Drumming up an absolute storm last night; my ears are still ringing. And I need a new camera…

“So where is the hope that you talked about going to spring from?”

“From young people, like I said. From their ability to organise. I believe the internet may have an even stronger influence than people have realised. Albert Einstein said that when you join an organisation – and that could be anti-war, anti-pollution, or pro the rights of lesbians and homosexuals – Einstein said that, once you join, you have more individuality, not less. Because you are another person who wants to count.”

Studs Terkel: The world’s greatest interviewer
He met everyone from Martin Luther King to Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams to Bob Dylan. He survived the McCarthy era to record a unique oral history of his country. Now in his nineties, the great US chronicler is still raging against George Bush, Hillary Clinton and the death of radical America

The Robert Chalmers interview
The Independent
Published: 21 October 2007

“You are God,” I tell Studs Terkel. “Re-create the world.” The writer says nothing for a couple of seconds, which is not like him. “As you seem to know,” he replies, “that’s a question I used to ask people. I think the best way I can respond is to tell you how one young kid answered it. He said: ‘I don’t want that job. That job is impossible.'”

“And these days, when you listen to the news, I imagine you can’t help thinking that boy was right. How does it feel when you’re 95 and almost every ideal you ever cherished is under threat; when your nation’s government has become less peaceful and more bloodthirsty; less equitable and more shamelessly driven by greed? What’s it like, towards the end of a lifetime devoted to civil-rights activism, to find your country led by a president more right-wing and nakedly acquisitive than any other in your memory?”

“It’s true what you say. I can’t deny it. At the same time, I once wrote a book called Hope Dies Last. I believe that. I might feel hopelessness, except for one thing: the young. I don’t mean the young as they’re portrayed in TV commercials: whores, bimbos and dummies. There are many who do not fall into those categories. The big problem is that there’s no memory of the past. Our hero is the free market. People forget how the free market fell on its face way back in the Depression. And how the nation pleaded with its government and got help. Today, all these fat CEOs say we don’t need government. And these fat boys get away with it, because of our collective Alzheimer’s, and the power of Rupert Murdoch and CNN. There is despair in this country, sure. At the same time, we are waiting.”

“For what?”

“For new voices.”

We are talking in the living-room of Terkel’s house in Chicago, near the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1996 he underwent a quadruple-bypass operation; three years ago he broke his neck when he tripped over a pile of his own books. He is physically frail to the point that the last of his beloved Romeo y Julieta cigars has long since been smoked. But age has not extinguished his mental alertness or mischievous energy. He is wearing the red-and-white gingham shirt and red cotton socks that have been his uniform since the 1950s. Terkel, who can manage a few steps using a cane, apologises repeatedly for not being strong enough to take me downtown for dry Martinis.

The word genius – grotesquely overused in most areas of the media – is not a term you hear disinterested observers use to describe an interviewer. But Terkel – a man with the wit, the longevity, but none of the compliant orthodoxy of an Alistair Cooke – has been the greatest American broadcaster of his, or any other, generation and he has done more than enough to earn it.

Over the years Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong and Dorothy Parker, among others, have sat where I am now, face to face with the best-loved figure in Chicago. Woody Guthrie used to stay in this house. True, that was in the days before you had to bellow at Terkel in the kind of voice that, given a calm night and a favourable wind, might be audible across the state line in Indiana. It’s ironic that a man who defines his role as “listening to what other people tell me” can’t work his hearing aids any better than he could his tape recorder, a device he could never be trusted to operate unaided.

“I realised very early on,” he says, “that the conventional way of approaching an interview was useless; that taking in a notebook full of questions, for instance, only made people feel interrogated.”

Terkel broadcast daily for the best part of 50 years on Chicago station WFMT; his last regular show was 10 years ago. He developed a discursive style of interviewing, his energies devoted to capturing the voices of what many radio presenters persist in referring to as “ordinary people”. One of his favourite films is Miracle in Milan by Vittorio de Sica, at the end of which a group of slum-dwellers suddenly levitate and soar into the clouds: it’s as good an image as any to represent Terkel’s life’s achievement.

