Greenfield said,  
Come with me, and I was riding an elevator to the publisher's office on  
the 11th floor of The Times. Sulzberger was due to land at Heathrow Airport,  
and Tony Lewis, the London bureau chief, was sent to the airport, where he  
was waiting for Sulzberger with an open phone line.


I sat in the room holding a phone with Tony Lewis on the other end. In the  
room were Greenfield; Harding Bancroft, executive vice president of The

Pentagon Papers Released 40 Years After New York Times Began Publishing Them





Pentagon Papers Released 40 Years After New York Times Began Publishing Them

by Jack Mirkinso, huffingtonpost.com

 

WASHINGTON — Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a 
secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in U.S. conduct 
of the Vietnam War, the report is coming out in its entirety on Monday.

The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational 
breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon's presidency and 
prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom. Prepared near the 
end of Lyndon Johnson's term by Defense Department and private foreign policy 
analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a 
brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of 
whistleblowing in U.S. history.

The National Archives and presidential libraries are releasing the report in 
full, long after most of its secrets had spilled. The release is timed 40 years 
to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of 
stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971. The papers showed that the 
Johnson, Kennedy and prior administrations had been escalating the conflict in 
Vietnam while misleading Congress, the public and allies.

As scholars pore over the 47-volume report, Ellsberg says the chance of them 
finding great new revelations is dim. Most of it has come out in congressional 
forums and by other means, and Ellsberg plucked out the best when he 
painstakingly photocopied pages that he spirited from a safe night after night, 
and returned in the mornings. He told The Associated Press the value in 
Monday's release was in having the entire study finally brought together and 
put online, giving today's generations ready access to it.

At the time, Nixon was delighted that people were reading about bumbling and 
lies by his predecessor, which he thought would take some anti-war heat off 
him. But if he loved the substance of the leak, he hated the leaker.

He called the leak an act of treachery and vowed that the people behind it 
have to be put to the torch. He feared that Ellsberg represented a left-wing 
cabal that would undermine his own administration with damaging disclosures if 
the government did not crush him and make him an example for all others with 
loose lips. It was his belief in such a conspiracy, and his willingness to 
combat it by illegal means, that put him on the path to the Watergate scandal 
that destroyed his presidency.

Nixon's attempt to avenge the Pentagon Papers leak failed. First the Supreme 
Court backed the Times, The Washington Post and others in the press and allowed 
them to continue publishing stories on the study in a landmark case for the 
First Amendment. Then the government's espionage and conspiracy prosecution of 
Ellsberg and his colleague Anthony J. Russo Jr. fell apart, a mistrial declared 
because of government misconduct.

The judge threw out the case after agents of the White House broke into the 
office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to steal records in hopes of discrediting 
him, and after it surfaced that Ellsberg's phone had been tapped illegally. 
That September 1971 break-in was tied to the Plumbers, a shady White House 
operation formed after the Pentagon Papers disclosures to stop leaks, smear 
Nixon's opponents and serve his political ends. The next year, the Plumbers 
were implicated in the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the 
Watergate building.

Ellsberg remains convinced the report – a thick, often turgid read – would have 
had much less impact if Nixon had not temporarily suppressed publication with a 
lower court order and had not prolonged the headlines even more by going after 
him so hard. Very few are going to read the whole thing, he said in an 
interview, meaning both then and now. That's why it was good to have the great 
drama of the injunction.

Story continues below 

The declassified report includes 2,384 pages missing from what was regarded as 
the most complete version of the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 by 
Democratic Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska. But some of the material absent from 
that version appeared – with redactions – in a report of the House Armed 
Services Committee, also in 1971. In addition, at the time, Ellsberg did not 
disclose a section on peace negotiations with Hanoi, in fear of complicating 
the talks, but that part was declassified separately years later.

Ellsberg served with the Marines in Vietnam and came back disillusioned. A 
protege of Nixon adviser Henry

40 years after leak, the Pentagon Papers are out






40 years after leak, the Pentagon Papers are out

by CALVIN WOODWARD and RICHARD LARDNER, 
sfgate.com
June 13th 2011 			 			 			 			   


(06-13) 16:43 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

Call it the granddaddy of WikiLeaks. Four decades ago, a young defense  
analyst leaked a top-secret study packed with damaging revelations about  
America's conduct of the Vietnam War.


On Monday, that study, dubbed the Pentagon Papers, finally came out in  
complete form. It's a touchstone for whistleblowers everywhere and just the  
sort of leak that gives presidents fits to this day.


The documents show that almost from the opening lines, it was apparent that  
the authors knew they had produced a hornet's nest.


In his Jan. 15, 1969, confidential memorandum introducing the report to the  
defense chief, the chairman of the task force that produced the study hinted  
at the explosive nature of the contents. Writing history, especially where  
it blends into current events, especially where that current event is  
Vietnam, is a treacherous exercise, Leslie H. Gelb wrote.


Asked by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to do an encyclopedic and  
objective study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1967,  
the team of three dozen analysts pored over a trove of Pentagon, CIA and  
State Department documents with ant-like diligence, he wrote.


Their work revealed a pattern of deception by the Lyndon Johnson, John  
Kennedy and prior administrations as they secretly escalated the conflict  
while assuring the public that, in Johnson's words, the U.S. did not seek a  
wider war.


The National Archives released the Pentagon Papers in full Monday and put  
them online, long after most of the secrets spilled. The release was timed  
40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its  
series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971, prompting President  
Richard Nixon to try to suppress publication and crush anyone in government  
who dared to spill confidences.


Prepared near the end of Johnson's term by Defense Department and private  
analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg,  
in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes  
of whistleblowing in U.S. history.


As scholars pore over the 47-volume report, Ellsberg said the chance of them  
finding great new revelations is dim. Most of it has come out in  
congressional forums and by other means, and Ellsberg plucked out the best  
when he painstakingly photocopied pages that he spirited from a safe night  
after night, and returned in the mornings.


He told The Associated Press the value in Monday's release was in having the  
entire study finally brought together and put online, giving today's  
generations ready access to it.


The Pentagon Papers chronicle failures of U.S. policy at seemingly every  
turn. One was a focused attempt from 1961 to 1963 to pacify rural Vietnam  
with the Strategic Hamlet Program, combining military operations to secure  
villages with construction, economic aid and resettlement.


The report concludes the U.S. had not learned lessons of the past, namely  
that peasants would resist attempts to change their lives. The hamlet  
program was fatally flawed in its conception by the unintended consequence  
of alienating many of those whose loyalty it aimed to win, it said.


At the time, Nixon was delighted that people were reading about bumbling and  
lies by his predecessors, which he thought would take some anti-war heat off  
him. But if he loved the substance of the leak, he hated the leaker.


He called the leak an act of treachery and vowed that the people behind it  
have to be put to the torch. He feared that Ellsberg represented a  
left-wing cabal that would undermine his own administration with damaging  
disclosures if the government did not make him an example for all others  
with loose lips.


It was his belief in such a conspiracy, and his willingness to combat it by  
illegal means, that put him on the path to the Watergate scandal that  
destroyed his presidency.






Original Page:  
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/06/12/national/w201515D 
94.DTL


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Amnesty International Launches Campaign Supporting Herman Wallace And Albert Woodfox Of The Angola 3






Amnesty International Launches Campaign Supporting Herman Wallace And Albert  
Woodfox Of The Angola 3


countercurrents.org | Jun 11th 2011 8:11 PM 			 			 			 			   


Amnesty International Launches Campaign Supporting
Herman Wallace And Albert Woodfox Of The Angola 3

By Angola 3 News


Angola 3 News

This week Amnesty International launched a global campaign calling for the  
authorities in the United States to end the solitary confinement of Herman  
Wallace and Albert Woodfox. They state that the treatment to which the two  
men have been subjected was 'cruel and inhumane' and amounted to a violation  
of the US' obligations under international law.


Guadalupe Marengo, Amnesty's deputy director for America said We are not  
aware of any other case in the USA where individuals have been subjected to  
such restricted human contact for such a prolonged period of time. Amnesty  
has also raised questions about the legal aspects of the case including the  
lack of any physical evidence linking Herman and Albert to Brent Miller's  
murder, lost DNA evidence and convictions based on questionable inmate  
testimony.


Amnesty is calling for people around the world to contact Governor Jindal  
via email or post and let their outrage regarding this injustice be heard.  
The spotlight on injustice which Amnesty International is now shining on the  
case of the Angola 3 is a monumental step of support to the campaign. We  
hope Albert and Herman's supporters will lead the charge in responding to  
Amnesty's call for action.


Please join us and take action today at Amnesty's action page.

Read/Download the full report: USA: 100 years in solitary: 'The Angola 3'  
and their fight for justice.


Watch the Amnesty International video, featuring Robert King, here.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE

EMBARGO: 7 June 2011, 00:01Hs GMT.

USA urged to end inmates' 40 year-long solitary confinement

The US state of Louisiana must immediately remove two inmates from the  
solitary confinement they were placed in almost 40 years ago, Amnesty  
International said today.


Albert Woodfox, 64, and Herman Wallace, 69, were placed in Closed Cell  
Restriction (CCR) in Louisiana State Penitentiary - known as Angola Prison  
- since they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. Apart  
from very brief periods, they have been held in isolation ever since.


The treatment to which Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been  
subjected for the past four decades is cruel and inhumane and a violation of  
the US's obligations under international law, said Guadalupe Marengo,  
Americas Deputy Director at Amnesty International.


We are not aware of any other case in the USA where individuals have been  
subjected to such restricted human contact for such a prolonged period of  
time.


Over the course of decades there has been no meaningful review of the men's  
designation to CCR. The only reason given for maintaining the men under  
these conditions has been due to the nature of the original reason for  
lockdown.


Both men were originally arrested for armed robbery.

The men are confined to their cells, which measure 2 x 3 metres, for 23  
hours a day. When the weather permits, they are allowed outside three times  
a week for an hour of solitary recreation in a small outdoor cage.


For four hours a week, they are allowed to leave their cells to shower or  
walk, alone, along the cell unit corridor.


They have restricted access to books, newspapers and television. For the  
past four decades they have never been allowed to work or to have access to  
education. Social interaction has been restricted to occasional visits from  
friends and family and limited telephone calls.


They have also been denied any meaningful review of the reasons for their  
isolation.


The men's lawyers have told Amnesty International that both are suffering  
from serious health problems caused or exacerbated by their years of  
solitary confinement.


Amnesty International has also raised questions about the legal aspects of  
the case against the two men.


No physical evidence linking the men to the guard's murder has ever been  
found; potentially exculpatory DNA evidence has been lost; and the  
convictions were based on questionable inmate testimony.


Over the years of litigation on the cases, documents have emerged suggesting  
that the main eyewitness was bribed by prison officials into giving  
statements against the men and that the state withheld evidence about the  
perjured testimony of another inmate witness. A further witness later  
retracted his testimony.


Apart from ongoing legal challenges to their murder convictions, Albert  
Woodfox and Herman Wallace are suing the Louisiana authorities claiming that  
their

Remembering Geronimo





Remembering Geronimo

by Bakari Kitw, sfbayview.com
June 9th 2011   

 Political activists around the country are still absorbing the news of 
Geronimo ji Jaga’s death. For those of us who came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s, 
the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s were in many ways a gateway for 
our examination of the history of Black political resistance in the U.S. 
Geronimo ji Jaga (formerly Geronimo Pratt) and his personal struggle as well as 
his contributions to the fight for social justice were impossible to ignore. 
His commitment, humility, clear thinking as well as his sense of both the 
longevity and continuity of the Black Freedom Movement in the U.S. all stood 
out to those who knew him. 

I interviewed him for The Source magazine in early September 1997 about three 
months after he was released from prison, having served 27 years of a life 
sentence for a murder he didn’t commit. Three things stood out from the 
interview, all of which have been missed by recent commentary celebrating his 
life and impact.

First that famed attorney Johnnie Cochran was not only his lawyer when ji Jaga 
gained his freedom, but also represented him in his original trial. They were 
from the same hometown and, according to ji Jaga, Cochran’s conscience over the 
years was dogged by the injustice of the U.S. criminal system that resulted in 
the 1970 sentence.

Second, according to ji Jaga, he never formally joined the Black Panther Party. 
As he remembered it, he worked with several Black activist organizations and 
was captured by the police while working with the Black Panther Party for 
Self-Defense.

And finally, his analysis of the UCLA 1969 shoot-out between Black Panthers and 
US Organization members that led to the death of his best friend Bunchy Carter 
and John Huggins is not a simple tale of Black in-fighting. Now is a good time 
to revisit all three.

Misinformation is so much part of our current political moment, particularly as 
the 24-hour news cycle converges with the ascendance of Fox News. In this 
climate, the conservative analysis of race has been normalized in mainstream 
discourse.

This understanding of racial politics, along with the election of Barack Obama 
and a first term marked by little for Blacks to celebrate, makes it a 
particularly challenging time to be politically Black in the United States. Ask 
Jeremiah Wright, Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones – all three serious advocates 
for the rights and humanity of everyday people whose critiques of politics and 
race made them far too easily demonized as anti-American.

If we have entered the era where the range of Black political thought beyond 
the mainstream liberal-conservative purview is delegitimized, Geronimo ji 
Jaga’s life and death is a reminder of our need to resist it.

Excerpts from the 1997 interview

Q: How did you get involved with the Black Panther Party?

A: Technically, I never joined the Black Panther Party. After Martin Luther 
King’s death, an elder of mine who was related to Bunchy Carter’s elder and 
Johnnie Cochran’s elder requested that those of us in the South that had 
military training render some sort of discipline to brothers in urban areas who 
were running amuck getting shot right and left, running down the street 
shooting guns with bullets half filled which they were buying at the local 
hardware store.

When I arrived at UCLA, Bunchy was just getting out of prison and needed 
college to help with his parole. We stayed together in the dorm room on campus. 
But we were mainly working to build the infrastructure of the party.

Q:You ended up as the deputy minister of defense. How did that come about?

A: They did not have a ministry of defense when I came on the scene. There was 
one office in Oakland and a half an office in San Francisco. I helped build the 
San Francisco branch and all of the chapters throughout the South – New 
Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Memphis, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and other 
places. We did it under the banner of the Panthers because that’s what was 
feasible at the time.

Because of shoot-outs and all that stuff, the work I did with the Panthers 
overshadowed the stuff that I did with the Republic of New Afrika, the Mau Mau, 
the Black Liberation Army, the Brown Berets, the Black Berets, even the Fruit 
of Islam, but I saw my work with the Panthers as temporary. When Bunchy was 
killed, the Panthers wanted me to fill his position [as leader of the Southern 
California chapter]. I didn’t want to do it because I was already overloaded 
with other stuff.

But it was just so hard to find someone who could

Occupation of Alcatraz helped Indians make gains






Occupation of Alcatraz helped Indians make gains

sfgate.com | Jun 11th 2011 			 			 			 			   

The Indian occupation of Alcatraz - one of the most unusual events in San  
Francisco history - ended on a June afternoon just 40 years ago today when  
U.S. marshals swooped down on the prison island, hauled off 15 somewhat  
bedraggled Indians and told them never to return.


It appeared to be an enormous defeat for American Indian activists who had  
seized Alcatraz and occupied it for 19 months, hoping to turn it into an  
Indian university or cultural center. None of that happened.


At the time it ended, the occupation seemed to be a failure, said Craig  
Glasner, a park ranger stationed on Alcatraz. But now, even the government  
admits the occupation was a landmark event.


For one thing, the government had to recognize a new Indian militancy. For  
another, plans to sell the island to private developers were dropped and  
Alcatraz is now part of a national park and draws 1.4 million visitors a  
year.


The occupation of Alcatraz exceeded our wildest dreams, said Adam  
Fortunate Eagle Nordwall, one of the original leaders of the occupation. It  
caused major changes in government policies toward Indians. So we won.


Federal raid

It certainly did not appear that way on June 11, 1971, when a raiding party  
of 20 armed federal marshals stepped off three Coast Guard cutters and  
evicted six men, four women and five children - the last remnants of  
hundreds of Indians and their supporters who had held the island for close  
to two years.


The government called them illegal inhabitants. Though none of them was  
arrested, marshals removed them from Alcatraz, put up chain-link fences and  
stationed federal officers on the island. We only want to get on with the  
business of developing the island, said U.S. Attorney James Browning.


Alcatraz had been abandoned as a prison in 1963 and declared surplus by the  
government. At one time it was offered for sale for $2 million. A more  
serious proposal was floated later - the island would be sold to a developer  
and turned into high-end residences and a grand casino, a sort of Monte  
Carlo in the bay.


Claiming the island

All that talk ended in November 1969, when Richard Oakes, a member of the  
Mohawk tribe who lived in San Francisco, led a group of 14 Indians to the  
island in a chartered boat to claim it for a group they called Indians of  
All Tribes.


They only stayed overnight, but three weeks later, a group of 80 Indians  
came back. This time we have come to stay, Oakes said.


They claimed the island by right of discovery and issued a proclamation  
offering to pay $24 for it - the price Dutch colonists paid for Manhattan.  
The Indians painted signs all over the island - You are on Indian land and  
Red Power.


Dead serious

At first it all seemed to be a lark. The news media loved it - colorful  
Indians camping on America's most famous island prison - but the Indians  
were dead serious.


The government at first backed off, and then began formal, and sometimes  
secret, talks with the Indians. The Indians wanted a cultural center,  
perhaps an Indian university.


We need this place, said Tom Joseph, a Shoshone-Paiute, who was a student  
at UCLA.


Alcatraz, said Nordwall, has become a symbol.

It was also a bargaining chip. As long as the Indians mounted a nonviolent,  
high-profile occupation, the government had to talk. Apparently, even  
Leonard Garment, a powerful adviser to President Richard Nixon, was  
involved.


At one point, Nordwall and several others say, the government offered to  
trade Fort Mason on the San Francisco waterfront for the island. I took the  
swap offer to Oakes, Nordwall said this week, but he turned it down colder  
than hell.


Events take a turn

But events took a turn for the worse in January 1970, when Oakes'  
12-year-old stepdaughter, Yvonne, died after a fall on the island. It broke  
Oakes' heart and he left the island.


Soon afterward, the Indian leadership fractured as different groups fought  
for control. Years later, Nordwall, now 81, said he was not surprised that  
the movement fractured. That goes with any revolution, he said. When you  
have an uprising, you have different factions duking it out. Just look at  
the Middle East now.


In May of 1970, the government removed a water barge that pumped fresh water  
into a tank on the island. Then they cut off the electricity. On June 1 a  
fire broke out and destroyed several structures, including the warden's  
residence. The government and the Indians blamed each other.


By summer, there were only 60 to 75 Indians still on Alcatraz, down from 800  
at the height of the occupation. We're Indians, all of us, and we belong on  
Alcatraz, La

Did Malcolm X Hate Women?





Did Malcolm X Hate Women?

by Natalie Hopkinson, theroot.com
June 10th 2011 12:31 AM 

 

Malcolm X was furious to learn at the last minute that a speaker had decided 
not to appear at a rally at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, N.Y., on Feb. 21, 
1965. A flustered aide said that he'd phoned Malcolm's wife, Betty, with the 
information, according to Manning Marable's controversial biography, Malcolm X: 
A Life of Reinvention.

Malcolm exploded: You gave that message to a woman?! ... You should know 
better than that.

The remarks, hours before he was assassinated, capped off a lifetime of 
frustration with, dependence on and anger at the women in his life. The fact 
was, Betty, pregnant with twins, did not know how to reach him. She and her 
four daughters had been living with friends since they were evicted from their 
former Nation of Islam-owned home -- which had just been firebombed. Malcolm 
kept his distance from the family to keep them safe.

Malcolm, for his part, was likely spending his final night at a hotel with his 
18-year-old secretary and alleged mistress, according to Marable. At the time, 
the woman, Sharon 6X, was living with Linward X Cathcart. Both had connections 
to members of the NOI mosque in Newark, N.J., who hatched the assassination 
plot. Both sat in the front row at the ballroom the day he was murdered. 
Marable wrote:

The seating arrangement may have been a coincidence, but subsequent evidence 
concerning Sharon and Cathcart makes this hard to believe. More than 40 years 
after the assassination, Cathcart and Sharon 6X Poole Shabazz live together in 
the same New Jersey residence, and Shabazz has maintained absolute silence 
about her relationships with both Malcolm X and Cathcart.

Last month in a Newark court, Cathcart filed a $50 million defamation suit 
against Marable's estate and the publisher of the biography, according to the 
Amsterdam News. Cathcart flatly denies any role in Malcolm's assassination. And 
Cathcart's attorney says that Cathcart and Sharon 6X were not an item at the 
time of Malcolm's murder; they were married to other people and she was renting 
an apartment in his house. (There are others who have had problems with 
Marable's findings; two of Malcolm's daughters, for example, have criticized 
the book for its depiction of their parents' marriage.)

But if true, Malcolm's alleged affair with his teenage secretary would be 
particularly hypocritical, since much of his moral fury against the NOI stemmed 
from Elijah Muhammad's multiple out-of-wedlock births with his female 
subordinates. But beyond that, many of Marable's other revelations about 
Malcolm's life paint a striking picture of his marriage and attitudes toward 
women in general.

