Monthly Archives for June 2008

BRAVO!: Counter military recuiters boldly pushing for high school campus access in L.A.

Activists seek to counter military recruiters on L.A. campuses

Group will ask school officials for access to high school facilities. But some say their message is controversial.

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

LATimes, June 8, 2008

Troubled by military recruiting at Los Angeles high schools, activists are seeking equal access to students on campus to provide what they say is unvarnished information about the armed forces and information about nonmilitary careers.

The Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools*, a Southern California group of educators, volunteers and veterans dedicated to promoting nonviolent alternatives to military service, is taking the proposal to the Los Angeles Board of Education, saying it is vital that students have the truth about military enlistment. That “truth,” however, is subjective: Some view the group’s literature as controversial itself.

Recruiters “are marketers. They have a quota, and it’s their job to get students to sign up. So just like a car salesman, they’re going to say everything they can to get students to sign up,” said Arlene Inouye, coordinator of the nonprofit South Pasadena-based group funded by grants and donations.

“The most important thing we want to tell students is that the military enlistment decision is probably one of the — if not the — most important decision in their life. It’s a really serious matter. They need to hear about some of the realities of what veterans have experienced and what the military enlistment contract actually says.”

Some military officials questioned the peace group’s motives.

” . . . we are not confident that these groups’ intentions are to provide students with opportunities, but rather to spend a great deal of time and effort to provide disinformation that advances their organizations’ agenda with little regard to the individual student,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, a Pentagon spokesman, in an e-mail.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, requires schools to provide military recruiters with the same access to high schools as colleges and employers, and compels schools to turn over students’ names, addresses and phone numbers unless parents opt out.

The U.S. Department of Defense spends $3.5 billion annually on recruitment and enlisted more than 181,000 people for active-duty forces in the 2007 fiscal year and more than 138,000 for the reserves. The Southland is fertile ground: Los Angeles County ranked third in the nation in raw numbers of Army recruits in 2007.

Military recruiters’ access varies among schools, with some administrators allowing them to wander the halls chatting with students, work out with the football team, and bring Hummers and sports cars on campus.

Under a pilot proposal, which United Teachers Los Angeles endorsed in April, peace group volunteers would visit 10 to 15 high schools per week and set up a table where they would offer information about enlistment, career alternatives and opting not to have their personal information shared with the military.

In May, Los Angeles Unified School District administrators said they could not unilaterally order high schools to give the group access. Instead, Inouye was urged to meet with principals, assistant principals and guidance counselors.

Inouye will present the proposal to the school board’s curriculum and instruction committee Thursday; it could come before the full board in July.

Legal precedent more than two decades old allows counter-recruiters equal access to schools, but in practice, rules vary widely. Some schools have opened their doors to counter-recruiters for years, while others refuse to allow them on campus. But as concerns about recruitment in a time of war have grown, schools in Oxnard, Minneapolis and Pinellas County, Fla., decided this school year to provide equal access to organizations such as Coalition Against Militarism in Schools, Veterans for Peace and others.

In Austin, Texas, Nonmilitary Options for Youth has worked for more than a decade to reach out to student organizations and guidance counselors. Two years ago, the organization, along with student activists, persuaded district officials to restrict recruiters’ movements on campuses so they could no longer roam the halls talking to students and to clarify counter-recruiters’ access to campus, said Susan Van Haitsma, a leader of the group.

Currently, the group sets up a table at most of the district’s dozen high schools about once a semester, distributing “Addicted to War” comic books, holding a poll in which students vote on how the government ought to spend its budget, and bringing in veterans to talk to students about their military experiences. The group is limited by its small budget and the free time of its volunteers, but Van Haitsma said they reach about 500 students annually.

In Los Angeles, access varies greatly depending on the school, Inouye said. Some administrators will not allow such groups on campus and try to restrict them from distributing pamphlets outside school. Others, such as Garfield High School, are more open.

At a career fair at the East Los Angeles high school last month, Inouye’s organization was given a table next to the Marines.

Staff Sgt. Victor Jimenez distributed T-shirts, water bottles, key chains and posters, and collected dozens of students’ phone numbers. Jimenez said he typically visits the school about twice a week, meeting with interested teenagers to discuss enlistment and going running with students. He also meets with students in his office in Montebello.

“We sit down with them one on one and talk about what the Marine Corps offers for them,” he said.

