Los Angeles Times

From Times Wire Services

January 28, 2006

WASHINGTON ó U.S. forces in at least two cases have detained wives of suspected insurgents in Iraq in an attempt to pressure the men into surrendering, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union confirm.

“This is not an acceptable tactic,” ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said Friday.

In one instance, members of a military task force seized a mother of three young children “in order to leverage” her husband’s surrender, according to an account by a civilian Defense Intelligence Agency officer.

In the other, an e-mail exchange includes a U.S. military officer asking, “Have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?”

Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said: “It’s very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happenedÖ.

“When you see an individual e-mail note, it’s oftentimes very confusing to figure out how that particular case fits into an overall, larger puzzle.”

In Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said that only Iraqis who pose an “imperative threat” are held in long-term U.S.-run detention facilities.

The documents are among hundreds the Pentagon has released periodically under court order to meet an ACLU request under the Freedom of Information Act.

A June 10, 2004, memo written by the DIA employee, labeled as “secret,” referred to “violations of the Geneva Convention.”

It described the actions of Task Force 6-26 and stated that on May 9, 2004, task force personnel detained the wife of “a suspected terrorist” in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad.

“The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the houseÖ. Her husband was the primary target of the raid,” the memo stated. “It was recommended Ö that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target’s surrender.”

The memo’s author said he objected but the “raid team leader detained her anyway.”

The memo said the wife was released two days later. It did not say whether her husband was eventually arrested.

In the other case, a U.S. lieutenant colonel e-mailed, “What are you guys doing to try to get the husband ó have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?”

A later e-mail stated, “These ladies fought back extremely hard during the original detention. They have shown indications of deceipt [sic] and misinformation.”

Army forces 50,000 soldiers into extended duty

By Will Dunham

(Reuters)

The U.S. Army has forced about 50,000 soldiers to continue serving after their voluntary stints ended under a policy called “stop-loss,” but while some dispute its fairness, court challenges have fallen flat.

The policy applies to soldiers in units due to deploy for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Army said stop-loss is vital to maintain units that are cohesive and ready to fight. But some experts said it shows how badly the Army is stretched and could further complicate efforts to attract new recruits.

“As the war in Iraq drags on, the Army is accumulating a collection of problems that cumulatively could call into question the viability of an all-volunteer force,” said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank.

“When a service has to repeatedly resort to compelling the retention of people who want to leave, you’re edging away from the whole notion of volunteerism.”

When soldiers enlist, they sign a contract to serve for a certain number of years, and know precisely when their service obligation ends so they can return to civilian life. But stop-loss allows the Army, mindful of having fully manned units, to keep soldiers on the verge of leaving the military.

Under the policy, soldiers who normally would leave when their commitments expire must remain in the Army, starting 90 days before their unit is scheduled to depart, through the end of their deployment and up to another 90 days after returning to their home base.

With yearlong tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, some soldiers can be forced to stay in the Army an extra 18 months.

HARDSHIP FOR SOME SOLDIERS

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said that “there is no plan to discontinue stop-loss.”

“We understand that this is causing hardship for some individual soldiers, and we take individual situations into consideration,” Hilferty said.

Hilferty said there are about 12,500 soldiers in the regular Army, as well as the part-time National Guard and Reserve, currently serving involuntarily under the policy, and that about 50,000 have had their service extended since the program began in 2002. An initial limited use of stop-loss was expanded in subsequent years to affect many more.

“While the policies relative to the stop-loss seem harsh, in terms of suspending scheduled separation dates (for leaving the Army), they are not absolute,” Hilferty said. “And we take individual situations into consideration for compelling and compassionate reasons.”

Hilferty noted the Army has given “exceptions” to 210 enlisted soldiers “due to personal hardship reasons” since October 2004, allowing them to leave as scheduled.

“The nation is at war and we are stop-lossing units deploying to a combat theater to ensure they mobilize, train, deploy, fight, redeploy and demobilize as a team,” he said.

A few soldiers have gone to court to challenge stop-loss.

One such case fizzled last week, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington dismissed a suit filed in 2004 by two Army National Guard soldiers. The suit claimed the Army fraudulently induced soldiers to enlist without specifying that their service might be involuntarily extended.

Courts also have backed the policy’s legality in Oregon and California cases.

Jules Lobel, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who represented the National Guard soldiers, said a successful challenge to stop-loss was still possible.