The strain began with Malcolm's mother, who was a widow who suffered from 
mental illness and was institutionalized for much of her life. In his brief 
career as a house robber, Malcolm used his white lover as a front; later, she 
betrayed him in court to save herself. As he rose through the ranks of the NOI, 
Malcolm was constantly pursued by women drawn to his magnetism, a charm that 
physically unsettled women such as Maya Angelou, who returned from exile in 
Africa to join his fledgling organization, the Organization of Afro-American 
Unity. (The secular group was run by a woman named Lynne Shifflet, who abruptly 
resigned in 1965 after Betty accused her of sleeping with Malcolm.)

Then, too, Malcolm had a complicated relationship with his sister Ella, who 
bailed him out during his Detroit Red days. After he was kicked out of NOI and 
lost his platform and source of income to support his massive family, it was 
his sister who threw him a life preserver by financing his trip to Mecca, and 
later his tour of Africa and the Middle East. But the two often fought, and he 
wrote in his autobiography that she wore out her three former husbands with 
her dominant personality.

Most telling, though, was his troubled marriage -- the opposite of the tender, 
sexually charged romance depicted by Angela Bassett and Denzel Washington in 
Spike Lee's film. Malcolm married Betty at the suggestion of NOI elders.

In a heartbreaking and impossibly earnest letter to Elijah Muhammad, he asked 
for advice on how to fix his marriage. Betty said that he could not sexually 
satisfy her, and threatened to find satisfaction elsewhere. This wounded him 
deeply and led him to avoid her and home at all costs, according to Marable.

Malcolm largely viewed his wife as a nuisance, Marable wrote. Aides said that 
she boldly flirted with the men around her, and they

Magic Trip (Official Movie Site) - Starring Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and The Merry Band of Pranksters - A Film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood - Premieres on Demand July 1st and In Theatres August 5t

2011-06-11 Thread res...@comcast.net


http://www.magictripmovie.com/

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After 40 Years, the Complete Pentagon Papers

2011-06-09 Thread res...@comcast.net





After 40 Years, the Complete Pentagon Papers

by SAM ROBERTS and MICHAEL COOPER, truth-out.org
June 8th 2011   

 

It may be a first in the annals of government secrecy: Declassifying documents 
to mark the anniversary of their leak to the press. But that is what will 
happen Monday, when the federal government plans to finally release the secret 
government study of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers 40 years after 
it was first published by The New York Times.

At first blush, it sounds like the release of one of the worst-kept secrets in 
history — finally unlocking the barn door four decades after the horses bolted. 
The study, after all, has already been published by The Times and other 
newspapers, resulting in a landmark First Amendment decision by the Supreme 
Court. It has been released in book form more than once. But it turns out that 
those texts have been incomplete: When all 7,000 pages are released Monday, 
officials say, the study can finally be read in its original form.

That it took until the era of WikiLeaks for the government to declassify the 
Pentagon Papers struck some participants as, to say the least, curious.

“It’s absurd,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND Corporation analyst who 
worked on the report and later provided it to The Times. He said Tuesday that 
the report should not have been secret even in 1971, when newspapers first 
published it, adding: “The reasons are very clearly domestic political reasons, 
not national security at all. The reasons for the prolonged secrecy are to 
conceal the fact that so much of the policy making doesn’t bear public 
examination. It’s embarrassing, or even incriminating.”

When Mr. Ellsberg first leaked the study, he had to take it volume by volume 
out of a safe in his office and ferry it to a small advertising company owned 
by the girlfriend of a colleague who had Xerox machine. Page by page, they 
copied it in all-night sessions. Now the National Archives and Records 
Administration will scan it and — behold — it will be online quickly.

Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who 
was the director of the task force that wrote the report, said he was surprised 
it had remained officially classified all these years, after so much of it had 
been made public. “It should have been declassified a long, long time ago,” he 
said.

But the secrecy has persisted. Timothy Naftali, the director of the Richard 
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said that when he recently put together 
an exhibit on Watergate, he wanted to display just the blue cover of the 
Pentagon Papers report. “I was told that the cover was classified,” he said, 
adding that he was astounded.

There is intrigue even in the release itself. Archivists touched off a new 
round of feverish speculation when they originally announced that 11 
never-before-published words of the 7,000-page report would remain redacted all 
these years later, only to reverse themselves and announce Tuesday that the 11 
words would be published after all.

So what were the mysterious 11 words?

Archivists originally joked that they would hold a Mad Libs contest, to see who 
could guess them. But even though the 11 words will be published after all, 
they have not said what they were — sparking a bit of a guessing game. Thomas 
S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington 
University, said he guessed the words had something to do with intelligence 
capabilities, or references to people who are still alive who had been sources, 
or North Vietnamese diplomats.

Get Truthout in your inbox every day! Click here to sign up for free updates.

“The criticism of their redacting the 11 words in the first place is that it’s 
self-defeating,” Mr. Blanton said. “You’re just flagging them for everyone to 
identify what they are.”

The bigger question is what new material will be made public for the first 
time. Several archivists who have seen the complete report declined invitations 
to repeat history and leak the full version of the Pentagon Papers to The 
Times. But there are some indications of what will be in it.

Until now, the complete text of the report — officially known as the Report of 
the O.S.D. Vietnam Task Force — has been as elusive to researchers as a clean 
copy of Hamlet has been to generations of Shakespeare scholars. The version Mr. 
Ellsberg provided to the press was incomplete. A book published by Beacon 
Press, based on a copy from Senator Mike Gravel, Democrat of Alaska, had 
missing sections. And a version published by the government

Amnesty International Calls for Angola 3′s Release from 40 Years of Solitary Confinement

2011-06-09 Thread res...@comcast.net





Amnesty International Calls for Angola 3′s Release from 40 Years of Solitary 
Confinement

by James Ridgeway and Jean Casell, 
solitarywatch.com
June 7th 2011   

 

Amnesty International has issued a press release, action alert, and detailed 
report on the case of the Angola 3, which has been extensively documented in 
Mother Jones (here, here, and here). The press release, issued yesterday, 
concerns the two members of the Angola 3 who remain in prison and have now 
entered their 40th year in solitary confinement.

The US state of Louisiana must immediately remove two inmates from the solitary 
confinement they were placed in almost 40 years ago, Amnesty International said 
today.

Albert Woodfox, 64, and Herman Wallace, 69, were placed in “Closed Cell 
Restriction (CCR)” in Louisiana State Penitentiary – known as Angola Prison – 
since they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. Apart from 
very brief periods, they have been held in isolation ever since.

“The treatment to which Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been subjected 
for the past four decades is cruel and inhumane and a violation of the US’s 
obligations under international law,” said Guadalupe Marengo, Americas Deputy 
Director at Amnesty International.

The action alert urges readers to sign a petition to Louisiana Governor Bobby 
Jindal. The twelve-page report describes the apparent miscarriages of justice 
involved in Woodfox and Wallace’s original murder conviction, and then asks, 
“Why are they still in isolation?” It goes on to explain:

In the early 1970s, conditions at Angola were brutal. Racism was rife. Inmates 
were racially segregated and guarded exclusively by white officers, as well as 
armed white inmates. The culture of violence that infused prison life was 
reflected in the high number of murders and the widespread use of sexual 
slavery among inmates.

In this toxic environment, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, who were both 
imprisoned for unrelated cases of armed robbery, founded a prison chapter of 
the Black Panther Party (BPP). They were later joined by Robert King and 
together the men campaigned for fair treatment and better conditions for 
inmates; racial solidarity between black and white inmates; and an end to the 
rape and sexual slavery that was then endemic in the prison.

“They tried to change conditions… the prison was considered the worst in the 
nation. They brought people together and brought in an ideology that said that 
despite the fact that you were prisoners, you still had some rights. Because of 
this, the administration saw them as being threats and they have paid dearly.” 
–Robert King, 2011

Throughout the long years of isolation, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have 
consistently maintained that they did not kill Brent Miller. They believe that 
they were falsely implicated in the murder because of their political activism 
in prison as members of the BPP. During the many years of litigation in the 
case, evidence has emerged to suggest that the decision to keep them in 
solitary was based at least in part on their political activism and association 
with the BPP.

“I would still keep [Albert Woodfox] in CCR. I still know he has a propensity 
for violence. I still know that he is still trying to practice Black 
Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he 
would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kinds of problems, 
more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them. I 
would have chaos and conflict and I believe that. He has to stay in a cell 
while he’s at Angola.” –Burl Cain, Angola prison Warden, 2008. These remarks 
were made despite a finding by a US district judge in November 2008 that Albert 
Woodfox had maintained a clean conduct record for 20 years.

Since 1972, the prison review board has reviewed the prison’s original decision 
to keep the men in solitary on more than 150 occasions. At each review, without 
giving the men an opportunity to participate in the process or dispute the 
decision, the review board has determined that Albert Woodfox and Herman 
Wallace should continue to be held in CCR due to the “nature of the original 
reason for lockdown”.

In 1996, Louisiana prison policy was changed to remove “original reason for 
lockdown” as a factor to be taken into account by the review board when 
considering whether to continue an inmate’s confinement in CCR. This change has 
never been applied to reviews of the continued isolation of Albert Woodfox or 
Herman Wallace; the board simply continues to note “Original

USA urged to end inmates’ 40 year-long solitary confinement

2011-06-09 Thread res...@comcast.net





USA urged to end inmates’ 40 year-long solitary confinement

amnesty.org | Jun 6th 2011  

 

The US state of Louisiana must immediately remove two inmates from the solitary 
confinement they were placed in almost 40 years ago, Amnesty International said 
today. Albert Woodfox, 64, and Herman Wallace, 69, were placed in Closed Cell 
Restriction (CCR) in Louisiana State Penitentiary - known as Angola Prison - 
since they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972.

Apart from very brief periods, they have been held in isolation ever since. 
The treatment to which Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been subjected 
for the past four decades is cruel and inhumane and a violation of the US’s 
obligations under international law, said Guadalupe Marengo, Americas Deputy 
Director at Amnesty International.

We are not aware of any other case in the USA where individuals have been 
subjected to such restricted human contact for such a prolonged period of time.

Over the course of decades there has been no meaningful review of the men’s 
designation to CCR. The only reason given for maintaining the men under these 
conditions has been due to the nature of the original reason for lockdown.

Both men were originally arrested for armed robbery.

The men are confined to their cells, which measure 2 x 3 metres, for 23 hours a 
day. When the weather permits, they are allowed outside three times a week for 
an hour of solitary recreation in a small outdoor cage.

For four hours a week, they are allowed to leave their cells to shower or walk, 
alone, along the cell unit corridor. They have restricted access to books, 
newspapers and television. For the past four decades they have never been 
allowed to work or to have access to education. Social interaction has been 
restricted to occasional visits from friends and family and limited telephone 
calls. They have also been denied any meaningful review of the reasons for 
their isolation. The men’s lawyers have told Amnesty International that both 
are suffering from serious health problems caused or exacerbated by their years 
of solitary confinement. Amnesty International has also raised questions about 
the legal aspects of the case against the two men. No physical evidence linking 
the men to the guard’s murder has ever been found; potentially exculpatory DNA 
evidence has been lost; and the convictions were based on questionable inmate 
testimony. Over the years of litigation on the cases, documents have emerged 
suggesting that the main eyewitness was bribed by prison officials into giving 
statements against the men and that the state withheld evidence about the 
perjured testimony of another inmate witness. A further witness later retracted 
his testimony.

Apart from ongoing legal challenges to their murder convictions, Albert Woodfox 
and Herman Wallace are suing the Louisiana authorities claiming that their 
prolonged isolation is cruel and unusual punishment and so violates the US 
Constitution. The treatment of these men by the state of Louisiana is a clear 
breach of US commitment to human rights, said Guadalupe Marengo.

Their cases should be reviewed as a matter of urgency, and while that takes 
place authorities must ensure that their treatment complies with international 
standards for the humane treatment of prisoners.

READ MORE
USA: 100 years in solitary: The 'Angola 3' and their fight for justice 
(Document, 7 June 2011)
Justice for Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace: Decades of isolation in 
Louisiana state prisons must end (Take action, 7 June 2011)
USA: The Cruel and Inhumane treatment of Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace 
(Public Statement, 5 April 2011)
USA: Amnesty International calls for immediate end to nearly 73 years of 
solitary confinement endured by Louisiana prisoners, Herman Wallace and Albert 
Woodfox (Public Statement, 30 March 2010)

USA: 100 years in solitary: The 'Angola 3' and their fight for justice

Download: Index Number: AMR 51/041/2011
Date Published: 7 June 2011
Categories: USA 

39 years ago, three young black men were put in solitary confinement; two are 
still in isolation. In total, the three men have spent more than 100 years in 
solitary, mostly in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, USA. But the 
‘Angola 3’ have refused to be silenced; their fight for justice continues. In 
this document Amnesty International is again calling on the Louisiana 
authorities to end the cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions in which they 
are held by immediately removing the men from solitary confinement.

Huey Newton Foundation Sues CafePress

Huey Newton Foundation Sues CafePress

by Janon Fisher, adweek.com
June 2nd 2011

The widow of Black Panther Party-co-founder Dr. Huey P. Newton is suing a
California clothing company for $2 million for unauthorized use of his likeness.

Fredrika Newton is accusing CafePress of Santa Mateo, Calif., of selling Huey
Newton paraphernalia—including coffee mugs, tote bags, kids’ baseball shirts,
hoodies, sweatshirts, pins, buttons, and badges— in violation of the trademark
held by the Vallejo, Calif.-based Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation.

Some of the items, which have been listed as some of the most popular items on
the clothier's website, are emblazoned with the iconic photo of Newton sitting
in a high-back rattan chair, wearing a beret and holding a rifle in one hand
and a spear in the other. Others sport a picture of a black panther.

The foundation trademarked both images in 2008, but that was already two years
after CafePress started selling its revolutionary-themed clothing line.

CafePress declined to comment, citing the lawsuit, but appeared to have removed
the offending items from its website.

During his life, Newton helped black people combat civil rights abuses,
provided free breakfast for impoverished children and raised awareness of
sickle cell anemia.

But his legacy was a complex one: he was also a drug addict, who had been
charged with murder three times, once for allegedly killing a police officer.
He was never convicted.

Today his likeness sells rather well. And at $20 for a CafePress T-shirt,
according to the suit, it’s cutting into money that would otherwise be going to
the foundation, which uses the funds to work for social change in Newton's name.

The foundation, which is run by Newton’s widow, also trademarked Newton's
catchphrase “Burn baby burn,” which it uses on a line of hot sauces.

Original Page:
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/huey-newton-foundation-sues-cafepress-132171

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Elmer Pratt, former Black Panther leader whose murder conviction was overturned, dies at 63

Elmer Pratt, former Black Panther leader whose murder conviction was
overturned, dies at 63

by Robert J. Lopez, washingtonpost.com

Mr. Pratt’s case became a cause celebre for a range of supporters — including
elected officials, human rights activists and clergy — who believed he was
framed by the Los Angeles police and the FBI because he was African American
and a member of the radical Black Panthers.

Mr. Pratt maintained that the FBI knew he was innocent because the agency had
him under surveillance in Oakland when the slaying was committed in Santa
Monica.

“Geronimo was a powerful leader,” Stuart Hanlon, Mr. Pratt’s longtime San
Francisco attorney, told the Los Angeles Times. “For that reason he was
targeted.”

Mr. Pratt was arrested in 1970 and two years later convicted and sentenced to
life in prison in the 1968 fatal shooting of Caroline Olsen and the serious
wounding of her husband, Kenneth, in a robbery that netted $18. The case was
overturned in 1997 by an Orange County Superior Court judge who ruled that
prosecutors at Mr. Pratt’s murder trial had concealed evidence that could have
led to his acquittal.

A federal judge later approved a $4.5 million settlement in Mr. Pratt’s
false-imprisonment and civil rights lawsuit.

Mr. Pratt, who also went by Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, was born Sept. 13, 1947, in
Morgan City, La. The youngest of seven children, Mr. Pratt was raised as a
Catholic by his mother and his father, who operated a small scrap-metal
business.

Growing up in the segregated South amid a tight-knit black community had a
profound effect on Mr. Pratt, he later told interviewers.

“The situation was pretty racist, on the one hand,” he said in an interview
with Race and Class magazine. “On the other, it was full of integrity and
dignity and the pride of being part of this community . . . the values, the
work ethic, very respectful to everyone.”

Mr. Pratt volunteered to join the Army and served with the 82nd Airborne in
Vietnam. After he was discharged, Mr. Pratt moved to Los Angeles in 1968 and
enrolled at UCLA. While attending classes, he met Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, a
Louisiana native and an early member of the Black Panther Party who recruited
him to the cause and gave him the “Geronimo” nickname.

Mr. Pratt was convicted in the 1968 shooting after compelling testimony by
Julius C. “Julio” Butler, a one-time Black Panther associate who told jurors
that Mr. Pratt discussed “the mission” with him before the attack and admitted
later that evening that he had shot the couple. Government records later showed
that Butler was an FBI informant at the time. Butler denied being an informant.

Nonetheless, three jurors who convicted Mr. Pratt said they would have held out
for acquittal if they had known of Butler’s relationship with the FBI.

For more than two decades, Mr. Pratt’s legal team — led by Hanlon and Los
Angeles lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. — struggled to win Mr. Pratt’s freedom.
Cochran, who died in 2005 and was a key member of O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team,”
said Mr. Pratt’s case was the most important of his career.

After he was released from Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County, Mr. Pratt
held no animosity toward authorities who had imprisoned him, Hanlon said. “He
was at peace with himself,” the attorney said.

— Los Angeles Times

Original Page:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/elmer-pratt-former-black-panther-leader-whose-murder-conviction-was-overturned-dies-at-63/2011/06/03/AGqb1TIH_story.html

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Ex-Black Panther Elmer Pratt, whose murder conviction was voided after 27 years, dies at 63





Ex-Black Panther Elmer Pratt, whose murder conviction was voided after 27 
years, dies at 63

by LINDA DEUTSCH, startribune.com
June 3rd 2011   

 

LOS ANGELES - Elmer Geronimo Pratt, a former Black Panther Party leader who 
spent 27 years in prison on a California murder conviction that was later 
overturned, has died at the age of 63 in his adopted home of Tanzania.

Pratt died early Friday at home in Imbaseni village, 15 miles (24 kilometers) 
from Arusha, Tanzania, where he had lived for at least half a decade, said a 
friend in Arusha, former Black Panther Pete O'Neal.

Pratt's name and his long-fought case with its political backdrop became 
emblematic of a tumultuous era in American history when the beret-wearing 
Panthers raised their fists in defiance and carried big guns, striking fear in 
white America.

The party, founded by Huey Newton in Oakland, Calif., in 1966, was targeted by 
late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a program which sent infiltrators into 
their gatherings and recruited informants. One of them, Julius Butler, was the 
key witness against Pratt when he was charged in 1968 with the Santa Monica 
tennis court shooting of school teacher Caroline Olson.

Pratt, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said he was innocent and maintained 
there were audiotapes that would prove he had been at a Black Panther meeting 
in Oakland the day of the killing. His lawyers later said that FBI agents and 
police hid and possibly destroyed wiretap evidence from the meeting which they 
had under surveillance.

His conviction in 1972 came during a period of turmoil marked by shootouts 
between police and Black Panthers, and the trial of activist professor Angela 
Davis, who was accused of providing guns for Black Panthers in a Marin County, 
Calif., courthouse shooting. She was acquitted of murder charges in a 
high-profile trial.

Although the Panthers were associated with violence, they also established free 
breakfast programs for poor children, health clinics and pest-control services 
for those who needed them.

It was their high-profile appearances bearing rifles — often licensed and legal 
— and gun battles with police, which took lives on both sides, that fueled 
their legend.

In 1967, the FBI launched a counterintelligence program — COINTELPRO — against 
what it termed black hate groups as well as other activists such as the 
Weathermen and the Socialist Workers Party.

Agents were assigned to expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize 
the activities of black nationalists, Hoover said in a once-classified memo to 
field agents.

The program's most controversial efforts may have been instigating a bloody 
feud between the Panthers in Los Angeles and a rival black organization known 
as US.

For years, Pratt supporters including well-known civil rights activists pressed 
for his release to no avail. But two lawyers, Stuart Hanlon and Johnnie L. 
Cochran, were relentless in pursuing the case. Each time they were turned down, 
they filed new motions. In 1997, they won.

Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey granted him a new trial, saying the 
credibility of prosecution witness Butler — who testified that Pratt had 
confessed to him — could have been undermined if the jury had known of his 
relationship with law enforcement. Pratt was freed later that month.

Cochran, best known for representing such clients as O.J. Simpson and Michael 
Jackson, called the day Pratt's freedom was secured the happiest day of my 
life practicing law.

Prosecutors announced two years later that they would abandon efforts to retry 
Pratt. But they never acknowledged he was wrongly convicted.

During the remaining 14 years of his life, Pratt divided his time between his 
home in Louisiana and his adopted home in Tanzania, according to his associates 
there.

Hanlon, the San Francisco attorney who helped Pratt win his freedom, told The 
Associated Press that Pratt refused to carry resentment over his treatment by 
the legal system. .

He had no anger, he had no bitterness, he had no desire for revenge. He wanted 
to resume his life and have children, he said. He would never look back.

Pratt worked with the United African Alliance Community Center in Arusha for 
the last nine years that he lived in the community, which sits near the base of 
Mount Kilimanjaro, said O'Neal, who founded the organization 20 years ago to 
empower youth.

