Monthly Archives for September 2007

"We can't all perish because of America's blindness."

Would you vote for this man?

Michael Odell
Saturday September 15, 2007
The Guardian

Ian Brown slides into a booth in a West London cafe looking every inch the weathered rock icon: a camouflage jacket, fancy trainers, raffishly fringed hair. His cheekbones protrude so starkly he looks like a man peering between jammed lift doors.

Today though, Brown doesn’t have anything as trifling as rock or his place in its hall of fame on his mind. The former Stone Roses singer is about to release his fifth solo album The World Is Yours and in it, he sets out his stall on a number of pressing geo-political issues. New single “Illegal Attacks” addresses the Iraq invasion in starkly undiplomatic language: “So what the fuck?” he begins before going on to deal with Israel/Palestine and the Taliban. Elsewhere on the album he tackles South America’s street children, and the plight of Africa.

On “Some Folks Are Hollow” Brown turns to old campaigner Sinead O’Connor and with her specialist knowledge of religious affairs advances the theory that there is Nazi gold buried under the Vatican.

As notional “rock PM”, Brown has assembled a motley cabinet of what he calls “rebels” for this album: Steve Jones and Paul Cook, guitarist and drummer from the Sex Pistols, former Smiths bass player Andy Rourke and Happy Mondays bass player Paul Ryder.

Brown is an unusual artist. He refuses to discuss the Stone Roses, except that the last offer to reform was last year: £5m for five shows.

“I can’t be bought,” he shrugs. “I’m proud of what we did. But I’m happier solo now.”

He manages himself – while we chat he fields a call from an Australian promoter and agrees to some gigs on the basis that the man will cook him a barbecue and let him use his swimming pool.

He hasn’t been drinking since 1998 – the year he was sent to prison for threatening to cut an air stewardesses hands of with plastic cutlery after she offered him duty-free in a dismissive manner. The prison experience was formative. Entering Strangeways Brown declared himself a Muslim, although he now states this was to “wind up the screws” and also to “guarantee chicken for my tea”. “Otherwise they give you pies and you don’t know what’s in ’em.”

Muslim or not, there is undoubtedly an Eastern tinge to his plans for the UK. His ideas he says have been influenced by the decision not to smoke ganja during the making of this album.

“People in the past have tried to make out I’m some kind of space cadet or a stoner,” he says. ” I gave it up for nine months to see if it would give the music and my ideas greater clarity.”

As he slurps a coffee and sets forth policy ideas for an alternative Brown government, no one can accuse him of not taking up the old Blair challenge and thinking outside of his box…

Foreign policy

Lambs On The Pentagon Roof
“America won’t accept that there is global warming. It’s not good enough. We can’t all perish because of their blindness. We need to ban all air freighted food. Carrots from Holland. Potatoes from Egypt. It’s got to stop. Lamb from NZ. Let’s get lambs grazing on the roof of the Pentagon or on the lawn of Buckingham Palace.

Permacultures – where you use the immediate environment to grow food – should be mandatory.
“We should be growing carrots up the side of the Empire State Building or Big Ben. Round my house I pull the kids off Xbox and make them dig soil in the garden. We grow parsnips, carrots and potatoes. I like to see ’em grafting. They appreciate the taste.”

All Cars To Be Filled With Shit
“It makes me angry that they’ve been able to build cars fuelled by corn oil or chicken shit for years. But the oil companies won’t allow it. Same with tyres and light bulbs: everlasting versions of these were invented years ago. The big corporations bought the inventors off . We’re all going to perish because of their greed. The chicken shit-powered car will only do 60mph but so what? Leave your house a bit earlier.”

Restraining Orders For Pink Floyd, Bono And Geldof
“I get angry about how African kids have to live. I thought the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in 2005 was a real missed opportunity. I applaud how Brown and Blair tried to put it at the top of the agenda. I didn’t like the way Bono and Geldof hijacked the G8 Summit demo with their pop concert. The only result was Pink Floyd sold a few more million albums.

