Minister of counterculture

Gilberto Gil is a musical legend – and a senior Brazilian politician. He tells Oliver Burkeman how poverty can be challenged if ideas are shared for free

Friday October 14, 2005
The Guardian

Gilberto Gil wears a sober suit and tie these days, and his dreadlocks are greying at the temples. But you soon remember that, as well as the serving culture minister of Brazil, you are in the presence of one of the biggest Latin American musicians of the 60s and 70s when you ask him about his intellectual influences and he cites Timothy Leary. “Oh, yeah!” Gil says happily, rocking back in his chair at the Royal Society of the Arts in London. “For example, all those guys at Silicon Valley – they’re all coming basically from the psychedelic culture, you know? The brain-expanding processes of the crystal had a lot to do with the internet.”

Much as it may be currently de rigueur for journalists to ask politicians whether or not they have ever smoked marijuana, the question does not, under the circumstances, seem worth the effort. Gil’s constant references to the hippy counterculture are not simply the nostalgia of a 63-year-old with more than 40 albums to his name. For several years now, largely under the rest of the world’s radar, the Brazilian government has been building a counterculture of its own. The battlefield has been intellectual property – the ownership of ideas – and the revolution has touched everything, from internet filesharing to GM crops to HIV medication. Pharmaceutical companies selling patented Aids drugs, for example, were informed that Brazil would simply ignore their claims to ownership and copy their products more cheaply if they didn’t offer deep discounts. (The discounts were forthcoming.) Gil himself has thrown his weight behind new forms of copyright law, enabling musicians to incorporate parts of others’ work in their own. And in one small development that none the less sums up the mood, the left-wing administration of President Luiz Inacio da Silva, or “Lula”, has announced that all ministries will stop using Microsoft Windows on their office computers. Instead of paying through the nose for Microsoft operating licences, while millions of Brazilians live in poverty, the government will use open-source software, collaboratively designed by programmers worldwide and owned by no one.

“This isn’t just my idea, or Brazil’s idea,” Gil says. “It’s the idea of our time. The complexity of our times demands it.” He is politician enough to hold back from endorsing the breaking of laws, for example on music downloading, but only just. “The Brazilian government is definitely pro-law,” he grins. “But if law doesn’t fit reality anymore, law has to be changed. That’s not a new thing. That’s civilisation as usual.” (He is not a hi-tech person himself, he says, but readily concedes that his children have “probably” done a fair bit of illegal downloading.)

Gil has lived by this philosophy – his guitar-based music has always been, in its own way, open-source, mixing the influences of bossa nova, samba, reggae and rock – and he has suffered for it, too. Tropicalia, the anti-establishment movement he helped found in Brazil in the 1960s, threatened the grip of the military dictatorship there and in 1968 he was jailed, along with his musical collaborator, Caetano Veloso, with whom he shared the status of a Latin American Lennon and McCartney. Freed after several months, he was instructed to leave the country and moved to London. His fame followed him to Europe and he went on to perform with, among others, Pink Floyd and Jimmy Cliff.

“Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life,” he says. “But I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future. I remember telling a Brazilian girl who used to be part of our community here in London, ‘I’m gonna have a role to play in politics in the future!’ And now … it is the future.”

Gil is in London as a signatory to the RSA’s Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property, which calls on governments to restrain corporations from further locking down their ownership of ideas. The campaign encompasses everything from the music industry’s myopia over downloading to the recent efforts of one agribusiness firm to patent basmati rice, then charge Indian farmers for the privilege of growing it.

Defenders of such developments insist that strong patent laws are crucial – without them, nobody would have the incentive to develop new ideas – and that anything else would impede innovation. Gil and his ministry team have an opposing theory: tough intellectual property law is a 20th-century idea and most of the blossoming of world civilisation has happened perfectly well without it.

“The 20th century is a cul-de-sac,” says Claudio Prado, Brazil’s digital culture czar, in London with Gil. “And the engine of progress doesn’t have a reverse gear, so it’s hard for the first world to get out of the cul-de-sac.”

The fact that many Brazilians still live in 18th or 19th-century conditions, he says, means that the country has an opportunity to accelerate into the 21st century without entering the cul-de-sac in the first place.

