From the Dec 1, 2004 SF Weekly:

A Psychomagical Encounter

Although Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known for his psychedelic, violent movies (El Topo, The Holy Mountain), he has also been, at one time or another during his 75 years on Earth, the mime prot?©g?© of Marcel Marceau, a surrealist performance artist, an esoteric comic-book author, and a tarot card reader. In life, as well as film, Jodorowsky is avant-garde. In a 1979 interview with Penthouse, the filmmaker spoke openly of demonstrating sexual positions with his wife for his curious, 7-year-old son, Axel. In his arguably most accessible movie, Santa Sangre, a circus family falls apart after a boy sees his mother’s arms sliced off by his knife-thrower father and loses his mind. As an adult (played by then-20-year-old Axel Jodorowsky), the character is forced into a semi-incestuous relationship with his mother in which he acts as her “arms.”

Jodorowsky appeared late last month at the California Institute for Integral Studies, but, somehow unsurprisingly, his lecture had absolutely nothing to do with film. Instead, it focused on “Psychomagic,” described in the institute’s literature as a healing practice developed by Jodorowsky that “uses the language of the subconscious to undo our deepest knots, phobias, fixations, and obsessions.”

Inside the institute’s Namaste Hall, chairs had been cleared away to fit a sellout crowd; Jodorowsky fans eagerly huddled together on the carpet. The Parisian-based filmmaker was jaunty and distinguished in a navy blue suit, no tie, and shocking white hair and beard. He cracked jokes and smiled warmly, belying his reputation as a reclusive eccentric. His eyes, accentuated by sweeping, Mephistophelean eyebrows, seemed to suggest derangement.

From the Nov 29, 2004 Guardian:

Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to “play something sad” while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. “What about Majdanek?” he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial “not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust”.

“Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust,” he wrote.

“If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps.”

Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is “the most moral in the world” because it says it adheres to a code of “the purity of arms”. There is rarely much public questioning of the army’s routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been “caught in crossfire”, or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.

But the public’s confidence has been shaken by the revelations of the past week. The audio recording of the shooting of the 13-year-old, Iman al-Hams, prompted much soul searching, although the revulsion appears to be as much at the Israeli officer firing a stream of bullets into her lifeless body as the killing itself. Some soldiers told Israeli papers that their mothers had sought assurances that they did not do that kind of thing.

One Israeli peace group, the Arik Institute, took out large newspaper adverts to plead for “Jewish patriots” to “open your eyes and look around” at the suffering of Palestinians.

The incidents prompted the army to call in all commanders from the rank of lieutenant-colonel to emphasise the importance of maintaining the “purity of arms” code.

The army’s critics say the real problem is not the behaviour of soldiers on the ground but the climate of impunity that emanates from the top.

While the officer responsible for killing Iman al-Hams has been charged with relatively minor offences, and the soldiers who forced the violinist to play were ticked off for being “insensitive”, the only troops who were swiftly punished for violating regulations last week were some who posed naked in the snow for a photograph. They were dismissed from their unit.

Last week the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem criticised what it described as a “culture of impunity” within the army. The group says at least 1,656 Palestinian non-combatants have been killed during the intifada, including 529 children.

“To date, one soldier has been convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian,” it said.

“The combination of rules of engagement that encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers together with the climate of impunity results in a clear and very troubling message about the value the Israeli military places on Palestinian life.”

