from Harvard Film Archive:

A pioneering work that blurred the boundaries between fictional and documentary styles, Ice was hailed by filmmaker and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas as “the most original and most significant American narrative film” of the late sixties. An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife which threatens its security and stages urban guerrilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and serve to restrain the melodrama inherent in the “thriller” genre. Shot in the gray landscape of New York City in a gritty cinema-verité style, the film has been compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

from Coolidge Corner Theater:

Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader: “One of American independent Robert Kramer’s strongest “underground” features (1969), arguably his best, made in and around New York before he resettled in Paris. This potent and grim SF thriller about urban guerrillas of the radical left, shot in the manner of a rough documentary in black and white, has an epic sweep to it. (Like many politically informed art movies of the period, starting with Alphaville and including even THX 1138, it was set in the future mainly as a ruse for critiquing the present.) Now as then, the power of this creepy movie rests largely in its dead-on critique of the paranoia and internecine battles that characterized revolutionary politics during the 60s; the mood is terrorized and often brutal, but the behavioral observations and some of the tenderness periodically call to mind early Cassavetes. A searing, unnerving history lesson, it’s an American counterpart to some of Jacques Rivette’s conspiracy pictures, a desperate message found in a bottle.”

Jonas Mekas said that ‘ Ice ‘ was “the most original and most significant American narrative film of the late sixties.

Born in New York in 1939, Robert Kramer ranks as one of the most original directors of American underground cinema. This exacting loner, the bard of the counterculture, has worked on the fringe both in his homeland and in France. In 1967, he founded The Newsreel, a militant collective that was among the first to produce films about the Vietnam war and its impact in America. His films constantly work at wearing away the impermeability of documentary and fiction forms, paying special attention to his characters. In 1969, Kramer visited Hanoï and brought back Peoples’ War. He returned 23 years later, keen on understanding what had become of Vietnam in the nineties – the result was Starting Place/Point de départ. The country was then in pieces; the old generation had its pride intact whereas the new generation had forgotten. Starting Place is also a melancholic stroll among faces, objects and vestiges that question our relationship with memory and images. His exploration of the American heartlands has been the other fixture of his work. Milestones (1976) is the polyphonic evocation of a rural community, which paints a pessimistic portrait of American society in the seventies. In 1989, he made Route One/USA – Route One is an historic, now disused, road that runs down the east coast. Through Kramer’s eyes, this route becomes the focal point that condenses American history and its traditions of violence, blends fiction and documentary, sets up echoes between collective memory and private recollections. This geographer’s work evokes wars (from the Civil War to Vietnam), confronts feminists with Christian fundamentalists, examines the demands of minority communities. There gradually takes forms a mosaic of America and its history as a living organism with a thousand facets.

From July 22, 2006 Los Angeles Times…

POP MUSIC REVIEW

Music fest is a many-octaved thing

Outsider artists come together for “5 Nights of Soleros and Bandoleros” to give “folk” a punky, esoteric, jazzy tinge.

By Ann Powers, Times Staff Writer

Devendra Banhart was as pleased as tequila-laced punch, holding his empty margarita glass proudly in the El Cid courtyard Tuesday as the first installment of the ambitious five-night outsider folk music festival he programmed slowly turned into a sellout.

He laughed when someone commented on all the bearded males in the room. “It doesn’t take any work to grow a beard,” he said. “You just let it happen.” That’s rather like the scene the gifted singer-songwriter has helped define, made up of lone wolves and outsider collectives emerging out of dusty corners from Venice to Granada.

Banhart, the unofficial leader of the handily named “freak folk” movement (though, naturally, he resists such labels), has a lot of Allen Ginsberg in him. He projects that same twinkly aura the great poet possessed, part hokum and part prodigious vision. This fete, titled “Hypnorituals and Mesmemusical Miracles Hanging in the Sky: 5 Nights of Soleros and Bandoleros,” brings together his “wish list” of semi-unknowns working on the edges of folk-influenced balladry. “A lot of these people came from punk rock,” he said.