Internet evangelists are fond of hyping the “network society”, but this, Prado argues, is what Brazil has been for centuries. “In a Brazilian favela, that’s the way it works,” he says. “You go and help your neighbour build their house. Or take carnival – that’s a totally collaborative process. Sixty thousand people, unrehearsed. That’s what you do when you don’t have money. You collaborate.” Brazil has ploughed millions of dollars into bringing computer access to the poorest parts of the country, but the bigger picture is not that President Lula’s government is embracing the internet. It is that Brazilian society, in a manner of speaking, was itself a kind of internet before the fact.

All this leaves the minister with little time for writing songs. “I haven’t even thought about it,” Gil says. “It’s a very different, drastic kind of time that you have to give to writing music. So for three years I haven’t even considered it – the last song I wrote was before the ministry. But now, as my routines become a little more controlled, I’m gathering momentum again. I might be reading documents for work, for instance, on a plane, and an idea comes and I write it down on the back of the page. It’s not a preoccupation, but I’m letting it come, slowly.”

Performing, he says, is more important to him, and he frequently leaves his wife Flora, with whom he shares a home in Rio de Janeiro, to perform abroad. He must surely be the only serving politician to have completed a 22-gig tour of Europe earlier this year.

The two worlds of Gil’s music and his politics merged most closely when he announced that he would license some of his own songs for free downloading. Time Warner, which owned the licences in question, quickly announced that, actually, he would not. “That showed me how difficult the situation is,” he says. “An author is not the owner anymore. He doesn’t exercise his rights. His rights are exercised by someone else, and sometimes the two don’t coincide.”

Explaining his view, he cups his palms and traces curved shapes in the air.

Time Warner won – “for the moment” – but it is characteristic of Gil that he regards the experience as a largely positive and most certainly rather amusing one. “I think it’s a good development that the minister of culture of Brazil is looking after the interests of a Brazilian artist,” he says, “who happens to be himself.”

A similar mischievousness seems to have explained the government’s response when an official accused Microsoft of behaving like a drug dealer in handing out free software to make customers dependent on its products. Microsoft Brazil sued, but the administration simply ignored the case, and the company eventually withdrew it. “But this is not demagoguery,” Gil insists, if you accuse him of just being provocative. “This is pedagogy.” Eventually, in other words, the world will learn.

Angela Carter: Beauty and the beasts

The fantastical author Angela Carter died 14 years ago, but her work has never been more popular. Christina Patterson goes in search of the reasons why her gender-bending fairytales and gothic romances remain so enchanting

Published: 18 January 2006
The Independent

Death, as any biographer knows, can be an excellent career move. Mozart died a pauper, but the nation that spawned him is currently awash with little chocolate balls in his name. The novelist Angela Carter did not die a pauper, but at times she lived like one. For much of her far-too-short life, her books were remaindered and out of print. Less than 14 years after her death, however, she seems set for a whole new lease of life. On Friday, this most theatrical of writers hits the stage of the Lyric, Hammersmith, with an adaptation of Nights at the Circus. In July, Vintage will reissue six of her works with new introductions and in June the South Bank Centre will hold a day of talks on her legacy. 2006 will, it seems, be the year to get Carter. All very nice, but why now?

“It just seemed to me that a lot of her books were cropping up on reading lists around schools and universities,” explains Vintage publisher, Rachel Cugnoni. “I think there’s a period of time that has to elapse before someone can be recognised as a classic author and I feel she’s reached that point.” Angela Carter is, in fact, one of the most widely studied contemporary writers in Britain and America. She has launched almost as many PhDs as Sylvia Plath and is a hot topic on many an internet bulletin board. “Hey guys, I really need someone’s help,” is a pretty standard entry from a desperate A-level student. “I need to write a thematic essay on animal imagery in the Bloody chamber. I am finding it… impossible.”