Recruiters for the Army and the Air Force worked other aisles of the job fair, sprinkled among scores of recruiters from UCLA, a beauty college, Toyota and others. About 1,500 students streamed through the gymnasium.

Jimenez was surprised to learn that the women at the next table were counter-recruiters.

“I don’t care,” he said. “They’re welcome to do what they want.”

But when told some of CAMS’ talking points, his eyes grew wide. “Wow,” he said.

The group does not mince words — a brochure on the table aimed at young women considering joining the military features the testimony of a woman who said she was raped while serving in the Navy, and says women in the armed forces are more likely to be sexually assaulted compared with women in the general population.

The volunteers told students that they would be sacrificing their lives to enrich private companies, that the military unfairly targeted minorities and poor communities, and that they would be sent to Iraq and “get your heads blown off.”

Freshman Ashley Flores, 15, said she was pleased to hear a different viewpoint on campus.

“You see lots of recruiters” at school, said Ashley, who said she was opposed to the war in Iraq and whose stepbrother is an Army soldier stationed there. “I think the military just shows the positives of what you get if you join. They just show the good things.”

But junior Jessica Reynoso, 16, whose brother is also in the Army, said the counter-recruiters’ table was offensive. In the poll about government spending, she bypassed the options labeled “education,” “environment” and “healthcare.”

“I put all my pennies in the military,” she said. “My brother’s risking his life for us.”

Inouye asked students why they wanted to join the military, turning to freshman Adrian Cruz, who plans to enlist in the Marines upon graduation.

“I want to fight for our country,” Adrian said. “I’ll be, like, the hero.”

Inouye told the wiry teen he would end up in Iraq “killing a lot of innocent people,” or could be killed himself.

“I’m only going to kill people who shoot at me,” Adrian replied, patting the round Marines sticker he had stuck to the strap of his backpack.

Adrian said he was angry that Inouye, along with his parents, brother and teachers, questioned his decision about what to do with his life.

“It just made me kind of mad,” he said. “I know they are right. I just put it in the back of my head. I still want to be a Marine.”

Adrian went back to the Marines’ table, where Jimenez, in his dress uniform, handed the 15-year-old his phone number.

seema.mehta@latimes.com

* The Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools is one of the beneficiaries of “So Much Fire to Roast Human Flesh,” a 2006 CD compilation by musician Josephine Foster and distributed by Arthur Magazine. This CD is still available–more info here.

NEWEST WALMART EMPLOYEES: AC/DC

Wal-Mart Signals Changes in Its Music Sales
By Ethan Smith

Veteran rockers AC/DC are set to become the next major band to sell a new album only through Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a move that highlights the growing music-industry clout of Wal-Mart.

The AC/DC deal, however, comes at a time when the retail giant — the largest seller of compact discs in the nation — is signaling it may rock the music world by stocking fewer CDs. Such a move is part of a trend that would further accelerate the already steep decline of CD sales as consumers make the transition to digital music.

…

The New York Times -June 9, 2008

For Some Music, It Has to Be Wal-Mart and Nowhere Else
By ROBERT LEVINE

One of the biggest music events of the summer has already taken place in Fayetteville, Ark. From Tuesday through Thursday last week, the Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas presented shows by Journey, the country singer Keith Urban, the “American Idol” personality Carrie Underwood and the alternative rock group All-American Rejects.

The occasion that brought this all-star line-up together? Not a festival or cause but Wal-Mart Stores’ annual shareholders meeting. Wal-Mart was the largest music retailer in the country last year, so musicians (and their labels) are eager to maintain good relationships, appearing in the special concerts for the chain, which are also open to the public.

During her performance, Ms. Underwood volunteered that a Wal-Mart had recently opened in her hometown, Checotah, Okla., and Keith Urban changed his lyrics from “Goodbye, city, I’m country-bound” to “I’m Wal-Mart-bound.” And the retailer is using its leverage to aggressively pursue new deals.

On Tuesday Wal-Mart started selling on an exclusive basis a three-disc collection by the popular 1980s band Journey called “Revelation.” The difference, however, is that there is no middleman: the album was bought directly from the band without the help of a record label. Journey went right to Wal-Mart and kept most of the money a record company would normally take as profit for the group. Last year Wal-Mart made a similar deal with the Eagles, who like Journey are represented by Front Line Management, the nation’s largest music management company.

