Now, more than two decades later, she wonders what her punk past was
all about.
   “I don’t agree with anything I said in those days,” she
said. “Nothing. Completely opposite. I don’t believe any of it. I think
it’s madness. Malcolm wrote these texts about Dickensian urchins creating
havoc, you know, very poetic, but nonsense. One of our slogans was, `Under
the paving stones lies the beach.’ And at one point, I thought to myself,
`I’ve no interest in living on the beach.'”
     “At the time I felt very rebellious,” she went
on, “but I now realize there’s no point in it. The urban guerrilla
was essentially what we were after, but I don’t believe there is a crusade
to be waged by wearing clothes. You just become the token rebel who persuades
everyone they are living in a free society. Society
tolerates its rebels because it absorbs them into its consumer society.

GM: That idea was me making sense of when I’d taken mushrooms and
read “Doom Patrol” — I was aware that I was holding a continuum, that’s
when I started to
develop ideas of comics as magic, comics as sigils, because I got
to page 22 then I turned back to page 8; I thought, “I’m in this story
which I don’t understand, I’ve read this bit, I can go back to the point
where the characters don’t know what’s about to happen to them and I
can experience it out of sequence and I saw that this comic was this entire
little universe/ continuum in
it’s own right and also the wider implications; that the DC Universe
and the Marvel Universe were also continuums in their own way created
by people when I was a kid or before I was born. Maintained by people,
who like these Demonic Corporations, maintained and kept these characters
which were sustained by people who would come in and look after them; people
who would come in and look after Scott Summers – it was that notion of
the universe in your hands and the possibilities in that.

BY: Do you think that informed your experience of Space-Time?

GM: Yeah – because it was a metaphor for that. I mean “Zoids”-

BY: I’ve not read it but I know of it.

GM: It winds up that the prime movers of the story are five-dimensional
being aliens who manipulate them all because the Zoids are toys-

BY: That’s hilarious – in “Zoids”!

GM: I thought, ‘What if I treat them literally as toys?’ When I was a kid I’d try and draw the fourth dimension. To me it’s something that’s always been there – it’s a refinement of ideas.
As you grow older you bring backup and other people’s ideas to scaffold
things you’ve thought yourself and you begin to assemble some kind of structure
from it and make some kind of sense of it.

BY: It’s always very comforting when you find someone in the pubic
realm who’s producing work that matches what you’re thinking and articulates
it when I couldn’t articulate it myself. I think comics lends itself to-

GM: Comics is like poetry. It’s a miracle that it has the circulation
that it does

BY: The chord it strikes in people who are attracted to it is so
strong it can be impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t experience
that.

GM: It’s the virtual world aspect of them. You’re actually inside
it. When you’re really enjoying a comic you’re inside the space like
nothing else. The way you have control over the time it takes to read
it. You’ve got control over this continuum. I just wanted to do that
with “Animal Man.” It was an experiment with those characters – I wasn’t
happy with that continuum. I wanted to do more of that with DC – I might
still do it with the HyperCrisis idea to explore that emotion of the comic
talking to you, developing it’s own language, to control how you read the
comic and how you would have certain kind of experiences while you read
the comic. So those are ideas ready to be played with: the actual thing
in your hand and how the characters react with it. The Challengers
of the Unknown standing on the boundaries of the comic saying ‘There’s
something massive…a massive lifeform out there. The entire continuum
is trembling.’

Two-Day Performance Workshop

Ms. Judith Malina with other Living Theatre members
will lead a free two-day workshop for activists, actors
and all persons opposed to state killing, to learn and perform
the anti-death penalty protest play “Not in My Name.”

The next workshop will be held:

May 15 & 16, 2004
11am to 6pm
at
Actors Movement Studio
302 West 37th Street, 6th Floor

New York City

To recognize the play’s tenth anniversary, the weekend will culminate
with a performance in Times Square on Sunday, May 16th at 6pm.

We encourage persons of all backgrounds and experience levels
to participate.

To find out more and to pre-register, please call 212 969-8905

This is the modern-day story of a native peoples’ remarkable victory
over Western Colonial power. A Pacific island rose up in arms against
giant mining corporation Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ) – and won despite a military
occupation and blockade. When RTZ decided to step up production at the Panguna
Mine on the island of Bougainville, they got more than they bargained for.
The island’s people had enough of seeing their environment ruined and being
treated as pawns by RTZ.
    RTZ refused to compensate them, so the people decided
it was time to put an end to outside interference in the island’s affairs.
To do this they forcibly closed down the mine.
     The Papua New Guinea Army (PNGDF) were mobilised
in an attempt to put down the rebellion. The newly formed Bougainville
Revolutionary Army (BRA) began the fight with bows & arrows, and sticks
& stones. Against a heavily armed adversary they still managed to retain
control of most of their island. Realising they were beaten on the ground,
the PNGDF imposed a gunboat blockade around Bougainville, in an attempt
to strangle the BRA into submission. But the blockade seemed to of had
little or no effect.

     With no shipments getting in or out of the
island, how did new electricity networks spring up in BRA held territory?
How were BRA troops able to drive around the island without any source
of petrol or diesel?
     What was happening within the blockade was an
environmental and spiritual revolution. The ruins of the old Panguna
mine where being recycled to supply the raw materials for the world’s first eco-revolution.
    A David and Goliath story of the 21st century, The
Coconut Revolution will appeal to people of all backgrounds

Winner:
FICA Festival of Environmental Film, Brazil
BEMA Richard Keefe Memorial Award – WWF
Golden Kite, Best Documentary, Mar del Plata, Argentina
Silver Kite, Best Film for Young People, Argentina

Runner up:
BEMA (British Environmental Media Awards) Best Documentary
Amnesty International Awards, Best Documentary
One World Media Awards 2001, TV Documentary

Director: Dom Rotheroe

Sound: Carlos Soto
Funding: Soros Documentary Fund
Producer: Mike Chaimberlain

When the Edge Moved to the Middle
By THURSTON MOORE

Published: April 8, 2004
New York Times

The boy looked just like Kurt Cobain. He was no more than 19. Same
yellow hanging hair, fallow blue eyes, the sad square jaw, innocent
and adult.