It’s a feeling that Emma Rice, director of Kneehigh Theatre, might understand. It took her, she tells me, “about 65 seconds” to come up with the idea of an adaptation of Carter’s fifth novel. David Farr, the Lyric’s new artistic director, had suggested “something circusy” and Nights at the Circus sprang to mind. Rice had read it as a student in the 1980s. “I was totally inspired and in awe of it,” she explains. “I love fantasy, I love theatre, I love lunacy and the book ticks all those boxes.” Then she went home and re-read it: “I thought, ‘What have I agreed to, this is a monster!’ But then I thought, ‘Take a deep breath, don’t panic and let the book speak now’.”

If anyone can do it, it’s probably Kneehigh, whose joyful, anarchic reworkings of classics like Cymbeline, The Bacchae and The Red Shoes have won it a reputation as one of Britain’s most innovative theatre companies. Their last production, Tristan & Yseult was hailed in this newspaper as “one of the best evenings in theatre you could hope to find.” “It made me,” said The Guardian’s reviewer, “want to gurgle with delight.” You can imagine Angela Carter gurgling with delight, too – not just at the prospect of the adaptation, but also at the description of her book as a “monster”. She always loved monsters. “It’s not a question of do monsters exist or can a monster have a mother?” she once told the audience of a science fiction writers’ convention, “it’s how does a monster’s mother feel?”

For her, fiction was about asking questions. At a time when most British writers were entrenched in the drab realism that she rather disparagingly described as “the low mimetic,” she was painting vivid pictures of fairy tale creatures and monsters in complex fusions of fantasy, gothic, science fiction and romance. While her peers anatomised adultery in Hampstead, she was taking her characters on wild journeys into castles and caves, across Siberian deserts and into enchanted kingdoms where nothing was what it seemed. Richly playful, these dense, glittering fictions drew on ideas ranging from Melville to the Marquis de Sade, Barthes to de Beauvoir and feminist theory to Freud, but with the emphasis firmly on the seductive power of the storyteller. It was not, however, a mix that appealed to all. John Bayley, writing in the New York Review of Books nine weeks after Carter’s death, claimed that she made “imagination into the handmaid of ideology,” castigated her work for its “political correctness” and predicted gloomily that “a process of inflation seems inevitable”.

In an age when PhDs are more likely to be on Big Brother than Beowulf, it’s an argument that might elicit sympathy. Fairy tales have undergone so many feisty feminist subversions that the old ones now seem refreshing. Literary theory – the Death of the Author, the plurality of the text, language as a system of signs etc – now seems a relic of a bygone age, an age when irony was the province of the enlightened undergraduate and not the default mode of an entire culture. Yes, it was all very radical, all very exciting to piss on those patriarchal monoliths and cackle with laughter, but isn’t it all a bit juvenile? A bit dated, in fact?

If energy, exuberance and riotous exploration of ideas are juvenile, then yes, it was. Carter’s preoccupation with the self as performer and what she called “the Ludic Game” was a theme in all her work, one which reaches a spectacular climax in Nights at the Circus. Fevvers, the winged trapeze artist whose adventures and tall stories it chronicles, is an archetypal Carter heroine: large, sexy, bawdy and with voracious appetites. She is a busty bottle blonde, a goddess, a fallen angel, a bird woman and an enchantress, one who captures the heart of a world-weary journalist on a mission to expose her as a fake. It’s a fiction about fiction, of course, full of allusions to the contract between writer and reader, the ways in which a self is constructed and the possibilities and limits of the act of narration. It’s also a glorious, colourful story, a dazzling demonstration of the fact that metafiction can be better fiction.

Sarah Waters, who has written the introduction for the new Vintage edition, agrees. “Nights at the Circus was her masterpiece,” she tells me. “She had that fantastic magpie quality, plundering high and popular culture, and this amazing capacity for huge landscapes.” Waters’ own novels, Tipping the Velvet, which was adapted by television by Andrew Davies and Fingersmith, are both vividly imagined, subversive tales set in Victorian London. It was, she confesses, while rereading Nights at the Circus that she realised, for the first time, the influence Carter had had on her. “But she did it all,” she says a touch ruefully, “so much better than me.”

For Helen Simpson, the author of four highly acclaimed collections of short stories, “the exuberance carries it through.” It was after winning a short-story competition in which she was compared by judge Brian Aldiss to “the young Angela Carter” that Simpson got hold of a remaindered copy of her early short-story collection, Fireworks. She went on to read The Bloody Chamber, the collection of stories that Salman Rushdie described as Carter’s “masterwork.”