“I set out,” he said, “to swallow the world.”

“Like last year we having video projections and a toy raffle. We are
also having a circuit bending workshop at 1pm.This year we are having
Evil Moisture (Andy Bolus) from France play the show. The lineup is:

Evil Moisture
Xdugef
Univac
Igor Amokian
Phillip Stearns
Rocker Parlour
and
Caveat Emptor”

BEND THIS TIMES THREE
OCT 20TH 9PM
at
IL CORRAL
662 no. heliotrope dr
los angeles, ca 90004
http://ilcorral.net
http://cannedbeefrecords.com/bendthis3x

‘I was trapped into being alive’
Never one to shy away from confronting his inner demons, Robert Wyatt’s latest work is as poignant as ever. He talks to Dave Peschek

Dave Peschek
Thursday October 18, 2007
The Guardian

‘I’m a mine of misinformation,” says Robert Wyatt, wheeling his chair into the front room of the Georgian townhouse he shares with his wife, Alfreda Benge. “I’ll just invent something.”

Wyatt is eloquent, voluble, as mischievous as he is sincere. It is more than 40 years since he started making music: initially as part of the progressive Canterbury scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s; then with Soft Machine; then, nominally at least, solo. It is more than 30 years since he was rendered paraplegic after falling from a window at a party while drunk. In the meantime, he has become a national treasure. Each of his sporadic albums retains a singular sense of pop melody and the freedom and inflection of jazz; each is an event. Few musicians who have appeared on Top of the Pops (in his wheelchair) can also claim to have been profiled by the Spectator.

Before you meet Wyatt, you meet Alfie. She drives me from Market Rasen station to Louth, Lincolnshire – the first place they hit on a drive from London looking for an affordable property with a ground floor big enough to give Robert freedom of movement in his chair. Like Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, Robert and Alfie live in an artistic symbiosis. She often writes lyrics for him, and has provided beautifully strange and bright cover art for all his records since his solo debut in 1973. “Everyone,” says Wyatt, “should have an Alfie.”

She is fierce and warm, a Polish refugee who came to London after the war when she was seven with her mother, who now lives with them. When Wyatt met her, she was “a proper mod”, had “all the records you would expect a girl to have, but also all this hard bop jazz.” She was also, it is clear from the photos in Wyatt’s music room, luminously beautiful.

She has not had an easy time of it. Wyatt was incontinent after his paralysis – “hard to live with for a partner, that helplessness,” he says – and suffered from profound depression through the 1990s. “Me and Alfie became like strangers who just accommodated each other,” he recalls. He was “quite unable to sleep. Couldn’t lie still, revolving in the bed all night, and Alfie had to go upstairs to sleep. Wheeling up and down the corridor at 20 miles an hour, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t write. I lost my sight, I suddenly needed glasses. It felt like dying, but that would have been a release. Physically, as it turns out, I’m very resilient. I was trapped in having to be alive.” Counselling saved him, and, in 1997, he made one of his most cohesive records, Shleep.

Reuters, Oct. 16 – The acclaimed American filmmaker David Lynch has brought his own distinctive style to the issue of Middle East peace in a meeting with the Israeli President, Shimon Peres.

Lynch, who’s well-known for films such as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and the Twin Peaks television series, told Peres he wanted to help bring peace to the region.

The filmmaker has been an advocate of transcendental meditation for more than three decades and he told the Israeli president that the practice could provide the Jewish state and the Middle East with better protection than armies.

Peres, a veteran of politics and conflict, welcomed Lynch’s perspective and his visit, although he did appear bemused by the proposals.

link courtesy Joshua Babcock

Why I’ll miss Arthur

British music magazines are formulaic and superficial in comparison to the underground American press.

by Alan McGee

The Guardian Music Blog – March 7, 2007 8:30 AM

Last month, the sad news that Arthur magazine would be taking an indefinite hiatus from publication was announced. Based in Los Angeles, Arthur was the most eclectic, thoughtfully designed periodical I have encountered. Arthur was clearly drawn to psychedelic music and was always a good place to look for fresh acts but to say it was a music magazine would be a misnomer. This free publication presented contemporary artwork, photography, political essays and literary reviews with admirable disregard for categorisation. I never picked up a copy of Arthur without finding something intriguing and informative and I believe that magazines of which this can be said are all too few and far between.