“People have to realise you don’t help African children singing along to 60-year-old men playing their tunes from 40 years ago. It was like 1750 all over again: we are the great white do-gooders. If there is another G8 meeting then there should be a court order banning Pink Floyd or Geldof or Bono from leaving their houses until it’s over.”

Send JCBs To The Vatican
“The Nazis looted gold from Spain and Portugal. Then when Mussolini took over Italy he stored all the gold in the Vatican. After the war the Catholics let the Nazis escape to South America dressed as priests on jets. The Nazis were religious nutcases who thought they were mentioned in the Bible as saviours of the world. Hitler converted to Catholicism just before he died.

“Let’s dig up the Vatican cellar and get the gold and the treasures and use them. They stole them. Let’s steal them back.”

Melt Down The Space Shuttle To Feed Farmers
“We’ve got to stop kids thinking of Space exploration and astronauts as a fun and glamorous thing. Nasa is an arm of the US military. The International Space Station is a military undertaking. We need to melt down the rockets. We’ve got to divert the money to the poor. The rural poor in this country are overlooked. The country mouse – he needs feeding.”

Recruit A Panel Of Dolphins For Crisis Planning
“Here we are with the polar ice cap melting due to global warming. Everyone wondering how the humans are going to survive. Well, we could do well to consult the animal world for clues. Dolphins used to walk on the land because they have warm blood. Also, they have the same bone structure in their flippers as humans have in their hands. Something made him go back to the sea – Now what was it? A lack of food or a terrifying predator on the land? If we could get some answers from dolphins then we’d have a fair idea of what to do next ourselves.”

Domestic policy

Taliban Patrols Of UK High Streets
“The Taliban are demented right? But they did have TWO good ideas. No booze. No gambling.
“I thought the news footage of them running over bottles of whisky and brandy with tanks was brilliant. In our society liquor companies run the world – they ruin lives and make high streets no-go areas on a Saturday night.
“Also casinos. I’ve got a friend who went on the internet gambling and he lost his house. His kids went to bed – and by morning he’d lost the house on online poker. It’s evil. They’re building a super-casino in Salford which has got enough problems already. Gambling is all based on 666 which is the number of the beast.”

Bring Back The Hoodie
“This is what I’m saying on the track Me And You Forever. Teenagers are being demonised for wearing hoodies. I’ve got a 15-year-old son and he can’t walk with his two mates through the Trafford Centre in Manchester. What’s that all about? The hoodie happens to be the perfect piece of clothing for up north. It gets flippin’ cold in Manchester. My dad wears a hoodie and he’s 72! The hoodie is one of the best and most useful items of clothing ever invented and it’s attacking northerners, anyone who is genuinely cold, to ban them.”

Starter Homes In The Grounds Of Balmoral
“It pisses me off when I see pictures off the Queen or that Duke husband at Balmoral or Sandringham or wherever. I don’t look at them, I look at their surroundings. All those little salmon rivers, beautiful creeks and beaches that they’ve stolen from us a thousand years ago. Let’s have them back. Gordon Brown says he wants to build three million new homes then that’s where we should build them. How many homes could you build on Balmoral? Loads.

Wembley Arena Designated A Cathedral
“There are some beautiful Bible stories – it’s just that in UK schools the teaching bores you stupid. The feeding of the 5000 isn’t meant to be taken literally. Jesus spoke to the people and that fed their spirit – that’s your two fish. Then he spoke some more – that fed their souls. That was the loaves. Then his posse went among them and the baskets were overflowing – that was the vibe in the air. That was the energy, the feeling. No, I don’t have a Messiah complex but I think music is the nearest thing to achieving Christian ends. It unifies people and sustains them. It uplifts them and makes them closer to love. You get a great gig at Wembley or somewhere and that is modern Christianity in action.”

Citizenship: Accent Tests For All
“It annoys me that everyone in this country under 18 wants to talk like Ali G. What happened to REAL accents? We need authentic accents from where people are from. You shouldn’t be allowed to talk like someone off the TV or off a rap record that you heard. It’s fake.”