“You couldn’t say it wasn’t brilliant writing,” says Simpson, who is writing the introduction to the new edition. She got to know Angela Carter while living nearby in Balham; when she took her first baby along to show her, the two writers became friends. “I just admire her so much,” she confesses. “I don’t write a thing like her, but she’s invigorating and inspiring. She put steel in my spine.”

Even those who found her fiction over-egged, who recoiled at the carnival parade of gothic grotesques, could hardly fail to enjoy Carter’s journalism: those piquant, passionate bursts of prose on life, literature, fashion and food. Infused with her own fierce brand of feminism and a passionate sense of social justice, these pieces are as entertaining today as when they were written. Paul Barker, one-time editor of the left-wing journal, New Society, published her for 20 years. “She wrote with great attack,” he tells me. “It came straight off the page and we put it right in.”

The key features of Carter’s journalism, and her fiction, and her life, were energy and passion. I was taught by her, briefly, on an MA course at the University of East Anglia. We were in awe of this large woman with wild grey hair and bovver boots, whose range of interests, and knowledge, we felt we couldn’t match. Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the first writers on UEA’s Creative Writing programme, remembers that she would speak “as if she had something extremely urgent to tell you. As a teacher what struck me was how open she was. She always spoke to me as though she was fascinated to find out how my imagination worked. As a writer she changed the landscape.”

It is hard to imagine the literary landscape without Angela Carter. Hers is a legacy that extends way beyond the bounds of her own work. For Margaret Atwood, she was “the opposite of parochial… She revelled in the diverse.” For Salman Rushdie, she was “the most individual, independent and idiosyncratic of writers.” For Ali Smith, whose novel, The Accidental, won this year’s Whitbread Novel award, she is in a league of her own. “I can’t think of anyone who is at that pitch of intellectual commentary, fictional experimentation and fullness of expression,” she sighs. “I’m not a patch on her. Jesus, I wish I was.”

‘Nights at the Circus’ opens at the Lyric, Hammersmith, London W6 (0870 050 0511; http://www.lyric.co.uk) on Friday

At the court of the Yellow Emperor, the Majoon Traveler & Lady Firefly appear in the Hall of Unconscious Magnetism.

Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road present

An Evening with MICHAEL MOORCOCK
in conversation with ALAN MOORE

Wednesday 18th January at 7pm.

Tickets £6, concessions £4, from the shop during opening hours (9.30 Р8.00 Mon-Sat, 12.00 Р6.00 Sun) or 0845 456 9876 (Mon-Fri, 9.30 Р6.00)

info courtesy John Coulthart

Interview with Allen Ginsberg by Paul Carroll, in Chicago, 1968. Published in Playboy, April 1969. Complete text available in Allen Ginsberg: spontaneous mind – Selected Interviews, 1958-1996,, edited by David Carter.

AG: … Progress requires abolition of race ego, national ego, boundaries; it requires planet-citizen consciousness.

Although a minority is aware what that next step is, what about the majority who are plunged in darkness, flood, apocalypse and destruction? How to redeem these ‘ignorant armies’ who clash by night from their own bad karma? Violent confrontation? Violence begets violence. Revolutionary violence begets fascist tyranny. So, though noble impetuosity of confrontation by some New Leftists may seem appropriate to a situation in which long-haired angels are surrounded by pigs. The problem remains: how to cast the Devil from the hearts of swine?

Playboy: We’ll bite. How do you?

AG: Since we’re in an apocalyptic situation, old historical dialectics no longer apply. I prophesy that the only way to reverse the apocalypse is white magic, because the apocalypse itself is incarnate black magic. What would be the effect of total sacramental harmonious shamanistic ritual prayer magic massively performed in the American or Russian political theater?

Playboy: We’re beginning to feel like a straight man. What would be the effect?

AG: Exorcism. We need a million children saints adept at high unhexings, technological vaudeville, rhythmic behaviors, hypnotic acrobatics, street trapeze artistries, naked circus vibrations–magic politics to exorcise the police state. Is there a kind of poetry and theater sublime enough to change the national will and to open up consciousness in the populace? If the direction of the will can be changed and consciousness widened, then we may be able to solve the practical problems outlined: ecological reconstruction and the achievement of clear ecstasy as a social condition. And once that is achieved, people could relax and start looking for the highest, perfect wisdom.

