“A huge mural painting of what Gaviotans have already accomplished, and their vision for the future. Note airship in the background.

“Gaviotas is a village of about 200 people in Colombia, South America. For three decades, Gaviotans – peasants, scientists, artists, and former street kids – have struggled to build an oasis of imagination and sustainability in the remote, barren savannas of eastern Colombia, an area ravaged by political terror. They have planted millions of trees, thus regenerating an indigenous rainforest. They farm organically and use wind and solar power. Every family enjoys free housing, community meals, and schooling. There are no weapons, no police, no jail. There is no mayor.
The United Nations named the village a model of sustainable development. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called Paolo Lugari [founder] the ‘inventor of the world.'”

The London Telegraph

New Age president lives alone in a hut
By Kate Connolly, in Berlin
Last Updated: 2:23am GMT 17/11/2006

The president of Slovenia has given up his palace for a mountain hut and habitually decks himself in leaves to celebrate nature.

Adopting a New Age existence after being diagnosed with cancer, Janez Drnovsek, 56, has moved from the presidential palace in Ljubljana to the village of Zaplana, where he lives alone with his dog on a vegan diet of organic fruit and vegetables, while he bakes his own bread.

He has even been known to “greet the trees” by dressing up in cloaks of leaves.

Mr Drnovsek appealed this week to his fellow countrymen to join him in embracing the simple life in the hope of averting a world catastrophe.

In a new self-help guide, The Essence of the World, a follow up to his best-selling The Thoughts of Life and Awareness, the politician describes the spiritual transformation he has undergone since renouncing the trappings of presidential life.

“Unfortunately we have many people nowadays who are without internal harmony, yet who want to change the world,” Mr Drnovsek said at the book’s launch this week at the Vienna Book Fair.

“But, the fact is, the world is heading towards a catastrophe and self-destruction.”

Slovenians say the once boring divorced banker has changed beyond recognition. A former prime minister, he took Slovenia into the European Union but now complains that the bloc spends more on cows “than half the population of the world gets”.

Mr Drnovsek’s party, Movement for Justice and Prosperity, promotes healthy living for both children and animals. But for some he is a bit too esoteric and liberal.

Last year he discovered a daughter he had unknowingly fathered and proudly presented her in public. In his new book, he says the world could end within 20 years.

COURTESY DAVID COTNER!

Jason Pierce has been technically dead twice since he was last seen on stage. Back on the tour circuit, he explains to Dave Simpson why drugs were only obliquely responsible

Friday November 17, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Just over a year ago, Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce was performing in London with Patti Smith when he began to feel ill. At first he thought nothing of it. “I was wasted, but I feel wasted quite often,” he observes – but soon realised this was different. As he found himself struggling to breathe, he was rushed to the accident and emergency department of Whitechapel hospital.

Pierce was diagnosed with double pneumonia. Both his lungs had filled with liquid. During the course of his illness, his weight plunged to seven stone and, technically, he died twice.

“I was breathing a breath a second [four times the normal rate] for four or five days,” Pierce says. “But it’s amazing how much your body will hang on to life.”

Twelve months on, Pierce – also known as J Spaceman – is recovered enough to clutch a pint of lager in a Liverpool hotel bar. Only his shades and bright silver trainers distinguish him from the gaggle of afternoon drinkers. Despite his reputation as a drugged-up, spaced-out cosmic explorer, he turns out to be a grounded thirtysomething with a dry sense of humour, who does the Guardian crossword. He can see the irony in his bands Spiritualized and his previous band, Spacemen 3, having written so many songs about life, death, and matters medical: Spiritualized’s 1997 breakthrough album Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space was memorably packaged as a prescription pill blister pack; Spacemen 3 once called an album The Perfect Prescription.