Bring Back Boredom
“My kids laugh at me when I tell them about life when I was 14. They say “Go on dad, tell us again”. There was no Walkmans, videos, Nintendo or Xboxes, no internet, no mobiles. No computers. No DVDs. There were only three TV channels. They cry laughing. But it made us hungry and thoughtful. And we had great things like the Sex Pistols.

“We’re breeding a generation who won’t invent anything. They’ve got everything. They’re stimulated all day and they’re never bored. I think there should be an hour of total boredom every day for all kids.”

The Birdfeeder Hat


Erica Fielder in her “Birdfeeder Hat” at the Mendocinio Coast Botanical Gardens in California.

The Bird Feeder Hat, designed to be quirky, gives you an opportunity to wear a bird feeder on your head in order to begin experiencing a deeper kinship with a wild creature up close. Come to The Bird Feeder Hat events to feel a song sparrow or gold finch hopping and feeding on your hat, meet other species, learn to create sustainable interspecies relationships with members of your watershed, pinpoint your watershed on a world map and add your name to the growing record of watershed-aware citizens.

Articles of faith

When two eminent US scholars wrote about the ‘Israel lobby’ they were vilified by colleagues and the Washington Post. This week Barack Obama joined the attack. Ed Pilkington hears their story

Ed Pilkington
Saturday September 15, 2007
The Guardian

Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.

The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.

The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.

For Walt, the explosion of criticism after the LRB publication in March 2006 struck particularly close to home as two members of his own Harvard faculty turned on him. Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature, compared Walt and his University of Chicago co-author’s work to that of a notorious 19th-century German anti-semite. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard criminal law professor who represented OJ Simpson, charged them with culling some of their references from neo-Nazi websites.

Given the battering he has taken, Walt is remarkably upbeat. “We were surprised by how nasty it got,” says the Harvard professor. “The David Duke reference, the neo-Nazi websites – these were intended to smear us and swing attention on to us rather than to what we were saying. It wasn’t pleasant, but it never made me doubt what we had written or doubt myself.” Standing tall in the face of attack is one thing; to raise your head above the parapet for a second round is quite another. But that is what the Mearsheimer/Walt double act are doing: they have gone on the offensive with the publication of a book-length version of their original treatise.

As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte – and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears.

There is one obvious question to put to Walt: why do it to yourself? Wasn’t one stoning enough? “We did ask ourselves, did we want to go through this again?” he admits, but only to add: “It didn’t take us all that long to figure out we had more to say and it was our job to say it.”

By writing a 496-page book, as opposed to the original article’s mere 13,000 words, the authors hope to present a more nuanced version of their case. They have taken in new examples to support their thesis, notably the second Lebanon war, which broke out in the interim, and have sought to address some of the points raised by critics.

The book follows the structure of the original article fairly faithfully, and its argument can be summarised thus: in recent years the US government has given Israel unconditional support, showering it with $3bn a year irrespective of the human rights violations it inflicts on the Palestinians. It was not always this way – think of the Suez crisis of 1956 when America stepped in to frustrate Israel’s (and Britain’s) ambitions. But from the 1960s onwards the relationship deepened to the extent that today American and Israeli interests are deemed by many Americans to be essentially identical.

The authors ask why this is the case, and argue that strategically there is no reason for it. The end of the cold war removed a central justification for the special relationship, as Israel no longer provided the US with a barrier to communism in the region. Post 9/11, the US and Israel are presented as partners against terrorism, but America’s vulnerability to attack partly stems from its support for Israel, which has provoked hostility in the Muslim world. Nor is there a moral argument for indiscriminately backing Israel – as a towering military presence in the Middle East, Israel is no longer under existential threat.

So what explains this ongoing largesse? The authors conclude that the answer lies with the Israel lobby, a loose coalition of individuals and organisations that wants US leaders to treat Israel as though it were the 51st state. The lobby stifles debate, inhibits criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and maintains the special relationship despite the fact that it has become a liability both for the US and for Israel itself.

