The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the ’60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, “Owsley” is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
For more than 20 years, Stanley — at 72, still known as the Bear — has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet.
Sporting a buccaneer’s earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.
‘Fuck for Peace: A History of the Fugs’ Printed Matter 195 Tenth Avenue Through September 8
‘Celebrate Independence Day with flagrant free speech and populist ridicule of the ruling class at this bracing exhibition of protest ephemera. An example of the former: songwriter Ed Sanders’s 1967 poetry collection, Fuck God in the Ass; of the latter: a photo of Nelson Rockefeller flipping the bird, which adorns the cover of bandmate Tuli Kupferberg’s Less Newspoems, a chapbook that sold for “70 cents (2 for 69).” With music self-described as “anti-war/anti-creep/anti-repression” and “dope-thrill chants,” the Fugs (whom Lester Bangs characterized as “not a garage band so much as a sixth-floor walkup band”) represented a major fault line in the cultural tectonics of the ’60s. Somehow they signed with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label, though they often parodied the hep cats of yore (Kupferberg did a rousing rendition of the “Goldfinger” theme, substituting “Stink-fingaaaaah . . .”). It’s fascinating to see the men’s magazine Cavalier present the band in East Village dishabille near an ad touting a swell in top hat and tails fondling a “Life-Size Instant Party Doll.” The times were certainly a-changin’, and in that grim year of 1968, with the Vietnam War grinding on and Nixon newly elected to lead it, one reviewer, a World War II vet, confessed to surprised admiration for the group in an article headlined “Cause to Worry: Fugs Make Sense.” Album covers such as Star Peace anticipated the Day-Glo tubular stylings of the Blue Man Group, while It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest features Wagnerian costumes worthy of Bugs Bunny’s “What’s Opera, Doc?” Just as wandering through Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo, surrounded by Caravaggios and Carracis, can sweep you back to the Baroque era, this bookstore’s walls—plastered with mimeographed flyers, loopy fan mail, smutty posters, and FBI surveillance files—truly capture the ’60s at street (or perhaps more accurately, gutter) level.’
You thought Arthur was gone for good? The indie magazine beloved for its music coverage and antiwar politics will resume publishing this summer.
by KEVIN MCCARTHY
THE NATION — July 16, 2007 issue
In 2002 a free counterculture music magazine, Arthur, came onto the underground scene and won readers in just about every city where young people (and some older ones) still flouted local noise ordinances. Edited by LA-based music journalist Jay Babcock and published by Philadelphia-based independent media veteran Laris Kreslins, it was distributed by volunteers across the nation who delivered issues to coffee shops, record stores and bookstores. With contributors like Thurston Moore of the legendary punk/noise band Sonic Youth; T-Model Ford, the elder blues statesman and Arthur advice columnist; and writer Trinie Dalton, the magazine specialized in long stories and interviews on wide-ranging subjects, from ’60s “White Panther” leader and MC5 manager John Sinclair, to ambient music pioneer Brian Eno, to novelist J.G. Ballard, to contemporary folk musician Devendra Banhart–each representing a segment of the counterculture.
Arthur’s music coverage has been among the most influential of its era, but the magazine was never just about music–it was from the beginning fiercely political. Babcock, who studied political science at UCLA, had at one time worked for Congressman Henry Waxman and drafted Waxman’s anti-NAFTA position paper. As the magazine was launching, the war in Iraq was being sold, and Arthur defined itself as a virulently antiwar publication; the magazine dedicated its fifth issue to a critique of the war. (The cover of that issue depicted comedian David Cross as a soccer mom cheerleading the war surrounded by the words “Hooray for Empire” and “USA #1 with a Bullet.”) The editors never stopped questioning the war and military recruitment. In 2004 Arthur teamed with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to run a PSA for antirecruitment campaigns in its pages. Then in May 2006, in an issue of Arthur, Babcock challenged Sully Erna of the rock band Godsmack for licensing his music to the military for use in recruitment ads and for using military images at concerts. The magazine’s pages were a regular space for artists and writers like Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and Kyp Malone, of the indie band TV on the Radio, to speak out against the war and President Bush.
Earlier this year, Arthur announced that it would no longer continue printing. Not long after, however, Babcock reached a deal with Kreslins and is about to relaunch the magazine as its editor and publisher. The next issue will arrive in record stores sometime in August. The Nation recently spoke to Babcock by phone about publishing a counterculture magazine in the current economic and political environment.
What drove you to start Arthur?
[As a culture/arts journalist] I grew more and more frustrated with the limitation of subject matter, technique and the length of story available to me in the outlets that existed. I realized that many other writers were feeling the same way. I thought the only way to do what I wanted to do was instead of campaigning for somebody to come to their senses, I would start my own magazine.
How did you get the magazine going?