He's my hero. He was and will continue to be, O'Neal said. Geronimo was a 
symbol of steadfast resistance against all that is considered wrong and 
improper. His whole life was dedicated to standing in opposition to

Former Black Panther Geronimo Pratt Dies at 63






Former Black Panther Geronimo Pratt Dies at 63

by Adam Martin, theatlanticwire.com
June 3rd 2011 			 			 			 			   

The Black Panther leader Elmer Geronimo Pratt, who spent 27 years in  
prison for a murder of which he was later exonerated, died yesterday at his  
home in Tanzania at the age of 63. His fellow former Black Panther Pete  
O'Neal told the Associated Press he probably died of a heart attack, but  
that hasn't been officially confirmed yet. He had lived in the city of  
Arusha for at least five years, reports the AP.


Pratt, who joined the Black Panthers in 1968 after he finished a tour with  
the Army in Vietnam and started at UCLA, was convicted of shooting Caroline  
Olson in a robbery that netted $18. He has said the FBI had him under  
surveillance in Oakland at the time of the murder in Santa Monica, but the  
prosecution didn't share that information with his defense lawyers before  
his conviction in 1972. In 1997, a judge in Orange County Superior Court  
ruled that prosecutors had withheld evidence -- namely that a key witness  
against him, Julius Butler, was an FBI and Los Angeles Police Department  
informant -- and he was released. Later, a federal judge awarded him $4.5  
million in a false-imprisonment and civil rights lawsuit.


As the Los Angeles Times points out in its obituary, Pratt's case became a  
cause celebre for a range of supporters, including elected officials,  
activists, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities who believed he was  
framed by Los Angeles police and the FBI because he was African American and  
a member of the radical Black Panthers. In 1980, two activists hoisted a  
banner on the Statue of Liberty that read, Liberty was Framed - Free  
Geronimo Pratt.


Pratt's attorney from the 1997 verdict, Stuart Hanlon, told the Times,  
Geronimo was a powerful leader... For that reason, he was targeted. After  
he gained his freedom, Pratt continued his activist work, participating in  
the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is currently on death row for  
murder, but who many believe to be innocent. According to Hip Hop Wired and  
a number of other sources, Pratt was Tupac Shakur's godfather. He is  
survived by his daughter, three sons, two sisters and two brothers.






Original Page:  
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/06/geronimo-pratt-dies-63/38470/ 



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Elmer G. Pratt, Jailed Panther Leader, Dies at 63





Elmer G. Pratt, Jailed Panther Leader, Dies at 63

by DOUGLAS MARTIN, nytimes.com
June 3rd 2011   

 

Elmer G. Pratt, a Black Panther leader who was imprisoned for 27 years for 
murder and whose marathon fight to prove he had been framed attracted support 
from civil rights groups and led to the overturning of his conviction, died on 
Thursday in a village in Tanzania, where he was living. He was 63.

Mr. Pratt, who was widely known by his Panther name, Geronimo ji-Jaga, had high 
blood pressure and other ailments, his longtime lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, said. 
Mr. Hanlon said he did not know the exact cause of death.

To his supporters — among them Amnesty International, the N.A.A.C.P. and the 
American Civil Liberties Union — Mr. Pratt came to symbolize a politically 
motivated attack on the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and other radical 
groups. But from the start, the grisly facts of the murder of a 27-year-old 
teacher dominated discussions of the case, including those of the parole board 
that denied parole to Mr. Pratt 16 times.

The teacher, Caroline Olsen, and her husband, Kenneth, were accosted by two 
young black men with guns on Dec. 18, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif. They took 
$18 from Mrs. Olsen’s purse. “This ain’t enough,” one said, according to the 
police, and ordered the couple to “lie down and pray.”

Shots were fired, hitting Mr. Olsen five times and his wife twice. Mrs. Olsen 
died 11 days later. Mr. Pratt was arrested.

The case against Mr. Pratt included evidence that both the pistol used as the 
murder weapon and the red-and-white GTO convertible used as the getaway car 
belonged to him. An informant wrote an eight-page letter asserting Mr. Pratt 
had bragged to him that he committed the murder.

Fellow Panthers did not support Mr. Pratt’s alibi that he was in Oakland, more 
than 300 miles away, at the time of the killing. A witness identified Mr. Pratt 
as one of two men who tried to rob a store shortly before the murder. And Mr. 
Olsen identified Mr. Pratt as the assailant.

Mr. Pratt was convicted of first-degree murder on July 28, 1972, and sentenced 
to life imprisonment a month later.

Information gradually surfaced that the jury had not known about when it 
reached its verdict. Mr. Olsen had identified someone else before he identified 
Mr. Pratt. Documents showed that the informant who said that Mr. Pratt had 
confessed to him had lied about himself. Wiretap evidence that might have 
supported Mr. Pratt’s alibi mysteriously vanished from F.B.I. files.

A public debate erupted over the extent to which Mr. Pratt and the Black 
Panthers had been singled out by law enforcement agencies. J. Edgar Hoover, 
director of the F.B.I., called the Panthers a threat to national security, and 
an F.B.I. report spoke of “neutralizing” Mr. Pratt. Others saw the Panthers and 
their leaders as a voice of black empowerment and as a service group that 
provided free breakfasts to the poor.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1997, John Mack, president of the 
Los Angeles Urban League, said, “The Geronimo Pratt case is one of the most 
compelling and painful examples of a political assassination on an 
African-American activist.”

As Mr. Pratt languished in solitary confinement, his supporters shed light on 
his case by hanging a banner from the Statue of Liberty. His lawyers, led by 
Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. — famed for defending O.J. Simpson — assembled 
ammunition for an appeal.

In 1997 a California Superior Court judge, Everett W. Dickey, vacated Mr. 
Pratt’s conviction on the grounds that the government informant, Julius C. 
Butler, had lied about being one. Moreover, it was learned that the Los Angeles 
Police Department, the F.B.I. and prosecutors had not shared with the defense 
their knowledge that Mr. Butler was an informant.

A juror, Jeanne Rook Hamilton, told The Times: “If we had known about Butler’s 
background, there’s no way Pratt would have been convicted.”

California lost its appeal to nullify Judge Dickey’s decision in 1999, and the 
Los Angeles County district attorney ruled out a new trial. In 2000, Mr. Pratt 
received $4.5 million from the federal and local governments as settlement in a 
wrongful-imprisonment suit.

Mr. Pratt said he would have preferred to press the matter in a trial so he 
could air the government’s “evil scheme,” but decided to accept his lawyers’ 
advice and take the settlement.

Elmer Gerard Pratt, the name he rejected at 20 as that of a “dirty dog” slave 
master, was born on Sept. 13, 1947, in Morgan City, La. His father was in the 
scrap-metal business. Elmer liked to

Former Black Panther Leader, Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, Wrongfully Imprisoned





Former Black Panther Leader, Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, Wrongfully Imprisoned for 
27 Years, Dies in Tanzania

democracynow.org | Oct 5th 2000 

 

We look at the life of former Black Panther, Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, who died 
in Tanzania on Thursday. In 1972, Pratt was wrongfully convicted of the murder 
of Caroline Olsen for which he spent 27 years in prison, eight of those in 
solitary confinement. He was released in 1997 after a judge vacated his 
conviction. The trial to win his freedom revealed that the Los Angeles Black 
Panther leader was a target of the FBI’s counterintelligence program, or 
COINTELPRO. We play an excerpt of a Democracy Now! interview with Pratt and one 
of his attorneys, Johnnie Cochran, Jr., in 2000. We also speak with his friend 
and former attorney, Stuart Hanlon, and with Ed Boyer, the Los Angeles Times 
reporter who helped expose his innocence. The FBI followed Geronimo every 
second, almost, of his life, and they knew he was in Oakland at the time of the 
homicide, says Hanlon. When we started litigating this, rather than turning 
it over, for the first time anyone could remember FBI wiretaps disappeared. And 
of course they knew where he was. It didn’t matter what the truth was, because 
he was the bad guy, and the truth had to take second place, even in the 
courtroom. Pratt ultimately won a $4.5 million civil rights settlement against 
the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: The former Black Panther leader Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt died 
Thursday at the age of 63 in a village in the East African country of Tanzania.

In 1972, Pratt was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Caroline Olsen. He 
spent 27 years in prison, eight of those in solitary confinement. He was 
released in 1997 after a Reagan appointee, a judge, vacated his conviction. 
Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, his family and supporters always maintained he was 
targeted and framed by the FBI and the L.A. Police Department because of his 
activity in the Black Panther Party. Two years after his release, Pratt won a 
$4.5 million settlement of his civil rights case against the FBI and LAPD. The 
FBI’s share of $1.75 million marked one of the few times in its history it was 
forced to admit culpability in a case of false imprisonment.

Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, born Elmer Pratt, was a Louisiana native, decorated 
Vietnam vet who served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne.

Before we turn to our guests, I’d like to play part of a radio interview I did 
with Geronimo Pratt in 2000, three years after he was released from jail. We 
were also joined in WBAI’s studios in New York for this conversation by one of 
Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt’s attorney’s, Johnnie Cochran, who died in 2005.

GERONIMO JI-JAGA PRATT: Well, I grew up in segregation, and we had to deal with 
the terror from the Klan violence and, you know, other forms of ignorance from 
those peoples. But growing up in that kind of environment instilled in me a 
pride of—or a sense of nationalism, that we can govern ourselves, and we can 
protect ourselves, and we didn’t need to be with anyone who didn’t want to be 
with us. So, out of that, I was part of a group that was selected by the elders 
to get military training, to come back to the community, you know, and help 
protect it, relieve the old soldiers. It just so happened that when I was 
selected, Vietnam was happening, and I ended up in Vietnam and survived that, 
two tours, or two and a half. And when I came back, it was shortly after Martin 
Luther King was assassinated, so the black nation was more or less at one now 
with the—just being fed up. And everyone was saying, Look, we have to do 
something. So us young militant types were employed quite extensively 
throughout the nation. And so, this is how I ended up in these cities 
contributing what little I could contribute.

AMY GOODMAN: And you got involved then with the Black Panther Party?

GERONIMO JI-JAGA PRATT: Well, with various organizations, including the Black 
Panther Party.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how did you end up in a courtroom being tried for the murder 
of Caroline Olsen? She was killed playing on a Santa Monica tennis court with 
her husband in 1968. You were caught and charged when?

GERONIMO JI-JAGA PRATT: Well, I was arrested two years after that, in 1970, in 
Dallas, Texas, where I was instrumental in helping to organize the first Black 
Panther chapter there in Dallas, Texas, and other parts of the South. I was 
charged because of a conspiracy by the government that was led by the 
Hoover—what we call the Hoover-Nixon regime, which was an

Black Panther Wrongfully Accused of Killing Teacher in Santa Monica Dies

Black Panther Wrongfully Accused of Killing Teacher in Santa Monica Dies

by Kurt Orzeck, santamonica.patch.com

Elmer Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther leader wrongfully accused of murdering
a schoolteacher on a Santa Monica tennis court in December 1968, died Friday.
He was 63.

Pratt was convicted for killing Caroline Olsen, a 27-year-old Culver City
schoolteacher, in 1972. But after spending 27 years in prison—including eight
in solitary confinement—the conviction was overturned.

Pratt died in his home, located in a village near Arusha, Tanzania. It is
suspected that the cause of death was a heart attack or stroke, as he had
recently been taken to a hospital for high blood pressure.

The murder occurred at the Lincoln Park tennis courts at Wilshire Blvd. and
Seventh St., where Reed Park's Santa Monica Tennis Club is now. Olsen had been
with her husband, Kenneth Olsen, and was fatally shot by two robbers, it was
alleged.

Pratt maintained his innocence, saying he had been in Oakland for Black Panther
Party meetings when the murder took place. He accused the FBI and police of
hiding and possibly destroying wiretap evidence that he said would have proven
his innocence.

He had no anger, he had no bitterness, he had no desire for revenge [over the
wrongful conviction]. He wanted to resume his life and have children, lawyer
Stuart Hanlon, who helped overturn Pratt's conviction told The Associated
Press. He would never look back.

In 2000, Pratt settled a $4.5 million false imprisonment and civil rights suit
against the city of Los Angeles and the FBI.

Pratt was granted a new trial in June 1997 after it was revealed that
prosecution witness Julius Butler hid critical information about himself,
including that he was an ex-felon and a police informant. Butler had testified
that Pratt told him he was responsible for the murder.

Later that month, Pratt was released from prison. Two years later, prosecutors
said they would not retry him.

Pratt's lawyers included Johnnie Cochran, who also represented O.J. Simpson and
Michael Jackson. The lawyers argued that Pratt's arrest was due to the J. Edgar
Hoover-led FBI's campaign against the Black Panthers and other leftist groups.

Cochran said the day of Pratt's release from prison was the happiest day of my
life practicing law.

Pratt relocated to Tanzania at least a half-decade ago. For the past nine
years, he worked with the United African Alliance Community Center, a
youth-empowerment organization.

Geronimo was a symbol of steadfast resistance against all that is considered
wrong and improper, Pete O'Neal—an ex-Black Panther, the UAACC founder and a
friend of Pratt—told AP. His whole life was dedicated to standing in
opposition to oppression and exploitation. ... He gave all that he had and his
life, I believe, struggling, trying to help people lift themselves up.

Sources: The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, BlackVoiceNews.net

Original Page:
http://santamonica.patch.com/articles/black-panther-wrongfully-accused-of-killing-teacher-in-santa-monica-dies

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Remembering Geronimo Pratt’s Love of Justice and Freedom

Remembering Geronimo Pratt’s Love of Justice and Freedom

by Stokely Baksh, colorlines.com
June 3rd 2011 5:36 AM

The former Black Panther Party leader Geronimo Pratt has passed away. Pratt
became a political prisoner after he was convicted in in 1972 for a murder he
did not commit, and his life came to symbolize bitter racial injustice and the
state-organized oppression of black resistance after he spent 27 years in
prison for that crime. His conviction was overturned in 1997.

“Geronimo was a symbol of steadfast resistance against all that is considered
wrong and improper,” his friend Pete O’Neal told NPR. “His whole life was
dedicated to standing in opposition to oppression and exploitation. … He gave
all that he had and his life, I believe, struggling, trying to help people lift
themselves up.”

After his release, Pratt had moved to Tanzania, where his friends and family
say he devoted his life to the local community and the United African Alliance
Community Center, and lived with his wife and family. He was 63.

Here now, a quick look back at the turmoil of Pratt’s life in images. For more
history, check out this Los Angeles Times account from 2008 of the 1968 murder
of Caroline Olsen all the way up to Pratt’s eventual exoneration.

Pratt was a decorated Vietnam War Veteran and war hero with two purple hearts.
After two tours, he enrolled at the UCLA.

Still/60 Minutes. 1984.

Pratt later joined the Black Panthers because of the racial violence he saw. He
would rise the ranks of the organization and soon became a target of the FBI.

Still/60 Minutes. 1984.

See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgcZvnw4LdU

Pratt was convicted in 1972 of the 1968 murder of a 27-year-old schoolteacher
on a Santa Monica tennis court and wounding her husband in a mugging. Pratt
maintained his innocence especially since he was in Oakland when the crime took
place. Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. along with Stuart Hanlon became the two key
attorneys on his case.

Video/60 Minutes. 1984.

Pratt served 27 years for a murder he did not commit at the San Quentin State
Prison. He would become a symbol for racial injustices.

Still/60 Minutes. 1984.

Pratt was granted a new trial in 1997 after a Orange County Superior Court
Judge ruled that prosecutors had concealed evidence that could have led to an
acquittal. The Court of Appeal panel affirmed that judge’s decision in 1999.

Still/Evening News with Dan Rather. 1999.

See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgS3tqFT6Tk

In 2000, Pratt was granted a $4.5 million settlement in his false-imprisonment
and civil rights suit against the FBI and the city of Los Angeles.

Video/CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. 1999.

Investigative reporter Jack Olsen documented Pratt’s story and false
imprisonment in “Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt.”

“Years would pass before it finally came to light that he’d been targeted by J.
Edgar Hoover and a systematic FBI counter-intelligence program whose admitted
goal was to undermine black solidarity and “neutralize” Panther leaders.”

Pratt continued to work on behalf of men and women believed to be wrongfully
incarcerated, and later went on to help communities in Tanzania, where he lived
for nearly 10 years.

Photo/Getty Images

Original Page:
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/06/geronimo_pratt.html?utm_source=feedburnerutm_medium=feedutm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28ColorLines%29

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COINTELPRO target Geronimo Pratt dead in African village





COINTELPRO target Geronimo Pratt dead in African village

m.examiner.com | Jun 6th 2011 10:35 AM  

 

Elmer Geronimo “Ji Jaga” Pratt is dead at 63 in his adopted African home of 
Imbaseni Village in Tanzania.  Pratt is reported to have died of complications 
of malaria and heart disease.  Pratt was born September 13, 1947 in Morgan 
City, Louisiana.

Geronimo Pratt is known to most people for his 27-year imprisonment on murder 
charges where he had been convicted in a trial tainted by withheld evidence and 
convicted on the testimony of an informer.  Ordered freed in 1997, after years 
in solitary confinement, the former Black Panther leader eventually won $4.5 
million dollars in a false imprisonment civil action.

The case of Geronimo Pratt was recently cited in Nebraska by the American Civil 
Liberties Union in an amicus brief urging the Nebraska Supreme Court to grant a 
new trial to Omaha Two ex-Black Panther leader Ed Poindexte r.   The state high 
court denied Poindexter’s appeal and ignored similar misconduct in Pratt’s case 
as unimportant.





Original Page: 
http://m.examiner.com/examiner/pm_60959/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=iYfhyB2J

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'Geronimo' Pratt, Former Black Panther Leader, Dies






'Geronimo' Pratt, Former Black Panther Leader, Dies

by The Associated Press, m.npr.org
June 3rd 2011 			 			 			 			   

Former Black Panther Party leader Elmer Geronimo Pratt, whose murder  
conviction was overturned after he spent 27 years in prison for a crime he  
maintained he did not commit, died early Friday from a medical ailment, an  
associate said. He was 63.


Pratt died just after midnight at his home in Imbaseni village, 15 miles  
from Arusha, Tanzania, where he had lived for at least half a decade, friend  
and former Black Panther member Pete O'Neal said. O'Neal said he suspects  
Pratt died of a heart attack or stroke. Pratt was taken to the hospital on  
Tuesday and Wednesday with high blood pressure.


Pratt was convicted in 1972 of being one of two men who robbed and fatally  
shot schoolteacher Caroline Olsen on a Santa Monica, Calif., tennis court in  
December 1968. No one else was arrested.


Pratt claimed he was in Oakland for Black Panther Party meetings the day of  
the murder, and that FBI agents and police hid and possibly destroyed  
wiretap evidence that would prove it.


The Black Panther Party was an African-American revolutionary leftist  
organization, active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. It achieved  
notoriety through its involvement in the Black Power movement and in U.S.  
politics of the 1960s and 70s.


Lawyer Stuart Hanlon, who helped Pratt win his freedom, said Pratt refused  
to carry any resentment about his treatment by the legal system.


He had no anger, he had no bitterness, he had no desire for revenge. He  
wanted to resume his life and have children, Hanlon told The Associated  
Press from San Francisco on Thursday. He would never look back.


Pratt lived a peaceful life in Tanzania that he loved, O'Neal said. Pratt  
returned from a visit to the U.S. about 10 days ago and remarked that he  
appreciated the pace of his life in Africa.


He's my hero. He was and will continue to be, O'Neal said. Geronimo was a  
symbol of steadfast resistance against all that is considered wrong and  
improper. His whole life was dedicated to standing in opposition to  
oppression and exploitation. ... He gave all that he had and his life, I  
believe, struggling, trying to help people lift themselves up.


Pratt worked with the United African Alliance Community Center in Arusha for  
the last nine years that he lived in the Tanzanian community, which sits  
near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. The organization, which O'Neal founded  
20 years ago, works to empower youth.


Pratt's lawyers, who included high-profile defense attorney Johnnie Cochran,  
blamed his arrest on a politically charged campaign by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI  
against the Black Panthers and other perceived enemies of the U.S.  
government.


Pratt's belated reversal of fortune came with the disclosure that a key  
prosecution witness hid the fact he was an ex-felon and a police informant.


Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey granted him a new trial in June 1997,  
saying the credibility of prosecution witness Julius Butler who testified  
that Pratt had confessed to him could have been undermined if the jury had  
known of his relationship with law enforcement. He was freed later that  
month.


Cochran, best known representing such clients as O.J. Simpson and Michael  
Jackson, called the day Pratt's freedom was secured the happiest day of my  
life practicing law.


Prosecutors announced two years after the conviction was overturned that  
they would abandon efforts to retry him.


I feel relieved that the L.A. DA's office has finally come to their senses  
in this respect, Pratt said at the time. But, I am not relieved in that  
they did not come clean all the way in exposing their complicity with this  
frame-up, this 27-year trauma.