In its transition from literary journal essay to stand-alone book, the authors have made a few telling alterations of presentation and emphasis. The most vivid is that in the body of the text they have demoted lobby to lower case: the Israel Lobby has become the Israel lobby. Walt sees that as the most minor of changes, remarking that: “John and I don’t even remember how the capital L got used in the first place.”

More substantially, perhaps, they have used the extra space to make several robust disclaimers, insisting that they have never questioned the right of Israel to exist or the legitimacy of the Israel lobby itself. They have also filed down some of the more jagged edges of their argument, such as their position on the role the lobby played in the build-up to the Iraq war. They still maintain that the war would “almost certainly not have occurred” were it not for the Israel lobby, but they soften the claim by adding that America’s belligerent mood in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington also had much to do with it.

Such nuances make for a more sophisticated read, but they fall far short of the revisions – the authors would say capitulations – that would be needed to satisfy their detractors.

Foxman is one of the most vocal critics. His new book, timed specifically to counteract the arrival on bookshelves of The Israel Lobby, pulls no punches. Its title is representative of the tone of the book: The Deadliest Lies. “This is a big lie that the Jewish people have lived with throughout history,” he tells me from his New York office. “Up to now these anti-semitic canards have been heard on the fringes, but to have two respected academics repeat them legitimises the debate and penetrates the mainstream.”

More measured – though still forceful – criticism of the Mearsheimer and Walt book has come from those titans of US journalism, the New York Times and the New Yorker. The Times’ book critic William Grimes takes a swipe at the authors’ claim that it is time for the US to treat Israel as a normal country: “But it’s not. And America won’t. That’s realism.” David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, suggests none too flatteringly that the book is symptomatic of a polarised era in which Americans are searching for an explanation to the evils of the times.

In the swirl of debate, the squabbling parties keep coming back to the core concept of an Israel lobby, case notwithstanding. The authors have been meticulously careful in the book to stress that they see the lobby as a loose coalition. It is not a single, unified movement and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy. Yet no matter how profuse their disclaimers, they have not assuaged those antagonists for whom any lumping together of Jews or Jewish interest groups sets alarm bells ringing. “Visit any anti-semitic website and you’ll hear the same old themes: the Jews have too much power; they exercise political influence not as individual citizens but as a cabal,” writes Foxman. “Walt and Mearsheimer sound all the same notes, with a subtlety and pseudo-scholarly style that makes their poison all the more dangerous.”

In our conversation, Walt accepts the phrase “the lobby” is “an awkward term as many of the groups and people in it don’t operate on Capitol Hill. It’s shorthand – you could call it the pro-Israel movement”. One wonders why he and his co-author have stuck with it, then, when it has allowed their detractors to smear other more credible parts of their argument.

Take the slanging match over the causes of the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer rightly lay a large part of the blame for this disastrous escapade on the neoconservatives within the Bush administration, but they then go on to define those neocons as an integral part of the Israel lobby. Books have been written about the various motivations of the neocons. Sympathy for Israel is one, but there are many others – the desire to spread democracy, a belief in the positive uses of military intervention, denigration of international institutions. To suggest that the neocons and the Israel lobby are one and the same is a conflation too far.

But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.

Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.

So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out – it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”

In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.

Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.

"Drugs helped us to explore music and our minds. We wanted to get away from the A-B-A format in music as well as in our lives…"

The Drumming Man: An interview with Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru
by Frank Gingeleit

From Aural Innovations #19 (April 2002):