I didn’t come from money, and I didn’t have any money. Laris didn’t come from money. So we pooled our credit cards and were able to start to pay the printer and so forth. The publishing situation in the United States has gotten to the point where you really do have to be wealthy in order to publish. Everyone can have access to a printing press, but hardly anyone outside the wealthy has access to the newsstands. It requires a huge amount of capital to start up a magazine and print it, and then convince the distributors that it deserves to distributed, and then be able to wait for them to pay you. The newsstand distribution system in this country is notoriously inefficient and corrupt…. That wasn’t an option for us. So what we did was, we created essentially an underground, alternate form of distribution.
What is the vision behind Arthur?
The biggest underlying idea is that the culture drives everything else. Culture creates the metaphors and the landscape on which politics and economics and so forth take place. And so then you ask: What kind of culture are you making, or taking part in, or helping to exist? Our idea was to do what all the other underground magazines or publications in America have done over the last 200 years or whatever, which was to attempt to infuse into the culture at large all of the liberatory, progressive and expansive ideas of freedom and values from the traditional underground, and to celebrate them, propagandize for them and push them.
What were your models?
We want to be in the tradition of the American underground press. Especially the twentieth-century underground press. Whether it’s the punk magazines, or the rave magazines, or the amazing underground press that was happening in the late ’60s and early ’70s, or the mimeo scene before that in the ’60s and ’50s, with the Beats and the whole literary poetic scene–there’s a whole tradition you can go back to: anarchist magazines, Wobbly magazines and so forth. And there’s always been artists and poets, and the serious ones have always been political, engaged and very far to the left.
Arthur grew more and more political. The fifth issue is dedicated almost entirely to looking at American imperialism. How did that political consciousness develop?
By the second issue the war stuff was starting to happen, and by coincidence we had a section about [civil rights and antiwar protest photographer] Charles Brittin. We found out that he had a photo of a parade of veterans against the Vietnam War that happened in LA in the late ’60s. It’s an incredible photo from the corner of Wilshire and Vermont that was just mind-blowing for those of us who live here in LA, to see this familiar landscape filled not with cars and billboards but with ex-soldiers protesting the war as far as the eye could see. So we elected to make that a centerfold.
For the third issue we did a back page that said “What War Looks Like,” and it was a picture from a book by [LA punk musician] Exene Cervenka, a photograph of an Iraqi soldier, dead, from the first Gulf War, with parts of his body blown off. It’s an extremely gruesome black-and-white photo that says all sorts of things about what war is, what it does to people, what people who kill have to look at. And you look at what the soldier was wearing–he’s wearing dress shoes, which shows how mighty the Iraqi army was that we were so afraid of. It was nothing–they didn’t even have boots.
And by the time we got to the fifth issue the war had started already and it was getting worse. We went all the way. We solicited special advertising saying we were doing an emergency issue of Arthur. We assembled it in just four weeks. Arthur isn’t exactly the biggest megaphone–but the megaphone that we did have was very carefully directed at this cultural class where things develop and bubble up occasionally into the mainstream consciousness. We wanted to be an incubator space. No other pop culture or culture magazine was taking any stand like that. We did it and we didn’t think we’d have much effect, but we did think we would be a comfort and an aid to those people in the culture who were doing good work but who needed to know that they weren’t the only ones out there, which would allow them to go on with what they were doing and to feel that what they were doing was worthwhile.
You mention in the editor’s notes in a later issue that you got a lot of mail about the fifth issue, some supportive and some very critical.
When you’re a small magazine, you need every issue that you put out to say the same thing over and over about what you’re doing, so that people who see it for the first time can get an idea about what it is you do. So it was very dangerous for us to completely depart from any music coverage, any arts coverage, and devote almost an entire issue to a radical political position stated in pretty blunt terms. We thought, Are we endangering our relationship with our advertisers? But because what we had done was something no one else was doing, it worked in our favor as a business. It won us a good amount of readers who were just shocked that there was this publication in record stores and coffeehouses for free, where you’re usually supposed to find pretty superficial status quo stuff—instead you’re finding this radical, impassioned and very smart talk about what was going on that you couldn’t find elsewhere. That a tiny magazine, with no budget and no capital, could put that together and nobody else could do that with their vast hundreds of millions of dollars, while the Hollywood liberals were all wringing their hands–that says something, not about how great we were but about how awful everybody else was.
Whom were you trying to reach?
We were very conscious that our audiences, our people, were artists themselves, musicians themselves, the record store clerks of America, and we wanted to remind them that they’re being told to shut up and not have an opinion and not state your opinion unless you are a politician or a Middle East expert. And we wanted to remind them that actually the voice of the poet, and the artist, and the musician is often where the deeper wisdom comes from. Those voices have always been heard, have always needed to be present and have always played a role.