He settled a false imprisonment and civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and  
city of Los Angeles for $4.5 million in 2000. [Copyright 2011 The Associated  
Press]






Original Page:  
http://m.npr.org/story/136924082?url=/2011/06/03/136924082/geronimo-pratt-for 
mer-black-panther-leader-dies


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Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies






Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies

countercurrents.org | Jun 6th 2011 8:11 PM 			 			 			 			   


By Stephen Lendman


Countercurrents.org

Reporting his death, AP said:

Former Black Panther Party leader Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt died at age 63 in  
a small (Tanzania village) where he had lived for at least half a decade, a  
friend of Pratt's in Arusha, former Black Panther Pete O'Neal, said.


He lived a peaceful life in Tanzania, O'Neal explained, adding:

He's my hero. He was and will continue to be. Geronimo was a symbol of  
steadfast resistance against all (he) considered wrong and improper. His  
whole life was dedicated to standing opposition to oppression and  
exploitationHe gave all that he had and his life, I believe, struggling,  
trying to help people lift themselves up.


His lawyer and longtime friend, Stuart Hanlon, who spent years working for  
his release, also announced his death, saying:


What happened to him is the horror story of the United States. This became  
a microcosm of when the government decides what's politically right or  
wrong. The COINTELPRO program was awful. He became a symbol for what they  
did.


He had southern, rural roots, and hardworking parents who sent all their  
kids to college. He (went) to the military, (fought) and (was awarded two  
Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts) in Vietnam, (came) home,  
(and became) a football star in college. That would be an American hero. It  
was different because he was black and he became a Panther and then the road  
went the wrong way.


Calling Pratt one of his closest friends, Hanlon said his case defined me  
as a lawyer.


David Hilliard helped recruit Pratt to provide leadership for the Los  
Angeles Panther chapter. He symbolized the best human spirit, he said.  
His spirit of endurance, his strength, his service to his people. He (was)  
very positive and a real example for young people who want to look into the  
direction of Che Guevara, Malcolm X and the leader of our party, Huey P.  
Newton. He (was) one of the true heros of our era. He dedicated his life to  
(serve) his people. There is nothing more honorable than that.


On June 3, Los Angeles Times writer Robert Lopez headlined, Former Black  
Panther whose murder conviction was overturned dies at 63, saying:


He became a symbol of racial injustices during the turbulent 1960sa  
cause celebre for a range of supporters, including elected officials,  
activists, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities, who believed he  
was framed by Los Angeles police and the FBI because he was Black and a  
Panther member.


In fact, he was under FBI surveillance in Oakland when the murder he was  
convicted of happened in Santa Monica, hundreds of miles south. Nonetheless,  
he was unjustly framed and served 27 years until freed.


In 1970, he was arrested and falsely charged with Caroline Olsen's murder, a  
Los Angeles teacher. In 1968, she and her husband Kenneth were attacked on a  
Santa Monica tennis court by two Black men. Three years later, Kenneth said  
Pratt was one of the assailants, pressured to name him after first  
identifying three other suspects from LAPD photos. In 1972, he was falsely  
convicted.


In fact, Pratt was framed, victimized by LAPD authorities working with the  
FBI's illegal COINTELPRO counterintelligence program against political  
dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights  
activists; the American Indian Movement; and Black Panther Party members,  
among others.


In their book Agents of Repression, Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall  
said:


(T)he term came to signify the whole context of clandestine (mostly  
illegal) political repression activities, (including) a massive surveillance  
(program via) wiretaps, surreptitious entries and burglaries, electronic  
devices, live 'tails' andbogus mail (to induce paranoia and) foster  
'splits' within or between organizations.


Other tactics included black propaganda, disinformation or gray propaganda,  
rumor spreading, manufactured evidence, harassment arrests on bogus charges,  
and assassinations, notably against Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December  
4, 1969 by Chicago police while they slept.


In Pratt's case, Julius Butler was the prosecution's main witness, an  
FBI/LAPD informant, expelled from the Panthers by Pratt for advocating  
violence. At trial, he falsely claimed Pratt confessed to the killing.


Later, when Butler was outed as an informer, paid to lie, LA authorities  
denied Pratt a retrial, keeping him imprisoned wrongfully for another 20  
years.


Moreover, according to former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen, Los Angeles  
Panther headquaters wiretap information showed Pratt was in Oakland when it

Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, a former Black Panther leader, dies in Tanzania





Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, a former Black Panther leader, dies in Tanzania

latimesblogs.latimes.com | Jun 2nd 2011 

 

 
Elmer G. Geronimo Pratt, a former Los Angeles Black Panther Party leader who 
spent 27 years in prison for a murder he says he did not commit and whose case 
became a symbol of racial injustice during the turbulent 1960s, has died. He 
was 63.
 
Pratt died at his home in a small village in Tanzania, where he had been living 
with his wife and child, according to Stuart Hanlon, a San Francisco attorney 
who helped overturn Pratt's murder conviction.  Hanlon said he was informed of 
the death by Pratt's sister.

Pratt's case became a cause celebre for elected officials, Amnesty 
International, clergy and celebrities who believed he was framed by the 
government because he was African American and a member of the Black Panthers.

Geronimo was a powerful leader, Hanlon told The Times. For that reason he 
was targeted.

Pratt was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to life in prison for the 1968 fatal 
shooting of Caroline Olsen and the serious wounding of her husband, Kenneth, in 
a robbery that netted $18. The case was overturned in 1997 by an Orange County 
Superior Court judge who ruled that prosecutors at Pratt's murder trial had 
concealed evidence that could have led to his acquittal.

Pratt maintained that the FBI knew he was innocent because the agency had 
him under surveillance in Oakland when the murder was committed in Santa 
Monica. 

ALSO:

L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa approves $6.9-billion budget

Man who sold whale meat to Santa Monica sushi restaurant pleads guilty

African American landmark building in West Adams named L.A. historical monument

— Robert J. Lopez

Twitter: @LAJourno

Photo: Geronimo Pratt, left, with defense attorney Johnny L. Cochran Jr. in Los 
Angeles in 1998. Credit: Nick Ut / Associated Press





Original Page: 
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/geronimo-pratt-dies.html

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World Leaders Encourage Countries to End Marijuana Prohibition





World Leaders Encourage Countries to End Marijuana Prohibition

commondreams.org | Jun 2nd 2011 

 

WASHINGTON - June 2 - Today, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, an 
international organization consisting of high level current and former heads of 
state and policy experts, released a report suggesting world governments give 
up the war on drugs and consider more rational harm-reduction policies, 
including removing all criminal penalties for the possession and use of 
marijuana. The Commission, which included former U.N. Secretary General Kofi 
Annan and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, among many others, 
urged leaders to consider alternatives to incarceration for drug use to shift 
their focus toward treatment of drug abusers, rather than punishment and 
interdiction for recreational users.

These prominent world leaders recognize an undeniable reality. The use of 
marijuana, which is objectively less harmful than alcohol, is widespread and 
will never be eliminated,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana 
Policy Project. “They acknowledge that there are only two choices moving 
forward. We can maintain marijuana's status as a wholly illegal substance and 
steer billions of dollars toward drug cartels and other criminal actors. Or, we 
can encourage nations to make the adult use of marijuana legal and have it sold 
in regulated stores by legitimate, taxpaying business people. At long last, we 
have world leaders embracing the more rational choice and advocating for legal, 
regulated markets for marijuana. We praise these world leaders for their 
willingness to advocate for this sensible approach to marijuana policy.

This study comes as Portugal enjoys the tenth year of its experiment with 
decriminalizing all drugs. Since making the bold policy move in 2001, Portugal 
has seen crime, use rates, addiction rates, overdose deaths, and blood-borne 
disease all decrease significantly. The study released today suggests that a 
similar model could be adopted successfully elsewhere. It also stresses the 
damage that prohibition policies do to society, including massive government 
expenditure, enrichment of criminal organizations, and interference with 
treatment and prevention of diseases like HIV/AIDS.





Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/06/02-7

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Baby Boomers are at it again

Baby Boomers are at it again

dailyhome.com | May 23rd 2011

Baby boomers have been
blamed for lots of society’s problems. After all, the generation born between
1946 and 1964 ushered in the decade of the Sixties, with protests against a war
and for civil rights, and it seems that group has been blamed or credited for
every trend in today’s world.

Worried about Medicare? Social Security? Well, the leading edge of the Baby
Boomers is about ready to start lining up for those federal benefits, as they
will turn 65 this year, to be followed by wave after wave of their brothers and
sisters in coming years.

Baby Boomers have contributed two presidents—Bill Clinton and George Bush—who
represented both ends of the political spectrum and neatly summed up the two
faces of their generation.

Even music is part of the Boomers’ heritage. It has been said that Oldies Radio
didn’t exist until the Boomers age caught up with them and they were no longer
setting the pace for musical taste. Unwilling to adopt new music, and so
self-centered they couldn’t bear the thought of not hearing the Beatles or the
Stones or the Eagles—they promptly rallied behind the stations that played
“their music” and they remain a powerful audience today. Which kind of brings
us to the point of all this:

As the Boomers age, their hips and knees and shoulders are wearing out. And
instead of cutting back on physical activity, or getting a cane or a wheel
chair—this generation is demanding that medical science replace their aging
joints so they can continue to run or walk or play basketball and tennis or
whatever they want.

It’s akin to the music demand in that Boomers allegedly don’t care about
whether the rest of the world likes it or not, or whether it is medically
necessary or cost-effective. It’s available and they want it.

The numbers bear this out.

Knee replacement surgeries have doubled over the last decade and more than
tripled in the 45-64 age groups, according to an Associated Press story. That’s
the boomer generation, getting older but not liking it and doing something
about it.

It’s “boomeritis or fix-me-it is,” says Dr. Nicholas Dubile, a Philadelphia
surgeon.

“It’s this mindset of “fix me at any cost, turn back the clock. The boomers are
the first generation trying to stay active in droves on an aging frame,” he
said.

There is a sense that all this is self-centered and somehow bad. But we don’t
necessarily agree with that. Joint replacements have helped millions of people
lead better lives, and apparently surgeons have no problems offering and
performing the procedures.

As with all relatively new medical procedures, there are questions. How long
will these replacements last? And how well will they perform with the
activities planned by the boomers.

Some doctors say those kinds of questions lead them to try to talk patients
under 50 out of replacement surgeries. But some Boomers don’t want to wait.

One told his doctor he wasn’t worried about how his new knee would work at 75,
he wanted it fixed now when he is 55 so he can continue with the active
lifestyle he now enjoys.

Is there an answer to all this? Or is there even a problem here? There are
plenty of replacement knees and hips around. And there are plenty of doctors
who are willing to perform the surgeries.

All this surgery does cost money. And insurance companies and Medicare will pay
for most of it. But all this surgery will also create jobs—from those who
manufacture the joints, to those who sell them, to those who work in the
hospitals where the knees are fixed and on and on.

Just like Oldies Radio, it seems the Boomers have defined a market and demanded
it be served.

Original Page:
http://www.dailyhome.com/view/full_story/13379504/article-Baby-Boomers-are-at-it-again?instance=home_opinion_bullet%3E

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‘My protests are conveyed through my music'





‘My protests are conveyed through my music'

hindu.com | May 29th 2011   

 Having staged a live 
concert in China last month, folk icon Bob Dylan walks down memory lane during 
a telephonic chat with RANJAN DASGUPTA. Photo: AFP

“Protests need not always come out on the streets or shooting with the gun,”  
says Bob Dylan, the folk icon, as he answers a long distance call from 
California. “I appreciate and admire the folklore of this glorious sub 
continent that has one of the richest cultural heritages.” Last month saw his 
first performance in China, where he was earlier forbidden or never invited.

Speaking of his China tour, Bob Dylan grows excited. “This was the concert of a 
lifetime. I admired the Red Revolution and China is a nation to look up to.

When President Lyndon Johnson stated that he was moved to tears by Bob Dylan's 
numbers, he conveyed the feelings of countless people across the world. 
Elaborating on folk songs, Bob Dylan states, “A country or folk song is very 
different from a popular one. If the lyrics do not have the essence of the 
birth place's soil, wind and waters, it is not a folk song at all.”

Songs like Blowin' in the Wind, The times they are a Changin' and albums like 
“Things Must Pass” and “No Direction Home” are legendary favourites.  Yet, he 
confesses, “My personal favourite is I will be working in Maggie's farm no 
more. Through this I brought out the plight of a deprived and exploited peasant 
in the American countryside who was ignored by Hollywood and the world. This 
song, I feel, is the hymn of farmers and peasants through the globe. Even Paul 
Robeson complimented me for my creation.”

More heart than craft

Of the current synthetic genre of music, Dylan says, “Synthetic music requires 
more heart than craft to be everlasting.  But the majority of numbers don't 
appeal permanently as they lack simple emotions.”  What did he think of the 
Beatles? “Their lyrics are said to be as popular as the Bible. They even 
outclassed their predecessors, Rolling Stones. Though I do not think along the 
same lines of all their songs, I must admit some of them like Yellow submarine, 
Michelle and I wanna hold your hand are fabulous.  A second Beatles can never 
be born.

Bob Dylan confesses, “The greatest singer to musically convey the voice of 
people the world over is Paul Robeson.  Sometimes I feel like a motherless 
Child is an evergreen number. The resonance in his voice is incomparable.  Pete 
Seeager also was very effective in Where have all the flowers gone.  I would be 
biased if I do not mention Dalia Lave, the greatest revolutionary female 
singer, who oozed emotions in her famous number My world can be yours.” 

No comparisons

He does not believe in comparing himself with any of these greats and knows 
that his style and trend are unique and different. In fact Pat Boon once said 
if Bob Dylan rendered Anastasia it would have been far more effective than his 
own. Nancy Sinatra was keen to render a duet with the inimitable Dylan after he 
praised her haunting duet with Lee Hazlewood, Strawberries, cherries and 
angel's Kiss in spring. 

The poetry of Dylan Thomas is the Bible for Bob Dylan, who feels that a 
combination of guitar, bass, drums and piano accompanied occasionally with horn 
sections and violins can create magical effects. 

Recollecting his joint performance and appearance with George Harrison for his 
Bangladesh concert in 1971, Bob Dylan states, “I was determined to musically 
greet the survivors of a bloody battle and convey my musical condolences to 
those noble souls who lost their lives to liberate their nation. George 
Harrison was on an objective mission and how could I not support his cause?”

Grammy awards don't mean anything for this revolutionary singer. According to 
him, the content of a song is best with imagination and protest against all 
forms of despotism and wrongdoing.

He signs off, “The U.S. may be a super power but not all the wars it has fought 
are just; nor are all its policies. I am a writer, singer and musician and my 
protests are conveyed through my music.”

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Feminists are ruining good clean fun, says former Playboy bunny






Feminists are ruining good clean fun, says former Playboy bunny

thisislondon.co.uk | May 27th 2011 			 			 			 			   

A sixties playboy bunny girl today hit back at claims by feminists that Hugh  
Hefner's new London club is demeaning to women.


Heather Colne-Bird, 70, hung up her rabbit ears and cuffs decades ago but  
believes campaigners are ruining good clean fun.


The launch of the Mayfair venue comes 30 years after the closure of the  
original 45 Park Lane club that was popular with Michael Caine, George Best  
and Jack Nicholson. It closed in 1981 when its gaming licences were revoked.


Mrs Colne-Bird applied for the job in 1966 after reading a story about it in  
the Standard. She said it was wrong to liken the waitress role of the  
bunnies to the close encounters offered by lap dancers and strippers.


I think these protesters are being pathetic, nobody forces a girl to do the  
job. Bunnies certainly aren't the same as table dancers or girls walking  
around in hooker shoes.


We were more glorified waitresses and couldn't even sit with customers, we  
had to perch. We were told that we were celebrities and that we had to keep  
our noses clean. The job was highly glamorous, that was very well paid and  
we were very protected.


Campaigners believe the new club in Old Park Lane is a retrograde step for  
women's rights. Activists from Eff Off Hef! picketed its press launch last  
night, with one protester dressed as

85-year-old Playboy founder Mr Hefner.

Campaigner Anna van Heeswijk said: It's not sexual liberation to serve men  
when you're dressed in bunny ears and a fluffy tail.


The new private members' club has a casino, dining room, cocktail bar and  
terrace as well as the bunny hostesses. Mrs Colne-Bird said: Perhaps  
bunnies are a bit twee by today's standards but it was a highly-respected  
and prestigious job. Even now, people say 'wow' when I tell them I was a  
bunny.


Mrs Colne-Bird from Whetstone, north London, recalls regular customers  
including the Beatles, Sammy Davis Jr, Dick van Dyke and Tommy Steele. She  
added: If the men touched a bunny they were slung out, it was a lovely  
regime and that's why I was happy to work there and my mum was so proud.  
There was nothing seedy or sordid about it.


Mrs Colne-Bird went on to run a Rolls-Royce hire company with her husband.
She said: I'm sure we'll be taking a trip up there to see the new club.  
There's a reunion each year in Limehouse, but vanity creeps in.






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-good-clean-fun-says-former-playboy-bunny.do


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In Commemoration of Memorial Day, Sixties Activist Timothy Fitzgerald Salut






In Commemoration of Memorial Day, Sixties Activist Timothy Fitzgerald  
Salutes the Men and Women Who Lost Their Lives in Our Nation's Wars


prweb.com | May 25th 2011 			 			 			 			   

In commemoration of Memorial Day, Mr. Fitzgerald salutes them along with the  
other military servicemen and women who lost their lives in the World Wars,  
Korean War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.


San Jose sixties activist Timothy Fitzgerald was born a few months after the  
ending of War World II. Mr. Fitzgerald was a student at San Jose State  
University in the 1960s. He was rejected from serving in the Vietnam War,  
because he failed the physical due to a hearing impairment.


I personally remember fellow classmates who lost their lives in the Vietnam  
War, said activist Timothy Fitzgerald. It was a sad time. In commemoration  
of Memorial Day, I salute them along with the other military servicemen and  
women who lost their lives in the World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam, the  
Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. We must not forget their sacrifice.


Mr. Fitzgerald is the author of two recent books. The first volume of his  
trilogy, The Wawona Brotherhood: The San Jose State Campus Revolt,  
chronicles Fitzgerald's civil rights experiences at San Jose State  
University during the turbulent 1960s through the early 1970s.


Fitzgerald's new book, A Diamond in the Rough is the second volume in his  
trilogy in which he along with others fight for much-desired urban renewal  
in San Jose in the 1970s and 1980s. Fitzgerald and his comrades join the  
working class of Silicon Valley to implement low-income housing and services  
for the working poor. Fitzgerald later runs for San Jose City Council in  
1982.


The trilogy notes that from his time as an undergraduate, Mr. Fitzgerald has  
been a community activist in San Jose for over thirty years. Mr. Fitzgerald  
is currently working on the third volume of the trilogy which records that  
in the 1990s, he ran for State Assembly and was the Vice Chairman of the  
Disability Advisory Commission of San Jose in 1997. Fitzgerald also was a  
Green Party state leader for fifteen years.


On June 25, 2011, Mr. Fitzgerald will be a participating member of a panel  
of Silicon Valley authors who will discuss their books.


Date: Saturday, June 25, 2011

Time: 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Place: Barnes and Noble
3600 Stevens Creek Blvd
San Jose, CA 95117
Fitzgerald is enrolled in the over-60 program at San Jose State University  
as a post-graduate student; and is now completing his third master's degree.  
He is on track to be awarded this degree in Philosophy in fall 2011. Mr.  
Fitzgerald is currently featured as a guest columnist in the web based  
journal DailyPost.org.


Mr. Fitzgerald has been a guest on American Voice Radio Network's New World  
Order Disorder, LA Talk Radio's Bipolar Nation, San Francisco radio station  
KPOO's Community Worker, San Jose radio station KKUP's Silicon Valli Voice  
and has appeared on San Jose radio station KBAY and Mammoth Lakes radio  
station KMMT. He also has been interviewed by the San Jose Mercury News, San  
Jose State Spartan Daily along with the Mammoth Times and Los Gatos Times  
Weekly. He also recently authored an article for AAboomers.com.


For more information about Timothy Fitzgerald, visit his Web site  
http://www.timfitzgerald.org. For interviews, e-mail  
timothyfitzgerald97(at)yahoo(dot)com or call 408.726-9940.


# # #






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KSU tragedy under investigation






KSU tragedy under investigation

newsrecord.org | May 24th 2011 11:05 PM 			 			 			 			   

More than 30 years after the May 4 Kent State University shooting during  
which National Guardsmen fired on a crowd of protesting college students,  
killing four and injuring nine, a push for a new inquiry may end up spurring  
a new investigation.


Laurel Krause, sister of the victim Allison Krause, is lobbying for a  
reexamination due to new evidence.


Stuart Allen, a New Jersey forensic audio expert who analyzed a reel-to-reel  
recording of the incident made by a KSU student, reported in October 2010 to  
have heard an order to fire on the students.


The recording was created by Terry Stubbe, a KSU student in 1970. Stubble  
set up a microphone in his dorm recording the demonstration and the  
13-second shooting.


The tape was given to Allen from Alan Canfora, one of the students injured  
in the shootings.


Allen reported hearing someone shouting, Fir- immediately before the  
troops fired. Allen also reported hearing what he believes to be a .45  
caliber handgun being fired before the call to pull the trigger.


Canfora has presented the evidence to the U.S. Justice Department in 2010  
and, if there is no federal investigation of the incident, Canfora plans to  
take the matter to court himself.