“The thing is, I never usually get ill,” he says. “I mean, I’m like Keith Richards.” That’s the other irony. Pierce has a reputation. Spacemen 3’s singer Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember talked openly about the band’s supposed heroin use (the band’s motto was “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”), while Spiritualized’s releases have contained barely veiled references to heavy narcotics. The sleeve design of 2003’s top 5 Amazing Grace album was a not so subtle dangling arm. The music of the two bands: epic guitar drones, with vocals intoned rather than sung, sounds exactly as you would expect “drugs music” to sound. Pierce’s followers (the fans Spacemen 3 once called “the fucked up children of this world”) would have expected the Spaceman to be hospitalised from a mind-boggling pharmaceutical cocktail, not pneumonia.

“I would have thought of that myself,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Although you could argue that it was drug related … you could argue that everything in my life is drug related.” Whatever does that mean?

“Everything you do leads you into another area,” he explains. “In a broader sense. Everything I did when I was 16 impacts on where I am now – I don’t mean everything in my life is to do with the ingestion of a particular drug.”

That seems to suggest his image is exaggerated, or that Pierce was wild once, but not now. “I think I’m as wild now as I was then,” he teases. “I was pretty slow then.”

Maybe it’s all relative, but perhaps Pierce reveals something when he says he loves the “mythology and exaggerations” of rock ‘n’ roll, one of the founding myths of which is that the blues singer Robert Johnson sold his sold to the devil at the crossroads, a “bullshit story, but beautiful”. Perhaps this explains why Pierce has always been a reluctant, guarded interviewee, protective of his own myth.

Today, he plays down the brush with death, which has never been made public (“It’s not the sort of thing you ‘announce'”). However, he seems more forthcoming than in the past. He vividly remembers waking up in intensive care. The first thing that shocked him was that wards are shared. “It’s not like in the movies,” he says, where there’s one person on their own with machines and doctors all around them. Pierce was in with six other people, each with their own heart monitor, beeping away, an experience he found “really beautiful”.

“Everyone’s heart machines are going at a different rate,” he smiles, “you’ve got all these weird polyrhythms.” He knows it sounds stupid, but there he was, on the brink of death, “listening to this music”.

When the other five people in the ward died around him he thought, amazingly, “Your odds are looking good now J, because someone’s got to get out of here.”

It was touch and go. His girlfriend was given bereavement counselling. His children were brought in to see him for the last time. “I was thinking, ‘Oh man, don’t bring the kids in. Look at the state of me.’ Not ‘Is it that time already?'”

Twice, he was revived after his heart stopped beating, but the man who once recorded Take Me To The Other Side doesn’t remember what it was like to be, on the opther side. There were no blinding white lights, heavenly visitors or out of body experiences. “I was very ill,” he says, more quietly. “It feels weird talking about it because my experience is so different from my girlfriend’s, or my mum’s. They really did suffer. I was just there …” he smiles, “listening to the music.”

He remembers more about the recovery, when he was confronted by a pale apparition at the end of the bed: Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, taking advantage of visiting times. “I remember him saying ‘I knew you’d fuckin’ make it, your handshake was too strong,'” smiles Pierce. But Gillespie was “a good man to see. Your nearest and dearest find it harder to cope. You need strong people who can say ‘This is not a disaster’.”

The perfect prescription that saved Pierce’s life was a simple antibiotic. Although some in that situation might have suspected another, heavenly hand, at work Pierce is having none of it. So what about all those hymnal, religiously-tinged songs in his canon, from Walkin’ With Jesus to Lord Can You Hear Me?

“It’s just language,” he explains, “like Be Bop A Lula.” Although he adds that “even Godless people turn to God in utter desperation, so that song’s a cry for help”.

For all the transcendental imagery in his music, Pierce insists he is a fan of science. But he admits that lately there have been so many weird twists in his life that he is at least starting to suspect it might all be some gigantic cosmic prank.

He’s in Liverpool for Silent Sound, a performance/art installation by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard for which he was asked to provide the score, his first classical composition (a serenely beautiful melody which, because he doesn’t read or write music, was hummed down the phone and transcribed, a three-hour “operation”). The show partly recreates a 1865 seance carried out by Victorian spiritualists the Davenports. The previous night, he had been onstage again with Patti Smith, but he didn’t flinch about returning. “It’s difficult not to fall in love with Patti Smith,” he says. “She can make the dumbest jokes with the audience and have them laughing, then she’s into the most intense moment.”