Though the trappings were more hippie-ish than punk — El Cid’s small main room overflowed with women in gauzy dresses and men wearing sparkly scarves — the sounds made during the program’s first two nights reflected the values those two subgenres share: unpolished enthusiasm, impetuous experimentation and an insiderness that nonetheless welcomed listeners willing to learn the ropes.

The eight acts appearing over the fest’s first two nights (both bookended by jovial readings by poet and painter Eric Ernest Johnson) ranged from solo acoustic guitar-based bards to shambling collectives. Listening felt like wandering through hallways in an old house, opening up doors to find things that never asked to be revealed. Yet the best acts had enough song sense and communicative skills to bring their esotericism into the light.

Most thrilling was Tuesday’s headlining band, Feathers, the Vermont-based collective whose debut album came out in April on Banhart’s Gnomonsong label. Feathers’ seven members alternate instruments every song, a nightmare for anyone wanting a tight set but a revelation for those interested in how improvisation becomes songcraft.

Everyone in the band — two women and three men presented their compositions — had his or her own sparkle, whether leaning toward winsome Baroque pop or feminine introversion. The collective approach and the club’s iffy sound might have sunk a less skilled crew, but Feathers showed how careful listening and subtle self-control can turn a potential mess into magic.

Conversely, Jana Hunter presented her reticent songs with a quietly fierce sense of solitude. Hunter, who hails from Houston and is also a Gnomonsong artist, writes fragmentary verses that work on the page. But it’s her voice, with a tone that’s fluty and rich, that makes her song sestinas memorable. Looking like Thora Birch in “Ghost World,” plucking at a worn guitar, Hunter was an unlikely inheritor of the folk goddess mantle. Her lack of aplomb only served to emphasize her songs’ quiet artfulness.

Entrance, who also performed Tuesday, was all aplomb: This pseudonymous wild man keened and slashed at his guitar, raising a flurry of psychedelic blues-punk that carried shards of Middle Eastern drone in its wake. Not always nailing the falsetto he preferred, Entrance still impressed with his dogged intensity as he sang disturbing meditations on death and transcendence. Not exactly accessible, but completely in the audience’s face, Entrance took the crown as the festival’s most determined rock star.

The only truly notable performer Wednesday couldn’t have been more different. Ruthann Friedman took the stage with unassuming sweetness, looking more like someone who’d headline a community picnic than a hipster gathering. The 62-year-old Los Angeles resident, who recorded one album in 1969 that was recently reissued, is best known for writing the Association’s vanilla pop classic “Windy,” but her set at El Cid showed her talent beyond one-hit-wonder status.

Friedman, a former housemate of David Crosby and the Jefferson Airplane, showed the influence of her peers, but her jazz-touched, melodically complex songs went beyond mere hippie confessions. One reflectively mourned her sister’s suicide; another she dedicated to Astrud Gilberto, and, though Friedman’s voice and guitar-picking showed the effects of years not performing, she captured that Brazilian lilt. As she shared stories from her long, strange trip, many of the festival’s other performers sat rapt, grateful that Banhart had rescued a mentor from obscurity.

Allen Ginsberg once described poetry as representing “that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public.”

That’s the essence of the scene Banhart is exposing. This evening’s final episode of the Hypnorituals festival, presented this week by Arthur Magazine and the Fold, brings esteemed folk elder Michael Hurley, Sun City Girls member Richard Bishop, and Britain-bred, Spain-based experimenters Stuart and Caan. Expect some doors to open.

Sunday, July 30, 2006 8pm – midnight

Arthur & Zebulon present a DVD Release Extravaganza!

Ira Cohen’s The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda + Brain Damage (PREMIERE)

Reading by Ira Cohen
Live scores by Sunburned Hand of the Man + mahasiddhi
Soul/Funk provided by The Rumpus Room Sound System DJS

Invite (click to view): http://www.iracohen.org/zebulon/

Location:
www.zebuloncafeconcert.com
718.218.6934
258 wythe avenue
brooklyn, ny 11211

Map it!

From the Associated Press

Thomas Pynchon fans, the long wait is apparently over: His first novel in nearly a decade is coming out in December. But details, as with so much else about the mysterious author of such postmodern classics as “V.” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” have proved a puzzle.