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MANSON GIRLS : The Movie and The Memorabilia





2011 May : MANSON GIRLS : The Movie and The Memorabilia

by THIRSTY, staythirstymedia.com

 

“How America raised a nation of female serial killers,” is Susanna Lo’s tagline 
for her upcoming movie, Manson Girls. Based on the infamous harem cultivated by 
Charles Manson, Lo’s original screenplay offers a fresh profile of the women 
responsible for what has been called the Manson Murders. With accomplished 
actors like Eric Balfour, Estella Warren and Taryn Manning, to name a few, and 
a score written by Doobie Brothers Guy Allison and John McFee, director Lo aims 
to recreate the Summer of ’69, a time when sex, drugs and rock n’ roll ruled 
the world.

THIRSTY: What persuaded you to write the screenplay for Manson Girls?

Susanna Lo: As a kid who just moved to the United States from Hong Kong, I 
remember seeing the commercial for the movie-of-the-week, Helter Skelter, and 
that terrified me. We never had anything like the Tate/LaBianca murders in Hong 
Kong that I was aware of. Then ten years ago, I found myself living across from 
the LaBianca estate on Waverly Drive. There were tour buses filled with people 
from all over the world coming to see the murder site. I became fascinated in 
finding out more about the story, not Charlie's story, that's been told a 
million times, and quite frankly, bored me. But as a woman, as a writer, as a 
director, I thought that the story of the girls, who they were before they met 
Charlie and who they became at Spahn Ranch, was infinitely more captivating and 
powerful; not to mention more original.

THIRSTY: How long did it take you to research and write the screenplay?

Susanna Lo: It usually takes me less than two weeks to come up with a first 
draft of any screenplay. Manson Girls took nearly a year for the first draft. 
It wasn't just the overwhelming amount of research involved, it was the fact 
that the story was such a devastating and horrific part of American history 
that it made it very tough to write. I simply had to take breaks to breathe.

THIRSTY: You have assembled an extraordinary cast of young, very talented 
actors and actresses. What is your secret?

Susanna Lo: I believe the only way to get a talented and very dedicated cast of 
actors onboard is to offer a strong screenplay and original acting parts that 
have not been offered to them before. Manson Girls has many roles that will 
give an established actor: Taryn Manning; Estella Warren; Eric Balfour - or 
up-and-coming young actors in television series: Tania Raymonde of MTV's Death 
Valley; Brit Morgan of True Blood; Gillian Zinser of 90210, the ability to flex 
their acting muscles.

THIRSTY: What does the Manson Girls logo mean?

Susanna Lo: The peace sign in the logo is obvious, the flower is innocence and 
love, and the drop of blood is the evil that invaded this world of peace and 
love. That was the 60's, hope and idealism mixed in with the tragedy of 
Vietnam, and ultimately, the crimes of the Manson Family. It's all about 
innocence lost.

THIRSTY: How do you plan to recreate what it was like to live the Summer of ’69?

Susanna Lo: Without a doubt, the music of the times plays heavily in this film 
to evoke what it was like to be there during the Summer of Love. I was 
approached by many representatives of musicians, from members of Guns N’ Roses 
to Prince's band. Then I was introduced to Guy Allison of The Doobie Brothers. 
Guy and I hit it off immediately. Then he brought John McFee into the mix and 
it was a no-brainer, I knew these were the guys to help me recreate the musical 
vibe of the 60s. The props are also vital. We're working on bringing back the 
everyday items from the 60s, from Zippo lighters and Zig-Zag papers to Harley 
Davidsons. Then the clothes, from wearing Levis to tie-dye while smoking a 
Lucky Strike and tossing a shot of Wild Turkey. All this helps to recreate the 
Summer of ‘69. And some of the actresses are so dedicated to their parts, 
they're going au naturel and not bothering to shave. It's quite a captivating 
cast and creative crew that we have assembled to bring to life Spahn Ranch, 
Venice Beach and Haight Ashbury in 1969.

True to the time-honored tradition of Hollywood movie tie-ins, Manson Girls 
recently opened a MANSON GIRLS virtual store to allow fans an opportunity to 
show their support for the film by wearing the film’s logo.





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The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide





The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide

erowid.org | May 19th 2011  

 

With the publication of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, James Fadiman has 
inaugurated a new era of spiritual and practical exploration of inner space. 
Mind you, he didn’t invent or even rediscover the spiritual use of entheogens, 
nor the psychotherapeutic exploration of psychoactive plants and chemicals, but 
this guidebook represents a bold re-emergence of an ancient healing practice.

Fadiman, a co-founder of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and author 
most recently of an undergraduate psychology textbook and The Other Side of 
Haight: A Novel, is a champion of psychedelic guiding. He’s been around since 
the giddy big bang of psychedelic culture, and now, gladly, and with hope, 
turns the keys to guided journeys over to the grandchildren of that distant 
revolution. There’s plenty by and about him on the web, if you’re curious.

Fadiman gets right to the guided session instruction without disclaimers and 
apologies—a courteous gesture considering we’ve waited for more than a 
generation already. The guidebook is replete with suggestions for both guide 
and voyager regarding everything from music, food and lighting to finer 
aesthetic points. The six aspects of the well-conceived voyage are set and 
setting (which you knew), but also: substance, sitter, session, and situation. 
The six stages of a voyaging session are all simple and easily spelled out, as 
well, but this is rather like saying most of the paintings in the Louvre are 
made with canvas, brushes and paint: within Fadiman’s simple protocol exists a 
universe of possibilities.

Not all these possibilities are happy ones, naturally, so there is plenty of 
material on what can go wrong, and how to recover. Some chapters, contributed 
in part by other writers, speak to the experiences of pioneering elders and 
suggest how voyaging can address healing, creativity, problem solving and 
everyday life. Other chapters bring history, science and future directions for 
research and experimentation into context.

No single volume could hope to address all the issues, and especially the 
practical concerns, of the myriad combinatorial nodes of the Six S’s, so The 
Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide wisely points out to the Web for other resources, 
and to a dedicated wiki, to which you, too, may contribute.

As noted, this topic has been around for a while; the World Health Organization 
published Ataractic and Hallucinogenic Drugs in Psychiatry in 1958! The 60s saw 
several widely read personal narratives of voyaging, a handful of guidebooks, 
quite a bit of science, and a larger number of rants, both pro and con, 
religious and secular, erudite and fulminating. The intervening decades brought 
hundreds of books about hallucinogens, cannabis and other drugs in religious, 
cultural, medical and literary contexts, but relatively few had practical 
advice or spiritual use in mind, although you could read between the lines, and 
many did.

The “How I Tripped Good” genre is alive and well—scarce copies of such books by 
folks who tripped to death fetch handsome prices—as is the perennially larger 
“How I Fucked Up Getting Fucked Up” school, which are quickly remaindered. But, 
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide belongs to an altogether higher order of 
endeavor, puns happily winked at. Truly destined to be a classic. Don’t leave 
everyday reality without it.





Original Page: http://www.erowid.org/library/review/review.php?p=334

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Landmark Clinical LSD Study Nears Completion





Landmark Clinical LSD Study Nears Completion

by David Jay Brown, santacruz.patch.com
June 30th 2011  

 

The first clinical LSD study on the planet in over 35 years is almost complete. 
The Santa Cruz Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is 
currently sponsoring this research, which began in 2008, when Swiss 
psychiatrist Peter Gasser, M.D., became the first medical researcher in the 
world to obtain government approval to do therapeutic research with LSD since 
1972. 

Before 1972, nearly 700 studies with LSD and other psychedelic drugs were 
conducted. This research suggested that LSD has remarkable medical potential. 
LSD-assisted psychotherapy was shown to reduce the anxiety of terminal cancer 
patients, the drinking of alcoholics, and the symptoms of many 
difficult-to-treat psychiatric illnesses.

For example, early LSD studies with advanced-stage cancer patients showed that 
LSD-assisted psychotherapy could alleviate symptoms of anxiety, tension, 
depression, sleep disturbances, psychological withdrawal, and even severe 
physical pain. Other early investigators found that LSD may have some valuable 
potential as a means to facilitate creativity, problem-solving abilities, and 
spiritual awareness.

Between 1972 and 1990 there were no government-approved human studies with any 
psychedelic drugs anywhere in the world. Their disappearance was no mystery. 
The worldwide ban on psychedelic drug research was the result of a political 
backlash that followed the promotion of these drugs by the counterculture of 
the 1960s. This reaction not only made these substances illegal for personal 
use, it also made it extremely difficult for medical researchers to obtain 
government approval to study them.

The situation began to change in 1990 when, according to MAPS President Rick 
Doblin, “open-minded regulators at the FDA decided to put science before 
politics when it came to psychedelic and medical marijuana research.” There are 
now over a half dozen clinical studies occurring worldwide that are examining 
the medical potential of psychedelic drugs.

Gasser’s almost-completed, MAPS-sponsored LSD study is being conducted in 
Switzerland, where LSD was discovered in 1943 by Albert Hofmann. The study is 
examining how LSD-assisted psychotherapy effects the anxiety associated with 
suffering from an advanced, life-threatening illness. There are twelve subjects 
in the study with advanced-stage cancer and other serious illnesses. 

According to Gasser, so far the results look promising. Early researchers found 
that LSD-assisted psychotherapy has the incredible ability to help many people 
overcome their fear of death, and this is probably a major contributing factor 
in why the drug can be so profoundly helpful when people are facing a 
life-threatening illness.

On May 26th the final subject in Gasser’s study completed his last experimental 
therapy session. The clinical team at MAPS is now conducting a preliminary data 
analysis, finalizing the study’s database for the FDA, and assisting Gasser in 
preparing a manuscript for publication.

MAPS is also sponsoring other medical research into the psychotherapeutic 
potential of psychedelic drugs, and more studies are on the way. The medical 
and therapeutic value of LSD and other psychedelic drugs appears to be quite 
substantial--although, personally, I’m really looking forward to the day when 
this research can go beyond its initial potential as a psychotherapeutic tool, 
as well as a spiritual aid, and delve into the mysteries of creativity, psychic 
phenomena, and the possible reality of parallel universes and non-human entity 
contact.

Meanwhile, it seems like these mysterious substances hold enormous potential 
for treating numerous psychiatric disorders. Evidence suggests that they have 
the ability to help us treat posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, 
obsessive compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, cluster headaches, and 
other difficult-to-treat mental disorders, including, I suspect, the general 
neurosis that comes from simply being a human being.

To read the interview that I did with LSD researcher Peter Gasser, see: 

www.maps.org/news-letters/v20n1/v20n1-42to43.pdf

To find out more about MAPS and medical research into psychedelic drugs, see: 
www.maps.org

If you enjoy my column, and want to learn more about psychedelic and cannabis 
culture, “like” my Facebook page:

Easy Rider Star Fonda Disses Obama






Easy Rider Star Fonda Disses Obama

by Authors, ultimatemotorcycling.com
May 24th 2011 			 			 			 			   Click the images below for bigger  
versions: 


Peter Fonda Vs. President Obama

Since his appearance in the 1960s counter-culture biker flick, Easy Rider,  
Peter Fonda has progressively gone greener and greener.


The motorcycle film icon, who piloted a stretched 1951 Harley-Davidson  
Panhead to New Orleans in Easy Rider, is now an active enviromentalist. In  
his latest film effort, he has co-produced the film The Big Fix, which  
tells the story of the last year's BP oil rig disaster off the coast of  
Louisiana.


And at the recent Cannes Film Festival in France, Fonda stirred up some  
controversy when he allegedly called President Barack Obama a traitor in an  
email, it was reported by The Telegraph.


The Telegraph reported that Fonda sent n an email to President Obama last  
week, stating: I sent an email to President Obama saying, 'You are a  
(expletive) traitor. You're a traitor, you allowed foreign boots on our soil  
telling our military - in this case the coastguard - what they can and could  
not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or  
could not do.


Peter Fonda was also reported to call the BP staff Brits who he thought we  
kicked them out a long time ago.


These are some heavy words for a man who did some much for motorcycle  
culture. And it's going to be a talker...opinions are welcome.






Original Page:  
http://www.ultimatemotorcycling.com/2011/easy-rider-star-fonda-disses-obama


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Peter Fonda encourages his grandchildren to take up arms against Obama





Cannes 2011: Peter Fonda encourages his grandchildren to take up arms against 
President Barack Obama

by Richard Ede, telegraph.co.uk
May 22nd 2011   

 

“I’m training my grandchildren to use long-range rifles,” said the actor, 71. 
“For what purpose? Well, I’m not going to say the words 'Barack Obama’, but …”

He added, enigmatically: “It’s more of a thought process than an actuality, but 
we are heading for a major conflict between the haves and the have nots. I came 
here many years ago with a biker movie and we stopped a war. Now, it’s about 
starting the world.

“I prefer to not to use the words, 'let’s stop something’. I prefer to say, 
'let’s start something, let’s start the world’.

“There’s no room any more for a cissy and, like I said, don’t forget that I’ve 
got grandsons who I’ve trained with long-distance rifles. We have to run like 
mofos to change this world.”


Original Page: 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8528327/Cannes-2011-Peter-Fonda-encourages-his-grandchildren-to-take-up-arms-against-President-Barack-Obama.html

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The Political Bob Dylan






The Political Bob Dylan

huffingtonpost.com | May 24th 2011 6:03 PM 			 			 			 			   

Bob Dylan turned seventy on Tuesday. The following essay is adapted from The  
100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame,  
which Nation Books will publish early next year.


When the makers of Hollywood movies, documentary films, or TV news programs  
want to evoke the spirit of the 1960s, they typically show clips of  
long-haired hippies dancing at a festival, protestors marching at an antiwar  
rally, or students sitting-in at a lunch counter, with one of two songs by  
Bob Dylan--Blowin' in the Wind or The Times They Are a-Changin'--playing  
in the background.


Journalists and historians often treat Dylan's songs as emblematic of the  
era and Dylan himself as the quintessential protest singer, an image  
frozen in time. Dylan emerged on the music scene in 1961, playing in  
Greenwich Village coffeehouses after the folk music revival was already  
underway, and released his first album the next year.


Over a short period--less than three years--Dylan wrote about two dozen  
politically oriented songs whose creative lyrics and imagery reflected the  
changing mood of the postwar baby-boom generation and the urgency of the  
civil rights and antiwar movements.


At a time when the chill of McCarthyism was still in the air, Dylan also  
showed that songs with leftist political messages could be commercially  
successful. Unwittingly, Dylan laid the groundwork for other folk musicians  
and performers of the era, some of whom -- like Phil Ochs, the subject of a  
wonderful new documentary -- were more committed to the two major movements  
that were challenging America's status quo, and helped them reach wider  
audiences.


By 1964, however, Dylan told friends and some reporters that he was no  
longer interested in politics. Broadside magazine asked Ochs if he thought  
that Dylan would like to see his protest songs buried. Ochs replied  
insightfully: I don't think he can succeed in burying them. They're too  
good. And they're out of his hands.


Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman and raised in Hibbing, a mining town  
in northern Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. As a teen he admired  
Elvis Presley, Johnny Ray, Hank Williams, and Little Richard, and taught  
himself to play guitar. In 1959, he moved to the Twin Cities to attend the  
University of Minnesota but soon dropped out. He stayed in the area to  
absorb its budding folk music and bohemian scene and began playing in local  
coffeehouses and improving his guitar playing. A friend loaned Dylan his  
collection of Woody Guthrie records and back copies of Sing Out! magazine,  
which had the music and lyrics to lots of folk songs. He read Guthrie's  
autobiography, Bound for Glory, and learned to play many of Guthrie's songs.


By then young Zimmerman had changed his name (apparently after Welsh poet  
Dylan Thomas) and had adopted some of Guthrie's persona. He mumbled when he  
talked and when he sang, spoke with a twang, wore workman's clothes  
(including a corduroy cap), and took on what he believed to be Guthrie's  
mannerisms. At first Dylan seemed to identify more with Guthrie as a loner  
and bohemian than with Guthrie the radical and activist. Soon after Dylan  
arrived in New York City in January 1961 at age nineteen, he visited  
Guthrie, then suffering from Huntington's disease, in his New Jersey  
hospital room.


At the time, New York's Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the folk  
music revival, a growing political consciousness, and (along with San  
Francisco) the beatnik and bohemian culture of jazz, poetry, and drugs. The  
area was dotted with coffeehouses, some of which charged admission fees and  
others which allowed performers to pass the hat while customers purchased  
drinks and sandwiches.


Dylan made the rounds of the folk clubs and made a big impression. His  
singing and guitar-playing were awkward, but he had a little-boy charm and  
charisma that disarmed audiences. Dylan's initial repertoire consisted  
mostly of Guthrie songs, blues, and traditional songs. At the time, he began  
weaving a myth about his past, including stories about being a circus hand  
and a carnival boy, having a rock band in Hibbing that performed on  
television, and running away from home and learning songs from black blues  
artists. He was, as he continued to do throughout his life, reinventing  
himself.


Dylan got a huge break when music reporter Robert Shelton wrote a flattering  
review of a performance at Gerde's Folk City in the New York Times on  
September 29, 1961 under the headline, Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist.  
Shelton said that Dylan seemed like a cross between a beatnik and a choir

Origin of Song: “George Jackson ”, “Hurricane ”, and Bob Dylan ’s Return to Protest Form

http://www.crawdaddy.com/index.php/2011/05/24/origin-of-song-george-jackson-h 
urricane-and-bob-dylans-return-to-protest-form/


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Malcolm and the music





Malcolm and the music

sfbayview.com | May 19th 2011   

 

by Norman (Otis) Richmond aka Jalali

Malcolm X, loved then and now by the people, eulogized by Ossie Davis as our 
“Black Shining Prince” El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was assassinated 46 
years ago, on Feb. 21, 1965, because of his attempt to internationalize the 
struggle of African people inside the United States. Malcolm was born 86 years 
ago on May 19, 1925. While U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama has acknowledged 
Kwanzaa, I doubt very seriously if he will show Malcolm the same love. 

Manning Marable’s new volume, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” has sparked a 
renewed interest and debate about Malcolm. Previous works like Karl Evanzz’ 
“The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X,” Zak Kondo’s “Conspiracies: 
Unraveling the Assassination of Malcolm X” and Bill Sales’ “From Civil Rights 
to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity” are 
all being reopened.

Contrary to popular belief, it was Malcolm, not Martin Luther King, who first 
opposed the war in Vietnam. Malcolm was the first American-born African leader 
of national prominence in the 1960s to condemn the war. He was later joined by 
organizations like the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Student Non-Violent 
Coordinating Committee and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. This was 
in the tradition of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin R. Delaney, 
Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker and Paul 
Robeson.

Malcolm continued to link the struggles of African people worldwide. King came 
out against the Vietnam War in his famous April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside 
Church in New York City. Malcolm spoke against this war from the get-go.

Musicians have done their part to keep Malcolm’s legacy alive. Long before 
Spike Lee’s 1992 bio-pic, “X,” hip hop, house, reggae and R’n’B artists created 
music for Malcolm, high-life and great Black music (so-called jazz) artists 
first wrote and sang about Malcolm. The dance of Malcolm’s time was the “lindy 
hop,” and he was a master of it. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which 
Malcolm wrote with the assistance of Alex Haley, gives a vivid description of 
his love of dancing.

Years later, on a visit to the West African nation of Ghana, Malcolm spoke of 
seeing Ghanaians dancing the high-life. He wrote: “The Ghanaians performed the 
high-life as if possessed. One pretty African girl sang ‘Blue Moon’ like Sarah 
Vaughan. Sometimes the band sounded like Charlie Parker.” Malcolm’s impact on 
Ghana was so great that one folk singer created a song in his honor called 
“Malcolm Man.”

After Malcolm’s death, many jazz artists recorded music in his memory. Among 
them, Leon Thomas recorded the song, “Malcolm’s Gone” on his “Spirits Known and 
Unknown” album; saxophonist-poet-playwright Archie Shepp recorded the poem, 
“Malcolm, Malcolm Semper Malcolm,” on his Fire Music album. Shepp drew 
parallels between Malcolm’s spoken words and John Coltrane’s music.

Said Shepp: “I equate Coltrane’s music very strongly with Malcolm’s language, 
because they were just about contemporaries, to tell you the truth. And I 
believe essentially what Malcolm said is what John played. If Trane had been a 
speaker, he might have spoken somewhat like Malcolm. If Malcolm had been a 
saxophone player, he might have played somewhat like Trane.”

Malcolm wrote: “The Ghanaians performed the high-life as if possessed. One 
pretty African girl sang ‘Blue Moon’ like Sarah Vaughan. Sometimes the band 
sounded like Charlie Parker.” Malcolm’s impact on Ghana was so great that one 
folk singer created a song in his honor called “Malcolm Man.”

Shortly before Malcolm’s death, he visited Toronto and appeared on CBC 
television with Pierre Berton. During the visit, Malcolm spent time with 
award-winning author Austin Clarke talking about politics and music. Time was 
too short to organize a community meeting, but a few lucky people gathered at 
Clarke’s home on Asquith Street. Clarke had interviewed Malcolm previously, in 
1963 in Harlem, when he was working for the CBC. Clarke recalled they “talked 
shop,” but also discussed the lighter things in life, like the fact that both 
their wives were named Betty.