Pierce’s task now is to reconnect with his own music. He’s currently in the midst of a one-off acoustic-based tour which will showcase tracks from an album due in early 2007, which Pierce typically describes as “the work of the devil, with a little guidance from me”. Recording was interrupted when Pierce got ill, and he says the finished record will reflect his encounter with mortality: “it’s about reaffirmation of life.”

His experience does not otherwise seems to have altered his view of the world. “I’m still the lazy person I always was; maybe I should get ill again,” he ponders. He hasn’t owned a house for years and is currently living with friends, and he still won’t think about his long-term financial security – Spiritualized runs at a “massive loss: I’d rather have 20 flugelhorns onstage than money in the bank.”

Pierce has a reputation as a dictatorial hirer-and-firer but he insists that working with him is “as relaxed as this – all I ask is people turn up to the shows on time and make some noise.” He seems genuinely upset and bewildered at the “long line of people who don’t want anything else to do with me”, principally former bandmates, whom he suggests saw Spiritiualized as their passport to fame.

“It’s like they feel I haven’t delivered,” he ponders. “I think they expected to be playing stadiums by now but that’s not what it’s about.”

So what is it about? “The most important thing in music is the physically doing it,” he suggests, “making changes there and then. If there’s one thing that has changed [since getting ill] it’s that I’m no longer as precious about everything, obsessively rewriting and chipping away. You have to let things go, and move on to something else.”

But there’s one thing he isn’t ready to abandon just yet. Conspiratorially, he says a Canadian scientist has invented a machine that uses magnetic waves to recreate the near death experience of “looking down over your body. I never had that,” he grins, obviously enormously disappointed. “So I love that idea that you can just plug something in and think ‘Can we do that again?'”

· J Spaceman’s acoustic tour continues at Kendal Brewery Arts Centre (Weds November 22), Sage, Gateshead, (Thur 23), Manchester Lowry (Fri 24), and Edinburgh Queens Hall (Sat 25).

· Silent Sound, featuring exclusive music from J Spaceman, appears at The Blade Factory, 67 Greenland St., Liverpool until November 26.

“COMMAND PERFORMANCE”

The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin

No. 0059

November 17, 02006

Website:

http://www.arthurmag.com

Comments:

editor@arthurmag.com

1. WHEN *ISN”T* MERCURY IN RETROGRADE IS WHAT I WANT TO KNOW.

2. NEW ISSUE OF ARTHUR ON ITS WAY TO *YOU*.

Getting it ready for you now… Erik Davis profiles JOANNA NEWSOM at serious length (12,000 words!), with exclusive photos of her geniushood by Eden Bakti… ALAN MOORE expounds on 25,000 years of pornography… a talk with CHUCK DUKOWSKI about the deeper issues surrounding all-ages shows… Kyp Malone of TV ON THE RADIO talks about military recruiters… New Herbalist Molly Frances on the roots of Christmas… Dave Reeves on GUNS… Douglas Rushkoff on ROBERT ANTON WILSON… Byron Coley & Thurston Moore on oodles of noodles… a full-page of PShaw… and a bunch of other unspeakable surprises… See the cover now at 

http://www.arthurmag.com

3. SATURDAY: JOHN LURIE MEETS HIS PUBLIC.

We are informed that John Lurie’s new art book, “Learn to Draw” (Koenig Press) will be making its US debut at the first annual Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair. The fair takes place at the old Dia Beacon Space at 548 West 22nd Street in New York City. We are further informed that JOHN LURIE HIMSELF will be signing copies of his book on Saturday, November 18 between 3-4PM.  Admission is FREE. Fun fact: Some of the images in this book were first published in the pages of Arthur magazine. 