The deals highlight the changing dynamics of the music industry as once-powerful labels decline because of the migration to digital downloads. To fill the gap, musicians are scrambling to connect with fans, and Wal-Mart is using these exclusive deals to assume a new role: hit maker.

The Eagles’ double disc, “Long Road Out of Eden,” sold 711,000 copies in its first week and three million since its release, according to Nielsen SoundScan, impressive numbers at a time when CD sales are declining. Journey sold 45,000 albums in its first three days on sale, and Irving Azoff, founder and chief executive of Front Line Management and a music industry veteran who ran MCA Records in the ’80s, predicted that it would sell more than 80,000 copies in its first week. That is probably enough to debut in the top five, and significantly more than its last album sold in total.

“With the downturn, the labels couldn’t match the marketing commitments that Wal-Mart could make,” Mr. Azoff said. “It was well in excess of anything a label could do.”

Front Line took on some of the traditional work of a record label, producing a video and promoting songs to radio. But most of the marketing was done at Wal-Mart itself. The chain ran print, radio and television advertisements that promoted the exclusive availability of the Eagles album. Stores display the Eagles and Journey albums in several locations, not just the music department, and this week some stores had the Journey DVD playing on their big-screen televisions.

In some ways, the arrangements that Wal-Mart has made with Journey and the Eagles represent the mainstream equivalent of the path that artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have taken by releasing albums on the Internet without a traditional label.

“It just goes to show you that fewer artists need to be associated with record companies,” said Larry Mestel, chief executive of Primary Wave Music Publishing and former chief operating officer of Virgin Records. “They don’t need to give up a big chunk of money to the record companies when they’re iconic. They can go direct to Wal-Mart and make four to five dollars per CD.”

It’s hard to tell how much traditional labels are threatened by the prospect of artists’ selling directly to retailers. New albums from more established acts can be less profitable if they have negotiated a higher royalty rate. And although the Eagles are reliable sellers, Journey is what industry executives delicately refer to as a “heritage act,” a steady summer concert attraction that sells relatively few albums of new material.

One reason the Eagles and Journey albums have sold so many copies is their price: $11.98. That’s an unusually low retail price, especially for “Revelation,” which consists of one CD of new songs, one CD of new renditions of Journey classics and one DVD of a recent concert performance. But one of Wal-Mart’s goals in promoting such releases is drawing customers into stores with a bargain they can’t find anywhere else.

“The goal with almost everything we do is to figure out how to make some kind of a profit,” said Gary Severson, Wal-Mart’s head of home entertainment. “But this can also give us the opportunity to add to the brand, and I hope we’ve accomplished that as well.”

Exclusive album deals have been happening for some time with that goal in mind. Wal-Mart and Best Buy, the two largest physical retailers of music, often get special editions of albums, with exclusive songs or video footage. In 2005, Wal-Mart made a deal to become the exclusive distributor of Garth Brooks albums, including a new collection of outtakes. But the Eagles and Journey are the first two major acts that have released albums of new material that are available at only one retailer. And although record labels tread carefully around such deals, for fear of upsetting rival stores, bands need not be so sensitive.

This summer Wal-Mart will carry an exclusive release by the young country singer Taylor Swift in a promotion that also calls for Ms. Swift to promote L.E.I. jeans. (In this case, Ms. Swift’s label was part of the deal.) And Mr. Azoff said that he was already talking to Wal-Mart about an exclusive deal for Fleetwood Mac’s next release. “Classic rock really works there,” Mr. Azoff said.

Front Line is only one of the major management companies that are trying to take on roles that have traditionally been filled by labels. The Nettwerk Music Group, which manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan, has set up custom labels for some small artists. And Q-Prime, which manages Metallica, recently hired an executive to start an independent label of sorts.

The idea of treating the label as a middleman that can be cut out fits Wal-Mart’s approach to cost-cutting. In the past the chain has pushed record labels to lower their wholesale prices, arguing that customers would buy more CDs if they were less expensive.

“I think that with any product, when the price goes up, the demand goes down,” said Mr. Severson. “Sometimes it’s about the right artist with the right product at the right price.”