This much is known about the new book: It’s called “Against the Day” and will be published by Penguin Press. It will run at least 900 pages, and the author, who doesn’t make media appearances or allow himself to be photographed, will not be going on a promotional tour.

Late last week, the book’s description was posted on Amazon.com. It read:

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

–Thomas Pynchon”

Warmer Waters Disrupt Pacific Food Chain

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 22, 2006
Filed at 3:46 p.m. ET

FARALLON NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Calif. (AP) — On these craggy, remote islands west of San Francisco, the largest seabird colony in the contiguous United States throbs with life. Seagulls swarm so thick that visitors must yell to be heard above their cries. Pelicans glide.

But the steep decline of one bird species for the second straight year has rekindled scientists’ fears that global warming could be undermining the coastal food supply, threatening not just the Farallones but entire marine ecosystems.

Tiny Cassin’s auklets live much of their lives on the open ocean. But in spring, these gray-and-white relatives of the puffin venture to isolated Pacific outposts like the Farallones to dig deep burrows and lay their eggs.

Adult auklets usually feed their chicks with krill, the minuscule shrimp-like crustaceans that anchor the ocean’s complex food web.

But not this year. Almost none of the 20,000 pairs of Cassin’s auklets nesting in the Farallones will raise a chick that lives more than a few days, a repeat of last year’s ”unprecedented” breeding failure, according to Russ Bradley, a seabird biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who monitors the birds on the islands.

Scientists blame changes in West Coast climate patterns for a delay in the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters from the ocean’s depths for the second year in a row. Weak winds and faltering currents have left the Gulf of the Farallones without krill, on which Cassin’s auklets and a variety of other seabirds, fish and mammals depend for food.

”The seas are warmer. And the number of krill being produced is lower,” said Bradley as he held a Cassin’s auklet chick, the only one from a study of 400 nests he expected to survive.

”Normally we would have hundreds,” he said.

The failure of last year’s Pacific upwelling killed seabirds from California to British Columbia. Scientists had hoped the change was just a natural temperature fluctuation in what is known as the California Current.

But the return of higher ocean temperatures and scarce food resources this year has scientists wondering whether last year’s erratic weather was not a fluke but the emergence of a troubling trend.

”How many years in a row do you see this before you start raising your eyebrows?” said Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Pacific Grove.

Climatologists describe global warming as a worldwide rise in temperatures caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses thought to trap heat in the atmosphere. Predictions of global warming’s effects include rising sea levels, fiercer storms, more wildfires and warmer oceans.

Without long-term data, scientists have so far found it difficult to make direct links between specific natural events and global warming.

But the Farallones present a special case. Researchers have kept Cassin’s auklet counts there every day since 1967. Never before have they seen such a drop-off in numbers. That decline comes as California ocean temperatures hover three to five degrees above average.

”One of the things that the climate models predict is that we’re going to have unpredictable weather, extreme weather, that the whole seasonal cycle of events will not be what we expect,” said Bill Peterson, a NOAA oceanographer in Newport, Ore. ”We aren’t seeing normal patterns.”

Perhaps nowhere is this ecological disruption felt more than here on the Farallones, a 200-acre island chain often described as California’s Galapagos. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service keeps the national wildlife refuge closed to visitors except for a small group of scientists and volunteers who live there year-round.

The krill-dependent whales and salmon that inhabit the surrounding waters have not appeared to suffer from the changes in food supply. But during a visit to the islands this summer, scientists pointed to other species feeling the consequences.

The absence of krill has led to a collapse of the juvenile rockfish population. This is the main food source for young of the common murre, a bird that resembles a flying penguin. Though the murre has made a dramatic comeback recently, with about 200,000 adults nesting on the islands this year, nearly three-quarters of murres breeding this year are not expected to raise chicks that survive.

”At this point it’s way too late in the season for the birds to initiate another attempt at breeding,” said Peter Warzybok, a Farallones-based biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. ”They’ll just have to wait around for next year and hope that it’s better.”