Skywatchers, Shamans & Kings : Astronomy and the Archaeology of Power

by E. C. Krupp

From Publishers Weekly
An astronomer with a Jungian streak, Krupp (Echoes of the Ancient Sky), the director of the Griffith Observatory in L.A., synthesizes the study of the heavens with archeology in an intriguing attempt to understand the cultural power of shamans and kings in ancient civilizations. In the tradition of Frazer, Eliade and Campbell, the author seeks commonality in the use of sky myths by shamans from cultures as diverse as the Mayan, Egyptian, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic, African and Inuit, as well as those of the indigenous peoples of the American plains, Northwest and Southwest. Carefully analyzing sacred petroglyphs, pictographs and statuary, he traces the evolution of culture from hunting bands to the establishment of complex civilizations. The journey includes study of the natural high places of the earth, which direct human awe heavenward toward the sky gods. Alternately, the chthonic depths of caves and grottoes are examined for insight into the traditions of nurturing mother goddesses and fertility cults. Throughout, reference to ancient awareness of the movement of the planets and constellations, especially in regard to the solstices and equinoxes, is highlighted. With an anecdotal style and with reference to myriad illustrations, Krupp enngagingly explores the historic derivation of political control descending from the skies, to rulers. The harmonics of order implicit in the structure of the cosmos, he forcefully contends, are endangered by contemporary reactionary, earthbound cultures, engendering conflicts that are expressed in rising social intolerance and religious fundamentalism.

COURTESY DAVE REEVES!

From the Nov 7, 2004 New York Times:

Where the Theater Is a Kibbutz, and the Kibbutz Is a Theater<br
By CHRIS FUJIWARA

ASHFIELD, Mass.

PLENTY of theater companies may profess as much, but the Double Edge Theater company truly believes that art is life. On the Farm, the group’s 105-acre estate in Ashfield, Mass., the company has built the dramatic equivalent of a kibbutz: an intimate, utopian and self-sustaining community, where its seven members live and work together, integrating their onstage and offstage lives.

The group, which is just finishing its New York debut at La MaMa E.T.C. with “The UnPossessed” – a play (very) loosely based on “Don Quixote” – is the creation of Stacy Klein, who founded the company in 1982 and then moved it to Ashfield, a half-hour north of Amherst, in 1994. Living here, she said, allows the group to “rehearse based on our creativity and not on our schedule.”

By joining the company, the members free themselves from prosaic distractions — say, holding down a paying job. “We are self-sufficient in that we can house all of our people, so we don’t need to have these huge jobs outside of the theater in order to pay for an apartment for each of us,” Ms. Klein said. “We can get as many vegetables as we can get off the farm.”

Ms. Klein trained with a student of the renowned Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most important figures in avant-garde theater. “The Grotowski connection is like a tribe of theater,” Ms. Klein explained, that views the actor as an creative artist in his own right, and “not as a puppet of the director or the designer.”

Erasing the line between work and home life can sometimes be trying, even for the initiated. “Who we are upstairs,” in the performance space, said Richard Newman, who has been living with Double Edge for about a year, “informs who we are in our daily life, but they’re not necessarily the same things. Some people I work with really well in the space, but in my daily life — cooking or doing farm things — I can’t really deal with them. It’s very difficult sometimes. It’s not bad, necessarily; it’s more interesting.”

Hayley Brown, who has also been at the Farm for about a year, agreed: “It’s certainly difficult, but I think it makes the work more powerful. It seems that the more time we spend here, the more your life and your work are the same thing, and everything about your life can be put into your work, and everything about your work can apply to your life.”

The members have been rehearsing “The UnPossessed” in the large barn that serves as a living and performance space. The show’s circuslike imagery and spectacle are evidence of the group’s fascination with street theater in South America.

After rehearsal comes daily training. The nine actors onstage (including the four interns who are working with Double Edge this fall) face one another in a circle and trade movements. Afterward, they work alone or in pairs or threes, balancing, rolling, hopping, running.

“The goals of the group training,” explained Carlos Uriona, Ms. Klein’s collaborator and the actor who plays Don Quixote, “are to tap energy, to develop endurance and strength, and to find power,” and, he added, to rid themselves of the “daily masks” that people wear.

Mr. Uriona described the group’s progress so far: “Have you ever spun yourself around to make yourself dizzy? If you try to control yourself, you get into trouble. The more you let yourself go, the better it is. That’s where we are now.”