By the time you get to the ninth issue [of Arthur], every artist we’re covering is talking out loud about what’s up. In that issue we ran a whole page put together in conjunction with the AFSC about how to counter military recruitment on campuses, in high schools and colleges. We’d already moved to the next part–you can’t have a war unless you have soldiers, so let’s try to convince kids not to be soldiers. That’s something everybody can do in their own neighborhood. Anywhere you live in America there is a high school.
You got a lot of attention for your interview with Sully Erna of Godsmack, in which you confronted him for allowing the military to use his band’s music in its recruitment ads and for using military images at concerts. That seemed to me to be kind of a cultural turning point–after years of hearing people called traitors and such for speaking out against the war, here’s someone challenged to explain why he supported it, and in the end he tried to distance himself from Bush and the war.
I conducted that interview over the telephone just a couple days after Stephen Colbert did his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I believe that was the real turning point. At the time, the mainstream media didn’t pick up on it. It took a few days before they realized that it was the hottest thing on YouTube. The cultural press had figured out that it was the real story, not George Bush and his doppelgänger doing a comedy routine. Colbert had done something absolutely heroic. And Neil Young was just about to come out with his Living With War record. So there was this sort of surge that happened, and the interview with Godsmack happened right in there. I’d been waiting to talk with that guy for years. When that invitation to interview him arrived in the mail, it was like a gift.
So you had been following him?
Oh, I’d been following him for years. I keep files. I do my best to do what Ed Sanders does–to keep files, and wait and wait. It’s the only way to be a journalist and advocate sometimes–keep track of stuff the best you can, and when the moment happens, seize it. To me it’s fair game to ask someone why they’re licensing their music to a certain cause. I would be derelict in my duty as a journalist to not talk about that in a time of war. When someone’s doing live concerts that are essentially war rallies, that naturally should be a subject of conversation with that person.
In a later issue, you talked to Kyp Malone, from the band TV on the Radio, about his experiences playing shows where the promoter had allowed military recruiters in to sign up kids against the band’s contract. Is this something you’ve seen a lot of with the artists you cover?
Kyp was the main one who would talk about that, but there have been other things that had happened. [The country-soul band] Brightblack Morning Light had some trouble in Tucson, because they have it in their rider that they don’t want recruiting to go on at their concerts. It’s kind of ridiculous that you’d have to say that…. But if word gets out that that’s in your rider…that was a problem for them.
Have you noticed artists that you cover becoming more radical or speaking out on politics or against the war?
I think that most musicians in the underground tend to be antiwar, peace people, and some of them are more open about it than others. Some of them feel more confident about it and have figured out a way to deal with it onstage or in the press in a way that they think is going to get across something valuable. Devendra [Banhart] didn’t have antiwar songs on his early records, but he did on his last album, and that’s clearly because of what’s been going on and because the situation keeps getting worse and worse.
Do we have someone just churning out the anthems like John Lennon was doing? He was writing song after song over a few months that would go from his guitar to being sung by people in protests. There is nobody doing that right now. I think there are people that are capable of doing it, but they’re not high-enough profile yet.
From the lead story on the front page of the LA Times:
“The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church nationwide…dwarf[ing] the next largest settlements in the U.S., including those reached in Boston, at $157 million, and in Portland, Ore., at $129 million….”
There was no mention of the contest for predator priests in Coney Island, where the winner ate 66 altar boys in 12 minutes.
——— Satirist Paul Krassner will perform at M Bar in Hollywood on July 20. More info: paulkrassner.com
Many sounds have never been heard—by humans: some sound waves you don’t hear—but they reach you. ‘Storm-stereo’ techniques combine singers, instrumentalists and complex electronic sound. The emotional intensity is at a maximum. Sleeve note for An Electric Storm, Island Records, 1969.
An Electric Storm by White Noise is reissued in a remastered edition this week. It’s a work of musical genius and I’m going to tell you why.
Hanging around with metalheads and bikers in the late Seventies meant mostly sitting in smoke-filled bedrooms listening to music while getting stoned. Among the Zeppelin and Sabbath albums in friends’ vinyl collections you’d often find a small selection of records intended to be played when drug-saturation had reached critical mass. These were usually something by Pink Floyd or Virgin-era Tangerine Dream but there were occasionally diamonds hiding in the rough. I first heard The Faust Tapes under these circumstances, introduced facetiously as “the weirdest record ever made” and still a good contender for that description thirty-four years after it was created. One evening someone put on the White Noise album.
It should be noted that I was no stranger to electronic music at this time, I’d been a Kraftwerk fan since I heard the first strains of Autobahn in 1974 and regarded the work of Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno and Isao Tomita as perfectly natural and encouraging musical developments. But An Electric Storm was altogether different. It was strange, very strange; it was weird and creepy and sexy and funny and utterly frightening; in places it could be many of these things all at once. Electronic music in the Seventies was for the most part made by long-hairs with banks of equipment, photographed on their album sleeves preening among stacks of keyboards, Moog modules and Roland systems. You pretty much knew what they were doing and, if you listened to enough records, you eventually began to spot which instruments they were using. There were no pictures on the White Noise sleeve apart from the aggressive lightning flashes on the front. There was no information about the creators beyond their names and that curious line about “the emotional intensity is at a maximum”. And the sounds these people were making was like nothing on earth.