How many music-orientated publications do we have in Britain that invigorate the mind and encourage the reader to explore unknown acts? Yet in the US, Arthur took a place among a score of publications that catered to tastes outside the boundaries of the big glossies. Major cities have weekly newspapers (the Village Voice, the Stranger) which cast a discerning eye over “alternative” culture, and magazines such as No Depression and Creem focus on specialised interests that are untouched by the chart-orientated monthlies.

While it would be unreasonable to expect the same range here in the UK, it has to be said that the publications we do have appear decidedly conservative and uninspired in comparison. There seems to be little or no ground between tabloid-style attention to chart acts and the more middle-aged, conservation work of tirelessly compiling lists and meditating on past glories. It’s a shame, because I believe that in drawing attention to what is being produced under the radar and discussing its merits, magazines like Arthur have a nurturing effect on great music and art. They connect artists with audiences and provide an outlet for intelligent discussion and detailed criticism. While the internet can be used to a similar purpose (salon.com being a good example), printed publications generally afford a greater consistency of quality and as far as I am concerned still command greater attention on the part of the reader.

When asked what inspired him to start the magazine, founder Jay Babcock replied: “I felt this creeping homogenisation of voice in magazines and papers. This snarky ironic tone was everywhere. Word counts were getting shorter for pieces and there didn’t seem to be room anymore for consistently in-depth writing.”

While considering the form his envisioned magazine would take, Babcock looked to American publications of the 60s, British music-press of the 70s, and several revered punk fanzines. The US has an undeniably rich tradition of countercultural publications and music journalism. Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus pioneered two very different approaches to criticism which have been broadly imitated over the decades (often in sloppy fashion) but the fact that Babcock looked to British publications of the 70s is a striking detail. It begs the question as to why a country in which the production of fanzines and musical criticism was once vibrantly alive now appears to offer so little in terms of printed matter.

I don’t wish to play the “everything was better in the 70s” card but it does seem to me that British music publications have fallen victim to the creeping homogenisation Babcock identifies. Beyond the fact that the magazines offered largely fall into the two categories I mentioned earlier, the relentlessly repetitive formulas they use are such that they have become a joke among people who care about music. Aside from the obsessive list-making there is a constant tendency to compare new artists to figures of the past rather than discuss what may be of interest in their own music. Namechecking like this does not encourage people to criticise music but promotes lazy and superficial categorisation.

In the US the backlash against this slump remains vigorous and widespread. While I truly hope that Arthur is revived I do not believe there will ever be any shortage of innovative publications of its kind in the US. It would be great to see the example taken up here. After all, wouldn’t you like the kind of magazine that brought you artwork from Art Spiegelman and Spike Jonze, a column from Thurston Moore, an interview with Arthur C Clarke and love advice from T-Model Ford?

mnsbc.com

Updated: 7:57 a.m. PT Oct 16, 2007

WASHINGTON – States and the federal government are not doing enough to monitor and manage the water quality of the Mississippi River and its impact on the Gulf of Mexico, where an annual “dead zone” from farm runoff is killing marine life, according to a major scientific assessment released Tuesday.

The study by experts with the National Research Council calls on the Environmental Protection Agency to coordinate the efforts affecting the river and the northern Gulf of Mexico where its water is discharged.

“The limited attention being given to monitoring and managing the Mississippi’s water quality does not match the river’s significant economic, ecological and cultural importance,” said David Dzombak, chairman of panel and professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

In recent years, actions have reduced much point-source pollution, such as direct discharges from factories and wastewater treatment plants.

But the report notes that many of the river’s remaining pollution problems stem from nonpoint sources, such as nutrients and sediments that enter the river and its tributaries through runoff.