“BioJustice 2007 is a week long celebration of sustainable food and alternatives to corporate healthcare. It is being developed by a wide coalition of public interest groups, activists, farmers, scientists, and concerned citizens, working together in response to the biotechnology industry’s international convention scheduled for the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center during May 6-9, 2007.
The biotech industry is bringing thousands of executives, lawyers, public relations people and corporate scientists to Boston to promote their agenda of genetically engineered food, unaffordable high-tech medicines and dangerous ‘biodefense’ research that increases the threat of new biological weapons. Through parades, rallies, educational events and publications, music, a free health care clinic and free daily non-GMO meals, Biojustice 2007 will dramatize popular resistance to this agenda and highlight a wealth of community-based alternatives.
BioJustice 2007 supports a decentralized local food economy that is free of genetically modified organisms, and is committed to working towards an accessible health care system not dominated by pharmaceutical companies and their costly and unreliable synthetic drugs. We oppose the commodification of life and support community resistance to the plans for a biological weapons lab in the heart of the Roxbury neighborhood. Join us!”
Psychobotany: Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Human/Plant Communication
proudly supported by
MACHINE PROJECT &
The CENTER for TACTICAL MAGIC
May 12 – June 16
MACHINE PROJECT
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 9002
213-483-8761
Opening Reception:
8pm May 12
Psychobotany: psycho (from the Greek psyche meaning mind or soul); botany (the study of plants).
Psychobotany cultivates a cultural terrain that includes a wide array of efforts at human/plant communication. Artists, scientists, subcultures, religions, activists, and visionaries all share plots in the field of Psychobotany. Combining elements of scientific truth, spiritual beliefs, aesthetic savvy, and social expression, Psychobotany is a fertile ground where the diverse cultural roots of human/plant communication can take hold.
Psychobotany blazes a meandering trail between the strict constraints of objective, peer-reviewed, rationalism and the unrestrained embrace of uncritical idealism. Along the way, one can expect to find military scientists rubbing shoulders with druids; tree-sitters cavorting with tech wizards; and conceptual artists conspiring with herbalists.
Featuring the efforts of:
Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
Botanicalls
Cleve Backster
Center for Tactical Magic
Peter Coffin
DARPA
Earth Films Molly Frances
Marc Herbst
Denise King
John Lifton
Richard Lowenberg
Jim Wiseman
Tom Zahuranec
…plus Moses, Druids, and More!
Please see psychobotany.com for further details, including screenings, performances, and presentations.
“I’ve always felt I belonged on the Lower East Side,” the 80-year-old avant-garde theater doyenne Judith Malina said recently as she sat on the terrace of her new apartment on Clinton Street. Several floors below, a half-dozen volunteers were putting the finishing touches on the 100-seat basement space that is the newest incarnation of her baby, the Living Theater. The opening night of “The Brig,” the first show there, was just hours away, but Ms. Malina made time to reminisce.
“The only time I lived down here,” she said, “was when I spent 30 days in the Women’s House of Detention.” That incarceration, for refusing to take shelter during an air-raid drill in 1957, was the second of many in a career that made her a pillar of the leftist cultural movement. Now, she said, “I really feel, finally, I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
And it took only a half-century. In 1947 Ms. Malina and her husband, the painter Julian Beck (she still refers to him by his full name, guru-like, though they were married for nearly 40 years), founded the Living Theater, an ensemble dedicated to challenging artistic and political conventions. For two decades they performed avant-garde and activist classics (Gertrude Stein, Lorca, Brecht) and naturalistic quasi-happenings. Audience interaction was the point, and confrontations, nudity, onstage and offstage sex and frequent police intervention were as much the marks of a good show as an ovation. (Ms. Malina, trained as an actress, did much of her best work with her arresting officers, she said.)
But the company was plagued with administrative and logistical problems. In 1963 its 14th Street theater was closed mid-run for tax evasion. Though the charge was eventually dropped, the couple’s antics at the trial, which they treated as an opportunity for anarchist performance, earned them a jail sentence for contempt of court.
The hoopla made them a cause célèbre but was not enough to keep them in New York. They continued to perform and teach, in various rented and public spaces in the United States and in Europe, but the theater has not had a dedicated building in New York for nearly 15 years.
The cheerful, modernist new Living Theater (the building was originally meant to be a hip restaurant, complete with two-story waterfall) seems at home among the neighborhood’s boutiques and bistros. And so, in a way, does its owner.
With witchy dyed black hair (she played the grandmother in the first “Addams Family” movie), ’60s-heavy eyeliner, a flowy black and orange pantsuit, black sneakers and big jewelry, Ms. Malina looks younger than her age. Her partner, Hanon Reznikov, 56, brought her a cup of coffee, though she hardly needed it. Sitting with one leg tucked under her, she frequently seemed moved enough by her own passion to nearly rock right out of her lawn chair.
“I just need to find sources for all the energy I get from what I see and hear around me,” she said. “I’m very inspired by the younger generation today. They understand, for instance, the balance between art and politics in a way that we had to struggle to understand it. I think it’s a good time for political theater.”