I recall sitting up and struggling through THC-delirium thinking (aptly) “what the fuck?!” when the orgy sounds first appeared in My Game Of Loving, a multi-tracked multiplicity of orgasmic groans which make Jane Birkin’s expirations on Je t’aime… moi non plus seem like the limpest Gallic ennui. (I must have missed the middle eight of Love Without Sound which quite possibly depicts an unwelcome erotic encounter between a woman and some ratcheted robotic contraption.) These were weird songs; the melodies were weird, the ideas were weird and the sounds were very weird.
After the Jean-Jacques Perrey-inspired hilarity of Here Come The Fleas and some druggy (and weird) psychedelia, we were into side two and The Visitation, a lengthy song/audio drama concerning a dead biker who returns to see his weeping girlfriend for the last time. The middle section is an electronic road journey that predates Kraftwerk’s similar sequence in Autobahn by five years. The simple musical theme was sublimely creepy, the sound effects literally out of this world. To my drug-addled brain this mysterious group had actually managed to create in sound the experience of being dead. This was exhilarating and deeply unnerving. Artist Mati Klarwein once related how it felt hearing Bitches Brew for the first time after Miles Davis had made him snort a line of coke beforehand: “When I heard the tapes I couldn’t believe the music. At first I thought it was the cocaine. Then I realised it was just incredible.” I know how he felt; the emotional intensity was at a maximum.
The final track was the icing on the cake. Of all the musical attempts to depict some kind of Satanic netherworld this is easily the most chilling and convincing. I don’t care what gaggle of blood-drinking, face-painted diabolists you want to bring to the virgin sacrifice, Ozzy and co. included; all must prostrate themselves before a polite bunch of English technicians. Electric Storm In Hell sounds exactly like its title and achieves its ferocity without guitars although the group did rely on a thundering phased drum kit to hold together those sounds of screaming souls being struck by lightning in a godless void.
After this first exposure I quickly acquired a copy of the album myself and played it to death, eventually gaining a reputation for foisting the horrors of side two on people when they were tripping. (To be honest I only did that once…)
Electronic music the hard way: the Unit Delta Plus studio, 1966.
So why was it so good, why does it still sound like nothing else in the history of music? Two words: Radiophonic Workshop. White Noise was a chance grouping of music and electronics student David Vorhaus together with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop who’d been indulging in some extra-curricula activity under the name Unit Delta Plus, a short-lived experimental music project. The Radiophonic Workshop was a special department of musicians and engineers who provided jingles, theme tunes and sound effects for BBC radio and television. Delia’s most famous production was (and still is) her arrangement of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme which she created using tape collage and very primitive oscillator equipment. Despite being reworked many times that original version still sounds unearthly. Not only was this the world’s first electronic TV theme but in 1963 it would have been the first electronic music most people heard at all.
The Radiophonic composers were tasked with creating music and sound effects the hard way, pre-syntheziser, using tape edits, varispeed and whatever rudimentary electronic devices they could lay their hands on. This was all they did, each day and every day, with the BBC footing the bill. So when a producer called asking for something unusual they had a formidable range of techniques that could be applied. Brian Hodgson’s TARDIS sound effects for Doctor Who are still in use today, and all that time spent producing theme tunes meant that Derbyshire and Hodgson were used to applying tape effects and audio collage in the context of popular music, rather than the more usual contemporary classical setting of electro-acoustic composition. David Vorhaus gave the pair the impetus to re-brand themselves and try something new, which is how An Electric Storm came about, with a proposal to Island Records for a vaguely psychedelic single, Love Without Sound. Chris Blackwell was enthused by the idea, gave them some money and told them to come back with an album.
Producing a novelty single was often as far as most electronic musicians got at this time especially given the huge amount of effort required to produce enough music to fill forty minutes. What’s extraordinary about the Electric Storm album is that all of it works, all the songs are great, strange songs. The only thing comparable is the equally wonderful album by Joseph Byrd‘s United States of America released the year before which featured similarly great songs with outré arrangements, mostly the product of ring modulators and other crude equipment. Yet that album sounds dated now, albeit in a good way. Many of the songs, despite their lyrical perversity, aren’t so far removed from Jefferson Airplane and the album as a whole owes much to the structural ambition of Sgt Pepper. A few of the White Noise songs sound of their time—Love Without Sound, Firebird (which would have been the single B-side) and Your Hidden Dreams especially so—but the otherworldliness of the arrangements lift them completely out of their era. So many of the tape sounds are completely unprecedented that it didn’t matter that synthesizers were coming along to replace all that laborious cutting and pasting and re-recording. Minimoogs were surprising and new in the early Seventies but now sound like…..Minimoogs; they’re as dated as wah-wah pedals. An Electric Storm still sounds like nothing else ever made. I place much of the originality and the sonic darkness at Delia’s door, she had a genius for the sinister that was evident as far back as the sucking reverse envelope that runs through the Doctor Who theme and the fluttering, purring noise that comes in at its very end. This unique quality has become more evident with the posthumous reissues of her library music and other TV and radio themes and it’s sad that she didn’t live to see the real influence and appreciation of her work that’s blossomed in recent years. In a field usually dominated by male nerds she was brilliant and dedicated and fiercely original.