Significant drops in murre and Cassin’s auklet numbers occurred during the El Nino years of 1983 and 1992, when warmer Pacific waters near the equator upset weather patterns worldwide.

A January conference of more than 40 climatologists, oceanographers, and wildlife biologists issued a report describing last year’s altered coastal climate as El Nino-like conditions in a non-El Nino year. Some researchers have given the new climate shift its own name: ”El Coyote.”

The report said a ”ridge” of winter air blocking winds from the Gulf of Alaska lingered more than two months longer than normal in 2005, which delayed the upwelling until well past the birds’ breeding seasons.

”It’s not just a local effect,” Schwing said. ”It’s related to global-scale changes in atmospheric circulation.”

But it could take researchers another decade to determine whether global warming caused those changes. Some climatologists warn against drawing overly broad conclusions from only two years of unusual weather.

Definitive results are ”not around the corner,” said Nick Bond, a research meteorologist the University of Washington who has studied the upwelling’s failure.

”We just don’t know how much the deck is stacked” by the effects of global climate change, Bond said. ”It’s hard to tell from just a deal or two.”

But whatever the cause, the ecological outcome if the trend continues is already clear, according to scientists.

The Cassin’s auklet is unlikely to adapt to the sudden loss of its main food source. And other animals could follow, Schwing said.

In the worst case, he said, ”we could see a great depression of the entire ecosystem.”

Times of London – July 13, 2006

Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death

By James Hider, of The Times, from Baghdad

As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali alive again. Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in west Baghdad, an area that is now in meltdown as a bitter civil war rages between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. It is, quite simply, out of control.

I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.

Ali phoned me on Tuesday night, about 10.30pm. There were cars full of gunmen prowling his mixed neighbourhood, he said. He and his neighbours were frantically exchanging information, trying to identify the gunmen.

Were they the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia blamed for drilling holes in their victims’ eyes and limbs before executing them by the dozen? Or were they Sunni insurgents hunting down Shias to avenge last Sunday’s massacre, when Shia gunmen rampaged through an area called Jihad, pulling people from their cars and homes and shooting them in the streets?

Ali has a surname that could easily pass for Shia. His brother-in-law has an unmistakably Sunni name. They agreed that if they could determine that the gunmen were Shia, Ali would answer the door. If they were Sunnis, his brother-in-law would go.

Whoever didn’t answer the door would hide in the dog kennel on the roof.

Their Plan B was simpler: to dash 50 yards to their neighbours’ house — home to a dozen brothers. All Iraqi homes are awash with guns for self-defence in these merciless times. Together they would shoot it out with the gunmen — one of a dozen unsung Alamos now being fought nightly on Iraq’s blacked-out streets.

“We just have to wait and see what our fate is,” Ali told me. It was the first time in three years of bombs, battles and kidnappings that I had heard this stocky, very physical young man sounding scared, but there was nothing I could do to help.

The previous night I had had a similar conversation with my driver, a Shia who lives in another part of west Baghdad. He phoned at 11pm to say that there was a battle raging outside his house and that his family were sheltering in the windowless bathroom.

Marauding Mahdi gunmen, seeking to drive all Sunnis from the area, were fighting Sunni Mujahidin for control of a nearby strategic position. I could hear the gunfire blazing over the phone.

We phoned the US military trainer attached to Iraqi security forces in the area. He said there was nothing to be done: “There’s always shooting at night here. It’s like chasing ghosts.”

In fact the US military generally responds only to request for support from Iraqi security forces. But as many of those forces are at best turning a blind eye to the Shia death squads, and at worst colluding with them, calling the Americans is literally the last thing they do.

West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.

Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighbourhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.

Hundreds — Sunni and Shia — are abandoning their homes. My driver said all his neighbours had now fled, their abandoned houses bullet-pocked and locked up. On a nearby mosque, competing Sunni and Shiite graffiti had been scrawled on the walls.

A senior nurse at Yarmouk hospital on the fringes of west Baghdad’s war zone said that he was close to being overwhelmed. “On Tuesday we received 35 bodies in one day, 16 from Al-Furat district alone. All of them were killed execution-style,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the city. I packed my bags at once and got ready to leave because they could storm the hospital at any moment.”