Ms. Klein created “The UnPossessed” after 9/11. “I was feeling like I was a fool to try to keep this enterprise going, and the whole idea of art going, when people would rather be at war and fighting,” she said. “And so immediately we started thinking about ‘Quixote.’ I remember saying to Carlos one day, ‘I feel like Quixote.’ I’m just an insane idealist who is fighting windmills.”

From the Nov 21 Los Angeles Times:

….With his laptop, [Army recruiter] Hill shows recruits the Army’s sexy new recruiting DVD: high-adrenaline rock music in sync with soldiers rappelling down mountains and parachuting out of planes. Most recruits are more interested in Hill’s screensaver, a photo of him storming into Baghdad with the first U.S. troops. Nearly every recruit asks, and sometimes Hill tells them his stories, describes what it was like to sleep on the floor of Saddam Hussein’s palace.

…He doesn’t tell them what it was like to have his tank hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and then to have the tank tumble into the Euphrates River. He doesn’t tell them about the shrapnel in both his legs, or the 38 friends he lost in battle ‚Äî including one who committed suicide, a man whose memory makes Hill’s eyes well with tears. He doesn’t tell them about the 30 rolls of film he took in Iraq, which he still can’t bring himself to develop. He doesn’t tell recruits about a day not long after he got home, when he was walking in the park with his 12-year-old son. A car backfired, and Hill dove into a ditch, where he lay cowering, suffering from tunnel vision and paralysis until his son phoned Hill’s wife and told her there was something wrong with Daddy.

“I’m glad he didn’t touch me,” Hill says. “Because I might’ve hurt him if he had.”

Hill keeps those things to himself, not because he’s afraid of scaring off recruits, but because he doesn’t yet feel comfortable sharing them with strangers.

There is something contradictory about striving to put fresh-faced men and women into the inferno of Iraq, and Hill acknowledges it, but only barely, because he lives inside the contradiction: He longs to return to Iraq. Most of the soldiers with whom he came home are soon being redeployed, and Hill wishes he were going with them. But the Army, he says, needs him here.

….

COURTESY S. O’MALLEY!

From Plan B Magazine:

ON BALANCE
Words : Mark Pilkington
Photos: Mark Pilkington

“Death, he is my friend, he promised me a quick end.”
‘Blood from the Air’, from Horse Rotorvator, Coil (1986)

Geff Rushton, aka John Balance of Coil, died on the afternoon of Saturday 13 November, in a fall from the first floor landing of his home. He was 42.

Founded by a young Balance in 1983, and bolstered by his musical and, until recently, life-partner Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, for 21 years, Coil’s music changed, deranged, detoured and matured with its creators. Each new album – and sometimes these were several years apart – brought new sounds and ideas to the fore: Coil’s sonic vision was persistently transgressive and transcendent, both aesthetically and technologically. Whether they were peering down into the sewers or upwards to the stars, Coil were always several steps ahead, or at least one step to the side, of their contemporaries, with much of their music sounding like transmissions from another dimension. In fact, some of it they claimed was from another dimension. Certainly they were bold explorers of psychedelic space, much of their sound being informed by the glittering jewels brought back from these inner-landscape excursions. Their capacity to merge heavy-duty avant-garde weirdness with a canny pop sensibility and an ear for a tune has made Coil’s sonic legacy an enduring one. What happens next for Coil is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to believe that Balance’s untimely death will do anything other than heighten their already semi-legendary status.

I first discovered Coil as a horror-film obsessed 14-year-old. They had brought out an unused soundtrack to Clive Barker’s film Hellraiser. I was hoping for something like the terror-funk of Goblin, who were my favourite band at the time, but what I got was something very different indeed, a haunting, captivating soundscape of tones, rumbles and music box tinkling. It was several years before I realised that I had been playing it at the wrong speed all that time, but it never seemed to matter. I would eventually pick up all their records and, while my tastes have changed (though not that much) over the past 16 years, their back catalogue still provides refreshing and rewarding listening. Their more recent output, especially a collection of improvisations recorded on the solstices and equinoxes of 2001–2002, remains sonically inspiring, forward-looking and defiantly uncategorisable.