There are few – if any – other German Rock Bands that stand for all aspects of the broad scope of German Progressive Rock of the Sixties and Seventies that consisted of heavy Rock, experimentalism regarding drugs, music and sexuality and a left wing political attitude as is true for Guru Guru. Guru Guru always considered themselves as a part of the students’ protest movement, lived together as a commune, and felt that the mere existence of their kind of music was a political statement in itself. Neumeier started his recording carreer as early as 1966 as the drummer of the Swiss based Irene Schweizer Trio. Free Jazz was one musical starting point for him, followed by an orientation towards eastern music (“Jazz meets India” was the title of a performance with Irene Schweizer at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in 1967), classic Jazz, ethnic drumming and, of course, the Rock Music of the late Sixties and early Seventies, leading to the fact, that Guru Guru was referred to as the German “Cream”, a title of honor first attributed by others but later kindly accepted by Mani and the band… Which band? There were quite a lot of completely different bands called Guru Guru and there were frequent changes of the line up. This was in general typical for German Rock Bands of that time, but Guru Guru seemingly set the record with 26 changes in 33 years. The continuous “mastermind” behind all these different projects under one name was Mani Neumeier. Besides his musical abilities, his personality is spiced up with whit and humor, mostly of a kind nature, but sometimes bizarre and deconstructive. This flows into the performances in general – Guru Guru shows represent “action music” (in analogy to “action painting”), intellectually transformed aggressiveness, colorful phantasies and reflections on human nature, including the amphibic origin of all higher species, as in the famous “Elektrolurch” and the “Terra Amphibia” project.

Guru Guru exists as a band up to this day, to be seen on stage at the annual “Finkenbach Festival” near Heidelberg, Germany, organized by Neumeier and on other rare occasions, as the band members now live in different parts of Europe, every now and then holding reunions for rehearsals, recordings and concerts. Besides this Mani Neumeier worked and works in a great number of other projects, among them free improvisations with guitarist Luigi Archetti performing as “Tiere der Nacht” (i.e., “nightly animals”), most recently recording and performing with the New Music composer and inventor of new musical instuments Hans-Carsten Raecke and working together in a Dance-Trance-Goa-Techno-Rock project called “Lover 303” with German female guitarist and drum machine programmer Conni Maly. But it is Japan, where Mani Neumeier is far more famous than in Germany or the US. Guru Guru and others of Mani’s recordings still sell best in Japan and his statue is to be seen in the Tokyo Wax Museum among celebrities of the world. The day Mani and I met to make the appointment for the interview to follow below, he had returned from a successful two weeks’ solo tour in Japan that led him to ten different cities. Up to now Mani recorded or contributed to more than 60 longplayers and compact discs, one for each year of his life. He is now 61 years old, still wildly drumming and with no plans for retirement in the near future.

Frank Gingeleit (FG): Since your life with music is much more than Guru Guru, let’s start where it all began. What were your first steps into the music business, what was your musical education like, and who were the examples you followed?

Mani Neumeier (MN): I started gigging as an amateur musician as early as 1959 in a couple of amateur bands in Switzerland. We started with Dixieland, Swing and Modern Jazz as at that time there was no Beat Music or Rock’n’Roll in Continental Europe. In Zurich, where I lived at that time you had much better opportunities to get the “new” records from England and the United States than in Germany. And it was also Zurich where I happened to see Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Theoloniuos Monk, Max Roach… To see them live on stage were the greatest moments in my life, and they were my “teachers”. I never reached their class, but I’m still striving to get closer to it and maybe I will some day. As a professional musician I started as a member of the Irene Schweizer Trio and the Globe Unity Orchestra together with Jacky Liebezeit. We took everything apart that we could find and put it back together in a new and fresh way. There were recordings produced by Joachim E. Behrend (later also well known as an author of books on Jazz – F. G.) and we were on stage at the Donaueschingen Music Festival and at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1966. I discovered and developed my own style of drumming. Maybe I might be called the first European Free Jazz drummer. But, anyway, I already had a “name in music” before the Guru Guru thing started. I had a few lessons at the “Basel Drum School” – all sorts of percussion instruments – and many years later I took lessons to play an Indian Drum called Tavil. My teacher, an Indian master of the drums, was Paramashivam Pillai, but I’ve already been in the music business for about twenty years then.

FG: Let’s focus on Guru Guru. It seems that this was quite a leap from what you had been doing before.