Delia Derbyshire.
David Vorhaus continued with White Noise after An Electric Storm but his second album lacks the magic and quality of the first; it lacks, I’d suggest, the Delian Mode, to borrow a title from one of Derbyshire’s solo compositions. More crucially it also lacks the song elements that make An Electric Storm such a success. Those original recordings had a curious afterlife, however, turning up in remixed form when Derbyshire and Hodgson worked on another children’s TV series, The Tomorrow People, with Dudley Simpson, and parts of Electric Storm in Hell are played during the invocation scene in Dracula AD 1972, the music there being far more chilling than anything in the rest of the film. Derbyshire and Hodgson also provided a suitable spooky and minimal score to The Legend of Hell House in 1973, a clone of The Haunting which makes me wish that Delia had produced the score for Robert Wise’s original film in place of Humphrey Searle’s orchestral bombast.
Two decades later groups such as Pram and The Orb were sampling from An Electric Storm (listen to Outland on The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld for a repetitive trill swiped from Love Without Sound) while Peter Kember of Spacemen 3 did much to bring Delia back to the attention of the music world before her untimely death in 2001. The work of the Radiophonic people has had a lasting influence on a new generation of British musicians, cited by Aphex Twin, Add N to (X), Broadcast, Pet Shop Boys (who had a track, Radiophonic, on their Nightlife album), Saint Etienne and many others. Most recent of these inspirations come from the Ghost Box collective who combine the jauntiness of Seventies’ library music and TV themes with a particular strain of English spookiness to brilliant effect.
This new CD reissue will be a welcome replacement for the poorly-produced edition from 1992 with its error-ridden insert notes. For more about the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, including an interview with Brian Hodgson and footage of Delia Derbyshire at work, the great BBC documentary, Alchemists of Sound, is on YouTube.
“Love Without Sound” 2:57 (Derbyshire/Vorhaus) “My Game Of Loving” 3:38 (Duncan/Vorhaus) “Here Come The Fleas” 2:31 (McDonald/Vorhaus) “Firebird” 2:43 (Derbyshire/Vorhaus) “Your Hidden Dreams” 4:25 (McDonald/Vorhaus) “The Visitations” 11:45 (McDonald/Vorhaus) “The Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell” 7:04 (White Noise)
Credits: Effects—David Vorhaus Electronics—Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire Percussion—Paul Lytton Producer (Co-ordinator)—David Vorhaus Vocals—Annie Bird, John Whitman, Val Shaw
Outfest Screening at Redcat Saturday 7/14 9:30 PM $12.00, Curated by José Muñoz and Nao Bustamante. -Live Performance by My Barbarian -A Family Finds Entertainment Directed By: Ryan Trecartin -Artist Statement Directed By: Daniel Barrow -Bra Burn Directed By: Marget Long -Dynasty Handbag: The Quiet Storm Directed By: Jibz Cameron, -Mata Hari Directed By: Alexis Del Lago -Nelson & Christina Directed By: Robert Coddington
Additionally 2 other great looking screening of shorts Sunday Night 7 & 9:30.
Western Shoshone leader dies at 87 Associated Press 10:23 a.m. July 11, 2007
RENO, Nev. – Corbin Harney, a spiritual leader of the Western Shoshone who challenged the federal government – and once his own tribe – to oppose nuclear weapons on aboriginal land has died at the age of 87. Harney, a fixture at anti-nuclear rallies, died Tuesday of complications from cancer near Santa Rosa, Calif., where he had hoped to finish a book, according to his family.
“We have truly lost a lot,” said his nephew, Santiago Lozada, who was with him when he died. “
Corbin was a World War II veteran and was known around the world for his activism against radioactivity and nuclear weapons,” said Robert Hager, Reno-based lawyer for the Western Shoshone tribe. “He’s irreplaceable to the Western Shoshone nation.”
“He was someone who just had this gentle spirit but a steely resolve that people should do the right thing,” Hager said. “He thought people would eventually come around and realize the harm people were doing to Mother Earth.”
Hager recalled that Harney bucked his own tribe when the federal government in the 1950s unearthed remains of Western Shoshone ancestors during digging for nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas.