Psychiatrist calls for end to 30-year taboo over use of LSD as a medical treatment

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Wednesday January 11, 2006
The Guardian

British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.
The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once “acid” hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon.

Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened. Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March – the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years.

“I really want to present a dispassionate medical, scientific evidence-based argument,” says Dr Sessa. “I do not condone recreational drug use. None of this is tinged by any personal experience.

“Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons. That’s what really drives me.”

LSD was brought to the UK in 1952 by psychiatrist Ronnie Sandison who had visited the labs of the drug company Sandoz, where Dr Hofmann worked. He came home with 100 ampoules in his bag and began to use them at Powick hospital, near Malvern in Worcestershire, on selected patients with conditions such as obsessional hand-washing or anxiety who did not respond to psychoanalysis.

Dr Sessa has looked back on the papers published by Dr Sandison and others from the heyday of psychedelic psychiatry, and thinks they may have modern relevance. They claim positive results in patients who were given LSD in psychotherapy to get to the deep-seated roots of anxiety disorders and neuroses. It took them, as the title of Aldous Huxley’s book has it, from the poem of William Blake, through “the doors of perception”. Yet when he was a student, says 33-year-old Dr Sessa, all his textbooks stated categorically that LSD had no medical use.

“It is as if a whole generation of psychiatrists have had this systematically erased from their education,” he says. “But for the generation who trained in the 50s and 60s, this really was going to be the next big thing. Thousands of books and papers were written, but then it all went silent. My generation has never heard of it. It’s almost as if there has been an active demonisation.”

He says he understands why. LSD became a huge social issue. But he argues that nobody would ask anaesthetists to forgo morphine use because heroin is a social evil, and cannabis is now being formulated as a therapeutic drug.

Since the 1960s, when research was stopped on LSD, “depression and anxiety disorders have risen to almost epidemic proportions and are now the greatest single burden on today’s health services. Therefore, today’s political climate may be just right for the medical profession to reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs”, writes Dr Sessa in an as-yet unpublished paper with Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation which promotes research into the nature of consciousness.

A major conference is being held in Basel, Switzerland, this weekend in honour of Dr Hofmann’s birthday. Scientists in the burgeoning psychedelic psychiatry movement will be there, alongside artists, musicians and those who look to hallucinatory drugs for spiritual experience.

In the past five years, the international climate has been changing, albeit very slowly. In the US, Israel, Switzerland and Spain, a few research projects have been permitted into the effects of LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – on the brain. They look at the use of the drugs in conditions such as post-traumatic stress, obsessive compulsive disorder and the alleviation of distress in the dying.

But Dr Sessa knows it will be an uphill struggle to get research proposals approved and funded in the UK. He believes the drugs are safe in medical use – given in a pure form in tiny doses and in controlled and supervised surroundings. But LSD is associated with flashbacks, and brain scans of clubbers using ecstasy have shown damage. Some psychiatrists are likely to be appalled at the idea. Former patients of Dr Sandison claimed his use of LSD had caused them long-term problems and attempted to bring a court action for compensation.

Dr Sandison says his early experimentation with LSD in the 50s produced results in difficult cases. “I recall one young woman. She had a near-drowning experience. She developed a severe anxiety state. It coloured everything.

“We didn’t get anywhere with ordinary psychotherapy, so we went on to LSD. She recalled an extraordinary memory of how, when she was eight, she had gone into a store with her mother and become separated from her. She went to a counter to ask an assistant and felt a man behind her trying to feel her up. She felt very confused by this and said she thought it was an odd way of stealing her purse.” he said.

“It was pretty alarming. She had suppressed all this. We began to get somewhere and we discovered why she had sexual difficulties with her husband and felt angry towards men.”

In 1954 he wrote his first paper, for the Journal of Mental Sciences, on LSD use in 36 patients. It concluded: “We consider that the drug will find a significant place in the treatment of the psychoneuroses and allied mental illnesses.” But by the mid-60s, Dr Sandison had had enough. The drug had become a street problem. He gave evidence in a couple of Old Bailey cases where arson and a murder were committed under the influence of LSD.

