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Les Dégonflés

The (London) Times
September 14, 2005

Ecowarriors go into battle against 4x4s – with cycle pumps
From Charles Bremner and Marie Tourres in Paris

DRIVERS who park gasguzzling 4x4s overnight in Paris are receiving an unpleasant surprise in the morning: flat tyres. A gang of young activists are deflating the tyres of what they regard as anti-social urban tanks which clog the narrow streets of the Left Bank.

Claiming kinship with Greenpeace’s war on motorised “climate criminals” in Britain, the group has immobilised dozens of Range Rovers, Mercedes, Jeeps and other upmarket quatre-quatres in the well-heeled sixth and seventh arrondissements since July.

To the amazement of furious owners, the police say that it is not a crime because property is not damaged. “We have had complaints, but it is not clear that any offence is being committed,” said an officer at the sixth arrondissement.

Owners may bring a civil action against the activists, who call themselves les Dégonflés, the deflated ones, or in slang, the chickens or scaredycats. Thanks, in part, to their internet site (http://degonfle.blogg.org), which shows pictures of deflating raids, they say that they have spawned other groups in Lyon, Rouen, Geneva and even Australia.

Like the protesters in Britain, who harangue off-roading mothers on the school run, the campaigners seem driven as much by social and political animosity as concern over climate change. The leader of the group, who uses the name Sub-Warrant Officer Joker, told The Times yesterday: “We think that our action makes the owners look like wallies. We operate once a week and we try to deflate 30 per evening.”

They expel the air slowly without setting off the vehicles’ alarms, fixing open bicycle pump hoses to the tyre valves and returning later to collect their equipment. They leave a leaflet explaining their action.

“Perhaps it’s cowardly that we prefer to be anonymous, but we have received death threats,” Joker added. “That’s perfectly in keeping with the mentality of the 4×4 people who want to crush everything in their path.”

Christophe Delabre, president of the French 4×4 Federation, said: “This is an act of vandalism verging on terrorism, which could put lives in danger.” But he agreed that all sides should lobby the manufacturers over clean fuel.

JOSH WOLF EXPLAINS HIMSELF


justice and journalism: josh wolf on information, independence and control

monday, april 23, 4-6 pm
university of san francisco, mclaren 252

from the press release:

“After videotaping an anti-G8 protest in San Francisco, journalist and videoblogger Josh Wolf was asked by federal officials to hand over his footage. Upon refusing he was jailed. Released a few days ago, he comes to USF to talk about why he was willing to spend 7 ½ months locked up for refusing to let federal investigators mine his footage for evidence. What are the implications of his case for media makers, sources and audiences? Wolf will discuss the importance of a federal shield law and his work with Free the Media and prisonblogs.net, two organizations he started while incarcerated.”

this event is sponsored by the journalism minor, college of arts and sciences, environmental studies, gleeson library, living-learning communities, media studies department, peace and justice studies, politics department, and sociology department.

this event is free and open to the public.

Return of the Living Theatre to New York City

THE BRIG
directed by Judith Malina

previews start April 18
Opens April 26

Wednesdays through Saturdays
8pm

Sundays
4pm

TICKETS
(Previews: $15)

Wednesdays: Pay-What-You-Can (no reservations)
Thursdays: $20
Friday, Saturday and Sunday: $30

The Living Theatre has signed a 10-year lease on the 3500 sq. ft. basement of a new residential building under construction at 19-21 Clinton Street, between Houston and Stanton Streets on New York’s Lower East Side. The company should be able to move into the completed space in early 2007. Plans are to open the new Living Theatre with a new production of The Brig by Kenneth H. Brown, first presented at The Living Theatre at 14th St. and Sixth Avenue in 1963.

The Clinton Street theater will be the company’s first permanent home since the closing of The Living Theatre on Third Street at Avenue C in 1993. The decision to return to the Lower East Side reflects the company’s continuing faith in the neighborhood as a vibrant center where the needs of some of the city’s poorer people confront the ideas of the experimenters in art and politics who have settled in the area. The presence of newly arrived upscale shops and venues only underlines the political contradictions which bristle through the crowded, narrow streets

The Brig, written by a veteran who survived incarceration in a U.S. Marine Corps Brig during the 1950’s, is a chilling portrait of the brutality of military prisons. The original production was the winner of the OBIE Award for the Best Play of 1963 and Jonas Mekas’ extraordinary film of the production, The Brig, won the Leone D’Oro for Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival the following year. The play had great impact in New York and then toured extensively in Europe until 1967.