It is not surprising that Malcolm made his way to Canada. His mother and 
father, Earl Little, met and married in Montréal at a Universal Negro 
Improvement Association (UNIA) convention. Both were followers of Marcus 
Garvey. His mother, Louise Langdon Norton, was born in Grenada but immigrated 
first to Halifax, Nova Scotia,

Bob Dylan's 70th

2011-05-25 Thread res...@comcast.net





By John Dickerson

by John Dickerso, slate.com
May 23rd 2011 1:55 PM   

 

Bob Dylan is turning 70, and here we all come: the writers, the critics, the 
biographers, the song-quoters—and not one of us with a cake or a candle. Each 
of us thinks we know how best to celebrate the changeling who has changed our 
lives. Dylan has been called the voice of a generation. It's true. He's given 
voice to generations of writers who say he inspired them. If every person has a 
book in them, it seems every writer has a Dylan book—or at least an essay—in 
them.

Dylan isn't thrilled with the birthday presents. He's always taken a dim view 
of critics, even adulatory ones: 40-year-olds trying to explain my music to 
10-year-olds, he once called them. In a recent letter to fans he rolled his 
eyes at the gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near 
future, dubious about the prospects of a great one. He has made a professional 
sport of embarrassing interviewers he thinks are trying to put him in a box, 
most famously Time's Horace Freeland Judson in the documentary Don't Look Back. 
A key theme of Dylan's music is: You're missing the point. Ballad of a Thin 
Man from 1965 says it most famously and explicitly: Something is happening 
here but you don't know what it is. You can even find the message in Boots of 
Spanish Leather.

It's your own fault, Bob. If you made everything so simple and so plain, you 
wouldn't have so many followers plumbing your lyrics, tweezing your life, and 
succumbing in the process to the many sins Dylan somehow makes it very hard for 
writers to resist. I committed one of them at the end of the last paragraph. 
Call it song dropping. I've tossed off a song title and moved on to the next 
paragraph. Unless you're a fan, you probably aren't familiar with the song. 
Even if you are, my point may not be as self-evident as I think. (For the 
record, my point was that the song Boots of Spanish Leather is a conversation 
between two lovers, each missing the point—maybe on purpose—the other is 
making.)

Other sins include endless citations of obscure blues and folk musicians and 
rhapsodic descriptions of Dylan concerts you've seen—merely to establish that 
I'm very well read, it's well known. This is another sin, gratuitous quotation 
of Dylan lyrics. Done sparingly it's part of the clubhouse conversation of 
Dylan fans—a breadcrumb sin—but it gets tedious fast (almost there) if the 
writer quotes a lyric with no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of 
what each one means. (See what I'm saying?)

When I started listening rapturously to Dylan as a teenager, in the mid-1980s, 
I wanted to know what his every word meant, including a, and the, and um. It's 
the least you can do when you're writing lyrics on your jeans. Emotionally, I 
was in his thrall, but I also wanted some glimpse of how those words might all 
add up. He's asking questions that call for answers or at least conversation: 
Who are you? What's it going to take? What's true? If you had to get out fast, 
would you use the window?

And as my bookshelves filled up with biographies and cultural histories, I had 
a recurring question about a lot of the answers I found in those books: Why, in 
all the time that I've been listening to Dylan, has he so often been judged to 
be on a comeback from the period before I was born? Caught up in the world of 
Dylan's fans, which included most of the people who wrote about him, I couldn't 
help feeling out of step. They were either too hard to please—they said he was 
no good after he went electric or after the motorcycle mishap or after he 
became a Christian—or they were so pleased by everything he did, it suggested 
his genius might be a big hoax.

Though the great Dylan book may not be at hand, even he might approve of the 
mission that inspires the most recent crop of writing about him: to celebrate 
the impossibility of pinning down Bob Dylan, as David Yaffe writes in his 
collection of four Dylan essays, Like a Complete Unknown. Above all, that means 
exploring the desire for change that drove Dylan from the start and still 
consumes him in his latest period, as Daniel Mark Epstein understands in his 
biography, The Ballad of Bob Dylan. In Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilentz 
traces the cultural currents and cross-currents he's constantly navigating. 
It's the lived Dylan experience—messy, conversational, and expanding—that has 
engaged Greil Marcus all along, as his incisive Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 
attests.

For an artist who began his career protesting, Yaffe writes, his most 
fervent protests have

Jane Fonda feeling herself at 73, gets nine hours of sleep and lots of sex

2011-05-25 Thread res...@comcast.net





Jane Fonda feeling herself at 73, gets nine hours of sleep and lots of sex

by Dave Masko, huliq.com
May 23rd 2011   

 

EUGENE, Ore. – Baby Boomers and seniors today may be heading in a backward 
direction due to their focus on money over love, states Jane Fonda during a 
recent interview at the Cannes Film Festival; meanwhile, both Fonda, 73, and 
other Baby Boomers -- confessing to befuddlement at the speed of modern life 
that focuses more on the future than to be here now -- has Fonda admitting that 
she takes life one day at a time as one means to stay mentally and physically 
healthy.

Jane Fonda is going public about her old age, active sex life and other truths 
she has about life. At the recent Cannes Film Festival, the 
double-Oscar-winning actress looked slim and fresh at age 73, reported London’s 
Daily Mail newspaper May 17. When asked how she manages “to look fabulous in 
her 70’s, Fonda told the Daily Mail that it’s “good genes and money,” as two 
factors, and the other “is sex.” In fact, Fonda wants more Baby Boomers and 
seniors to admit to still enjoying sex into their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and older. 
Moreover, Fonda was asked about how much money she spends on staying young. 
“See these teeth? They cost $55,000. It was teeth or a new car, and I opted for 
the teeth,” Fonda said.

Jane Fonda’s “Workout” is now how she lives her day-to-day life as a senior, 
age 73

The whole truth from Jane Fonda these days is contained in yet another book 
about her life and lost loves, as well as numerous magazine and Internet 
interviews.

Her new book, “Prime Time: Creating A Great Third Act,” is set for release in 
August, with Fonda coming to a book store near you to promote the book and her 
lifestyle.

While she never states her age at 73, she does talk a lot about being old. 
Instead, Fonda likes to talk about mental and physical health for those aging 
Baby Boomers like herself who are facing the final years of their lives.

For instance, in the March 2011 edition of Whole Living, Fonda noted that “I 
finally felt at home with myself when I turned 60. I spent the previous year 
trying to figure out what the first two acts of my life meant and what I wanted 
to become during my third and final one. I started to own who I was: brave, 
strong, not fat (that was my father’s issue, not mine). Being a late bloomer 
has its advantages,” she said.

As for her divorces and trouble with men, Fonda said one thing she can do now 
that she couldn’t 20 years ago is “be in a relationship. It was more difficult 
then because I didn’t know who I was. I’ve worked hard at becoming a whole 
person, and it’s made relationships easier.”

By being a “whole person,” Fonda explains many of her fellow “older” Baby 
Boomers are finding themselves at a “lonely crossroads in life” because they’re 
too centered on money and living for tomorrow over what’s happening in their 
lives right now.

At the same time, those of Fonda’s age and generation – people in their mid to 
late 70’s, who were born between World War I and World War II – are simply not 
into “wasting their time on Facebook, unlimited text messaging and buying more 
stuff,” says Alice, a Jane Fonda fan from Eugene who’s proud of her age at 76.

“She’s a roll model for us girls that age. I wish I had her looks,” adds Alice 
with a lazy laughter in her eyes.

Fonda’s breast cancer scare prompts her and others to live more in the now

Other than a story last year in the Los Angeles Times – that “Fonda has 
reportedly undergone treatment to remove a breast tumor, but declares herself 
‘cancer-free' -- how she overcame her illness is raising more questions than 
answers because she keeps private on certain things.

In turn, she told Whole Living recently that she sleeps “nine hours a night,” 
and although she produced the famed Jane Fonda Workout video nearly 30 years 
ago, Fonda admitted that “I don’t like to exercise.”

She also noted that “she doesn’t take kindly to being told hot to think – 
especially by cynics.”

“I’m an optimist. I’d be funnier if I were cynical, but I’d rather not be 
cynical than be funny,” Fonda says in Whole Living, while also pointing to her 
passion right now of “stopping violence against women and helping adolescents 
believe they have a bright future head of them.”

Fonda’s had a long, but sad life but she carries on “because there’s always 
something to see and learn.”

While Jane Fonda rose to fame in the Sixties with films such as “Barbarella” 
and “Cat Ballou,” and went on to win two Academy Awards and numerous other 
awards during her 50 plus years as an actress, it’s

Widening the circle

2011-05-25 Thread res...@comcast.net





Widening the circle

by ALLIE SHAH, startribune.com
May 16th 2011   

 The drum beat loudly as paradegoers in Minneapolis sized up the 
unlikely trio marching. 

Three women -- two Somali and one American Indian -- walked arm in arm.

This small, bold act was designed to send a message to the American Indians and 
Somalis living near Franklin Avenue: We can and should be friends.

It's along this stretch of pavement, in one of the city's poorest 
neighborhoods, where a people who have been on this land the longest regularly 
bump up against a people who have only recently arrived.

Now, ambassadors from both communities are striving to move from animosity to 
friendship. Calling themselves the Native American Somali Friendship Committee 
(NAFSC), they meet monthly to speak frankly about the latest clashes and find 
common ground.

Group members say they've been through a transformation themselves since they 
started up last year.

I was one of the top ones saying, 'I can't stand these people. They park in 
our parking lots. They stop in the middle of the road and talk to each other,' 
said Mike Forcia, a committee member who runs the Wolves' Den cafe at the 
American Indian Center on Franklin. Getting to know these people on a personal 
level has really changed that.

Suddenly neighbors

Old and new federal policies created the collision of cultures along Franklin 
Avenue.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government relocated many American 
Indians from reservations to cities.

The idea was to assimilate us. Get us off the reservation, said Terri 
Yellowhammer, an attorney and Friendship Committee member.

Thousands of Indians moved to Minneapolis. Most settled in the East Phillips 
neighborhood, making it home to one of the largest concentrations of urban 
Indians in the country.

Franklin Avenue became known as Indian country, and to this day, the street 
holds a special place in American Indian history. Civil rights activists met 
there in the 1960s and 1970s and founded the American Indian Movement.

The first housing project in the nation to give preference to American Indians 
was built near Franklin.

Today, the avenue is seeing a renaissance, having just been designated the 
American Indian Cultural Corridor, with banners hanging from streetlights and 
new Indian-owned art spaces and businesses opening.

Wade Keezer, another Friendship Committee member, remembers when the first wave 
of Somali refugees started appearing on south Minneapolis streets in the early 
1990s, the women covered head to toe in flowing fabrics.

I thought they were some new type of Catholic nun, he said.

The federal government chose Minnesota as a resettlement site for the thousands 
escaping Somalia's bloody civil war. Many came to the East Phillips 
neighborhood where rent was cheap.

Soon, Somali-owned businesses started opening, and the grumbling began.

Some Indians started calling the Aldi's grocery store on Franklin Ali's, 
because it attracted Somali shoppers.

In some Somali circles, where alcohol is taboo, Indians were viewed as drunks.

A lot of people really started noticing when they started opening halal 
markets and getting into the subsidized housing, Keezer said. A lot of Indian 
people couldn't get into there because they couldn't pass the background 
checks. People started saying, 'How do they get all this property and how do 
they get the push?'

Somali immigrants had an edge over Indians applying for housing because, as 
newcomers, they had a clean slate.

Oil and water

Tensions reached a boiling point in the summer of 2009 when an American Indian 
woman reported that she had been beaten and robbed on Franklin by three Somali 
teenagers.

The hateful comments about Somalis that Keezer overheard told him it was time 
to do something. He fired off an e-mail reflecting on what was happening, 
sparking a community conversation.

It was the start of monthly gatherings that alternate between the American 
Indian Center and the Brian Coyle Center, which is frequented by Somalis.

People come and tell their real stories, said Amina Saleh of the Family 
Partnership.

Yellowhammer was one of the founding members.

The message I got from the Somalis I met with fairly early on was, 'This does 
not reflect our values. These attacks on your people -- this is not who we 
are,' she said.

The Somalis talked of youth who were growing up as orphans, unschooled and 
unconnected to Somali culture.

That resonated with Forcia, Yellowhammer and Keezer, who saw similar problems 
among American Indian youth.

We have the same dynamics, but instead of

Freedom Rides: 50 years later






Freedom Rides: 50 years later

sfgate.com | May 22nd 2011 			 			 			 			   

As the bus departs Atlanta, Dennis Climpson is eager for conversation. He  
wants to discuss college football this Sunday morning, but first I have a  
question for him.


Have you, I ask, ever heard of the Freedom Rides?

Fifty years ago this May, a group of 15 passengers traveled the same route.  
Like us, they were black and white sitting together on a bus - at the time  
unheard of in the segregated South. Climpson, 48, says he hasn't heard of  
the protest but is intrigued. He turns to his smart phone to check  
Wikipedia.


In 1961, the Freedom Riders were traveling on two buses from Washington,  
D.C., to New Orleans to test compliance with federal integration laws.


Charles Person, a Georgia native who at 18 was the youngest rider, still  
remembers entering Alabama that Mother's Day.


There was tension. It was kind of eerie, Person says from his home. He  
expected to be roughed up, but didn't imagine much worse. This was broad  
daylight. Later that day, the Ku Klux Klan would set one bus on fire and  
beat riders on the other.


The racial violence shocked - and changed - America.

Today, you can retrace the Freedom Rides easily by car or bus. The Alabama  
cities on the route are marking the anniversary with murals, exhibits and a  
new museum. It's a leisurely three-day tour of the Deep South, easily  
driven, but also possible to visit by bus, which may take an extra day.  
Along the way, you'll find gracious hosts, good food and stark reminders of  
a not-so-distant past.


Anniston, Ala.

Climpson, who is bound for Jackson, Miss., can't believe what he's reading  
on his phone. Anniston, Alabama? he asks, pointing to the screen. I  
thought that was a quiet town.


A half century ago, when a Greyhound pulled into the foothills of the  
Appalachians, a crowd awaited. Ku Klux Klan members pummeled the vehicle and  
slashed its tires. Six miles down the road, the bus stopped with a flat.


Anniston resident Bernard Emerson, who after 50 years still lives on a hill  
overlooking the spot that now bears a historic marker, says that someone  
that night had tossed burning rags through a smashed window on the bus.


The smoke was getting pretty thick, he recalls. One lady was coming out  
of the window. She got her foot caught and was kind of hanging there.


Anniston, a town of 23,000, has only recently acknowledged the incident,  
commissioning murals and exhibit signs at its former bus stations, two  
blocks away from the current stop.


I layover for a few hours and eventually find my way to a restaurant called  
Classic on Noble. Its Sunday brunch has more than 100 offerings, including  
fried green tomatoes, grits, shrimp salad, beef tenderloin and a dessert  
counter with 26 pies, cobblers and cakes. The after-church crowd is  
predominately white, but a few black guests feast, too.


We're a nice town, the hostess tells me. We have a dark past, but we've  
overcome it.


Bus 2

When the second bus reached Anniston in 1961, a pair of Klansmen boarded to  
beat the riders, warning that worse awaited 60 miles down the road in  
Birmingham. They taunted us all the way, Person says.


When the bus arrived at the Trailways station, the wounded protesters headed  
to the white waiting room.


The walls were surrounded by a group of men, Person recalls. As we got  
toward the center, they started coming. Person's head was bashed with a  
pipe. Attackers had grabbed onto his jacket, but a news photographer snapped  
a picture, distracting the crowd. I just walked out of my jacket, he  
recalls. I did not run. I was still under control.


The first Freedom Rides had ended, and Person had escaped with his life.

The Trailways station is gone, replaced by a Wells Fargo bank and a historic  
marker. It's one of many civil rights sites in the state's largest city.


Visitors also come for the music scene, which has produced a handful of  
American Idol finalists, and the restaurants, which regularly win James  
Beard Award nominations.






Original Page:  
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/22/TR7J1JF3UH.DTL


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Bob Dylan at 70: fans celebrate but interview tapes reveal a dark episode





Bob Dylan at 70: fans celebrate but interview tapes reveal a dark episode

by Alexandra Topping and Caspar Llewellyn 
Smith, guardian.co.uk
May 24th 2011   

 

From Moscow to Madrid, Norway to Northampton and Malaysia to his home state of 
Minnesota, self-confessed Bobcats will gather today to celebrate the 70th 
birthday of a giant of popular music. Bob Dylan will celebrate with tribute 
bands, original works, intellectual debates and simple singalongs to applaud a 
man born as Robert Allen Zimmerman in St Mary's hospital, Duluth on 24 May 
1941.

In New York, the BB King Blues Club hosts tribute band Highway 61 Revisited, 
with guests including Rolling Thunder Revue violinist Scarlet Rivera and Never 
Ending Tour drummer Winston Watson, recreating Dylan's greatest hits.

In Hibbing, Minnesota, the town where he was raised, the annual Dylan Days 
festival at the weekend, with music, art and literature, will showcase the 
place that spurred the young Zimmerman. With Bob Dylan turning 70 we are 
taking a year to honour not just his accomplishments but the creativity he 
continues to inspire, said Aaron Brown, Dylan Days spokesman.

At the University of Bristol, The Seven Ages of Dylan promises to bring forth 
the UK's foremost Dylan scholars to assess his continuing capacity to inspire 
and infuriate. No one since Kipling has given the English language as many 
memorable phrases as Dylan, said Craig Savage, one organiser of the academic 
conference.

As fans prepare their celebrations, fresh details of Dylan's turbulent life at 
the height of his fame in the 1960s have emerged. Interviews found by the BBC 
reveal the singer had been addicted to heroin and contemplated suicide. Opening 
up to critic Robert Shelton on a private plane after a concert in March 1966 in 
Lincoln, Nebraska, Dylan said he kicked a heroin habit in New York. I got 
very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked 
the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it, he said.

Shelton first wrote about Dylan in 1961, publishing the definitive biography No 
Direction Home, The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, in 1986. The tapes of the 
previously unheard recordings were found during work on a new edition published 
for the singer's birthday.

The recordings show that weeks before his 25th birthday Dylan admitted 
experiencing this suicidal thing. He said: I'm not the kind of cat that's 
going to cut off an ear if I can't do something. I'm the kind of cat that would 
just commit suicide. He added: I'd shoot myself in the brain if things got 
bad. I'd jump from a window … man, I would shoot myself. You know I can think 
about death, man, openly.

Dylan held no hope that his songwriting would get me out of the fiery 
furnace, adding that it was certainly not going to extend my life any and 
it's not going to make me happy. But parties around the globe on Tuesday will 
pay testimony to the happiness he has brought others.

John Butt, a former broadcaster, is hosting the only event listed in India, at 
his home in Delhi. Bob Dylan has been a constant figure in my life since I 
heard The Times They Are a-Changin' in 1964, and the more I listen to his 
music, the more it means to me, he said.

Having put his living-room event on Google's map of celebrations around the 
world, there was a danger that half of Delhi could turn up. Butt was not 
worried. If they do I'll welcome them in, he said. Dylan's message had 
particular resonance in India, he added. Dylan was always able to express his 
spirituality in a profound but very idiosyncratic way and I think that is in 
line with the way India celebrates the diversity of its spirituality. In 
Norway, fans are holding a Bobfest with quasi-religious fervour. Slow Train – 
the gospel according to Bob Dylan is being held at the cathedral in Toensberg, 
60 miles south of Oslo. Thousands of miles away at the Chatkhara restaurant in 
Lahore, Pakistan, local Bobsessives will come together to share mixtapes and 
listen to Dylan.

In Tel Aviv, Israeli artists including Yuval Banai, Yali Sobol and Noam Rotem 
will play Dylan hits in English and Hebrew on Tuesday night at the Barby Club. 
Dylan plays the city in June, his first concert in Israel since 1993. Event 
organiser Dror Nahun said: Most of the songwriters in Israel have been 
influenced by Dylan, he has a huge following. Dylan is celebrated wherever 
there are human beings, from China to America – he knows how to touch people 
all over the world.

“What’s Going On, ” 40 years later





“What’s Going On,” 40 years later

by Brian Gilmore, progressive.org
May 24th 2011   

 

It was 40 years ago this month that Marvin Gaye’s legendary album, “What’s 
Going On,” was released. The album, now considered a masterpiece of music and 
social commentary, remains all-too relevant today.

Gaye’s album appeared at a time of tremendous political and social chaos in the 
United States.

The civil rights movement was dying a slow death in 1971. Martin Luther King 
Jr. was no more, and Bobby Kennedy, as well. Richard Nixon had been elected 
President in 1968 using racial division as a campaign strategy.

The Vietnam War was still raging in 1971, despite its growing unpopularity. 
Millions of people in Southeast Asia were dead, and 50,000 U.S. soldiers had 
lost their lives there.

The “war on poverty” was over. Poverty had won. Riots had broken out in some 
inner cities in the 1960s as a result, but the problem still festered.

Marvin Gaye’s album dropped into this America on May 21, 1971.

Gaye, born in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 1939, was a highly successful 
singer-songwriter with Motown records. Gaye’s venture did not go over well with 
his boss at Motown, Berry Gordy, who hated the single “What’s Going On” and 
initially refused to release it. But he relented in January 1971, and “What’s 
Going On” immediately shot up the pop charts. Soon, an entire album was 
demanded. Gaye delivered his gem a few months later.