“I think the whole stop-loss program is a misrepresentation to people of how long they’re going to actually serve. I think it’s caused tremendous morale problems, tremendous psychological damage to people,” Lobel said.

“When you sign up for the military, you’re saying, ‘I’ll give you, say, six years and then after six years I get my life back.’ And they’re saying, ‘No, really, we can extend you indefinitely.”‘

Congressional critics have assailed stop-loss, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry called it “a back-door draft.” The United States abolished the draft in 1973, but the all-volunteer military never before has been tested by a protracted war.

A report commissioned by the Pentagon called stop-loss a “short-term fix” enabling the Army to meet ongoing troop deployment requirements, but said such policies “risk breaking the force as recruitment and retention problems mount.” It was written by Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer.

Thompson added, “The persistent use of stop-loss underscores the fact that the war-fighting burden is being carried by a handful of soldiers while the vast majority of citizens incur no sacrifice at all.”

FAIN THE SORCERER
by Steve Aylett
PS Publishing UK

A Cabellian fantasy. After strangling a mime in the King’s court, Fain encounters a crazy old man who offers to grant him three wishes. What will Fain ask for?

Looping through his own past and offending kings and leaders throughout the world, Fain searches for the means to wisely direct his new powers. His quest becomes progressively more vivid as he encounters monsters, mermaids, warlocks and autarchs, gathering richer understanding with each new magic gift.

With an introduction by ALAN MOORE and cover artwork by AYLETT, Fain the Sorcerer is a dense and mischievous work of shamanic satire.

SIGNED by Aylett and Moore.
out April 2006

Sly Stone’s Surprise

Reclusive Musician May Emerge to Perform At Grammy Awards
By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 27, 2006; C01

Sly Stone, the reclusive, long-vanished funk-rock pioneer whose potent recordings in the late 1960s and early ’70s defined the era and altered the course of popular music, may be about to strut back into the public eye.

According to several friends and associates, discussions are well underway about a Sly and the Family Stone reunion performance at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 8 in Los Angeles.

It would be Stone’s first live performance since 1987, and his first major public appearance since Jan. 12, 1993, when Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It would also mark the first time since 1971 that the band has played in its original configuration. (Drummer Greg Errico quit the group that year and was soon followed by bass player Larry Graham.)

As songwriter, producer, bandleader and singer, Stone dazzled the world of pop music more than 35 years ago with a string of superlative anthems — timeless songs, including “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Family Affair” and “Everyday People” (whose lyric “Different strokes for different folks” became a slogan for the Woodstock generation). By the early ’70s, though, he had developed an all-consuming cocaine addiction, and he soon faded from the spotlight. Speculation on the whereabouts and condition of Sly Stone has been a pop pastime for decades.

Ron Roecker, a spokesman for the Recording Academy, wouldn’t confirm that the reunion is on the Grammy-night schedule, which already includes an all-star tribute to Sly and the Family Stone. The tribute — featuring John Legend, Maroon 5, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, among others, performing a medley of Sly classics — was announced yesterday by the academy. (All the artists appear on a Sly and the Family Stone tribute album that will be released the day before the Grammys.)

“The facts are what we put in the press release,” Roecker said. “As far as anything else, it’s all just rumor. But we do believe that he is attending the Grammy Awards.”

He added: “It seems like the right time for him. We’re thrilled that we’ll be able to do this.”

Stone’s manager, Jerry Goldstein, could not be reached for comment.

Nor could Stone himself — no surprise, given that he stopped speaking to the media in about 1987.

But sources close to the band said rehearsals are scheduled to begin next week in Santa Monica, Calif. They cautioned, however, that the reunion could implode at any point, given Stone’s long history of erratic behavior.

Still, that there’s talk at all about a Sly Stone coming-out party is a surprise.

“He’s been in seclusion for so long, he’s like J.D. Salinger,” said Greg Zola, who is producing and directing “On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone,” a documentary about the elusive musician and his band mates. “He was so famous for a period of time, but he’s just not around anymore. A lot of people who you’d think are in the know actually think Sly Stone is dead.”

Stone’s younger sister, Vaetta, acknowledges as much on her Web site, where she’s selling T-shirts that say, simply: “Sly Lives.”

“I don’t think Sly has been hurting from his underground status — I think he likes the mystique,” said Rickey Vincent, author of “Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One” and host of a funk radio show in the San Francisco Bay area. “But it would be nice to see him make a triumphant return — to be treated the way Carlos Santana was at the Grammys a few years ago, and the way George Clinton was treated at the Grammys.”