“I don’t see either ethically or professionally or technically why it shouldn’t be used in the future,” he says. “But anything done now has to be very different from what we did. All the expertise developed in those years by a large number of people has been lost so we have to start again.”

“Amazonia Ambient Project”

Based on the experiences of an anthropologist and three electronic musicians, this project deals with Amazonian reality and its current implications, including ecology, shamanism and the encounter of cultures.

For the occasion, The Young Gods will be in small-scale electronic formation (computer, sampler and percussion), and will blend a presentation of their new ambient album “Music for Artificial Clouds” (2004) with soundtracks recorded in the Amazon and reworked by computer: a live work of electronic improvisation.

Jeremy Narby is a doctor in anthropology from the University of Stanford. He has worked with indigenous people in the Western Amazon for two decades on questions of territorial rights and bilingual, intercultural education. He has written several books, including “The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” (1998, Penguin Putnam, New York), which breaks new ground in showing connections between indigenous knowledge and science. He also co-edited with Francis Huxley the first-ever anthology showing the evolution of Western attitudes towards shamanism on a worldwide scale, called “Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge” (2001, Penguin Putnam, New York).

He works as coordinator of Amazonian projects for Nouvelle Planete, a Swiss NGO.
The “show” should last about 90 minutes and should include several phases, including music only, anthropological tales only, and others in which music and story combine.

2006 Venues

Amazonia Ambient Project at Les Docks, Lausanne Switzerland on March the 5th 2006.

Nouvelle PlanÔø?te is celebrating their 20th anniversary with Amazonia Ambient Project, Jeremy Narby & The Young Gods
A sonic conference about amazonian reality and its current involvement for ecology. A lively narration combined with an electronic improvisation.
Doors : 18:00
Show : 19:00

Subdelegado Zero’s Trip Resumes
| January 8, 2006 |

Originally published in Spanish by the EZLN
***********************************
Translated by irlandesa

CommuniquÔø? from the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Campaign – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Mexico

January 8, 2006

To the Supporters of the Sexta and the Other Campaign
To the People of Mexico:

CompaÔø?eros and CompaÔø?eras:
Brothers and Sisters:

As you already know, our compaÔø?era Comandanta Ramona, a member of our political organizational leadership, died on January 6.

Comandanta Ramona, in addition to being our leader, had become a symbol of the struggle, of the struggle built from below and to the left. Her loss has meant great pain for us, and it is very difficult to talk about it. That is why we are unable to say anything else about our Comandanta and about what her absence means, and will mean, to us.

On that very day, January 6, the EZLNÔø?s Sixth Committee (as part of the first stage of our participation in the Ôø?Other CampaignÔø?) was in the city of TonalÔø?, Chiapas when we learned of the great sorrow which came into our hearts. Given the magnitude of the loss, activities were then suspended, and the EZLNÔø?s Sixth Committee delegate returned to the city of San CristÔø?bal de Las Casas in order to wait there for directions from the CCRI-CG of the EZLN.

While still sorrowing over the death of Comandanta Ramona, the Comandantes and Comandantas met in their respective regions to review, discuss and decide on the Sixth CommitteeÔø?s national trip. They decided on the following:

They ordered the EZLNÔø?s Sixth Committee, following our Comandanta RamonaÔø?s internment, to resume their trip throughout all the states of the Mexican Republic and to carry out their mission of listening to our compaÔø?eros and compaÔø?eras of the Ôø?Other CampaignÔø? throughout Mexico and the United States, of calling on the people of Mexico to join in with the Sixth Declaration and of uniting those struggles which are by themselves. To this end, some adjustments were made in the tripÔø?s program so that the activities which were suspended in the Coast and Sierra of Chiapas can be carried out.

We respectfully ask supporters in Mexico and the American Union to excuse us for the problems that these changes may cause them. Regarding Chiapas, Quintana Roo and YucatÔø?n, we have already been in contact with their respective committees, and they have, nobly and generously, agreed to make the necessary changes so that, respecting the number of days which had been established for each state, the calendar can be modified.