In just 24 hours before noon yesterday, as parliament convened for another emergency session, 87 bodies were brought to Baghdad city morgue, 63 of them unidentified. Since Sunday’s massacre in Jihad, more than 160 people have been killed, making a total of at least 1,600 since Iraq’s Government of national unity came to power six weeks ago. Another 2,500 have been wounded.

In early June, Nouri al-Maliki, the new Prime Minister, flooded Baghdad’s streets with tens of thousands of soldiers and police in an effort to restore order to the capital.

More recently, he announced a national reconciliation plan, which promised an amnesty to Sunni insurgents and the disbandment of Shia militias. Both initiatives are now in tatters.

“The country is sliding fast towards civil war,” Ali Adib, a Shia MP, told the Iraqi parliament this week. “Security has deteriorated in a serious and unprecedented way,” said Saadi Barzanji, a Kurdish MP.

Mr al-Maliki told parliament: “We all have a last chance to reconcile and agree among each other on avoiding conflict and blood. If we fail, God knows what the fate of Iraq will be.”

Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, described Baghdad after a recent visit as a city in the throes of “nascent civil war”.

Most Iraqis believe that it is already here. “There is a campaign to eradicate all Sunnis from Baghdad,” said Sheikh Omar al-Jebouri, of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni parliamentary group. He said that it was organised by the Shia-dominated Interior Ministry and its police special commandos, with Shia militias, and aimed to destroy Mr al-Maliki’s plans to rebuild Iraq’s security forces along national, rather than sectarian, lines.

Ahmed Abu Mustafa, a resident of the Sunni district of Amariyah in western Baghdad, was stunned to see two police car pick-ups speed up to his local mosque with cars full of gunmen on Tuesday evening and open fire on it with their government-issued machineguns.

Immediately, Sunni gunmen materialised from side streets and a battle started. “I’d heard about this happening but this was the first time I’d seen police shooting at a mosque,” he said. “I was amazed by how quickly the local gunmen deployed. I ran for my life.”

Yesterday, General George Casey, the most senior US commander in Iraq, said that the US might deploy more American troops in Baghdad. He said that al-Qaeda, to show that it was still relevant, had stepped up its attacks in Baghdad following the killing last month of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “What we are seeing now as a counter to that is death squads, primarily from Shia extremist groups, that are retaliating against civilians.”

A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.

My driver and his extended family are now refugees living in The Times offices in central Baghdad.

Ali is also trying to persuade his stubborn family to leave home and move into our hotel.

Those that can are leaving the country. At Baghdad airport, throngs of Iraqis jostle for places on the flights out — testimony to the breakdown in Iraqi society.

One woman said that she and her three children were fleeing Mansour, once the most stylish part of the capital. “Every day there is fighting and killing,” she said as she boarded a plane for Damascus in Syria to sit out the horrors of Baghdad.

A neurologist, who was heading to Jordan with his wife, said that he would seek work abroad and hoped that he would never have to return. “We were so happy on April 9, 2003 when the Americans came. But I’ve given up. Iraq isn’t ready for democracy,” he said, sitting in a chair with a view of the airport runway.

Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.

Muhammad al-Ani, who runs fleets of Suburban cars to Jordan, said that the service to Amman was so oversubscribed that that prices had rocketed from $200 (£108) to $750 per trip in the past two weeks.

Despite the huge risks of driving through the Sunni Triangle, the number of buses to Jordan has mushroomed from 2 a day to as many as 40 or 50.

Abu Ahmed, a Sunni who was leaving Ghazaliya with his family and belongings, said that he was ready to pay the exorbitant prices being charged because his wife had received a death threat at the hospital in a Shia area where she worked.

“We can’t cope, we have to take the children out for a while,” he said.

In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005 — about 2.5 per cent of Iraq’s population. In total, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating “the biggest new flow of refugees in the world”, according to Lavinia Limon, the committee’s president.

And the exodus may only just be starting.