Clinton thinks so, too.

A funk legend himself, Clinton was forced to rethink his approach to music after hearing Sly and the Family Stone’s landmark 1969 album, “Stand!”

“He’s my idol; forget all that peer stuff,” Clinton said. “I heard ‘Stand!,’ and it was like: Man , forget it! That band was perfect. And Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one. He was the baddest thing around. What he don’t realize is that him making music now would still be the baddest. Just get that band back together and do whatever it is that he do.”

In its heyday, from roughly 1968 through 1971, Sly and the Family Stone created revolutionary music, an intoxicating mix of psychedelic pop, pulsating funk and social commentary. Among the first fully integrated groups on the American music scene, with blacks and whites and men and women together onstage, the seven-piece San Francisco band played the world’s biggest venues while cranking out hit after cutting-edge hit.

Stone was an innovator whose work inspired Motown to find its social conscience, helped persuade Miles Davis to go electric, and ultimately laid out a blueprint for generations of black pop stars, from Prince and Michael Jackson to OutKast, D’Angelo and Lenny Kravitz.

“There’s black music before Sly Stone, and there’s black music after Sly Stone,” said Joel Selvin, author of “Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History” and a San Francisco Chronicle music critic for the past 30 years. “He completely changed what black music was. I mean, he changed Motown! Before Sly, the Temptations were ‘I’m Losing You.’ After Sly, they were ‘Ball of Confusion.’ It’s a black and white moment.

“The album ‘Stand!’ summed up the times, with the humanitarian sentiments, in a perfect sloganeering way. ‘Dance to the Music,’ ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ — these were revolutionary documents. And Sly’s statements last. They sound as good today as they did when they were recorded. There’s really nobody like Sly Stone in the history of black music.”

Lamont Dozier, part of the Holland/Dozier/Holland hit-making machine at Motown, said in an interview that Stone “took music in a new direction, another step forward. He definitely had some potent stuff, and some new stuff, in a new voice. It was this funky, street-y, but pop R&B music. I was very much a fan.”

Said Vincent: “Sly was so far ahead of everybody else, he was flaming out when everybody was still trying to figure him out.”

Indeed, even as Stone’s star was ascending, he was deteriorating personally — skipping concerts (he missed a third of the band’s shows in 1970), blowing off record-label deadlines, acting increasingly ornery. He was abusive toward associates, band mates, friends and family members, too: Once, upon being caught with cocaine and a handgun, Stone — whose real name was Sylvester Stewart — told police that his name was Freddie Stewart. (Freddie was Sly’s little brother and the guitarist in the Family Stone.)

By 1975, the hits had dried up, and Stone’s downward spiral quickened.

“He was so creative, one of the most talented guys I’ve ever met,” said R&B great Bobby Womack. “It was inspirational being around him. He made some great music. He just wasn’t happy in his personal life. He got to the point he wouldn’t even listen to his own stuff. That’s paranoia. As the drugs set in, the warm, creative side went away. And then it got worse and worse. He was a person out of control.”

Womack added: “We used to be as tight as bark on a tree. But I haven’t heard from Sly in 15 years. At least. The last time I saw him, I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard, and he was going the opposite way. I blew the horn and said, ‘Sly!’ He looked at me and just kept going.

“But then he turned around and said, ‘Bobby, I can’t do that to you, man.’ I said: ‘What was that about?’ ”

Stone, who’d once earned a reported $2 million per album, was cut loose by Epic Records in 1978. Warner Bros. offered a half-million-dollar contract, and in 1979, the label released Stone’s “Back on the Right Track.” It didn’t even crack the Top 150 — a disastrous showing for an artist who was once a fixture at the top of the charts.

Stone summarily retreated from the studio and the spotlight. His brother Freddie told Spin magazine several years later that Stone had “wanted to get away from the fast pace. He just kicked back. . . . He didn’t want to be out in front anymore. The glamour didn’t mean anything anymore. He wanted to be normal.”

In 1981, Stone — who’d been raised in a strict Pentecostal household and grew up singing gospel songs with his siblings — reemerged to work with Clinton on a Funkadelic album, a summit that resulted in both artists getting arrested for possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia.