MN: I started Guru Guru as “The Guru Guru Groove Band” together with Uli Trepte in 1968. We wanted to leave the Free Jazz thing into the direction of electronically amplified music. Jimi Hendrix was the shining example, followed by Frank Zappa, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, in the late Seventies also Punk Music. From the beginning we also brought African and Indian elements into our music. We wanted to make some sort of music that has not been there before. I think we set a mark with the album UFO. We were almost instantly identified with German Rock Music, but I didn’t like the term “Krautrock”. It was a label put upon us by others like “Oh, now the Krauts even want to make Rock Music…” Of course there was musical development, with new phases of the band project every three to four years – sometimes even faster – adding up to 26 different line ups ’till now. If we would still perform like in 1968, people would probably run away. Despite this: What we were doing in 1968 was essential German Rock. We are still musical underground, something that does not get on the air regularly. And drug experiences were an essential part of our music. Drugs helped us to explore music and our minds. We wanted to get away from the A-B-A format in music as well as in our lives…

FG: So the Guru Guru band project also was some kind of a sociological experiment?

MN: Yes, we were a commune, a part of the Underground Movement. All our time was exclusively devoted to the group and the music. From 1968 to 1971 we did not even have a permanent residence. We lived in a bus like nomads. Every now and then we lived at the homes of friends, fans and other bands. From 1971 to 1976 we lived in a house in Langenthal and in 1976 we found our home in Finkenbach. We lived there as a band together with our girlfriends and our tour crew. It was a project that worked quite well and it was even more than a project, rather a clan, a family. (Since 1981 the home in Finkenbach serves Mani Neumeier as his personal “summer residence” – FG) We wanted to change the whole society. We lived “socialism”. Everybody had to put in as much as he took out. We shared everything and everybody was equal.

FG: A word about your economical situation at that time?

MN: In the beginning there were certain restrictions and limitations – for a little while we lived on jelly sandwiches and joints, but we never starved or suffered from severe poverty. At that time not all of the 22 Guru Guru longplayers had been released, but we sold records, played many concerts, appeared in movies, had more than one hundred radio and TV shows and were featured on the front pages of several German music magazines.

FG: This was in the beginning, and then?

MN: Guru Guru sold more than half a million copies of more than twenty record releases, not of one album, as the music industry might have preferred. We went through twenty different managers, were ripped off by almost all of them and later it was me who did the job with the bookings. We successfully toured abroad, in Continental Europe, in the United States and in Japan. After the shows people came with piles of records to be autographed.

FG: Let’s return to Guru Guru in the political climate of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Looking back: Was it only a personal experience of the band members and the people who lived with them, or was there more?

MN: Our music at that time was a political statement in itself. We were part of a scene together with other bands with political attitudes like ours. We were left wing but no members of a political party. The sessions we had with other bands or some of their members – Amon Düül, Can, Xhol Caravan, Kraan – had a touch of conspiracy. The musical output was completely new. Most of the tunes, like our LSD Marsch for instance, had nothing to do with the British or American examples of that time. We played concerts with a left wing student union called SDS, where political statements were read between our tunes. In the city of Heidelberg in the Neckar valley, we managed to put on a daytime show on a hillside facing the famous Heidelberg Castle where the whole city was forced to listen. When the police showed up to end the concert, we had already split. To us left wing political attitudes meant openmindedness, toward the whole world and foreign customs, cultures and attitudes. In 1974 a group of Shoshonees lived with us for a while and our concerts at that time were demonstrations meant to draw the attention to the political and social situation of the Native Americans. All this was quite provocative at that time. Another example: we were one of the first bands in Germany wearing long hair. We were bad mouthed in the streets and we were not served in restaurants. But we wanted these effects of shock and provocation.

FG: But provocation was also a programmatic part of your regular shows?