The new calendar is as follows (program details for each location will be released, in due course, by the committees of each state):

January 9 and 10 – Coast of Chiapas. Base: TonalÔø?
January 11 – Sierra and Coast of Chiapas. Base: Huixtla
January 12 – Travel from Huixtla – San CristÔø?bal de Las Casas
January 13 – Travel from San CristÔø?bal – Palenque
January 14 – Travel to Quintana Roo
January 15, 16 and 17 – Quintana Roo
January 18, 19 and 20 – YucatÔø?n

January 21 – Traveling to Campeche-Tabasco
January 22, 23 and 24 – Campeche
January 25, 26 and 27 – Tabasco

January 28 – Travel to Veracruz
January 29, 30 and 31 and February 1, 2 and 3 – Veracruz

February 4 – Travel to Oaxaca
February 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 – Oaxaca

February 11 – Travel to Puebla
February 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 – Puebla
February 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 – Tlaxcala

February 24 – Travel to Hidalgo
February 25, 26, 27 and 28 and March 1 and 2 – Hidalgo and part of Veracruz

March 3 – Travel to QuerÔø?taro
March 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 – QuerÔø?taro

March 10 – Travel to Guanajuato-Aguascalientes
March 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 – Guanajuato-Aguascalientes

March 17 – Travel to Jalisco
March 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 – Jalisco

March 24 – Travel to Colima or Nayarit
March 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 – Colima-Nayarit

March 31 – Travel to MichoacÔø?n
April 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 – MichoacÔø?n

April 7 – Travel to Morelos
April 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 – Morelos

April 14 – Travel to Guerrero
April 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 – Guerrero

April 21 – Travel to the State of Mexico – Federal District
April 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 and May 1, 2 and 3 – DF – EDOMEX

May 5 – Travel to San Luis PotosÔø?
May 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 – San Luis PotosÔø?

May 12 – Travel to Zacatecas
May 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 – Zacatecas

May 19 – Travel to Nuevo LeÔø?n – Tamaulipas
May 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 – Nuevo LeÔø?n -Tamaulipas

May 26 – Travel to Coahuila – Durango
May 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 and June 1 – Coahuila – Durango

June 2 – Travel to Chihuahua – the Other Side
June 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 – Chihuahua – the Other Side

June 9 – Travel to Sinaloa – Sonora
June 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 – Sinaloa – Sonora

June 16 – Travel to Bajas – the Other Side
June 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 – Bajas – the Other Side

June 23, 24 and 25 – Return and Informative Plenary in DF
June 26 – 30 – Return to the mountains of the Mexican Southeast

These are our thoughts, compaÔø?eros and compaÔø?eras. Hopefully adjusting your program of activities to this new calendar will not cause you many problems. We await your proposals.

We send you our zapatista greetings and abrazos from compas of this Ôø?otherÔø? struggle we are moving forward.

Democracy!
Liberty!
Justice!

By the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Sixth Committee of the EZLN

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico, January of 2006

CNN.com – Jan 11, 2006

LONDON, England (Reuters) — British researchers said on Wednesday they had uncovered the first proof of teaching in non-human animals — ants showing each other the way to food.

The ants studied over two years by scientists from Bristol University used a technique known as tandem running — one ant led another ant from the nest to a food source.

It was a genuine case of teaching as ant leaders observed by Professor Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson slowed down if the follower got too far behind. If the gap got smaller, they then speeded up.

Tandem leaders also paid a penalty, because they would have reached the food four times faster if they had gone alone. But teaching had its advantages — the follower ant then learnt much more quickly where the food source was.

Information then flows through the ant colony when followers are promoted to leaders and the teaching process starts all over again.

“Teaching isn’t merely mimicry. It involves the teacher modifying its behavior in the presence of a naive observer at some initial cost to itself,” said Franks, who reported the findings in the journal Nature.

“We think real teaching involves a lot of feedback. This is to our knowledge the first example of formal teaching in non-human animals,” he told Reuters.

“What’s nice about this demonstration is that the ant is an animal with a small brain. The human brain is a million times larger and yet the ant is very good at teaching and learning.”