“He picked up the remains and gave them a decent burial,” Hager said. “He took a lot of flack from Western Shoshone leaders who said he should have nothing to do with the U.S. government. But I always respected Corbin for doing what, to the Western Shoshone, was not politically correct but in his mind was the right thing to do.” Ian Zabarte, secretary of state for the Western Shoshone National Council, said Harney “was always steadfast in trying to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and guard the people against the threats and hazards that nuclear technology poses.”
Harney traveled around the world as a speaker and environmentalist. He received national and international awards and spoke before the United Nations in Geneva.
Public Statement by Corbin’s Immediate Family
July 10, 2007 (TurtleIsland). Corbin Harney Spiritual Leader of the Western Shoshone Nation crossed over at 11:00 a.m. this morning in a house on a sacred mountain near Santa Rosa, CA (Turtle Island). He had dedicated his life to fighting the nuclear testing and dumping.
That battle claimed his life through cancer.
Before he passed, he said to remember:
“We are one people. We cannot separate ourselves now.
There are many good things to be done for our people and for the world.
It is important to let things be good. And it is important to teach the younger generation so that things are not lost.”
According to witnesses present, in the morning fog, the spirits of four Shoshoni dog soldiers were outside on horseback before Corbin’s passing. But then one of the Shoshone present, Santiago Lozada, yelled “Tosawi Tosawi!” (White Knife). And then the fog shifted and there were thousands of spirits waiting.
Corbin passed peacefully at the end. He was only worried that he still had more to do. When he finally let go and went with the dog soldiers, Red Wolf Pope, grandson of Rolling Thunder, was present and sang him the Tosawi death song to call the dog soldiers to come take him home. Golden eagles continue to circle the house hours after his crossing.”
True to form Corbin joked around several days ago that he was going to go at 11:00, and kept his promise.
Over his lifetime, Corbin traveled around the world as a speaker, healer and spiritual leader with a profound spiritual and environmental message for all. He received numerous national and international awards and spoke before the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Corbin also authored two books: “The Way It Is: One Water, One Air, One Earth” (Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1995) and a forthcoming book, “The Nature Way”. Numerous documentaries have been made about his work and message. In 1994, Corbin established the Shundahai Network to work with people and organizations to respond to spiritual and environmental concerns on nuclear issues. He also established Poo Ha Bah, a native healing center located in Tecopa Springs, California. He will be missed but always honored for his work and dedication to traditional ways.
Corbin Harney is descended from generations of Newe (Shoshone) traditional healers and was always grateful for the many extraordinary teachers who shared their knowledge in his lifetime. Corbin is survived by his daughter Reynaulda Taylor; granddaughters Ann Taylor and Nada Leno; grandsons Keith, Jon and Joel Leno and William Henry Taylor; seven great-grandchildren; two great-great grandchildren; and his sister Rosie Blossom’s family and many cousins and other family members as well as many, many friends around the world. Corbin was preceded in death by his mother, father, sister, grandparents, uncle, great granddaughter, cousins, and friends. A very special thanks to Patricia Davidson, Corbin’s caregiver in his final months; Dominic Daileda, Corbin’s friend and companion for his support and compassion in hard times, and the family of Dixie and Martin van der Kamp for opening up their home and their hearts to Corbin and his family and friends during his time of need.
Dates and times for services are being made with official announcement to follow. Three day services are planned at the home of Larson R. Bill, So Ho Bee – Newe Sogobe (Lee, Nevada –Western Shoshone Territory) with burial services at Battle Mountain Indian Community, Battle Mountain Nevada.
Donations may be made either to the immediate family through:
Reynaulda Taylor P.O. Box 397 Owyhee, Nevada 89832
775-757-2610 or 775-757-2064
annietaytay@yahoo.com
Or, to:
The Corbin Harney Way 6360 Sonoma Mtn. Rd. Santa Rosa, CA 95404
No other individual, organization or entity is authorized to receive donations on behalf of Corbin’s immediate family or Corbin Harney.
R.I.P. LADY BIRD JOHNSON
“As first lady, she was perhaps best known as the determined environmentalist who wanted roadside billboards and junkyards replaced with trees and wildflowers. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to beautify Washington. The $320 million Highway Beautification Bill, passed in 1965, was known as ‘The Lady Bird Bill,’ and she made speeches and lobbied Congress to win its passage.
“‘Had it not been for her, I think that the whole subject of the environment might not have been introduced to the public stage in just the way it was and just the time it was. So she figures mightily, I think, in the history of the country if for no other reason than that alone,’ Harry Middleton, retired director of the LBJ Library and Museum, once said.”
Lady Bird Johnson went up against the outdoor advertising lobby to build a new federal highway program, flower by flower by flower.
The U.S. federal highway system was a legacy of the Eisenhower administration. And the U.S. billboard industry was instantly hip. Instead of muscling up to customers, why not let a captive audience of consumers roll right past your pitch? “Take a Puff, It’s Springtime!”
