From the Dec. 1 New York Times:

A 60’s Psychedelic Tale of Youth Conquering All (the Revolutionaries Are Puppets)
By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF

In a small theater on the grounds of the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, across the street from the hundreds of art dealers offering works this week at Art Basel Miami Beach’s international fair, a very different kind of art event is selling out. For seven performances starting today, packed audiences will watch 10 marionettes strut, scheme and rock out to the music of Sonic Youth, among others, as they send viewers back to the 1960’s in a bitingly funny and psychedelic piece of puppet theater, “Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty.”

When the veteran conceptual artist Dan Graham first thought of creating the piece, he had no idea that marionettes would have stolen their way back into pop consciousness.

The makers of “South Park” hadn’t launched their apocalyptic movie satire “Team America: World Police,” now in theaters, with its marionette supercops conquering a toy-size Kim Jong Il. Even Spike Jonze’s screw-loose hit film from 1999, “Being John Malkovich,” with John Cusack as an existential puppeteer who mysteriously enters Mr. Malkovich’s brain, was still to come.

“COMMAND PERFORMANCE”

THE ARTHUR MAILING LIST BULLETIN No. 0011

FRIDAY DECEMBER 3, 2004

title: “IF NOT FOR LOVE, WHY?”

Did you know?: “The ‘Ferals’ of eastern Australia are yet another present day link in the chain of youths who have abandoned urbanism and returned into forested areas where they live mostly in nomadic tipis in the Nimbin/Byron region of New South Wales, sometimes numbering as many as 10,000… Nearly all of these Gen-X kids come from the big cities like Sydney and Melbourne, and are a modern-day echo of the German Naturmensch and the American youth movements in the 1960s.” (found online)

The new issue of Arthur has been printed by our friends across the Northern border and is now speeding its way to distro points across North America via truck, boat, car and 10-speed. Look for it starting around December 11. Sorry we can’t be more exact than that.

What we can be exact about, though, is Arthur No. 14 (Jan 05)’s contents: cover star Jello Biafra tells all to Sorina Diaconescu in a 9,000-word interview, Ms. Ryan Beshara presents a photo essay of bingo players across the USA, we chat with an American who’s already moved to Canada about how it’s going up there in Quebec, Jay Babcock talks with Danish art collective Superflex about how to open-source soft drinks (!), T-Model Ford tells us what he wants for Christmas, Mark Pilkington explains why magic mushrooms are legal in the UK, MF Doom gives us his recipe for Villainous Mac & Cheez, angry Paul Cullum discusses the late great American satirist Bill Hicks, James Parker on the latest from old grizzlies Mike Watt and Richard Meltzer, Daniel Pinchbeck on the plight of the Hopi, very funny comics about woodworking, very angry comics about the Great Satan, a full page of color artwork by Seldon Hunt, mushroom drawings by Matt Greene, and Byron Coley & Thurston Moore review a metric ton of new loam from the undergrounds. 48 pages of genuine Arthur smash. Yeah!

Over at the Bastet end of the office, the phone has been ringing off the hook for the last 96 hours with pre-orders for the forthcoming Bastet release–a brand new album by none other than Sunburned Hand of the Man, co-stars with Comets On Fire and Six Organs of Admittance in Tony Rettman’s piece in Arthur No. 7. The cd is called “No Magic Man” and is beard-certified primo Hand material: dark foggy funk, psychedelic exploration reports, echo chamber escape artistry, gumbo yeh-yeh ya ya…you know the deal with their real feel. Starting December 20, we really can listen to the Hand (sorry), for only twelve bucks usa, 14 canada, 17 rest of the world. And now being prepared for 2005 release: a new Bastet compilation of hot spaz curated by Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller.