For Journey, some of the success of “Revelation” is also about the right timing. For a band that hit its commercial peak in the early ’80s, Journey has enjoyed an unlikely revival in the last few years. The song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” has been licensed for “Family Guy,” “Scrubs,” “Laguna Beach” and, most famously, the last episode of “The Sopranos,” and the exposure increased the song’s sales on Apple’s iTunes store. Journey, which has gone through several vocalists, recently hired a new singer, Arnel Pineda, whom Journey’s guitarist, Neal Schon, discovered singing the band’s covers on YouTube.

But Journey would almost certainly not be selling as many albums without the support of Wal-Mart.

“Shelf space has shrunk so much over the last five years that for anyone to give you shelf space and exposure is a big deal,” said Terry McBride, chief executive of Nettwerk Music Group. “Should the labels be worried? There’s been a move away from the labels for a number of years now. And it’s not necessarily their fault. The shelf space to have those records sell just isn’t there. That’s the market reality.”

Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Rosenbloom contributed reporting.

"Jajouka music as it should be heard, in the open air on their mountain."

JULY 29, 2008: Brian Jones 40th Anniversary Festival With the Master Musicians of Joujouka

Moroccan Village of Joujouka honours Rolling Stone Founder Brian Jones in 40th Anniversary Festival

Tickets and Booking:
www.joujouka.net

To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones’s visit to their village, Morocco’s most renowned Sufi trance Masters, The Master Musicians of Joujouka, are staging a music festival in his honour on 29 July, in Joujouka, Morocco.

Joujouka is a tiny village in the southern Rif Mountains of Morocco founded by the 8th century Sufi mystic Sidi Ahmed Scheich. It is famous for its Sufi trance music, its connections with the Beat Generation and the Rolling Stones, and its annual celebration of the God Pan.

On 29th July 1968, following in the footsteps of William Burroughs, Robert Palmer and Paul Bowles; Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones and recording engineer George Chkiantz visited Joujouka with Brion Gysin and Mohamed Hamri to record an album with the Master Musicians. Jones spent much of his last year mixing and producing the Joujouka tapes and preparing the cover art. He died on 7 July 1969. The resulting LP “Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka” was the first release on Rolling Stones Records in 1971.

In Joujouka the villagers still perform the ancient Rites of Pan. A boy sewn in goatskins dances wildly to the music of the Masters. This music and festival is called Boujeloud, or the Father of Skins in Joujouka. It is a fertility rite directly related to the ancient worship of the God Pan. Pan was evoked in the springtime to ensure the fertility of both the crops and the people. The people of Joujouka have kept this ancient tradition alive. The evening and night will be devoted to the healing trance music of Joujouka. There will be a full performance of the Boujeloud Rite in honour of Brian Jones. The Master Musicians of Joujouka 2006 CD Boujeloud features various variations on the ritual music associated with Pan.

In his short stay in Joujouka Brian Jones made a big impression on the musicians. To this day the song “Brian Jones Joujouka very Stoned” sung in English and Arabic, is a standard at all ceremonies and celebrations in the village.

To commemorate the 40th Anniversary of Brian Jones’s visit to their village the Master Musicians of Joujouka are staging a festival to honour Brian Jones memory and his efforts to raise them and their fathers out of poverty.

Guests will be transported to the village from the nearest town Ksar El Kebir. They will stay in the village in traditional Joujouka houses with musicians and their families. In the afternoon there will be a visit to the 8th century sanctuary of Joujouka’s patron saint Sidi Ahmed Schiech and to the cave of Pan/Boujeloud.

This is an once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience a day and night in Joujouka as guests of the Master Musicians of Joujouka and their families in their mountain village.

Master Musician of Joujouka Ahmed Attar recalls Jones’ visit in 1968 “I was a twelve years old learning drumming with my father and the Mallims (Masters) when Brian Jones came. Brian Jones was very good. My father played rhiata with and for him and I danced and played my drum. He came with Hamri and Brion Gysin. He had long hair and he rubbed my head. He brought a lot to Joujouka. Besef Baraka. We will mark the 40th Anniversary of his visit here in Joujouka to honour Brian Jones and to let people come to Joujouka and see what it is like here for themselves. It is good to feel the Baraka (Blessings) of Sidi Ahmed Scheich. Joujouka is his country. He is the Cultivator with Lions and Healer of Crazy Minds.”