“In 1958, Congress had passed a highway bill that gave states an extra half percent in funding if they controlled billboards, but the incentive appeared ineffectual in stopping highways from being blanketed” with signs.
Enter Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. After making the drive from Central Texas to D.C. one too many times, Lady Bird pressured her husband to push through a Highway Beautification bill in 1965, “improving landscaping, removing billboards, and screening roadside junkyards.”
You don’t hear the word “beautification” anymore. There aren’t any more idle groups of white ladies in white gloves. But in fact, Mrs. Johnson’s efforts—whatever they were once called—streamed into present-day environmentalism and conservation.
“After President Johnson left office, Mrs. Johnson continued to be a champion of environmental initiatives. In 1982, she founded the National Wildflower Research Center (now the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center), and in 1987, she helped add the native wildflower requirement as an amendment to the Surface Transportation Urban Relocation Authorization Act.”
Now, native wildflower seeds or seedlings must be planted in landscaping all federal highways projects.
Alison Lewis, left, and Rachel Antonoff of the indie label Mooka Kinney.
TEVA DURHAM is an unlikely idol, a soberly outfitted, plain-talking mother with a passion for quirky yarns. But to her fans, who snap up her how-to-knit books by the tens of thousands, Ms. Durham is the undisputed mistress of stitchery.
Those admirers, often young and aesthetically inclined, follow her patterns — casting on, increasing, decreasing — with unwavering fidelity. As well they might. Ms. Durham’s artfully crafted stockings and skirts, open-work dresses and cardigans vie in style and intricacy with many of their counterparts on the fashion runways.
Just a few years ago, the assertion that hand-stitched garments could compete with designer wares would have raised derisive hoots from the fashion set, which viewed the needle crafts as the domain of ladies in buns and harlequin glasses. As Ms. Durham acknowledged mildly, “People still think of knitting as, you know, a homey hobby.”
Well, no. Formerly neglected domestic arts like knitting, quilting, sewing and embroidery are being eagerly embraced, especially by the young. Their passion kindled by the abundance of handcrafted looks on the runways, they are blowing the dust off these folksy skills and lending them the bright sheen of style.
“It wasn’t that long ago that people would cringe at the word ‘craft,’ ” said Melanie Falick, who developed a crafts imprint at Stewart, Tabori & Chang. “Ten or 20 years ago, there were far fewer crafters and knitters, certainly fewer who ‘outed’ themselves. Now it has become a badge of honor.”
And an insignia of chic. The new generation of needle hobbyists, nimble-fingered women in their 20s and 30s, is growing ever more sophisticated, seeking out novel yarns imbued with bamboo or fur, working confidently with elaborate patterns, swapping tips online and emulating styles by fashion designers like Marc Jacobs, Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga and Michael Kors.
If needlework has been transformed from a homely pastime into a legitimate fashion pursuit, is it any wonder that some artisans are marketing their handwork online and at cutting-edge boutiques? And influencing designers in turn.
“I do think the runways were inspired by people doing crafty things at home and by how inventive this generation is,” said Ruth Sullivan, an editor at Workman Publishing, which publishes large numbers of crafts books. She added that designers may also be looking at the Internet, where rafts of people are designing their own patterns and posting them on blogs.
Visiting an exhibition of quilts from Gee’s Bend, Ala., at the Whitney Museum, Marc Jacobs was sufficiently impressed to introduce whimsical patchwork skirts and dresses into his secondary line for spring 2007. Fashion titans like Fendi are offering bags that might have been stitched by your Great-Aunt Fanny, albeit with a tribal twist. Fendi’s coveted Voodoo bag is a bestseller at Bergdorf Goodman, as are open-work cashmere wraps from Loro Piana and hand-embroidered flats from Emma Hope. Even at the luxury level, shoppers are craving a handcrafted look, said Ed Burstell, senior vice president for beauty, accessories and footwear at Bergdorf.
The revival of these arts also owes a debt to a clutch of needle-wielding superstars: Ms. Durham, whose first book, “Loop-d-Loop,” was a best seller on Amazon; Wenlan Chia, a knitwear designer with an avid following; Diana Rupp, a youthful doyenne of home sewing; and Debbie Stoller, the founder of the popular Stitch ’n Bitch knitting circles across the country, who has been credited with jumpstarting the knitting rage with her popular series of Stitch ’n Bitch books. (Some four million people in the United States have taken up knitting since 2003, Ms. Sullivan said.)
The women — and a few men — who are buying these books march into crafts shops, eager to follow their patterns or to improvise. They also arrive with magazine tear sheets in hand, hoping to copy the styles of their favorite designers.
Ms. Rupp, who teaches a popular sewing class at Make Workshop, her studio on the Lower East Side, cheers them on by displaying fashion magazines and Barneys New York catalogs on cutting tables throughout her workshop.