Hey, if you have pictures of Ron Boise’s Thunder Sculptures, please be in touch with the person who answers email at

editor@arthurmag.com

And, if you are in California this December, you may enjoy attending one of these Arthur-sponsored shows, starring our multi-talented psychedelic utopian freak friend from Chicago–Plastic Crimewave. He’ll be accompanied on this jaunt by underground psych-folk legend Nick Castro of Los Angeles. Here are the dates:

Dec. 10, Voltaire Commune (4862 Voltaire, San Diego): Plastic Crimewave with Frankie Delmaine, Nick Castro, Tiffany Anders, Becky Stark and the Lavender Diamond

Dec. 11, Tonevendor (1812 J Street Sacramento), early show: Plastic Crimewave (featuring Frankie Delmane) with Nick Castro

Dec 12, The Hemlock (1131 Polk St., San Francisco): Plastic Crimewave with Nick Castro, Eric Landmark

Please be well and stay that way,

The Arthur Tough Doves

http://www.arthurmag.com

(This is the end, my friend.)

From the Dec 1, 2004 SF Weekly:

A Psychomagical Encounter

Although Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known for his psychedelic, violent movies (El Topo, The Holy Mountain), he has also been, at one time or another during his 75 years on Earth, the mime prot?©g?© of Marcel Marceau, a surrealist performance artist, an esoteric comic-book author, and a tarot card reader. In life, as well as film, Jodorowsky is avant-garde. In a 1979 interview with Penthouse, the filmmaker spoke openly of demonstrating sexual positions with his wife for his curious, 7-year-old son, Axel. In his arguably most accessible movie, Santa Sangre, a circus family falls apart after a boy sees his mother’s arms sliced off by his knife-thrower father and loses his mind. As an adult (played by then-20-year-old Axel Jodorowsky), the character is forced into a semi-incestuous relationship with his mother in which he acts as her “arms.”

Jodorowsky appeared late last month at the California Institute for Integral Studies, but, somehow unsurprisingly, his lecture had absolutely nothing to do with film. Instead, it focused on “Psychomagic,” described in the institute’s literature as a healing practice developed by Jodorowsky that “uses the language of the subconscious to undo our deepest knots, phobias, fixations, and obsessions.”

Inside the institute’s Namaste Hall, chairs had been cleared away to fit a sellout crowd; Jodorowsky fans eagerly huddled together on the carpet. The Parisian-based filmmaker was jaunty and distinguished in a navy blue suit, no tie, and shocking white hair and beard. He cracked jokes and smiled warmly, belying his reputation as a reclusive eccentric. His eyes, accentuated by sweeping, Mephistophelean eyebrows, seemed to suggest derangement.

From the Nov 29, 2004 Guardian:

Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to “play something sad” while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. “What about Majdanek?” he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial “not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust”.

“Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust,” he wrote.

“If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps.”

Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is “the most moral in the world” because it says it adheres to a code of “the purity of arms”. There is rarely much public questioning of the army’s routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been “caught in crossfire”, or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.

But the public’s confidence has been shaken by the revelations of the past week. The audio recording of the shooting of the 13-year-old, Iman al-Hams, prompted much soul searching, although the revulsion appears to be as much at the Israeli officer firing a stream of bullets into her lifeless body as the killing itself. Some soldiers told Israeli papers that their mothers had sought assurances that they did not do that kind of thing.

One Israeli peace group, the Arik Institute, took out large newspaper adverts to plead for “Jewish patriots” to “open your eyes and look around” at the suffering of Palestinians.

The incidents prompted the army to call in all commanders from the rank of lieutenant-colonel to emphasise the importance of maintaining the “purity of arms” code.

The army’s critics say the real problem is not the behaviour of soldiers on the ground but the climate of impunity that emanates from the top.

While the officer responsible for killing Iman al-Hams has been charged with relatively minor offences, and the soldiers who forced the violinist to play were ticked off for being “insensitive”, the only troops who were swiftly punished for violating regulations last week were some who posed naked in the snow for a photograph. They were dismissed from their unit.

Last week the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem criticised what it described as a “culture of impunity” within the army. The group says at least 1,656 Palestinian non-combatants have been killed during the intifada, including 529 children.

“To date, one soldier has been convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian,” it said.

“The combination of rules of engagement that encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers together with the climate of impunity results in a clear and very troubling message about the value the Israeli military places on Palestinian life.”