Food and Board
Full board will be provided: lunch on arrival on the 29th, a celebratory feast in the evening including charcoal roasted whole sheep and a wide variety of mountain dishes including many vegetarian specialties. Traditional breakfast will be provided on the morning of the 30th. All the dishes will be prepared by the villagers and will be traditional Moroccan fare for a celebratory feast.

Frank Rynne, co-organiser of the Festival, has produced three CDs of Master Musicians of Joujouka and also their 1996 collaboration with Marianne Faithfull “My Only Friend”(10%:file under Burroughs, Sub Rosa Records). He has visited and recorded for extended periods in the village since 1994.

“I first met the musicians in 1992 when I curated a William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin art show. It is great that the musicians have decided to celebrate Brian Jones life and work. As well as giving people an opportunity to hear their music as it should be heard, in the open air on their mountain.”

More info music and videos
myspace.com/mastermusiciansofjoujouka

Tickets and Booking:
www.joujouka.net

Art auction to raise completion funds for Lavender Diamond film

From Maximilla Lukacs:

“For the last few months I have been working on a film to accompany the Lavender Diamond album “Imagine Our Love”. We had a sold-out event last week at the Silent Movie Theater in celebration of the film with performances by Becky Stark, The Chapin Sisters, Eleni Mandell, Mia Doi Todd and Palms. We also screened a sneak peak at the film.

Pictures and reviews:
imagineourlove.uber.com/news

“We are having an online art auction to raise funds to complete the film. Artists include Kime Buzzelli, Ron Rege Jr, Devendra Banhart, Guy Blakeslee (The Entrance Band), Jeaneen Lund, Alissa Anderson, Alia Penner, Annie Costello Brown, Amy Joe Diaz, Miss KK, Mekenzie Schneider andRachael Cassells. The auction will continue to be updated so please check in with our Uber site:

imagineourlove.uber.com

as we will be adding new work in the weeks to come.

“Also, we will be updating the site with upcoming events, stills, and maybe some footage from the film… (we have been shooting on a fancy Red Camera with our amazing DP, 3-D pioneer Max Penner) Thank you to all of you for all your love and support. We hope to bring forth some beautiful visons to help heal our planet.

“Peace on Earth forever!
~Maximilla”

ARTHUR events today in Los Angeles

Arthur columnist ERIK DAVIS is in town to do his bus tour of spiritual/mystical sites around Hollywood and L.A, starting at 10:45am…. He’ll also be doing a talk tomorrow downtown at Clifton’s…

Jack Kirby collaborator and biographer MARK EVANIER will be doing a talk and signing at 2pm at Meltdown on Sunset… (Kirby was the great comic book creator who gave us the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Thor, New Gods, Forever People and so much more…)

Arthur contributor JOE CARDUCCI will be doing a talk and signing at Book Soup on Sunset tonight at 7pm, on the occasion of the publication of his SST memoirs, “Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That.” Black Flag, minutemen, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Saccharine Trust, Saint Vitus, Opal — Joe saw it all, and helped make it happen. His wildly controversial book-length treatise “Rock and the Pop Narcotic” is also back in print…

More information on all of these events is available in the ARTHUR AGENDA window above…

And, hey, if you’re going to any of these and you’ve got a good digital video camera… Record it! Get in touch with us and we’ll post it on
arthurworldservice.com

thanks,

The Arthur Gang

How to effectively subvert corporate branding and manufacturing: an interview with Rasmus Nielsen of SUPERFLEX (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 14 (January 2005)

A DRINK WITH A TWIST

How art collective/company SUPERFLEX is changing the world, one soda pop at a time.

Text by Jay Babcock, photography by W.T. Nelson.

Openings at art galleries always offer beverages, but this is taking the concept to the extreme: here, at downtown Los Angeles’ Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theatre (REDCAT) gallery one night this past spring, the drink—which is being bottled and sold in the gallery itself—is the art.

The drink on offer is a berry-flavored energy soda called Guarana Power, jointly developed in the last year by two cooperatives: a three-man Copenhagen-based art collective called Superflex and COIMA, a guarana berry farming collective based in Maues, Brazil. For the next month, REDCAT will be transformed into an in-house Guarana Power bottler and an instructional workshop in a strategy as delicious and inspiring as the drink itself: the exploitation of powerful transnational corporations by an alliance of self-organizing third-world farmers.