Needlework hobbyists have become more savvy, said Joelle Hoverson, an owner of Purl and Purl Patchwork, neighboring yarn and fabric boutiques in SoHo. “A lot of that is driven by fashion,” she said. Ms. Hoverson has noticed that designers like Mr. Jacobs inspire her customers. “But they’re also looking at clothes from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s,” she said. “And they’re looking at each other. It’s very cool.”
The ardent pursuit of the needle arts has fueled a $1.07 billion industry, according to the National Needlework Association. That figure does not take into account mass merchants and chains. “This is no mom and pop retail phenomenon,” said Sherry Mulne, a marketing consultant for the association. “This is big business.”
Sewing is the latest of the domestic arts to be touted as a hipster passion, the rock ’n’ roll of the crafts world. Inspired by television hits like “Project Runway,” aspiring designers have re-energized the industry. The Home Sewing Association says that there are about 35 million sewing amateurs in the United States, compared with 30 million in 2000. And Singer reports that annual sales of its machines have doubled to three million since 1999.
The mushrooming of the needle crafts, which extends even to arcane pursuits like shoemaking and hat design, is also driven by a growing aversion to cookie-cutter mall fashions, by a desire to connect with like-minded sisters and reinforce a sense of community, and by a wish to handle solid, tactile materials in an increasingly virtual world.
“There is a natural need to do something low tech, to get your hands involved,” said Ms. Falick, the crafts editor. Ms. Stoller, an advocate of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, added: “It’s so nice to have something in your life that’s not just about self-improvement — that is, losing weight or advancing your career.”
Needle arts have also received a boost from hobbyists determined to market their one-offs and few-of-a-kind designs. Rachel Antonoff and Alison Lewis, the designers behind the indie label Mooka Kinney, comb flea markets and estate sales for vintage clothing and fabrics.
“We couldn’t get over the wealth of amazing fabrics we found,” Ms. Antonoff said, “so we just started making these dresses.” Today they sell their brightly patterned pieces at stores like Barneys and Satine in Los Angeles.
Sydney Albertini, a painter and ceramicist, sells her whimsically patterned tunics and wrap skirts from her studio in East Hampton, N.Y. “I think to myself, ‘Maybe one of the little girls whose portrait I’m painting would wear this skirt,’ ” she said of the designs she hopes one day to place in progressive boutiques.
Etsy, a two-year-old online marketplace for craftspeople, has 50,000 sellers, many of whom are independent artisans trying a hand at fashion. The online crafts market, initially built on sales of toys and dolls, has shifted to clothing in the last year or two, said Robert Kalin, Etsy’s founder, growing from 2 or 3 percent six years ago to as much as 30 percent.
Online marketers showcase handiwork that can be surprisingly refined, surpassing the cable-stitch sweaters, wrap skirts and tote bags that are the bread and butter of older crafts primers. The wares include items like fishnet funnel-neck tunics, ruched camisoles, intricate cocoon wraps, cobwebby disco dresses and even tulle-edged corsets.
Designers and mass apparel makers keep an eye on the independent craftspeople, Mr. Kalin said. “This is where fashion comes from. The big companies tend to be a couple of years behind in poaching ideas from these little guys, who will always be on the cutting edge.”
Vashti Valentine has yet to explore the opportunities of Etsy, but Ms. Valentine, who attends Make Workshop, has dreams of her own. She inherited a desire to sew from her mother, who died last fall. “In August she was supposed to make my wedding dress,” she said, “but she was so sick that she couldn’t.”
To honor her mother’s legacy, she is learning to use a machine and hopes eventually to design a line with a friend.
Vivian Pan, her classmate and a graduate student in psychology, plans only to acquire enough tailoring skills to whip up decorative pieces for her home.
“I have expensive tastes and a grad school budget,” she said. “But that’s not going to get in my way.”
“Tim Dundon
– called the ‘King of Compost’ by Organic Gardening Magazine – has cultivated the mammoth compost pile in the backyard of his Altadena home, carefully blending household garbage, animal droppings and mulch into an organic tower of supercharged soil!
“Tim has demonstrated that the management of organic material is not only fun, but also takes those who are involved into a whole new dimension of enlightenment.
“Dedicating his entire life to proving the marvel of mulch, this man has accomplished wonders towards the education of schools, children, their families and the community at large.”
(Corbin courtesy N. Shinewater; knitware courtesy M. Frances)
“Tracks,” a French-German TV program, is featuring a segment on Arthur in its 12 July 02007 broadcast. Arik Roper, Vashti Bunyan, Brightblack Morning Light and Priestbird are also featured.
Print Fetish interviews Arthur editor/owner Jay Babcock.
Arthur was featured in the 29 June 02007 edition of Spanish daily El Pais. (No link yet, sorry!)
Arthur Magazine 