And does she still consider herself an anarchist or a pacifist or …?
“Still?” Ms. Malina said. “I’m just beginning! Still!?” She harrumphed and continued: “Each day starts with, ‘How much can I do today to get toward that B.N.V.A.R.’? You know what a B.N.V.A.R. is? It’s the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. That’s what we work for every day.”
The focus of the Living Theater has changed little since the days when B.N.V.A.R. might have been a household phrase. “As long as you hear the outcry of the needy, how can you not respond?” Ms. Malina asked. “If I was a shoemaker, I’d try to figure out how everybody could have shoes, but I’m an artist and I want to convey hope in a difficult situation.”
Her method today is the same as it was then: “The Brig,” Kenneth H. Brown’s stark drama about a military prison, was one of the Living Theater’s most successful works when it was first staged in 1963. Given the play’s resonance with news about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, it seemed a natural choice for the inaugural production in the new space, said Ms. Malina, who directed.
“I thought it would be one of the plays that we should do because it would encourage revolution,” she said. “It’s tragic that 30 years later it’s still valid. It shouldn’t be anymore.”
Four years ago she decided to realize her lifelong dream of having a theater with a living space above it. She sold the eight-room West End Avenue apartment where she had lived with Mr. Beck, who died in 1985, and their two children, and put the money into the Clinton Street space, where she has a 20-year lease but no other financing.
The reception from the theatrical world has been warm. “Tony Kushner promised us a new play,” Mr. Reznikov said. “Jim Rado, who wrote ‘Hair,’ just gave us a new play.” And Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater, who has been promoting “The Brig” there, sent a bouquet of flowers, with a black card signed, “In socialist solidarity.”
But it remains to be seen whether socialist solidarity will fill seats. The opening-night crowd was mostly the couple’s gray-haired (and ponytailed) friends, and it had the air of a leftist reunion.
Still, Ms. Malina’s drive remains undimmed. She and Mr. Reznikov were elated to find a building with an elevator to ferry her between the apartment and the theater — “so she can direct until she’s 105,” Mr. Reznikov said.
She still begins her day by writing in a diary. Two collections of her entries — one spanning 1947 to 1957, and the other, “The Enormous Despair,” a memoir of her American homecoming in 1968 — have been published so far. In their three-room apartment, still sparsely furnished, save for dozens of boxes with labels like “thesis + texts,” Ms. Malina sits at a small wooden desk with a green-shaded lamp, editing poetry and working on a book about the director Erwin Piscator, a progenitor of Brecht’s. (She began it in 1945, when she studied with Piscator.)
With the help of one employee, she runs the theater alongside Mr. Reznikov, who took over where Mr. Beck left off, personally and professionally. Among her other projects is preparing for the Living Theater’s next show, a two-woman play based on a Doris Lessing novel. Ms. Malina expects to star.
What does she like to do for fun?
“I like to make love,” Ms. Malina said. “Study. I don’t do much else except study, make love and run the theater.”
“I mean,” she added, “we’re big love bugs. We think that’s the answer: Make love, not war.”
Study’s findings on longer deployments raise questions about Pentagon’s decision to extend tours
By Julian E. Barnes, Times Staff Writer
2:54 PM PDT, May 4, 2007
WASHINGTON — Longer deployments of soldiers and Marines in Iraq erode the morale and mental health of service members, an Army survey released today has found. The conclusion raises new questions about the Pentagon’s recent decision to extend Army tours to 15 months.
The report found that soldiers, who have tours that are twice as long as Marines, have lower morale, more marital problems and higher rates of mental health problems. The report also found that soldiers who had been sent to Iraq more than once were more likely to screen positive for acute stress and mental health problems.
About 10% of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property. And a majority of soldiers and Marines said they would not report a fellow service member for mistreating an Iraqi.
The study found that soldiers who had high levels of anger, experienced high levels of combat or screened positive for a mental health symptom were nearly twice as likely to mistreat non-combatants as those who reported low levels of anger, said Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the acting Army surgeon general.
Experts said those findings raised warning signs about the possibility of more incidents like the massacre of civilians at Haditha or the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib as tours grow longer to accommodate the current buildup in forces.
“What it says to me is, we should get out of Iraq before a real disaster happens for us,” said Cindy Williams, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on military personnel policies. “Iraq is already in chaos, but for us to stay there and continue to wreck our Army over this is a big mistake.”
At a news conference to discuss the report, Pollock acknowledged that longer tours would be an added stress. But she said that in the wake of the report, the military was doing more to train its leaders to help support troops and lessen the stress. She suggested, however, that the real solution to the problem was a larger Army.
“The Army is spread very thin, and we need it to be a larger force for the number of missions that we were being asked to address for our nation,” she said.
The new report also contained some troubling data about suicides. The average suicide rate in the army is 11.6 per year for every 100,000 soldiers. The rate in Iraq however is 16.1. And military officials said the report found that the suicide prevention efforts being carried out in Iraq was not designed for a war zone.