Intrigued by the underlying concept, the accompanying literature and the simply unbelievable documentary films being screened in the gallery, I contacted Superflex’s Rasmus Nielsen, in town with fellow Superflexer Jakob Fenger as visiting faculty at CalArts for a semester, for an interview.

ARTHUR: How did the Guarana Power drink come about?

Rasmus Nielsen: We were invited by the Amazon Government to a residency in Brazil. We were contacted by this cooperative of guarana farmers, who wanted to present themselves and wanted to talk about their organization, because we had said we were interested in how various people locally have organized themselves They came to us and explained to us why they had formed this organization.

Guarana is a berry, it looks like an eye, it grows on these bushes, it’s a very old Indian tradition that you dry it and then you pound it and then you mix it with water or juice and then you drink it. It has caffeine and other kinds of energetic elements—it’s like an energy drink, and it’s used in sodas. The biggest soda in South America, bigger than Coca Cola, is a guarana-based soda called Antarctica Guarana.

What had happened was these small breweries had merged and founded their own big company which was called the American Beverage Company, AMBEV. Pepsico was a part of that also, that major fusion. It was kind of a classical trend that comes with globalization, you have these big fusions, which then begin to monopolize the purchase of the raw commodities.

Because they are basically one big group, they can dictate the price they purchase the berries at…

And there’s nothing illegal in that, they’re not committing any kind of crime or anything. But what happened was prices fell 80% in just a couple of years! That affected this area a lot, because selling their guarana is their area’s main income. So these guys had formed this cooperative to try and deal with that situation. They didn’t want to have to sell their guarana to AMBEV at these low prices—but then they didn’t who else to sell it to.

So we agreed on making a workshop. The whole cooperative came and we showed them some ideas we had seen in other places and situations, the main idea being, What if you twist the situation? The way these big multinationals work is they use the raw material coming from farmers. What if the farmers used the raw materials that the company is producing, which is their identity, their brand, their logo, all this kind of stuff?

That was one part of it. We also agreed that unless you have to have some part in the next phase of the commodification of the guarana. If you don’t, you are fucked, basically. This is case for most of the Third World farmers; this is the logic of the present global economic structure. If you are a sugar or coffee producer or whatever, if you’re only a producer of raw materials, then you are screwed. The raw material producers be part of the commodification, or own elements of the chain, that’s the key.

And it’s not gonna be sold as a high-end soda, or a “fair price” soda. A lot of the alternatives to big global market structures try to talk to your moral sense, like “Be ethical. Buy this coffee that costs ten dollars more per kilo.” We don’t wanna go that way. We wanna totally appropriate the rules of the basic soda. This is not gonna be pushed as a fair-price thing, but as a soda, where you like it. Of course you like the idea, but you don’t buy it necessarily because of your moral point of view. Cuz I think those attempts have failed, somehow. Not totally, but it will always only be a small portion of the people. Like, how often do you buy “fair price” coffee? It’s really hard to find! So we try to not make something special, but just do the same thing as the normal sodas, same price as normal sodas. Same level, somehow. But it’s owned by the producers, rather than multinationals.

How did you come up with this idea?

For a long time we’ve worked in Thailand, where copying as an economic strategy. You copy a Rolex watch or a shirt or something and sell it. It’s an economic strategy. But then there’s another element to it, which is the interesting part: you copy something, and you TWIST it a little bit, and then you send it back. Maybe you change the name a little bit. Maybe you add your local flavor.

So we showed the guarana collective a couple examples of this, one of them being an example from France, where some French Tunisian second-generation guys have launched a product called Mecca Cola. They use the Coca Cola imagery with red and white and cursive but then substitute the word “Mecca,” which is the city in Saudi Arabia of great importance. Mecca Cola has succeeded in making politics in the framework of the market, basically: the surplus of the Mecca Cola goes to so-called humanitarian issues in Palestine. I don’t know exactly what that means [laughs] but anyway it makes a policy using Coca Cola as a medium, somehow. That strategy we found interesting.

We also know, because we have communicated with these Mecca Cola people, that the guy who started it was a radio journalist.

They had no experience in making sodas, but they were able to do it.

Right. So people started thinking and then coming up with ideas and what came out of the workshop was, We should make a soda. That’s the most obvious thing. Then we discussed how this would look and things like that. We made a prototype of this soda which we showed in the Venice Biennial in Italy last year. Now we’re showing it here in L.A. The next step is there are some people who want to put money into it. The final goal of course is to get in to a market situation and then make a foundation that owns the recipe and takes care of it. This cannot develop into a copy of the structure that these multinational corporations represent, but something that has a different character, that is owned by the people who are producing the guarana and the idea.