MN: Yes, our concerts did not only mean to present music. The intention was total artwork. Besides all other intentions there was also an element of slapstick and play acting. The name Guru Guru itself was a joke in the direction of the Beatles – they had their personal Gurus in the late Sixties. In some songs we used animal sounds instead of vocals. We were the first Rock Band that had put on masks during a concert (as the Elektrolurch Mask – see photo, F. G.), we had chickens on stage during the Chicken Song (sings “Set your chicken free”) and other provocative actions. In the beginning we sometimes took LSD just before a concert began and then we were waiting for what might happen on stage. – It was only about three years ago that I learned that in Japanese Guru Guru means “rotating”, I didn’t know this before. Did you know that they put a statue of me in the Tokyo Wax Museum, right next to celebrities of the world?

FG: Besides Guru Guru your career was full of other projects.

MN: The main side projects are Tiere der Nacht, Terra Amphibia and Lover 303. Tiere der Nacht is improvisational free music. Not only Free Jazz, but also other musical elements. It’s a conversation between Luigi Archetti and me. I tried this concept also in full band performances, but this soon turned out to become too dense. With only two performers it has an air of minimalism. I love it. To work like this means full freedom, it’s a gift, but it takes years of experince to achieve this.

The latest project is Lover 303. I really hate Techno, but I used to play along with drum machines and sequencers long before there was Techno. Conni Maly, my partner in this project, uses electronic devices and a guitar. She has a good feeling for rhythms, and I am forced to play in a way completely different to how I usually play, mainly counterbeats. This way Techno gets a warmer texture and it appears to become more “human”. This project is also a bridge between generations. Conni is about half as old as I am, a “networked post hippie girl”. We also play Goa Shows in rural areas and so Techno reaches the villages. And I’m also involved in Contemporary Music projects. There’s a great diversity in all of these projects. One outstanding project was of course “Meet the Demons of Bali” together with Peter Hollinger and sixteen native drummers from Bali. And there is the Mani Neumeier “One Man Show”, quite frequently seen on stage.

FG: Other well known music performers using provocation as a part of their concerts, as Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne for example, always claim that this is merely a part of their shows and has nothing to do with them personally. What do you think about yourself in this respect?

MN: For me it’s not only show. My message is love and trance and do your own thing. For me it means more than an element of my shows. “Love” is the word that describes it most precisely – and simply. In the beginning of Guru Guru provocation was a goal in itself. Now I want to make people happy. And I think I can achieve this. People have a better state of mind after a concert than they had before. But on the other hand I’m not quite sure that it’s me who’s doing it. Maybe it’s something cosmic that goes through me and reaches the people.

FG: This last statement might have been a good end for an interview with a Space Rock Magazine. But readers might also be interested to know how it will go on. What are your plans for the future?

MN: There will be a documentary CD of the live performances during my “Sixtieth Birthday Anniversary Tour”, where I performed with Luigi Archetti, Conni Maly, Hans Reffert and former and present members of Guru Guru. And there will be a new Guru Guru CD before this year ends. The current Guru Guru line up is: Roland Schaeffer, Peter Kuehmstedt, Luigi Archetti and me. Hans Reffert joins us every now and then. And I will go on tour again. I want to perform as long as I can make people feel happy.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein and Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron

From the New York Times: “Festivalgoers in Venice and Toronto who attended the premieres this weekend of The Shock Doctrine, a six-minute film written by the author Naomi Klein and the director Alfonso Cuarón, saw images of electroshock treatments from the 1950s, animated pages from a C.I.A. torture manual and footage of the 9/11 attacks and the 2004 tsunami. The brief movie encapsulates the thesis of a new book of the same title by Ms. Klein: That unconstrained free-market policies go hand in hand with undemocratic political policies.

“While Mr. Cuarón’s political passions can be glimpsed in his dystopian 2006 thriller Children of Men (Ms. Klein is a commentator on the DVD), most Hollywood directors don’t end up making promotional videos for thick texts about global economics. “When she asked if I was interested in doing a trailer,” he said from Italy, “my answer was, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it.’ ”

“Then Mr. Cuarón read the book: “I had to call her back. I said, “Naomi, please don’t drop this. You — we — have to do this.” He drafted his son Jonás to direct.”