As Stone’s career faltered, his legal problems mounted. In 1983, he was charged in Illinois with possessing a sawed-off shotgun; was found barely conscious in a Fort Myers, Fla., hotel room, apparently a result of a cocaine overdose; and was then arrested during the middle of a show in Fort Lauderdale on charges that he’d stolen a ring from a hotel owner. (During one court hearing that year, bailiffs had to shake Stone awake.)

In November 1987, on the eve of a two-night comeback engagement at a small club in Hollywood, Stone told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he was clean, saying: “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m straight, I’m clean. What else can I say?” The night after the first show — which was declared a disaster by a Times critic — Stone was arrested outside the club for having failed to pay $2,856 in child support. He was also charged with cocaine possession.

“It’s amazing he’s still here,” Errico said in an interview last fall. “But he is. I always say that a cat has nine lives, and Sly has nine cats. He’s a character in every respect.”

In 1989, after failing to show up for a court date in Los Angeles, Stone was declared a fugitive. The FBI arrested him in Connecticut and extradited him to Los Angeles, where, in a two-week span at the end of the year, Stone pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine and then guilty again to two counts of cocaine possession.

Since then, the world has heard very little from — or about — Sly Stone. Just a single song recorded with Earth, Wind & Fire, a national advertising campaign for Toyota that used “Everyday People,” and the 1993 appearance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, where the six original members of Family Stone (drummer Errico, bassist Graham, saxophonist Jerry Martini, trumpet player Cynthia Robinson and the siblings Freddie and Rose Stone) walked onto the stage, sang a bit of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” said their thanks . . . and then waited for Sly to surface.

“As usual, it’s just us,” Rose said, looking at her watch.

Sly finally materialized, in an electric-blue leather jumpsuit, and gave a brief speech, which concluded: “See you soon.”

Bucking Hall of Fame tradition, he didn’t stop afterward to pose for pictures with his band mates, instead disappearing into the night — and into the ether, for 13 years of radio silence.

There are rumors, of course: He’s broke! He’s dead! He’s homeless! Insane!

Stone, who is 61 or 62, or maybe 64 (“I’ve lied about my age so much, I’m not quite sure how old I am,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1987), is either living: In a mansion in Beverly Hills; in a dingy apartment in the San Fernando Valley; on the streets of Hollywood; in a nice place in Pacific Palisades; or elsewhere in Southern California.

“He’s in Malibu,” said Clinton. But Clinton isn’t completely sure, since he couldn’t get Stone on the phone — even after Stone left a message for his friend to call.

In 1986, Stone was living in an apartment in Toluca Lake, Calif., when his landlord filed a lawsuit, alleging that Stone and a roommate were making excessive noise — and that they’d refused to leave the apartment after being served an eviction notice.

His health is also unclear. Stone’s manager, Goldstein, recently told an associate that Sly is “frail.” When Stone surfaced at his father’s funeral in 2002, he was reportedly in bad shape.

“Sly went down the aisle of his brother’s church with his mother on his arm, and nobody recognized him, because he has a hunchback,” Selvin said. “He deprived his body of too much nutrition over the years.”

There are reports — unconfirmed, as with much in the murky, mysterious world of Sly Stone — that he’s done recording sessions and then gone in and erased all the tapes.

“He’s got hundreds of songs that he’s sleeping on,” Errico said. “He’s been writing the whole time. Where are all those songs? But I haven’t heard one in 20 years. He’s written and destroyed who knows how many great songs over the years with all the insanity he’s been through.”

But Stone is said to have been recording recently with his sister Vaetta, who performs in a Family Stone tribute band. Last year he even surfaced at one of her shows, in Los Angeles.

Zola, who’s making the documentary on Sly and the Family Stone, was at the club that night and saw Sly Stone with his very own eyes.

“This adventure to find Sly, it can feel hopeless,” he said. “There was a period of time where I really wondered where he was. But he was there! It was remarkable.”

from 4AD…

“(19 January 06)

We’re delighted to announce that Scott Walker has completed work on his first album for the label.

The long-awaited new album – called “The Drift” – will be Scott’s first since the ground-breaking “Tilt” was released in 1995.

4AD will release the album worldwide in May. The exact date will be announced shortly.

A documentary film about Scott’s music – including the making of “The Drift” – is being made by the New York -based director Stephen Kijak. Titled “30 Century Man”, it will also be released in 2006.”

Above: Henry Fuseli – The Nightmare 1781

Alan Moore on Gothic Nightmares

Saturday 25 March 2006
15.00-16.00

Legendary graphic novelist Alan Moore considers the work of Henry Fuseli and his contemporaries.