You had to figure out the recipe. Reverse-engineering.

We took one of these big sodas that we were somehow copying, that we wanted to modify, and took it to a chemist. He deciphered it, and came up with a recipe, which is probably pretty close to the original one. Exactly. But then we added a lot more of guarana to it. We modified it. But taste-wise, it follows close to the original one.

Of course this is slightly dangerous. Copyright-wise, you can get into trouble. But that’s consciously built into our strategy. We thought, Well if these people come after us, that also highlights the problem that they are causing.

Have you got in trouble yet?

Not yet. We have with other projects. We made a modified Danish lamp that we had copied in Bangkok, and we made it so it would work with biogas instead of electricity. But that lamp is illegal. I can’t show you a picture of it. It would be illegal! Copyright law is stretching out to more and more areas of society, and of course that’s usually serving the guys on top.

You’re taking the “open source” idea from software development—Linux, etc.—and taking it to things much more fundamental: what we drink, how we light our homes…

Yeah. We did a project in Italy where we had art students copying things from 7-11, like Mars Bars and toothpaste. Copying them, changing them maybe a little bit, and then selling them at a market. When I was a kid, we used to have this soda fountain machine, where you could make your own soda at home. It felt as a kid so empowering. You could make your own soda! Of course it was a soda company selling it to you anyway but that idea of reverse-engineering–I think it’s very interesting. Imagine if you started making your own Mars Bars! It’s a very small political act but if a lot of people would do that it would change fundamental economic structures.

Copying is a strategy of economics, but it’s also a strategy of some kind of counter-identity strategy. The potential empowerment in doing that, taking apart, reverse engineering these brands, this specific capitalist cultural power that comes from these brands, taking it a part bit by bit somehow… It’s about being on top of things you put in your mouth, things you buy, things you wear.

For Guarana Power, it looks like you stamped your new logo literally on top of the “Antarctica Guarana” logo.

Yeah. Actually in the beginning we modified the original logo just a little bit. We were showing it in the National Gallery in Finland, and their lawyer was afraid that they would sued by Pepsico or Ambev or something. Which is interesting that even before you do something in a museum , there’s a lawyer’s copyright checking you! It shows you how far the copyright law stretches out into contemporary culture. We were sitting and talking with her and we said, “Well okay what about if we self-censor it? Just put a black box in front of it.” But she was like, “Yeah but you can still see it in the back.” Then we were like, “Okay we will make it a little bit bigger.” She’s a lawyer, knowing about these things, and then at the end she says, “Okay now it’s big enough, now you can do it.” We ended up kind of liking it, that it was sort of censored but you could still… In South America, you will recognize it. It’s like if you used the red color with a Coke with a black color, then it’s Coca Cola. And Coca Cola tried to copyright those two things together, the color red and Coke, which they failed in. That’s like copyrighting a car, or shoes, or something.

You come from Denmark. How did you become interested in people in the plight of third world farmers?

Basically just being there. We were in a residency in the Amazon, and we were just listening to what they were telling us. Of course they are living in a totally different situation then us—I come from a Northern European, very rich country—but somehow we are part of the same economic structure, and we are both faced with economic and cultural pressure coming from this contemporary capitalist culture. They are the producers of the stuff we drink. Even Coca-Cola takes caffeine out of guarana and puts it in Coke! It’s all very linked. In that way, it’s natural to be interested in where things come from.

I’m trying to think really hard about how did I get interested. I wouldn’t say it’s just ethics: ‘I’m trying to be a good moral person and therefore I should do something good.’ That’s not the issue. Their situation is so typical. You don’t need to be an economist to figure this out. Things get produced in the Third World, gets commodified and branded by the First World, and sold and the profit gets made. That’s why things are so cheap here. That’s kind of how it works. I feel if I could change that just a little bit, that makes my day somehow.

Not all of the projects we do are Third World-based. They all deal somehow with elements of empowerment and self-organizing. It’s somehow a trend in contemporary capitalist logic to disable community structures: it could be family structures in America, it could be guarana farmers in Brazil – so we try to make these tools that empower people with creating their own TV stations, or energy systems, or soda, or whatever.