Portfolio: Billy Brown
(intended for publication in now-cancelled Arthur No. 26)
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor will present its 12th Annual Exhibition of Prison Art opening March 27, featuring more than 300 works of art by over 200 artists. Longtime participant Billy Brown’s work caught the eye of Arthur’s art directors for its wholly unique style of energetic lines, warm kaleidoscopic palette, and obsessively detailed textures. The work’s dense pencil-work and heavy patterning give the appearance that one is looking at richly woven textiles.
With the assistance of The Prison Creative Arts Project founder Buzz Alexander, program coordinator Emily Harris, and the cooperation of the warden where Billy is currently incarcerated, we were able to ask Billy a few questions about his work.
Billy began making art in 1995 and has exhibited his work in every PCAP exhibition since the first one. When asked about the origins of his work’s style, he explains, “I was in an art program at Ionia Maximum Facility. The Art Teacher told me I had to sit down and come up with something of my own. With the help of the good Lord and me not giving up, came ‘Billy Art.’” He draws his inspiration from “making people happy with my art” and explains that “when one learns art, he learns a lot.” Each of Billy’s works are clearly the result of hours, if not days and weeks, of intense and focused drawing and he describes the healing process of art as one of “patience” and “understanding” where he “can learn about myself and others, and you make changes in your life. ‘Cause you just don’t get up and do things, you have to sit down and think about what you are going to put on that paper. So it becomes a part of the way you look at life, and go about life.”
In addition to his art, Billy says he “came up in the church” and loves to sing gospel music, desribing it as “a healing in itself.” When asked if there’s anything he would like to share with the readers of Arthur magazine, he says he “would like our society to know this art program has been a blessing to me and I believe I can say for other prisoners also.“
I’ve been alternating between reading The Secret and The Truth About Bullshit. Funny how complementary these two disparate books can be, which has led me to the concept of Secret Bullshit, based on a psychological notion that in order to deceive others you need to deceive yourself.
So, take the CBS lawyers who agreed to the stipulation in Don Imus’ contract that he be given a warning before being fired for doing what they hired him to do in the first place, known as the “dog has one bite” clause. Well, their secret bullshit–bound to become their defense in court–is that although Imus wasn’t warned after referring to Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz as a “boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jewboy,” they still had the right to fire him for saying “nappy-headed hos.”
Now there’s Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. Madam, who wants all those former clients to follow the lead of ex-Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias and testify that they also hired those gals only for a massage, never for sex. OK, everybody say, “Yeah, right.” Ironically, once they’re outed, won’t they gladly reinforce Palfrey’s secret bullshit with their own in order to correspond with what they must now tell their wives?
And finally, the spectacle of ten white male Republican presidential candidates all vying to become the leader of the western world by competing to see which one most disbelieves in evolution, has itself become the Dinosaur Follies. Their utter disdain for stem cell research and their unquestioning support of the invasion-turned-occupation of Iraq are two sides of that same secret bullshit.
You can watch secret bullshit becoming public bullshit as the language becomes increasingly perverted, ranging from the Bush doctrine that the new winning is not winning, to the cavalier morphing of the word ‘debate’ to mean that candidates are not permitted to ask each other any questions–the very antithesis of what a debate originally meant.
“They should call it an AA meeting,” my wife Nancy observed. “No cross-talk allowed.” She is an instinctive detector of secret bullshit when expressed publicly, that transcends political correctness. As the pundits discuss the merits of stiffer sentences for hate crimes, Nancy wonders aloud, “And what are the others–love crimes?”
———–
Paul Krassner is the author of One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available from www.paulkrassner.com
Japrocksampler: How the post-war Japanese blew their minds on rock ‘n’ roll
by Julian Cope
Available 3 Sep 2007 (subject to change).
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 9780747589457
Format Trade paperback, B format
A unique account of the Japanese rock phenomenon from a legendary rock musician with an army of fans
Julian Cope, eccentric and visionary rock musician, hip archaeologist and one time frontman of Teardrop Explodes, follows the runaway underground success of his book Krautrocksampler with Japrocksampler, a cult deconstruction of Japanese rock music.
Japrocksampler reveals what really happened when East met West after World War Two and the mayhem that ensued … and is a must for anybody interested in modern music and Japanese culture. It explores the clash between traditional, conservative Japanese values and the wild rock ‘n’ roll renegades of the 1960s and 70s and tells the tale of six seminal groups of artists in Japanese post-war culture, from itinerant art-house poets to violent refusenik rock groups with a penchant for plane hijacking. The book concludes with enticing reviews of Julian’s Top 50 Jap Rock albums.
Julian Cope was born in Deri, South Glamorgan, and grew up in Tamworth. After forming a succession of half-groups and writing songs with Ian McCulloch (later of Echo & the Bunnymen), he eventually formed Teardrop Explodes with Gary Dwyer in 1978. He is the author of Krautrocksampler, Megalithic European, The Modern Antiquarian, Head-On and Repossessed. His website, http://www.headheritage.co.uk, contains some of the most entertaining and insightful album reviews on the web.
Arthur Magazine 