Moore has worked in the comic book industry for over 25 years and is credited with redefining the genre through the introduction of adult themes, intricate plots and challenging subject matter… In this talk Moore — himself a practising magician — leads a tour focusing on visionary heroism, ungovernable forces and superheroes.

Tate Britain In the Exhibition
Free with exhibition ticket, booking recommended
For tickets, call 020 7887 8888.

Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination
15 February – 1 May 2006

Gothic Nightmares explores the work of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) and William Blake (1757–1827) in the context of the Gothic – the taste for fantastic and supernatural themes which dominated British culture from around 1770 to 1830. Featuring over 120 works by these artists and their contemporaries, the exhibition creates a vivid image of a period of cultural turmoil and daring artistic invention.

The central exhibit is Henry Fuseli’s famous The Nightmare 1781. Ever since it was first exhibited to the public in 1782, this picture has been an icon of horror. Showing a woman supine in her boudoir, oppressed by a foul imp while a ferocious-looking horse glares on, the painting draws on folklore and popular culture, medicine, concepts of imagination, and classical art to create a new kind of highly charged horror image. This is the most extensive display of Fuseli’s art seen in Britain since 1975 and includes around sixty of his most important canvases and drawings including Titania and Bottom c1790, The Three Witches 1783 and The Shepherd’s Dream.

A selection of works by Fuseli’s contemporaries and followers, dealing with themes of fantasy, horror and perverse sexuality, complement his work. This includes over twenty-five exceptional watercolours and paintings by the visionary artist William Blake, among which will be The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, The House of Death c1795; his vampire-like Ghost of a Flea, The Whirlwind: Ezekial’s Vision c1803–5; The Witch of Endor Raising the Spirit of Samuel 1783 and Death on a Pale Horse c1800.

The exhibition is further enriched with works on Gothic and fantastic themes by, among others, Joseph Wright of Derby, George Romney, James Barry and Maria Cosway, John Flaxman and Theodore von Holst, and features a large group of caricatures by James Gillray, whose satirical works incorporate some of the most inventive cosmic and fantastic imagery of the era. A special section of the exhibition presents a recreation of a ‘Phantasmagoria’ show – a kind of animated slideshow with sound effects and shocking images – giving visitors to the exhibition a chance to experience at first hand the same chills and thrills as their forebears in the 1800s.

As a literary phenomenon, the Gothic has had an enduring influence. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and the novels of Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, William Beckford and Ann Radcliffe are still widely read. Modern Gothic novelists including Angela Carter, Patrick McGrath and Toni Morrison are highly regarded, and the Gothic continues to influence film and TV – from classics like Nosferatu (1922) through to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2002) – and visual artists like Glenn Brown and the Chapman brothers. This exhibition is the first to explore the roots of this phenomenon in the visual arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The exhibition is curated by Martin Myrone and accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Professor Sir Christopher Frayling on The Nightmare and the heritage of horror, and Professor Marina Warner on Fuseli’s fairies.

Minister of counterculture

Gilberto Gil is a musical legend – and a senior Brazilian politician. He tells Oliver Burkeman how poverty can be challenged if ideas are shared for free

Friday October 14, 2005
The Guardian

Gilberto Gil wears a sober suit and tie these days, and his dreadlocks are greying at the temples. But you soon remember that, as well as the serving culture minister of Brazil, you are in the presence of one of the biggest Latin American musicians of the 60s and 70s when you ask him about his intellectual influences and he cites Timothy Leary. “Oh, yeah!” Gil says happily, rocking back in his chair at the Royal Society of the Arts in London. “For example, all those guys at Silicon Valley – they’re all coming basically from the psychedelic culture, you know? The brain-expanding processes of the crystal had a lot to do with the internet.”

Much as it may be currently de rigueur for journalists to ask politicians whether or not they have ever smoked marijuana, the question does not, under the circumstances, seem worth the effort. Gil’s constant references to the hippy counterculture are not simply the nostalgia of a 63-year-old with more than 40 albums to his name. For several years now, largely under the rest of the world’s radar, the Brazilian government has been building a counterculture of its own. The battlefield has been intellectual property – the ownership of ideas – and the revolution has touched everything, from internet filesharing to GM crops to HIV medication. Pharmaceutical companies selling patented Aids drugs, for example, were informed that Brazil would simply ignore their claims to ownership and copy their products more cheaply if they didn’t offer deep discounts. (The discounts were forthcoming.) Gil himself has thrown his weight behind new forms of copyright law, enabling musicians to incorporate parts of others’ work in their own. And in one small development that none the less sums up the mood, the left-wing administration of President Luiz Inacio da Silva, or “Lula”, has announced that all ministries will stop using Microsoft Windows on their office computers. Instead of paying through the nose for Microsoft operating licences, while millions of Brazilians live in poverty, the government will use open-source software, collaboratively designed by programmers worldwide and owned by no one.

