[NOLA] COMMON GROUND co-founder admits being FBI INFORMANT first is a statement by a group of Austin-based community organizers to provide background info, followed below by the actual letter from Brandon Darby, co-founder of COMMON GROUND in New Orleans, in which he publicly acknowledges that he is working with the FBI and has been for some time…

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Go thou here.

The Boston Globe (Jan 2, 2009):

How the city hurts your brain
…And what you can do about it

By Jonah Lehrer

THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. Continue reading →

Maya wakes in a ghostly light…                                  Photo by Ira Cohen & Bill Devore

From The Sunday Times of London (November 25, 2007):

Ira Cohen: From the Mylar Chamber

‘It blew my mind, man’ – our correspondent sees a forgotten 1960s genius swirl back into focus

Waldemar Januszczak

A couple of years ago, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and turned on the telly, on which Channel 4 was showing something weird and wobbly that caught my eye. Had it been any other hour, I would surely have zapped ahead to a more legible offering, but you know how it is with late-night television. It takes you somewhere else. So, I found myself staying till the end with something called The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, directed by someone called Ira Cohen.

It is difficult to describe what happens in Thunderbolt Pagoda – not because I have forgotten, but because the action is pretty much indescribable. Against a background of throbbing Moroccan trance music, punctuated by the occasional screech of what seems to be a Formula One car going too fast around a bend, strange people dressed in strange robes loom in and out of focus in a strange and bendy way as the camera moves strangely among them and into them. The director appeared to be on acid, the actors on angel dust, the make-up artists on opium, the costumiers on methedrine and the set designers on speed. Ninety-nine times out of 100, I would have hated it. But The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, in the preferred parlance of its time, blew my mind, man.
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alerted via Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter!

If the devil were to come to this plane, it really would make sense to come as Bowie. I don’t think I need to explain any further, but…