The prominence of U.S. Military Prisons in various locations around the world at the beginning of the 21st century gives new relevance to this play. The perverse logic behind the treatment of prisoners within the martial system is made stunningly clear in Brown’s play, which was the first production staged by The Living Theatre after director Judith Malina read M.C. Richard’s as yet unpublished English translation of The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud, whose radical approach to articulating a theatrical relationship between cruelty and transcendence transformed The Brig into a physical experience of pain and release unlike any conventional drama. Plans are developing for a repertory program as well as musical, dance, poetry and political events. Watch for coming announcements of the projects due to flower at the our new home. We look forward to seeing you there.

Esalen and its cultural effects….

On the Edge of the Future
Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture
Paperback
$21.95
Edited by Jeffrey J. Kripal and Glenn W. Shuck

An inside look at the history and influence of New Age’s spiritual home.
“Esalen is on the edge. Located in Big Sur, California, just off Highway 1, Esalen is, geographically speaking, a literal cliff, hanging rather precariously over the Pacific Ocean. The Esselen Indians used the hot mineral springs here as healing baths for centuries before the European settlers arrived. . . . Today the place is adorned with a host of lush organic gardens; mountain streams; a cliffside swimming pool; an occasional Buddha or garden goddess; the same hot springs now embedded in a striking multimillion-dollar stone, cement, and steel spa; and a small collection of meditation huts tucked away in the trees. These are grounds that both constitute the very edge of the American frontier and look due west to see the East. . . .” —from the Introduction

The renowned Esalen Institute, founded in 1962 by Stanford graduates Michael Murphy and Richard Price, was created as a place “where the body can manifest the glories of the spirit.” It offered guests a heady mixture of world mythology, hypnosis and psychic research, spiritual healing, sport mysticism, and Tantric eroticism. Among the notables who have spent time at the Institute are Abraham Maslow, Timothy Leary, Paul Tillich, Carlos Castaneda, B. F. Skinner, and former California governor Jerry Brown.

Despite its cultural significance, remarkably little has been written about Esalen itself. In On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture, 11 original essays, plus an afterword by co-founder Murphy, examine the Institute’s roots, the place of its beliefs in American religious history, and its influence. This lively volume will fascinate anyone interested in the history of American religion as well as those who regard this remarkable place as the epicenter of the human potential movement.

The contributors are Catherine L. Albanese, Erik Erickson, Robert Fuller, Marion S. Goldman, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Don Hanlon Johnson, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Timothy Miller, Michael Murphy, Glenn W. Shuck, Ann Taves, and Gordon Wheeler.
Jeffrey J. Kripal is J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Glenn W. Shuck is visiting professor of religion at Williams College. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Series: Religion in North America
Distribution: worldwide
Publication date: 6/28/2005
Format: paper 344 pages, 3 b&w photos, 2 figures, 1 index, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 0-253-21759-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21759-2

MUDEDE ON KHAT: "I am still buzzing, and the buzz lasts for the rest of the day. There's no crash in the end; no hangover, no headache, no lethargy, nor the pressing desire to chew more."

from The Stranger – March 14, 2007

The War on Chewing

Is Khat Crack? Or Is Khat Cappuccino?

By Charles Mudede

I’m in the back of a Yellow cab. It’s 3:00 in the morning. The meter is about to reach the $10 mark. Five more dollars and I’ll be at my apartment’s door. Traffic has abandoned the city. Homes sleep. A building at the top of Beacon Hill glows like a demon hospital. A solar system of streetlights revolves around the windows. I’m the center of all this. I’m drunk. The driver is trying to convert me to Islam.

He is from Somalia. He appears to be tall. His age is somewhere between 28 and 32. He has been in the U.S. for four years and already has a strong grasp of English. A cloud of Arabic music rises from the stereo. The singer is as intoxicated by God as I am by wine.

“Look, what do you believe in? What is your faith?” the driver asks.

I don’t want to tell him that I have no faith in any God—or at least what is usually understood to be God. My concept of God is taken from Spinoza’s concept of substance and that is a conversation I don’t want to get into at 3:00 in the morning. To avoid complicating matters, and insulting him with my Spinozisms, I say that I’m a Methodist.