“What’s Going On” was Gaye’s desperate cry for a world where war was not the 
answer, where only love could conquer hatred. Other songs on the album 
addressed many of the social ills of then and now: “Inner City Blues” dealt 
with the problems of urban America; “Save the Children” focused on the children 
of the world; “Mercy, Mercy, Me” condemned environmental destruction.

Today, the United States is still engaged in wars abroad that have taken a huge 
financial and human toll. Today, racism still lurks beneath the surface, 
poverty and economic inequality remain with us, and corporate interests 
continue to destroy the environment.

The persistence of these problems makes Gaye’s album more important every day, 
as does his universal message of love. It is a message we should heed today.

Brian Gilmore, a lawyer and poet, resides in Michigan. He can be reached at 
pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.

You can read more pieces from The Progressive Media Project by clicking here.





Original Page: http://www.progressive.org/mpgilmore052411.html

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Like a rolling ode: academic conference weighs up Bob Dylan's poetic licence






Like a rolling ode: academic conference weighs up Bob Dylan's poetic licence

by Steven Morris, guardian.co.uk
May 24th 2011 			 			 			 			   

Twenty-year-old Natasha Tabani had queued for three hours to make sure of  
her place in lecture theatre three of Bristol University's English  
department.


She wasn't displaying such keenness at the prospect of a fine exposition of  
a Shakespeare play or an inspiring talk on the Victorian novelists that  
might help improve her next English literature essay. This event was all  
about a gnarled singer-songwriter who had reached his 70th birthday.


I just love Bob Dylan. I've come hoping to learn more about him. I want to  
be able to get more out of his words and music, to compare my idea of him  
with other people's, said Tabani. Her favourite Dylan song, Visions of  
Johanna, appeared on Blonde on Blonde a quarter of a century before she was  
born. What he sang then still sounds as relevant now to me. That song is  
almost eight minutes long but it never seems enough. It's just beautiful.


The Seven Ages of Dylan, as the conference was called, was an attempt to  
bring together Britain's most eminent scholars on the music star who was  
born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, on 24 May 1941.


As the delegates (mostly, to be fair, middle-aged music fans in soft shoes  
rather than youthful students like Tabini) packed into the underground  
lecture at Bristol, devotees around the world were celebrating Dylan's  
three-score-and-10. In Shillong, in north-east India, for example, fans  
flocked to gigs organised by Lou Majaw (often dubbed the country's Dylan).  
He, perhaps optimistically, called for the state government to declare 24  
May Bob Dylan Day. Thousands of other Bobcats gathered in Lahore, Nepal,  
Moscow, Brazil, Melbourne and Cape Town.


In the mining town of Hibbing in Minnesota, where he was raised, organisers  
were putting the finishing touches to their annual festival, Dylan Days. New  
for 2011, is an authentic rock 'n' roll hop featuring music popular at the  
time Dylan graduated from Hibbing high school in 1959, and the first Dylan  
Days symposium will reunite members of Dylan's school band, The Golden  
Chords, for a discussion.


Back in Bristol, one of the first thorny subjects to be tackled was whether  
Dylan could really be considered a fine poet.Danny Karlin, Winterstoke  
professor of English at Bristol and a leading expert on Robert Browning,  
argued he could not. If his words were published as poems rather than songs,  
nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice, Karlin claimed. He said  
Dylan should be viewed as a bard whose work needed to be heard rather than  
read.


Nevertheless, some speakers analysed particular Dylan songs as they would  
have done a Browning poem. Dressed all in black, Aidan Day, professor of  
English at Dundee, examined Man in the Long Black Coat and compared the  
central character with Satan in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and  
Hell.


David Punter, a professor of English at Bristol, spoke on Visions of Johanna  
and Mr Tambourine Man, admitting at one point: I feel an idiot reading out  
Dylan.


The talk continued outside over lunch and tea. Coco Creme, 20, admitted she  
was here partly to find out why her parents made so much fuss over Dylan.  
He was always playing in the background when I grew up. I want to find out  
why,


Stephen Jordan, of the faculty of music at Oxford University, tried to  
explain, saying he believed Dylan's music had provided the soundtrack to  
everything from the Cuban missile crisis to the New Orleans floods. There  
are maybe 60 people sitting around here. Probably there are 60 different  
visions of every Dylan song and all of them valid. He is part of our lives,  
our culture, he said.






Original Page:  
http://www.guardian.co.uk//music/2011/may/24/bob-dylan-birthday-conference-br 
istol/print?mobile-redirect=false


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Beyond the legend of Malcolm X






Beyond the legend of Malcolm X

socialistworker.org | May 24th 2011 			 			 			 			   

Brian Jones reviews a riveting--and controversial--biography of one of the  
most important revolutionaries of the 20th century.


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY professor Manning Marable has written the most detailed  
account to date of the life of a legendary African American. Malcolm X: A  
Life of Reinvention is the product of at least two decades of research.  
Tragically, this work is Marable's last--he died of lung disease just days  
before its publication.


The great temptation for the biographer of an iconic figure, Marable wrote  
in the book's introduction is to portray him or her as a virtual saint,  
without the normal contradictions and blemishes that all human beings  
have...My primary purpose in this book is to go beyond the legend: to  
recount what actually occurred in Malcolm's life.


Marable's telling of Malcolm's biography makes for a fascinating read.  
Following his theme of reinvention, Marable takes us through Malcolm's  
various incarnations--including, but not limited to, Malcolm Little, Detroit  
Red, Malcolm X and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.


Marable weaves together what he learned from extensive interviews, personal  
testimonies, police and FBI records, the public record of Malcolm's speeches  
and writings, and some new documentation that was unavailable to previous  
researchers. Based on this evidence, Marable also presents his own theory of  
Malcolm's assassination.


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

WHAT MOST people know of Malcolm, they learned from The Autobiography of  
Malcolm X, the book he told to Alex Haley--or from the Spike Lee film  
based on the book. But Marable sets out to show that this text was itself  
another reinvention. Marable argues that the Autobiography's omissions,  
exaggerations and politics are the product of Haley's attempt to package  
Malcolm for a liberal integrationist audience, and of Malcolm's attempt to  
shape his posthumous image. The extent of his criminal activity, for  
example, Marable claims, is greatly exaggerated to amplify the narrative  
power of his conversion to the Nation of Islam.


Furthermore, Marable asserts [b]ased on circumstantial but strong evidence  
that Malcolm also made money from sexual encounters with an older white man.  
This claim takes up no more than two pages out of nearly 600, but has become  
a prominent feature of the controversy surrounding the book.


Malcolm's grandson Malcolm Shabazz disputes many of the book's claims,  
arguing that Marable's purpose was primarily to make money. But Shabazz is  
particularly angered by the claim that his grandfather had same-sex  
relations. They want to promote homosexuality at the end of the day, he  
told the Amsterdam News. When I was at school, people were not openly gay;  
today, people are saying they are gay in the first grade. It's really  
acceptable today. They want to promote that today to our people with one of  
our greatest leaders. But there is no proof, there's no basis, no facts.


In a discussion on Democracy Now! with two critics of the book, author  
Michael Eric Dyson put his finger on the real meaning of this  
controversy--homophobia:


[There is] the deep and profound homophobia and the resistance of certain  
sectarian interests within African-American culture that refuses to  
acknowledge the full humanity--[that] wants to talk about black unity, but  
always wants to exclude...You don't have a problem with Malcolm being a  
hustler...You haven't asked for evidence of that...None of that is being  
questioned.


In prison, Malcolm became a Muslim and joined the Nation of Islam, a small  
but growing religious separatist movement of African Americans. Marable  
traces the history of Islam in general, and of the NOI in particular.  
According to the NOI's theology, Black Americans were the earth's Original  
People, and whites were devils created by an evil scientist. They  
considered Americanized surnames to be slave names, and so, they often  
took X as a last name to stand in for their unknown African name. As  
Marable writes:


The demonizing of the white race, the glorification of blacks and the  
bombastic blend of orthodox Islam, Moorish science and numerology were a  
seductive message to unemployed and disillusioned African Americans casting  
about for a new rallying cause after the disintegration of Garveyism and the  
inadequacies of the Moorish Science Temple.


Contrary to the opinions of the FBI, the NOI was not a radical group, but a  
profoundly conservative one. While civil rights campaigns against  
segregation were growing in the Southern states, the NOI built up a  
following in the North that advised Blacks against any civic engagement

Where’s My DVD?: Thumb Tripping





Where’s My DVD?: Thumb Tripping

by John Seal, berkeleyside.com
May 17th 2011 9:00 AM   

 

This week, Berkeleyside’s film writer John Seal looks at a movie he recommends 
you check out on DVD.

It’s 1972, and the watch words around America are acid, amnesty, and abortion. 
Kids across the nation have already turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, 
leaving the country with a surfeit of stoned street musicians. They’re still 
trying to find the meaning of life and their place in the universe, however – 
and that’s what this peripatetic road movie is all about.

Enter Gary (Michael Burns), a winsome, rather innocent middle-class lad 
slumming it on the highways and by-ways of the good ol’ U. S. of A. He’s 
determined to experience life to its fullest and face every challenge squarely 
– and there are challenges aplenty (albeit mostly formulaic ones) in the 
90-plus minutes of Thumb Tripping.

The story commences on a fog-bound central California beach near Big Sur as the 
local fuzz round up a batch of hippies for deportation to friendlier climes. 
Amongst the tribe are sleepy-eyed Shay (Meg Foster), a stereotypical hippie 
chick with a serious case of wanderlust, and the aforementioned Gary, a 
Connecticut refugee whose clean-shaven face belies an innate curiosity and 
questioning personality.

The two aren’t acquainted, but after casting knowing looks at each other in the 
back of the Black Maria, bingo – they’re traveling partners and lovers. An 
idyllic five-finger lunch in the sleepy seaside resort of Carmel finds love 
blooming and beachside soup boiling over as the twosome share a sparse meal of 
bread and broth with two fellow travelers biking their way up the coast.

Morning comes, however, and brings with it the first fly in the ointment for 
our protagonists. As they trudge north along the highway, destination anywhere, 
a speeding car nearly runs them over, and Gary loudly lambastes the driver with 
some choice language. That’s a big mistake, as the man behind the wheel is a 
complete loony named, appropriately, Simp (Larry Hankin). Even worse, 
knife-wielding hippie-hater Smitty, played to full tilt perfection by cinematic 
wild man Bruce Dern, is riding shotgun.

Incredibly, the four make a tenuous peace and Smitty and Simp offer a ride as 
recompense for their hazardous driving – but some rides are more expensive than 
others, even when there’s no money exchanged, and Gary and Shay soon regret 
accepting their hospitality. After a scary admonition from Smitty accompanied 
by some threatening gestures from his trusty blade, our clueless couple is once 
again looking for new transport.

They find it in the form of a woman (Joyce Van Patten) whose bitter curiosity 
about the hippie lifestyle stems from the loss of a runaway daughter. Matters 
aren’t helped by the additional presence in the car of the woman’s two 
incredibly bratty children, and after enduring a few maternal lectures there’s 
a mutual parting of the ways at the foot of a cliff. Luckily for Shay and Gary, 
however, friendly truck driver Diesel (Michael Conrad) takes a bathroom break 
above them, and after peeing all over the pair kindly offers them a warm and 
dry place in the cab of his big rig.

Alas, Gary’s faith in mankind is tested once again when Shay and Diesel engage 
in a little consensual hanky-panky at the next truck stop. Turns out free love 
is for HIPPIES, not bald working class guys, and jealous Gary breaks up the 
party and almost breaks up with Shay. But the two have one more adventure in 
store before the final fadeout: they meet Jack and Lynn, a grumpy married 
couple from Santa Rosa with a penchant for classic Chevy convertibles and open 
liquor containers. After a beer-drenched skinny-dipping and necking party and a 
drunken sojourn in a local bar, Gary has finally had enough and leaves Shay 
somewhere near the Russian River. He’s no closer to the meaning of life than 
when the film started, and he probably has a nasty set of blisters to boot.

Stoic Michael Burns got his acting start as an adolescent on television. He 
appeared in everything from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Love American Style 
and Wagon Train before retiring from screens large and small in favor of 
academia. Thumb Tripping was Meg Foster’s springboard to success, and she’s had 
a long and moderately successful stage and screen career: her credits include 
Laurence Harvey’s notorious Welcome to Arrow Beach, 1980’s excellent sideshow 
drama Carny, and (ahem) Masters of the Universe.

Buxom Marianna Hill (Lynn), meanwhile, appeared in a pair of Elvis features as 
well as Medium

Baby boomers still battle Hep C





Health Baby boomers still battle Hep C

by J. Adrian Stanley, csindy.com
May 16th 2011   

 Confession: I smirked a little when an e-mail entitled Baby Boomer 
Alert: You May Have Hep C  Not Know It showed up in my inbox. 

It's not just that I'm a jerk on Monday mornings. It's that I am a child of 
Baby Boomers. And that headline just brought me right back to my teen years, 
when my parents were desperately (and futilely) trying to impart the usual 
parental wisdom on me.

Here I was, raised by people who glorified their youth of free love, drug 
experimentation, loud concerts and hitchhiking. And suddenly, when I was 13, 
they were telling me, Well, sure, it was a blast for me, but I better not 
catch you doing it, because, uh ... because ... because ... it's a different 
world now!

I remember how I enjoyed feasting on their delicious hypocrisy when I was 
coming of age. Now, of course, it's different. Now I understand how they must 
have felt.

And now, too, I understand how much my parents wanted me to dodge all those 
ghosts of youth that can come and bite you in the ass decades later. Things 
like Hep C, which is often spread through intravenous drug use.

According to the e-mail press release, More than two-thirds of Americans with 
Hep C are baby boomers and 75 percent of those with the disease have not been 
screened and diagnosed.

Hep C, by the way, attacks your liver. And, smirking aside, Hep C used to be 
spread not only through drug use, but through blood transfusions.

Read on:

BABY BOOMER ALERT: YOU MAY HAVE HEPATITIS C 

AND DON’T KNOW IT

Two-Thirds of Infections Occur Among Baby Boomers;

Three-Quarters of All Who Have Disease Haven’t Been Diagnosed.

Colorado Group Launches Campaign for Baby Boomers to Get Screened


(DENVER) — Stressing the need for early diagnosis and treatment, Colorado’s Hep 
C Connection is launching a new campaign throughout the state to raise 
awareness among Colorado’s baby boomer population about a simple blood 
screening that could save thousands of lives in our state alone. More than 
two-thirds of Americans with Hep C are baby boomers and 75 percent of those 
with the disease have not been screened and diagnosed.

“Our relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers need to hear the call,” said 
Nancy Steinfurth, executive director of Hep C Connection. “Many Colorado baby 
boomers are walking around with Hep C and don’t know it. They can avoid 
devastating, painful and life-threatening liver disease with a simple blood 
test. By the time the symptoms are noticeable, it’s much tougher to treat.”

Hepatitis C is a contagious liver disease prevalent — and widely undiagnosed — 
among baby boomers, with experts estimating that that two-thirds of those with 
Hep C were born in the baby boom years of 1946 to 1964. Hepatitis C ranges in 
severity from a mild illness lasting a few weeks to a serious, lifelong illness 
that attacks the liver. It results from infection with the hepatitis C virus 
(HCV), which is spread through contact with the blood of an infected person.

A federal strategy released in recent days recommends placing a priority on 
screening Americans by age. A new national study showed that screening all 
Americans born between 1946 and 1964 could save 48,000 lives.

A listing of free confidential testing sites statewide is available by visiting 
the Hep C Connection website at www.hepc-connection.org or by calling 
1-800-522-HEPC (4372).

She noted that an important goal of the campaign is to eliminate false and 
unfair stigmas associated with Hepatitis C — which often cause men and women to 
avoid screening.

“Some people don’t get tested because they believe that the only way to have 
contracted Hep C is through intravenous drug use, and that’s just plain false,” 
she said. “The truth is that many Americans — including many veterans — who had 
transfusions prior to 1992 were infected with Hep C before donated blood was 
accurately screened for the disease.”

Steinfurth said an additional reason to raise awareness among the baby boomer 
population is that the costs to treat the advanced liver disease that arises 
when hepatitis C is not treated early are high, and may include liver 
transplantation. Given that the first baby boomers are turning 65 this year, 
without changes in the rates of diagnosis and treatment, health insurance and 
Medicare costs will double in a decade and increase five-fold in 20 years.

ABOUT HEP C CONNECTION

Hep C Connection, based in Denver, is a statewide organization that educates 
the general public about hepatitis C and provides resources and support for

Hipsters: A (de-)evolution like no other






Hipsters: A (de-)evolution like no other

m.alligator.org | May 17th 2011 12:02 AM 			 			 			 			   


They're really obscure. You've probably never heard of them.

They've grown strong. They have cluttered the grounds of Gainesville,  
evolving from the primordial grass roots of their ancestors.


The enemies of our past have changed with the times. They are no longer the  
simple, passive, drug-abusing, tie-dyed, nomadic, sexually deviant,  
environmentally-conscious, free loving, smelly, barefoot degenerates of  
yore.


A new generation has embraced the mindset of hippies and blended it with  
arrogance. They mark themselves with inked astrological symbols. They treat  
Pabst Blue Ribbon as if it is the gods' ambrosia. They describe themselves  
by rare artistic expressions created by other people, never by any personal  
merit. Without any visual impairment, they equip large black framed glasses  
for cosmetic purposes alone. They have androgynous hairstyles that can  
confuse even the most effeminate.


You haven't heard of the band Moonlit Rose Petals? You know nothing of fine  
arts.


Society calls these creatures hipsters.

How did they come to be? Long ago, when hippies were cast into the dredge of  
society, an acid trip among members of the Council of Free Love resulted in  
a random thought that, contrary to hippie nature, turned out to be genius.  
The plan was to isolate the central characteristics of hippie culture as a  
sleeper gene in the genetic code of their offspring. First generation  
children of hippies showed no apparent signs of free-love hippie bullshit.  
When prompted with any aspect of the hippie mentality, these children felt  
the burn of evil across their skin and vomited profusely, as is the normal  
reaction to hippie sentiments. With no hippie characteristics, these men and  
women became perfectly acceptable, successful members of society.


But the hippies had planned for this. The sleeper gene emerged in the  
following generation. The free-love sentiment of hippies, although  
nauseating, was never capable of caustic destruction. Somewhere in  
transcription, free-love was lost and elitist entitlement, obscurity and  
the arrogant assumption of individual supremacy was attained.


Hey, it could be worse. It could be Scientology.

Luckily, hipsters are not driven to any type of solidarity or teamwork.  
Hipsters are incredibly self-centered and currently lack the focus to infect  
the masses. Luckily their funding is better spent on improving their  
collection of ironic T-shirts.


They infiltrate new technological regions of society that hippies were  
incapable of infesting. They defile the Internet with blogs pertaining to  
the urgency behind their pretentiousness. They punish right-minded  
individuals with a complete denial of rationality and logic, choosing to  
endorse whining and bitching as the sole means of action. Anything less than  
Nietzsche is considered paltry. A hipster believes that anyone who disagrees  
is an ignorant fool even though hipster logic is based not at all on  
evidence or facts and solely on emotions and gut feelings. Hipsters are  
intellectually snobbish even though they lives rely on factors that  
ironically contain nothing intellectual. Whereas hippies held hands and  
spoke of peace, hipsters dedicate their lives to competitive elitism.


With very few actions, we can approach the dramatic conquest of an evil  
enemy a la Independence Day only with less explosions.


As long as you stay strong. If you become infected, once you notice the  
tell-tale signs of douchebaggery, it will be too late.


I sense dark times ahead. The End of Days is coming. Expect an all-out war.

But, make sure to be on the right side.

Shea Ford is a psychology senior at UF. His column appears on Tuesdays.





Original Page:  
http://m.alligator.org/mobile/opinion/columns/article_cd98b9ec-8031-11e0-8a88 
-001cc4c03286.html


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Theater ends season with musical Hair





Theater ends season with musical Hair

by JOHN BRANDENBURG, m.newsok.com
May 16th 2011   

 

A revival of “Hair” that has some of the infectious spirit of a revival meeting 
for “sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll” rather than the old-time religion is being 
staged by Reduxion Theatre Company.

The vintage vehicle was more a medley of sometimes forgettable and sometimes 
memorable anthemlike and iconic songs and comedy bits than it was a 
conventional musical comedy or a play. But it played remarkably well, and 
earned a standing ovation, and the active participation of some ticketholders, 
on opening night.

“Hair” is performed in-the-round with great gusto on a bare wooden plank stage 
and raised platform by a 14-member cast clad in classic “hippie” attire: beads, 
bandannas, leather, the flag and patched or tie-dyed fabrics.

Set in 1967 in New York City, the Reduxion production was more the collective 
ritual of a “tribe” of rebellious young people than it was a star vehicle, but 
there were some outstanding individual performances.

Nick Orfanella had the right merry, mischievous energy and self-absorption as 
Berger, leading the hippie tribe in such mocking, satiric songs as “Donna” and 
“Going Down.” Rousing in such numbers as “I Got Life,” Charlie Monnot got 
across the bravado and conflicts of Claude, who protests serving in the Vietnam 
War and ultimately becomes its sacrificial victim.