“This isn’t just my idea, or Brazil’s idea,” Gil says. “It’s the idea of our time. The complexity of our times demands it.” He is politician enough to hold back from endorsing the breaking of laws, for example on music downloading, but only just. “The Brazilian government is definitely pro-law,” he grins. “But if law doesn’t fit reality anymore, law has to be changed. That’s not a new thing. That’s civilisation as usual.” (He is not a hi-tech person himself, he says, but readily concedes that his children have “probably” done a fair bit of illegal downloading.)

Gil has lived by this philosophy – his guitar-based music has always been, in its own way, open-source, mixing the influences of bossa nova, samba, reggae and rock – and he has suffered for it, too. Tropicalia, the anti-establishment movement he helped found in Brazil in the 1960s, threatened the grip of the military dictatorship there and in 1968 he was jailed, along with his musical collaborator, Caetano Veloso, with whom he shared the status of a Latin American Lennon and McCartney. Freed after several months, he was instructed to leave the country and moved to London. His fame followed him to Europe and he went on to perform with, among others, Pink Floyd and Jimmy Cliff.

“Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life,” he says. “But I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future. I remember telling a Brazilian girl who used to be part of our community here in London, ‘I’m gonna have a role to play in politics in the future!’ And now … it is the future.”

Gil is in London as a signatory to the RSA’s Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property, which calls on governments to restrain corporations from further locking down their ownership of ideas. The campaign encompasses everything from the music industry’s myopia over downloading to the recent efforts of one agribusiness firm to patent basmati rice, then charge Indian farmers for the privilege of growing it.

Defenders of such developments insist that strong patent laws are crucial – without them, nobody would have the incentive to develop new ideas – and that anything else would impede innovation. Gil and his ministry team have an opposing theory: tough intellectual property law is a 20th-century idea and most of the blossoming of world civilisation has happened perfectly well without it.

“The 20th century is a cul-de-sac,” says Claudio Prado, Brazil’s digital culture czar, in London with Gil. “And the engine of progress doesn’t have a reverse gear, so it’s hard for the first world to get out of the cul-de-sac.”

The fact that many Brazilians still live in 18th or 19th-century conditions, he says, means that the country has an opportunity to accelerate into the 21st century without entering the cul-de-sac in the first place.

Internet evangelists are fond of hyping the “network society”, but this, Prado argues, is what Brazil has been for centuries. “In a Brazilian favela, that’s the way it works,” he says. “You go and help your neighbour build their house. Or take carnival – that’s a totally collaborative process. Sixty thousand people, unrehearsed. That’s what you do when you don’t have money. You collaborate.” Brazil has ploughed millions of dollars into bringing computer access to the poorest parts of the country, but the bigger picture is not that President Lula’s government is embracing the internet. It is that Brazilian society, in a manner of speaking, was itself a kind of internet before the fact.

All this leaves the minister with little time for writing songs. “I haven’t even thought about it,” Gil says. “It’s a very different, drastic kind of time that you have to give to writing music. So for three years I haven’t even considered it – the last song I wrote was before the ministry. But now, as my routines become a little more controlled, I’m gathering momentum again. I might be reading documents for work, for instance, on a plane, and an idea comes and I write it down on the back of the page. It’s not a preoccupation, but I’m letting it come, slowly.”

Performing, he says, is more important to him, and he frequently leaves his wife Flora, with whom he shares a home in Rio de Janeiro, to perform abroad. He must surely be the only serving politician to have completed a 22-gig tour of Europe earlier this year.

The two worlds of Gil’s music and his politics merged most closely when he announced that he would license some of his own songs for free downloading. Time Warner, which owned the licences in question, quickly announced that, actually, he would not. “That showed me how difficult the situation is,” he says. “An author is not the owner anymore. He doesn’t exercise his rights. His rights are exercised by someone else, and sometimes the two don’t coincide.”