“We Muslims believe in Jesus,” he says. “You know that? He was a prophet.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“So all you have to do is take the next step and believe in the last prophet. And that is it. That is Islam.”

As we near my apartment, the driver, who has devoted only 3 percent of his attention to the operation of the cab, explains with great excitement the connections between Christianity and Islam, and why Islam is the superior path. We turn onto my street. We reach my building. We come to a stop. But the driver has not stopped talking; he is still making these crucial connections, still trying to trap me in his faith.

To divert him for a moment, I ask him about the big subject of the day, at least for Somalis: khat. Pronounced “cot,” and also called miraa, the leaves and twigs of this shrub are said to have a stimulating effect on the mind. In the movie Dirty Pretty Things, the hero, a cab driver, uses khat to stay awake, to keep working, to keep making the piles of money that all immigrants hunger for.

Khat is very popular in Djibouti, where it is estimated that 93 percent of the men chew it, and also Yemen, where in the late ’90s, President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to set an example of how not to abuse it by announcing he would “only chew it on the weekends” (Associated Press, April 24, 2000). Khat, which is also popular with my driver’s countrymen, is banned in America, and was also banned by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which ruled Somalia for much of the second half of 2006. (The ICU was overthrown in December of 2006 by the Ethiopian military.)

“Khat is bad,” my driver replies. “It is not good for you.”

“Why?”

“It excites you.”

“What is wrong with excitement?”

“Allah is enough for you. You don’t need drugs. Allah provides you with all the joy you need.”

The intensity of the Arabic singer rising from the speakers behind my head brings me to the point of believing my driver. The singer is in heaven, swimming in a pool of God’s greatness, intoxicated from lips to toes by the ever-loving, ever-living All. Nevertheless, I pay my fare and leave the cab without submitting to Allah, peace be upon him.

• • •

In late July of 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided 17 homes and businesses in King County and seized about 1,000 pounds of khat. Fourteen members of what it called a local “cell” of khat dealers were arrested and chained to the slow and costly wheels of justice. The sting was part of a larger and longer crackdown called Operation Somalia Express, which ended with the arrest of 44 East Africans who, according to the DEA, were dealing and distributing khat in cities including Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Washington DC, and Seattle.

Continue reading →

Science Fiction Mini Festival tonight at MACHINE.

machine project

Science Fiction Mini Festival
8pm April 20th 2007

Mark von Schlegell, author of VENUSIA (M. I. T./Semiotext(e)), performs “Marc Martin in Angleterre” — the intermezzo short story centerpiece to his new science fiction novel FONDEST REGARDS, MERCURY STATION — with ambient space sounds by Ambient Force 3000.

Before the reading we will be screening Kelly Sears’s new film about mutinous astronauts, and listening to Anthony McCann read poems on the topic of the moon. Come join us, we’ve picked up some astronaut ice cream for the occasion.

Cosmic organ music.


‘Pipe organ’ plays above the Sun


By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, Preston

Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun’s atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.

These “coronal loops” carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.

Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.

“The effect is much like plucking a guitar string,” Professor Robert von Fay-Siebenbuergen told BBC News at the National Astronomy Meeting in Preston.

The corona is an atmosphere of hot, electrically-charged gas – or plasma – that surrounds the Sun. The temperature of the corona should drop the further one moves from the Sun.

But, in fact, the coronal temperature is up to 300 times hotter than the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere. And no one can explain why.

Fiery fountains

The coronal loops arch hundreds of thousands of kilometres above the Sun’s surface like huge fiery fountains, and are generated by the Sun’s magnetic field.

As solar plasma travels from the photosphere into the loops, it is heated from about 6,000 Kelvin (5,700C) to upwards of one million Kelvin.

Solar explosions called micro-flares can release energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs.

These blasts can send immensely powerful acoustic waves hurtling through the loops at tens of kilometres per second, creating cosmic “organ music.”

“These loops can be up to 100 million kilometres long and guide waves and oscillations in a similar way to a pipe organ,” said Dr Youra Taroyan, from the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Centre (SP2RC) at the University of Sheffield.

The sound booms decay in less than an hour and dissipate in the very hot solar corona.

The Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Preston runs from 16-20 April.