Info:

www.strangeandbeautiful.com

www.nyartbookfair.com

4. SATURDAY: SHOPTALK & MORE WITH LIVING THEATER CO-FOUNDER JUDITH MALINA & HANON REZNIKOV. 

We are told that as part the “Coffee House Chronicles” series, Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov will talk with all comers about The Living Theatre’s long odyssey on Saturday, November 18 from 3-5pm at LaMama ETC, 74 East 4th Street in New York City. Admission FREE. Fun fact: The Living Theater are the subject of the next Arthur/Bastet DVD, Ira Cohen’s “Paradise Now,” due next year. 

5. SUNDAY: FAIRLY INCREDIBLE FREE MUSIC NIGHT AT MOUNTAIN BAR. 

Sun Nov. 19

Arthur Presents an Ovrcast Production

* Psychic Paramount

* Residual Echoes

* Jack Rose

* Peter Walker

FREE

21 & up

Doors 8pm

Mountain Bar of Chinatown in Los Angeles

473 Gin Ling Way

Los Angeles, 90012

(213) 625-7500

6. LOTS OF FLASHY ARTHUR NIGHTS PIX UP AT THE OL’ ICE CREAM MAN SITE.

Nice nice NICE photos of Comets on Fire, Boris, Devendra Banhart, Fiery Furnaces, Be Your Own Pet, Sun Ra Arkestra, Tav Falco & Panther Burns, Living Sisters, OM, Bert Jansch, Espers, Six Organs of Admittance, White Magic, Heartless Bastards, Kyp Malone of Tv on the Radio, Howlin Hex and Ruthann Friedman performing at Arthur Nights. Yes a festival with this lineup actually happened, here’s some photographic evidence for the skeptics:  

http://www.icecreamman.com/projects/article_1385.shtml

7. FAIR WARNING.

We have under 90 copies left of the universally acclaimed Ira Cohen “Invasion of Thunderbolt” DVD we released in June. We only made 1000 and we honestly don’t know yet when we are going to be able to make more. Okay? Please don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Info:

http://www.arthurmag.com/store/dvds.php

8. IF YOU THOUGHT DEREK JENSEN WAS EXAGGERATING JUST A TAD IN HIS APOCALYPTIC INTERVIEW IN ARTHUR 23, PART 2

Check out “The Darkening Sea: Carbon Emissions and the Ocean” by one of America’s best journalists, Elizabeth Kolbert, in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.

9. WE LIKE TO MEET NEW PEOPLE. 

Won’t you join us at Little Joy in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles for another session of

The Echo Park Social(ist) & Pleasure Club

every Thursday night

9:55pm-close

at

Little Joy

1477 Sunset Blvd in Echo Park

FREE

21 & up

At recent EPSCs, this music was played for the enjoyment of all:

///Jay Babcock set – Nov 9\\\

Dominique Cravic & Les Primitifs du Futur feat. Robert Crumb – Fox Musette

Dominique Cravic & Les Primitifs du Futur feat. Robert Crumb – Portrait d’ un 78 tard

Tim Buckley – Move With Me

Selda – Meydan Sizindir

Tony Allen – Road Safety

Curtis Mayfield – Future Shock

Silver Apples – I Don’t Care What the People Say

Yo La Tengo – Nuclear War [Sun Ra cover/children’s choir version]

The Good The Bad and The Queen – History Song

Dirty Pretty Things – Bang Bang You’re Dead

Nick Oliveri & Mondo Generator – All the Way Down

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Fortunate Son

Sade – Why Can’t We Live Together

Mighty Baby – A Jug of Love

Ginger Baker [feat. Fela Kuti] – Tiwa (It’s Our Own)

Wind – track 1 off “Seasons” [’71]

///Richard Pleuger set- Nov 9\\\

The Mystic Tide – Mystery Ship

Xu Xu Fang – Seven Days

Truth And Janey – My Mind

German Oak – Raid Over Düsseldorf

Lucifer’s Friend – Ride In The Sky

The Mystic Tide – Frustration

J.A. Caesar

Mott The Hoople – Thunderbuck Ram

T. Rex – Calling All Destroyers

Truth And Janey – Under My Thumb

Dr. Feelgood – She Does It Right

Buffalo – Sunshine (Come My Way)