You come at this from an art angle, not an activist angle. You’re an art collectiove. How can you afford to do this?

We were trained in sculpture at the Denmark Royal Academy of Fine Arts. But the framework of the art world seemed too narrow, somehow. On the other hand, it was a space available that was not totally defined by the same parameters that you would find in business, where you basically have to make a surplus, or in academia where you somehow have to produce a specific kind of result, which is very often also based on some kind of economic thinking. So we found this area that was a white space where you could experiment with things and do things that failed. You could ask questions without necessarily having answers. You could make models, propose projects that may not be sound or economically viable. All these opportunities put together made us not totally leave the art world, while also having an activity that’s going on totally outside.

In a museum situation, like here at Redcat, it’s showing a model, it’s showing a prototype, it’s discussing a problem in a public forum. I guess you could do that somewhere else, also, but in this particular case, the context of art facilitates a project like that. We’re basically just pirating on that structure, and they don’t seem to mind!

Of course there’s potentially also a danger. You have to be aware when you use this strategy, it could also turn out, “Well this is kind of JUST art, therefore it’s not really serious, maybe doesn’t really mean anything.” There’s a certain element of repressive tolerance built in to that structure also. You just have to be aware of that when you work there, that this can happen, that it can be commodified as an art object. Everything can be turned into objects within this context. You just have to work with that, somehow.

And Superflex is a company as well as an artists’ collective.

Yes. If you want to achieve something today, what form can you choose that is most flexible in contemporary society? The role of the artist is definitely pretty limited. You do a project like the soda project or biogas and you go out to an investor, they wouldn’t take you seriously because you’re an artist. But as a corporation? Suddenly they listen. You just use the language that this world understands. It’s somehow about appropriating identities to make things happen.

The projects have different spaces that they operate in. One can be an artspace and one can be a farm in Africa. Sometimes they merge. Sometimes funding from one place goes to the other. Like this biogas project: it’s basically a system that makes energy out of shit. It makes gas in your kitchen, so you can make food on waste, basically. We made a small system that facilitates that. It’s an energy system that enables people to become self-sufficient in energy: you don’t have to buy energy, or firewood or charcoal, you don’t have to walk really far to the forest to get firewood, you can make your own energy from basically the shit that your household generates. It is not a new invention, we took some technology and scaled it down, so it’s basically on a family level for families in Cambodia or Thailand. For that project, there were investors who came and put money in the project as a kind of investment thing, totally outside the art context, and part of that money we have also used within the art context. And vice versa.

You just have to remember in the morning what hat to put on. It’s a little bit confusing sometimes. It’s like applied schizophrenia. You try somehow to avoid specialization, which is a global tendency also. Because, for example, if this project ONLY was an art project, I think it would have limits. It would probably be commodified and then some kind of art collector would buy it and it would end up in a corner in a … That kind of limit.

We think of our work as tools that can work on different levels at the same time, without that sort of opposing each other. Right now we teach at Cal Arts. We’ve also taught at an agriculture school in Cambodia. In that situation, our background as artists doesn’t have any importance at all. It’s not a secret… but in that situation we are agricultural consultants. Again, just remember what hat to wear.

When did Superflex start, and how big are you now?

We started working together in ’93 in art school. There was three when we started and there’s still three and it’s the same three. It’s similar to marriage! [laughs] We live in Denmark, and then depending on the project we go and stay a month here and a month there. Bjorn [Christiansen, the third Superflex] is in Germany now, doing this open-source Mars bar thing with some German students. Basically he’s making a market where you copy things from 7-11 and sell them, close to another 7-11.

For different projects, there’s usually specialists involved. For example with Guarana Power, we work with a chemist. Of course, these technicians we work with, we can’t pay them what they’re worth, but they think it’s interesting to maneuver in different spaces as well. For example this guy we are working with now, he’s making a whiskey for Saudi Arabia, without alcohol. He’s using some kind of chili pepper to fake the alcohol feeling. And he says people get drunk! So, he likes trying out things like that. He gets to play!

POSTSCRIPT: An update from Superflex, October 16, 2004:
“Guarana Power is now on the market in Denmark, mainly in cafes and small shops. It’s small-scale distribution, but it’s going well. We have also opened a Guarana Power Bar in our office that runs every weekend. More info at guaranapower.org“