Explaining his view, he cups his palms and traces curved shapes in the air.

Time Warner won – “for the moment” – but it is characteristic of Gil that he regards the experience as a largely positive and most certainly rather amusing one. “I think it’s a good development that the minister of culture of Brazil is looking after the interests of a Brazilian artist,” he says, “who happens to be himself.”

A similar mischievousness seems to have explained the government’s response when an official accused Microsoft of behaving like a drug dealer in handing out free software to make customers dependent on its products. Microsoft Brazil sued, but the administration simply ignored the case, and the company eventually withdrew it. “But this is not demagoguery,” Gil insists, if you accuse him of just being provocative. “This is pedagogy.” Eventually, in other words, the world will learn.

Angela Carter: Beauty and the beasts

The fantastical author Angela Carter died 14 years ago, but her work has never been more popular. Christina Patterson goes in search of the reasons why her gender-bending fairytales and gothic romances remain so enchanting

Published: 18 January 2006
The Independent

Death, as any biographer knows, can be an excellent career move. Mozart died a pauper, but the nation that spawned him is currently awash with little chocolate balls in his name. The novelist Angela Carter did not die a pauper, but at times she lived like one. For much of her far-too-short life, her books were remaindered and out of print. Less than 14 years after her death, however, she seems set for a whole new lease of life. On Friday, this most theatrical of writers hits the stage of the Lyric, Hammersmith, with an adaptation of Nights at the Circus. In July, Vintage will reissue six of her works with new introductions and in June the South Bank Centre will hold a day of talks on her legacy. 2006 will, it seems, be the year to get Carter. All very nice, but why now?

“It just seemed to me that a lot of her books were cropping up on reading lists around schools and universities,” explains Vintage publisher, Rachel Cugnoni. “I think there’s a period of time that has to elapse before someone can be recognised as a classic author and I feel she’s reached that point.” Angela Carter is, in fact, one of the most widely studied contemporary writers in Britain and America. She has launched almost as many PhDs as Sylvia Plath and is a hot topic on many an internet bulletin board. “Hey guys, I really need someone’s help,” is a pretty standard entry from a desperate A-level student. “I need to write a thematic essay on animal imagery in the Bloody chamber. I am finding it… impossible.”

It’s a feeling that Emma Rice, director of Kneehigh Theatre, might understand. It took her, she tells me, “about 65 seconds” to come up with the idea of an adaptation of Carter’s fifth novel. David Farr, the Lyric’s new artistic director, had suggested “something circusy” and Nights at the Circus sprang to mind. Rice had read it as a student in the 1980s. “I was totally inspired and in awe of it,” she explains. “I love fantasy, I love theatre, I love lunacy and the book ticks all those boxes.” Then she went home and re-read it: “I thought, ‘What have I agreed to, this is a monster!’ But then I thought, ‘Take a deep breath, don’t panic and let the book speak now’.”

If anyone can do it, it’s probably Kneehigh, whose joyful, anarchic reworkings of classics like Cymbeline, The Bacchae and The Red Shoes have won it a reputation as one of Britain’s most innovative theatre companies. Their last production, Tristan & Yseult was hailed in this newspaper as “one of the best evenings in theatre you could hope to find.” “It made me,” said The Guardian’s reviewer, “want to gurgle with delight.” You can imagine Angela Carter gurgling with delight, too – not just at the prospect of the adaptation, but also at the description of her book as a “monster”. She always loved monsters. “It’s not a question of do monsters exist or can a monster have a mother?” she once told the audience of a science fiction writers’ convention, “it’s how does a monster’s mother feel?”

For her, fiction was about asking questions. At a time when most British writers were entrenched in the drab realism that she rather disparagingly described as “the low mimetic,” she was painting vivid pictures of fairy tale creatures and monsters in complex fusions of fantasy, gothic, science fiction and romance. While her peers anatomised adultery in Hampstead, she was taking her characters on wild journeys into castles and caves, across Siberian deserts and into enchanted kingdoms where nothing was what it seemed. Richly playful, these dense, glittering fictions drew on ideas ranging from Melville to the Marquis de Sade, Barthes to de Beauvoir and feminist theory to Freud, but with the emphasis firmly on the seductive power of the storyteller. It was not, however, a mix that appealed to all. John Bayley, writing in the New York Review of Books nine weeks after Carter’s death, claimed that she made “imagination into the handmaid of ideology,” castigated her work for its “political correctness” and predicted gloomily that “a process of inflation seems inevitable”.