Metallica – Leper Messiah

Chrome – TV As Eyes

The Sonics – The Witch (Live ‘ 72)

Dr. Feelgood – Rollin’ and Tumblin’

Hawkwind – Motorhead

Francoise Hardy – Le Soir

Xu Xu Fang – Good Times

The Dovers – She’s Not Just Anybody

German Oak – Shadows Of War

///Peter Relic set – Nov 9\\\

mikey d and l.a. possee “coming in the house”

just ice “cold gettin dumb”

boogie down productions “jimmy”

ray cash feat. yummy “da bomb”

dj quik “pitch in on a party”

mystikal “shake ya azz”

tone loc “i got it going on”

twin hype “do it to tha crowd”

three 6 mafia “ridin spinners”

killer mike feat. whyte chocolate “for the no no”

epmd “so whatcha sayin”

nas “memory lane”

incredible bongo band “let there be drums”

bone thugs’n’harmony “teach the world”

///Aaron Aldoriso set – Nov 16\\\

phew – closed

pink floyd – see emily play

dead moon – dead moon night

spacemen 3 – rollercoaster

traffic sound – lux

galaxie 500 – another day

the beach boys – slip on through

john phillips – drum

the clean – anything can happen

wire – map ref 41N 93W

mayo thompson – dear betty baby

leigh stephens – another dose of life

thinking fellers union local 282 – cup of dreams

siouxsie and the banshees – happy house

the byrds – everybody’s been burned

the moles – wires

la dusseldorf – dusseldorf

gal costa – cinema olympia

the jesus and mary chain – never understand

judy henske and jerry yester – raider

bridget st. john – every day

royal trux – you’re gonna lose

yoko ono – don’t worry kyoko (mummy’s only looking for her hand in the snow)

the fall – eat y’self fitter

bobby charles – i must be in a good place now

lee hazlewood – my autumn’s done come

///Mark Frohman & Molly Frances set – Nov 16\\\

funkadelic  free your mind

weird war   AK-47

sly stone luv n haight

dr john I been hoodooed

tommy james  gotta get back to you

junior wells & buddy guy   snatch it back and hold it

the sonics  louie louie

the stooges   rubber legs

rock erikson  two-headed dog

glass candy   hang on to yourself

the cramps garbage man

lou reed  gimme some good times

Blue Oyster Cult  Transmaniacon

richard hell   down at the rock and roll club

patti smith  poppies

essential logic  bod’s message

burning spear  african postman

the clash  one more time dub version

culture  black starliner

the clash   version city

burning spear  columbus

rolling stones  heaven

alan vega  jukebox baby

the chromatics  the wanderer

paul mcartney and wings  nineteen hundred and eighty five

gogogo airheart  when the flesh hits

weird war  if you can’t beat em bite em

the clash  ghetto defendant / innoculated city

red krayola  duke of newcastle

sly stone  runnin away

chromatics in the city

john phillips   let it bleed, guinevere

10. APPEAL: FREE THE GANGSTER MACAQUE 15.

On January 11, 2006, The Daily Mirror of England reported that “A city police force is struggling to contain a marauding band of terrifying, glue-sniffing ‘gangster monkeys.’ Wild macaques have been stealing bags of glue from addicts, getting high and launching attacks in Phnom Penh, Cambodia…The crazed beasts have been biting people and stealing laundry…. Deputy governor of the city’s Daun Penh district Pich Socheata, said: ‘We have to remove the nasty creatures from the city. They grab glue bags from street kids, climb up into the trees and sniff it up.’ Officials have so far ‘detained’ 15 macaques.” 

Love, etc., 

Arthur Peace Macaques

Bushwick * Fairmount/Brewery Town * Atwater Village 

from Strange and Beautiful News…

John Lurie’s new art book, “Learn to Draw”(Koenig Press) will be making its US debut at the first annual Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair. The fair takes place at the old Dia Beacon Space at 548 West 22nd Street in New York City. John will be signing copies of his book on Saturday, November 18th between 3-4PM.