Orfanella and Monnot also teamed to lead the tribe in the musical's title song, 
an irresistible musical celebration of hair, and especially long hair, almost 
for its own sake, as a kind of life force. Leavell Javon Johnson brought a 
powerful stage presence and a good voice to his role as Hud, celebrating black 
pride in no uncertain terms in such songs as “Colored Spade” and “I'm Black.”

Cristela Carrizales was robust and ribald as Dionne, leading the cast in the 
haunting early number “Aquarius,” while Rachel Bouton, as Sheila, beautifully 
expressed the downside of free love in “Easy to Be Hard.”





Original Page: 
http://m.newsok.com/theater-ends-season-with-musical-hair./article/3568555

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A tribute to anti-racist Freedom Rides





A tribute to anti-racist Freedom Rides

by Abayomi Azikiwe, workers.org
May 19th 2011 10:12 PM  

 

May 4 was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Freedom Rides, a major 
civil rights campaign that legally broke the back of racial segregation in 
interstate public travel in the United States. “Freedom Riders,” a powerful 
documentary directed by Stanley Nelson, aired on PBS on May 16 and sparked much 
discussion on both the historical significance of the Civil Rights movement as 
well as the current status of African Americans today.

The documentary featured interviews and archival news footage of the period in 
1961 when anyone, Black or white, challenging segregation in the South risked 
imprisonment, torture and even death. During the course of the lunch counter 
sit-ins the previous year in 1960, a broad-based student movement was formed 
and organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The Freedom Rides were started by the Congress of Racial Equality, a 
nonviolent, civil rights organization founded in 1942. On May 14, 1961, a 
Freedom Ride Greyhound bus was firebombed in Anniston, Ala. The Freedom Riders 
were then savagely attacked with lead pipes and baseball bats by a racist white 
mob.

Resisting pressure from the Kennedy administration to abandon the Freedom 
Rides, SNCC activists based in Nashville, Tenn., under the leadership of Diane 
Nash, announced that it was essential that the Freedom Rides continue. The 
documentary exposes the fact that President John Kennedy and his brother, then 
U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were more interested in protecting the 
image of the U.S. — which appeared increasingly racist — than in supporting the 
Civil Rights movement, including the Freedom Rides.

Student activist Lucretia Collins summed up the sentiments within SNCC when she 
said, “In Nashville, we had been informed that CORE was going to have Freedom 
Rides that could carry people all over the South, and their purpose was to test 
the facilities at the bus stations in the major cities. Later we heard that a 
busload of the Freedom Riders had been burned on Mother’s Day in Anniston, 
Ala., and that another bus had been attacked by people in Birmingham.” (“The 
Making of Black Revolutionaries,” James Forman, 1972)

Collins went on to stress that “CORE was discontinuing the Freedom Rides, 
people said. We felt that it had to continue even if we had to do it ourselves. 
We knew we were subject to being killed. This did not matter to us. There was 
so much at stake, we could not allow segregationists to stop us. We had to 
continue that Freedom Ride even if we were killed in the process.”

After the continuation of the Freedom Rides by SNCC and their supporters, the 
federal government was forced to intervene by pressuring the Interstate 
Commerce Commission to repeal the segregation laws that regulated interstate 
public transportation. This was only done after hundreds of activists 
volunteered to be imprisoned on false charges in Parchman Correctional Facility 
in Mississippi, one of the most notorious prisons in the South. Although many 
were beaten and tortured in Parchman, racist repression only fueled this heroic 
mass, anti-racist movement.

Changing the course of history

The Freedom Rides, as the sit-ins had done the year before, provided greater 
momentum for the Civil Rights movement. Increased mass mobilizations took place 
throughout the South beginning in Albany, Ga., in 1962, when an 
anti-segregation campaign brought out thousands for mass protests and arrests.

In 1963, the Civil Rights movement would advance even further with mass 
mobilizations in Birmingham involving thousands of students. These 
demonstrations against segregation would spread throughout the South as well as 
the North, to cities such as Somerville, Tenn., and Chicago.

These demonstrations during the spring and summer of 1963 led to the first 
massive protests of the era, in Detroit on June 23 and later the historic March 
on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 on August 28. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was 
then passed outlawing racial discrimination inside the U.S.

After the efforts of the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi and other areas 
and the voting rights campaign in Selma during early 1965, the Voting Rights 
Act of 1965 was passed ostensibly guaranteeing universal suffrage. In 1966, the 
movement would become more militant when SNCC came out in opposition to the 
draft and the Vietnam War as well as raising the slogan of Black Power during 
the “March Against Fear” from Memphis, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., in

The 'Reborning' of Zayd Dohrn





THEATER / Jonah Raskin : The 'Reborning' of Zayd Dohrn

theragblog.blogspot.com | May 16th 2011 

 
The Reborning of Zayd Dohrn:

A fascinating piece of theater from the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers 
that speaks to our time now and where we've come from as a society...

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 16, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- What do you do if you’re a young, rising playwright and you’re 
the son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? You write plays about parents and 
children and about parenting.

That’s what Zayd Dohrn, the oldest of three sons raised by Dohrn and Ayers, has 
done in his one-act play Reborning, which is on stage off, off, off Broadway at 
the San Francisco Playhouse.

If you don’t live in the city or nearby it might be long way to go to see a 
75-minute play that races along, but if you can go in the next month or so it’s 
a fascinating piece of theater that speaks to our time now, and that also shows 
where we’ve come from as a society.

Part comedy, part tragedy, Reborning mixes satire with real pathos, and makes 
for laughter and for tears. The play features only three characters: a young 
woman who has been abandoned by her mother; an older woman who has lost a baby 
and wants a replacement; and a young man who brings them together tenderly in a 
kind of family.

The older woman might in fact be the biological mother of the younger woman, 
but the play leaves the relationships ambiguous, as though to say that we can 
choose or not choose our parents and our children, and make the families we 
want to make.

The narratives we tell ourselves and one another are all-important. Nothing is 
fixed or unalterable in Zayd Dorhn’s world and everything is possible. Secrets 
come to light, the past is peeled away, and scars are healed almost overnight.

It’s tempting to read Reborning as an autobiographical work, and there’s no 
doubt that Zayd Dorhn drew upon his own emotional crosscurrents to write his 
play. Growing up an underground kid with fugitive parents wanted by the FBI 
gave him plenty of sensational material and dramatic, real life characters to 
mirror.

Still, his characters aren’t copies of his parents or their contemporaries. 
Unlike them, his fictional people are pulled to art rather than to ideology, 
and express themselves in creative work rather than in political struggle.

Reborning takes theatergoers through a kind of emotional hell that includes 
dumpsters, death, and denial, but it’s a therapeutic work that ends on a note 
of reconciliation. The characters clash with one another; they shout and they 
argue, but they don’t hit, shoot, and bomb, and the play offers no big blow-up.

The final scene is an unclimactic kind of climax, but nonetheless genuinely 
heartfelt. It reflects a world in which mistakes are unmade, and seemingly 
irreconcilable differences are resolved peacefully.

The tensions between the two women -- the mother/daughter figures -- drive the 
play, but it’s the male character who brings them together. He’s also the 
comedian of the piece and he supplies the sexual energy that can be as funny as 
it is steamy.

In the first scene of the play, he walks around on stage holding a huge phallus 
in his hand and that irreverent image sets the tone for much of the play. Could 
the male character be inspired by his father and could the women be inspired by 
his mother? Maybe so.

Zayd Dohrn was in the audience the evening Reborning had its premier in San 
Francisco -- the celebrity in the crowd. His parents were in the audience, too, 
though no one seemed to recognize them. They might still have been anonymous 
underground fugitives out on the town for the evening, not the infamous 
Dohrn-Ayers duo in the media at the time of Obama's election.

Like many of the sons and daughters of former Weather Underground fugitives, 
Zayd Dohrn has come of age, and put the underground behind him. “Reborning” 
seems an apt metaphor for his own evolution as a playwright who dramatizes the 
theater of the human heart.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie 
Hoffman, and teaches media at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by 
Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog





Original Page: 
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/theater-jonah-raskin-reborning-of-zayd.html

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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: Manning Marable’s Exhaustive Biography





Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: Manning Marable’s Exhaustive Biography of 
the Civil Rights Leader

by Author Interviews, democracynow.org
May 19th 2011   

 

Events are being held today across the country to mark what would have been 
Malcolm X’s 86th birthday. Earlier this year a major new biography, Malcolm X: 
A Life of Reinvention was published. The book’s author, Columbia University 
Professor Dr. Manning Marable, died at the age of 60 just days before its 
publication. Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is 
described as a re-evaluation of Malcolm X’s life, providing new insights into 
the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about 
Malcolm X’s own autobiography. We speak with Zaheer Ali, one of the researchers 
who worked with Dr. Marable on the biography. In a sense, this book is a kind 
of iconoclasm in that way, in that it takes Malcolm off of the pedestal to 
examine him as a human being struggling through these political and religious 
currents that he was in, says Zaheer. [includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ: Events are being held today across the country to mark what 
would have been the 86th birthday of Malcolm X. He was born Malcolm Little in 
Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19th, 1925. His mother, Louise Norton Little, raised 
the family’s eight children. His father, Earl Little, was an outspoken Baptist 
minister and avid supporter of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey.

In an interview in the 1960s, Malcolm briefly spoke about his childhood.

JIM HURLBUT: You were born in Omaha, is that right?

MALCOLM X: Yes, sir.

JIM HURLBUT: And you left—your family left Omaha when you were about one year 
old?

MALCOLM X: I imagine about a year old.

JIM HURLBUT: And why did they leave Omaha?

MALCOLM X: Well, to my understanding, the Ku Klux Klan burned down one of their 
homes in Omaha. They had a lot of Ku Klux Klan—

JIM HURLBUT: This made your family feel very unhappy, I’m sure.

MALCOLM X: Well, insecure, if not unhappy.

JIM HURLBUT: So you must have a somewhat prejudiced point of view, a personally 
prejudiced point of view. In other words, you cannot look at this in a broad, 
academic sort of way, really, can you?

MALCOLM X: I think that’s incorrect, because despite the fact that that 
happened in Omaha, and then when we moved to Lansing, Michigan, our family home 
was burned down again—in fact, my father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan—and 
despite all of that, no one was more thoroughly integrated with whites than I. 
No one has lived more so in the society of whites than I.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Malcolm excelled in school but eventually dropped out and became 
a drug dealer, a pimp and a thief. While serving time in prison, he joined the 
Nation of Islam, a move that transformed his life. He would rise to become the 
organization’s national spokesperson and one of the most prominent black 
leaders in the country. He eventually split from the Nation of Islam and 
founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Malcolm X was shot to death on February 21st, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom. He 
was only 39 years old. Details of his assassination remain disputed to this day.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year a major new biography of Malcolm was published, 
entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. The book’s author, Columbia 
University Professor Manning Marable, died at the age of 60 just days before 
its publication. Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is 
described as a re-evaluation of Malcolm X’s life, providing new insights into 
the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about 
Malcolm X’s own autobiography.

Manning Marable appeared on Democracy Now! a number of times to talk about the 
life of Malcolm X.

MANNING MARABLE: I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical 
figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, 
but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize black 
urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against 
structural racism, and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision 
of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual, that he 
shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson a pan-Africanist internationalist 
perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black 
institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a commitment to peace 
and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American 
to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, By Manning Marable





Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, By Manning Marable

by Stephen Howe, independent.co.uk
May 13th 2011   

 

The global fame and iconic posthumous stature of the man born as Malcolm Little 
may seem anomalous, even inexplicable. By most measures, his career was neither 
very successful, important, nor admirable. Murdered by former devotees at the 
age of just 39, he left no institutional legacy: the political and religious 
organistions he founded, always small and fragile, withered away within weeks 
of his death. 



Unlike more quietly effective African-American leaders of his era – a Bayard 
Rustin or Philip Randolph, let alone a Martin Luther King – he pioneered no 
legislative or electoral victories, no mass movement, no obvious concrete 
achievements. Nor was there a significant literary legacy. His inspirational 
Autobiography was, as Manning Marable shows, far more ghostwriter Alex Haley's 
book than Malcolm's own. 

Most of his public life had been devoted to propagating what he finally scorned 
as some of the most fantastic things that you could ever imagine: the Nation 
of Islam's bizarre mélange of theology, science fiction and racial chauvinism. 
Although in his last months he was breaking away from those beliefs – and died 
because of that break - he did so only in ambiguous ways. His ideological 
evolution was rapid, and was cut brutally short, enabling admirers to project 
onto him multiple imaginings about where it was going. But it had not (yet?) 
included clear-cut rejection of ideas he had once propounded: like the inherent 
evil of white people and especially Jews, the natural inferiority of women, the 
desirability not just of armed revolution but of political murder, or for that 
matter that black Gods were circling the Earth in giant spaceships. 

Amid all the things Malcolm X was not, there were two great things which he 
was; albeit one mostly only in retrospect. He was a great talker, and he became 
a screen onto which millions of people could project their diverse hopes and 
aspirations. His verbal brilliance was itself of two kinds, as orator and as 
conversationalist. This made him a crucial transitional figure, between the 
earlier age of the great face-to-face public meeting and the emerging media 
world of the soundbite and TV debate. 

Malcolm shone at both, in ways which as Marable shrewdly suggests, shared a 
great deal both with the revered tradition of the improvising jazz musician and 
the later art of the rapper. If much he said seemed, to sober Civil Rights 
luminaries as well as to the American establishment, to be mischievously 
irresponsible, then this placed him within another compelling lineage: that of 
the black outlaw-trickster. From West African Anancy tales and their North 
American offspring Brer Rabbit, through folk icons like Stagger Lee to Tupac 
Shakur, that figure echoes throughout African-American history. As Marable 
argues, much of Malcolm X's enduring popular appeal came refracted through that 
imagery, fed always by an enduring sense of black powerlessness. 

Whether this tradition will, or indeed should, survive into the Age of Obama is 
a question at which Marable's biography repeatedly hints, but never fully 
addresses. Its attitude towards its subject remains deeply, deliberately 
ambivalent. The central trope is reinvention: how Malcolm Little constantly 
reworked himself and how commentators and iconographers have repeatedly revised 
him. Marable gives us all the raw material for a harshly critical appraisal. He 
shows that the man's early criminality was far less serious and prolific than 
depicted in the Autobiography - but in some ways more sordid, since it included 
theft from his friends and family. He skates rather lightly over some of the 
madder beliefs of the Nation of Islam, but does not conceal either their 
absurdity or nastiness. 

Marable is critical, too, of the top-down leadership Malcolm always promoted, 
and of the sexism from which, despite a few modifying or mollifying remarks, he 
never broke away. More bluntly, Marable notes how many violent and unstable 
characters were attracted to the Nation of Islam in Malcolm's time, and 
especially to its enforcer wing the Fruit Of Islam. 

If you recruit in prisons, as the NoI so prominently did, you may get many 
born again followers – but you also get something else, really obvious but 
consistently denied or ignored by 1960s US radicals. Not all prisoners were 
nascent revolutionaries. Some were, believe it or not, criminals. There is no 
record of Malcolm ever criticising

50 Years After Freedom Rides, a Stunning Film Revives the Heroism





50 Years After Freedom Rides, a Stunning Film Revives the Heroism

by Jamilah King, colorlines.com
May 16th 2011 9:02 AM   

 

Tuesday will mark 50 years ago since the first group of Freedom Riders boarded 
a bus in Washington, D.C., and headed on their historic journey south. The 
inaugural team had one ambitious goal: to help lead the charge against American 
racial segregation. Their plan was to defy the South’s social order by brazenly 
traveling as an interracial group through Southern cities before ending their 
tour in New Orleans on May 17, 1961. History would take a different course, 
however. Before the first group of riders could reach Louisiana, they were met 
by angry mobs in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Ala. Buses were set on 
fire and the riders were beaten mercilessly, but they continued their journey 
anyway, eventually making it to New Orleans on a plane that had to be chartered 
by the federal government. The trip sparked a nationwide movement in which 
hundreds of young activists joined the Freedom Rides and many were hauled off 
to one of the nation’s most notorious prisons. The saga made international 
headlines and turned the nation’s attention to the often brutal struggle 
against racial inequality.

A stunning new documentary debuting tonight on PBS details the extraordinary 
tale of the Freedom Riders and the activists who followed them. In “Freedom 
Riders,” Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson uses masterful 
storytelling and gripping interviews with key players of the era to document 
what would eventually become one of the civil rights movement’s major 
victories. But he also shows that those victories were deeply nuanced, as 
younger activists fought for recognition from the president and, sometimes, 
from older movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. Through it all, the 
riders were an organized team of well-trained activists who committed 
themselves to non-violence despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

On a recent celebration of the Freedom Riders on “Oprah”, movement leader Diane 
Nash reiterated lessons from the era that are still applicable today:

“Voting is not enough. It’s important, but it’s not enough. That ten minutes 
that you spend in the voting booth every 10 years is not enough to fulfill our 
duty as American citizens. I think we need to begin seeing that all of 
us—millions and millions of us—need to use non-violent direct action to bring 
about the changes that need to be done in this country.”

I spoke with Nelson following a San Francisco screening of “Freedom Riders” 
last week. He explained why the film is significant, and what young activists 
can still learn from the movement.

On the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides:

I think that it’s a great story, it’s also a story about the very beginnings of 
the civil rights movement. [It was] at a place where the civil rights movement 
was really in jeopardy of failing. It’s a story that people don’t know, people 
don’t know the outcome, people don’t know the ins and outs. So when you see it, 
you kinda don’t know what’s gonna happen from place to place. It’s a story that 
has great witnesses and characters who are still alive, who are still vibrant.

On the Kennedys’ role:

What was really surprising was the involvement—or non-involvement—of the 
Kennedys. John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, they just wanted the Freedom Rides to 
stop. They want it to go away. They don’t wanna become involved in it. They 
don’t wanna be seen as in any way opposing the Southern political 
establishment. So they’re not the kind of civil rights heroes so many times 
we’ve come to expect or think they are.

On lessons for today’s young activists:

I think that it’s important that we understand that the Freedom Rides are a 
great example of people taking a step and doing what they feel is right at 
great personal risk with no guarantee of success, but they take a step out 
there and they succeed. I think that’s the kind of political action that we 
need now.

It’s great screening the film with young people because they’re always so 
inspired by the Freedom Riders. The first group of Freedom Riders were 13 
people who just got on a bus in Washington, D.C., and traveled to the South, 
and ended up becoming a movement and ended up changing America.





Original Page: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/freedom_riders.html

Reflections on the Freedom Riders






Michael Powell: Reflections on the Freedom Riders

santacruzsentinel.com | May 15th 2011 1:30 AM 			 			 			 			   


Michael Powell

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Freedom Rides  
of 1961. The movie on them, based on Raymond Arsenault's book, will air on  
PBS Monday. The KQED times are 9 p.m. on Monday on their 9HD channel and 8  
p.m. on Tuesday on their Life channel. I encourage everyone who can to  
take the time to view this moving documentary with their families. The Santa  
Cruz Film Festival hosted an advance showing of it on Tuesday, May 10. As a  
former Freedom Rider, I was asked to introduce it and what follows is taken  
from my prepared remarks:


Over 400 Riders were involved. My own part was a small one, though it did  
involve six weeks in prison. Others get to the heart and soul of what  
happened. I want to focus on one name, and one idea: The name is the  
Reverend James Lawson. The idea is non-violent direct action.


The book quotes Rev. Lawson: ... it was all but impossible to solve the  
problem of racial injustice without people being hurt. Only when this  
hostility comes to the surface, as it did in Montgomery and Birmingham, will  
we begin to see that the system of segregation is an evil which destroys  
people and teaches them a contempt for life. We are trying to reach the  
conscience of the South. Brutality must be suffered to show the true  
character of segregation.


Rev. Lawson was a mentor to the student movement in Nashville. John Lewis  
now a congressman from Atlanta, was part of that movement, one of the first  
Freedom 

Riders, and their first victim of serious violence: In Rock Hill, South  
Carolina, approaching the White waiting room, he was attacked, suffering  
bruised ribs and severe cuts around his eyes and mouth. Asked if he wished  
to press charges, he declined. Almost 48 years later, one of his attackers  
came to Congressman Lewis to apologize. Asked why on Oprah Winfrey's show,  
he credited God with changing his heart and using Lewis' conduct to bring  
about the change. 

This shows the meaning of two key phrases from that time: The first is  
redemptive suffering. It is not the one who suffers who is being redeemed,  
but the one who afflicts him! The second is the beloved community being  
built as non-violent confrontation changes hearts.


Courage to persevere was also needed: When the dazed and battered original  
Freedom Riders where coaxed into leaving the effort in Birmingham, it was  
the Nashville student movement that would not accept defeat. Hearing their  
offer to continue, James Farmer told their representative, Diane Nash, You  
realize it may be suicide. She responded, We fully realize that, but we  
can't let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead. When  
Robert Kennedy's representative protested that their lives would be in  
danger, the book records her reply: If the first wave of Nashville Freedom  
Riders were to die, she calmly informed him, then others will follow them.


This movie is the story of a wonderful and remarkable chapter in our  
history, one that triggered progress toward racial equality that can only be  
described as astounding in its speed. I thank God for having been a small  
part of it.


Michael Powell is a semi-retired software developer living in Boulder Creek.





Original Page: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/opinion/ci_18067572%3E

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Local men who were Freedom Riders 50 years ago say the struggle isn't over