In an age when PhDs are more likely to be on Big Brother than Beowulf, it’s an argument that might elicit sympathy. Fairy tales have undergone so many feisty feminist subversions that the old ones now seem refreshing. Literary theory – the Death of the Author, the plurality of the text, language as a system of signs etc – now seems a relic of a bygone age, an age when irony was the province of the enlightened undergraduate and not the default mode of an entire culture. Yes, it was all very radical, all very exciting to piss on those patriarchal monoliths and cackle with laughter, but isn’t it all a bit juvenile? A bit dated, in fact?

If energy, exuberance and riotous exploration of ideas are juvenile, then yes, it was. Carter’s preoccupation with the self as performer and what she called “the Ludic Game” was a theme in all her work, one which reaches a spectacular climax in Nights at the Circus. Fevvers, the winged trapeze artist whose adventures and tall stories it chronicles, is an archetypal Carter heroine: large, sexy, bawdy and with voracious appetites. She is a busty bottle blonde, a goddess, a fallen angel, a bird woman and an enchantress, one who captures the heart of a world-weary journalist on a mission to expose her as a fake. It’s a fiction about fiction, of course, full of allusions to the contract between writer and reader, the ways in which a self is constructed and the possibilities and limits of the act of narration. It’s also a glorious, colourful story, a dazzling demonstration of the fact that metafiction can be better fiction.

Sarah Waters, who has written the introduction for the new Vintage edition, agrees. “Nights at the Circus was her masterpiece,” she tells me. “She had that fantastic magpie quality, plundering high and popular culture, and this amazing capacity for huge landscapes.” Waters’ own novels, Tipping the Velvet, which was adapted by television by Andrew Davies and Fingersmith, are both vividly imagined, subversive tales set in Victorian London. It was, she confesses, while rereading Nights at the Circus that she realised, for the first time, the influence Carter had had on her. “But she did it all,” she says a touch ruefully, “so much better than me.”

For Helen Simpson, the author of four highly acclaimed collections of short stories, “the exuberance carries it through.” It was after winning a short-story competition in which she was compared by judge Brian Aldiss to “the young Angela Carter” that Simpson got hold of a remaindered copy of her early short-story collection, Fireworks. She went on to read The Bloody Chamber, the collection of stories that Salman Rushdie described as Carter’s “masterwork.”

“You couldn’t say it wasn’t brilliant writing,” says Simpson, who is writing the introduction to the new edition. She got to know Angela Carter while living nearby in Balham; when she took her first baby along to show her, the two writers became friends. “I just admire her so much,” she confesses. “I don’t write a thing like her, but she’s invigorating and inspiring. She put steel in my spine.”

Even those who found her fiction over-egged, who recoiled at the carnival parade of gothic grotesques, could hardly fail to enjoy Carter’s journalism: those piquant, passionate bursts of prose on life, literature, fashion and food. Infused with her own fierce brand of feminism and a passionate sense of social justice, these pieces are as entertaining today as when they were written. Paul Barker, one-time editor of the left-wing journal, New Society, published her for 20 years. “She wrote with great attack,” he tells me. “It came straight off the page and we put it right in.”

The key features of Carter’s journalism, and her fiction, and her life, were energy and passion. I was taught by her, briefly, on an MA course at the University of East Anglia. We were in awe of this large woman with wild grey hair and bovver boots, whose range of interests, and knowledge, we felt we couldn’t match. Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the first writers on UEA’s Creative Writing programme, remembers that she would speak “as if she had something extremely urgent to tell you. As a teacher what struck me was how open she was. She always spoke to me as though she was fascinated to find out how my imagination worked. As a writer she changed the landscape.”

It is hard to imagine the literary landscape without Angela Carter. Hers is a legacy that extends way beyond the bounds of her own work. For Margaret Atwood, she was “the opposite of parochial… She revelled in the diverse.” For Salman Rushdie, she was “the most individual, independent and idiosyncratic of writers.” For Ali Smith, whose novel, The Accidental, won this year’s Whitbread Novel award, she is in a league of her own. “I can’t think of anyone who is at that pitch of intellectual commentary, fictional experimentation and fullness of expression,” she sighs. “I’m not a patch on her. Jesus, I wish I was.”

‘Nights at the Circus’ opens at the Lyric, Hammersmith, London W6 (0870 050 0511; http://www.lyric.co.uk) on Friday

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