Late in 2000 I interviewed Balance for Fortean Times magazine, at the home where he died, while Peter snoozed upstairs. It was a very human discussion about drugs, magick, birds and dreams.

Following this, Balance (I always called him this, though I knew he was Geff) and I kept in touch, sometimes regularly, mostly not.

In 2002 Coil performed at Conway Hall alongside Drew Mulholland’s Mount Vernon Astral Temple and others at the Megalithomania event I co-curated with Neil Mortimer of the now defunct Third Stone Magazine. Feeling like Kermit the frog, I introduced them and wound the curtains open with a huge handle offstage. Their performance was uniquely odd and a one off, with a clearly drunk and unhappy-to-be-there Balance yelling largely incoherent abuse over a pulsing, shifting synthesised backdrop provided by Sleazy, Thighpaulsandra and Simon Norris. Meanwhile their Italian dancer friends Massimo and Pierce freaked the audience out inside barely-moving black-hooded entity costumes on the sides of the stage. At one point Balance hurled a large stuffed rabbit into the audience, hitting the Lovecraftian magician and anthropologist Justin Woodman, and towards the end looked like he was about to throw one of the London Musicians’ Collective’s monitors (hired by us at some expense) overboard. I projected a telepathic plea to him to put it down, which he did, afterwards insisting that it was only because he’d wanted to, even though he’d got the message.

We can all only know aspects of each other. I knew Balance as a mercurial, warm, funny, sharp and highly curious individual. I only caught glimpses of his demons, most of them seemingly borne of the alcohol that would eventually kill him, but got the impression from talking to others that he’d upset many people over the years.

Our last real conversation was in February of this year at the Strange Attractor Journal launch at London’s Horse Hospital. We discussed beards, garlic, magick, the whereabouts of Atlantis and psychedelic jazz. At one point we were both startled as a full beer bottle spontaneously exploded as it stood on the floor at our feet. Our final encounter was a fleeting one, as I snapped away from the photo trench beneath the stage at Hackney’s Ocean venue in August, at what would be Balance’s last London performance with Coil. Curiously a friend had told me beforehand that this was to be the band’s final gig – I don’t know where he’d got that information from. Balance did a double take as I sent a friendly wink his way from under his feet. It was a good gig, though perhaps not as awe-inspiring as I know they were capable of, presenting some of the group’s more melodic new electronic offerings, including the cosmi-comic ‘Sex With Sun Ra’ that’s sure to become a posthumous favourite.

At gig’s end John waved and said “Thanks Mark!” through the PA.

Thanks John/Geff, wherever you are now.

“Already regarded as an architectural icon comparable to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or Farnsworth House, Werner Sobek’s glass house R128 (R??merstrasse 128) in Stuttgart is residential technology taken to the highest possible level of sophistication. Sobek’s open-plan cube wrapped in a glass shield is an ecological show-house of precise minimalism. There are no walls and no closed rooms. The house provides its own energy. Recognizing Sobek’s voice, the front door opens if called. R 128 is a prototype. R 129 is already being planned.”

“Sobek’s website.

From the November 19, 2004 New York Times:

Forced to Work Off the Clock, Some Fight Back
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Soon after Trudy LeBlue began working at the new SmartStyle hair salon outside New Orleans, her salon manager began worrying that business was too slow and profits were too weak.

To keep costs down, Ms. LeBlue said, the manager often ordered her and the two other stylists to engage in a practice, long hidden, that appears to have spread to many companies: working off the clock.

Many weeks, Ms. LeBlue spent 40 hours in the salon, but was ordered to clock out for 20 of them while waiting for customers to show up, she said. With the salon’s computer tracking her official hours, she was told to clean up and stock merchandise during the unpaid stretches.

“If you weren’t doing hair or a perm, they’d tell you to get off the clock, but you still had to stay in the salon,” she said.