More info:
http://www.nyartbookfair.com/

From top: Decorated amplifier; gorgeous members of an unidentified fife-and-drum band; guitarist-singer T-Model Ford; drummer Cedric Burnside.

Photos by Gary W. Miller for Blues Source.

Link courtesy Amos Harvey!

Street Food With Ambition in Berlin

By GISELA WILLIAMS

Published: November 12, 2006
New York Times

NEW YORKERS have hot dog stands, Parisians have crêperies, but street food in Berlin is all about imbisse — a word that encompasses everything from sidewalk stalls that sell currywurst (sliced sausage smothered with curry powder and ketchup) to holes in the wall that serve Turkish döner kebabs (thick pita sandwiches stuffed with shaved meat, salad and yogurt sauce).

They’re great if you’re in a rush or need to save some beer money (the price rarely exceeds 3 euros, or less than $4 at $1.28 to the euro), but don’t expect a culinary revelation. The taste usually ranges from salty to saltier.

But lately, Berlin’s fast-food scene has gone foodie. Imbisse (the singular form of the word is imbiss) with an epicurean twist are popping up all over this city, Western Europe’s most affordable capital, bringing fancy fast food to the masses.

One of the best is the W Imbiss (Kastanienallee 49; 49-30-48-49-26-57; http://www.agentur103.de) on the stylish edge of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, whose logo resembles the golden arches turned upside down. If you’re lucky, Gordon W., as its Canadian chef and owner calls himself, will be in the tiny open kitchen, wearing his signature fez and manning the tandoor.

Four euros will get you a delicious and filling nan-bread pizza, topped with fresh ingredients like pesto, fresh arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts. Six and a half euros buys one of the popular rice bowls, piled high with marinated tandoori salmon, leafy greens and Japanese-style dressing. Besides being cheap, everything is made to order, so expect long waits — though no one in this tiki-inspired joint seems to mind.

Nearby is WKD Lebensmittel in Mitte (Rochstrasse 2; 49-30-2759-6130), a small storefront that sells fresh produce, organic cheeses and German wines. A chalkboard lists the daily specials, many of them typical of southern Germany like roasted pork (7.50 euros) and liver dumpling soup (3.50 euros). Setting the casual vibe is Gerhard Wick, one of the three owners, who can often be found socializing with his über-trendy customers on the simple wooden tables.

“It’s definitely not a restaurant,” Mr. Wick said, preferring to describe his year-old space as part mini-grocery store, part imbiss. He went on to explain that the ingredients came directly from regional producers, allowing him to sell slow food at near fast-food prices.

That’s also partly true at the FoodBall (Neue Schönhauser Strasse 11; 49-30-24-62-88-92), a new food stand inside the Camper shoe store, also in Mitte. As the name suggests, everything is shaped like a soccer ball, whether it’s the savory organic rice balls stuffed with wild mushrooms, chickpeas or free-range chicken, or the dessert balls made from dates or carob. For a playful lunch, order its version of a Happy Meal: a trio of rice balls and a choice of coffee or tea (6.99 euros).

Like Berlin itself, imbisse are absorbing new cultural flavors. A few blocks away is Dolores (Rosa Luxemburg Strasse 7; 49-30-28-09-95-97; http://www.dolores-online.de), a colorful and modern spot that serves made-to-order burritos and quesadillas, starting at 3.55 euros. When it opened, it was Berlin’s first burrito imbiss, and at lunchtime it’s packed with a young crowd.

The German owners, Philipp Krahé and Grischa Coenen, lived and worked in London before opening Dolores two years ago. “It’s been much more of a success than we thought,” Mr. Krahé said. “All we knew, when we opened, is that there is a large American community that lives in Berlin, and we were counting on them as customers.”

Being around the corner from a McDonald’s, one of the few in Mitte, doesn’t give him concern. “Sometimes they take so long to make a Filet-O-Fish,” Mr. Krahé said. “Our burritos only take a minute.”