    We were in a Brooklyn basement full of artists and
sound-poets gathered to watch musicians throw down extreme noise improvisation.
One performer played records with two customized tone arms on his turntable;
the discs broke and scratched, creating shards of hyperfractured beat
play. He was followed by a quartet of young women scraping metal files
across amplified coils mixed through junk electronics. I was to perform
a spontaneous guitar/amp feedback piece with a stand-up bass player on
loan from his teaching post at Berklee College of Music and a free jazz
percussionist who had traversed through New York’s downtown underground
in the 60’s. Not your typical night of alternative rock.
   And I had a feeling this kid was looking for alternative
rock. It was the year 2000. Kurt had died six years earlier, and through
whatever fleeting friendship I had with him, this ethereal look-alike
saw me as some connection.
   Before being labeled alternative rock, Sonic Youth,
the band I started in 1980 (and continue in still!), was called “post-punk.”
By the early 90’s, we existed as a sort of big brother (and big sister)
group to Kurt’s generation of underground America. When Nirvana became
popular, we were all called alternative rock — a less threatening term
than anything with punk in the title (though with Green Day and Blink 182
in the late 90’s, punk ultimately became accessible and extremely profitable
— at least for the new MTV punks). The original alternative rock bands
— Nirvana and Sonic Youth included — never had any allegiance to alternative
rock. We all had come too far and through too much for any professional
advice toward stylistic adjustment.

    Kurt was not enamored with new traditionalism. He
was more attached to the avant-garde rock of his hometown pals, the Melvins,
who continue to stretch the parameters of what rock music can be. The traditional
aspects of Nirvana’s music — aspects that lent it accessibility — were
expressed through Kurt as if they were experimental gestures. (The Beatles,
also grand pop experimentalists, were loudly whispered by Nirvana as a
primary influence, something unusual for punk devotees.) These elements
were an important part of Nirvana’s appeal. But what is transcendent about
Kurt’s art — what today, 10 years after his death, gives him rock immortality
— was his voice and performance ability, both of which exuded otherworldly
soulful beauty.
    The initial popularity of alternative rock was in
conflict with punk culture, which has a history of denouncing commercial
success. Nirvana’s second album, “Nevermind,” along with the success of
the Lollapalooza tours, changed the game. Both announced the discovery
of an unaccounted-for demographic, cynical and amused by the pop rebellion
displayed by new wave (Duran Duran) and hair-metal (Guns N’ Roses). This
newly discovered audience, one that surged well beyond the punk elite to
the greater population of alienated and dislocated youth, was all at once
represented by Kurt.

    Kurt was aware of his sudden high profile and how
it could be perceived as uncool in the punk scene. He made snotty comments
about the fresh-minted alternative rock acts being touted by MTV. We
all did. At the request of The New York Times, Nirvana’s first record
label, Seattle’s Sub Pop, created a mock lexicon of “grunge” culture.
Remarkably, the news media ran with it — to our disbelief and delight.

     In the face of success, Kurt seemed to feel
the need to maintain this stump position of punk rock credibility. Save
the mainstream acceptance of the relatively straight-ahead pop of R.E.M.
— which Kurt loved as much as hard-core thrash — there really was no model
for such success from our community. He told Flipside, the iconic Los Angeles
punk rock fanzine, that he hoped the next Nirvana album would vanquish
their affiliation with the “lamestream.” He recounted being taken aback
by an audience member who grabbed him and advised him to, “Just go for
it, man.” I remember smiling at this, as it was how most of us felt. We
didn’t perceive Nirvana’s status as lame. It was cool.
    After all, the kids chose “Nevermind.” Geffen Records,
the band’s label at the time, had no real plans for it, hoping for modest
sales. Rolling Stone gave it a lukewarm review. Its subsequent off-the-map
success was wonderful, fantastic and completely genuine. What was disingenuous
and annoyingly misrepresentative was the reaction of the corporate music
industry. The alternative rock phenomenon was a youth culture hit and
it made stars out of select artists but, for the most part, it was a
bunch of corn to the creative scene where Kurt came from.

    Nrvana made a point of touring with challenging groups
like the Boredoms, the Butthole Surfers and the Meat Puppets and presenting
them to a huge audience — one that was largely unaware of those bands’
influence. But only the Meat Puppets would click a little bit. Without
MTV or radio support, no one was likely to reach Nirvana’s peak.
     When Kurt died, a lot of the capitalized froth
of alternative rock fizzled. Mainstream rock lost its kingpin group,
an unlikely one imbued with avant-garde genius, and contemporary rock
became harder and meaner, more aggressive and dumbed down and sexist. Rage
and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he
was profoundly gentle and intelligent. He was sincere in his distaste
for bullyboy music — always pronouncing his love for queer culture, feminism
and the punk rock do-it-yourself ideal. Most people who adapt punk as a
lifestyle represent these ideals, but with one of the finest rock voices
ever heard, Kurt got to represent them to an attentive world. Whatever contact
he made was really his most valued success.
     You wouldn’t know it now by looking at MTV,
with its scorn-metal buffoons and Disney-damaged pop idols, but the underground
scene Kurt came from is more creative and exciting than it’s ever been.
From radical pop to sensorial noise-action to the subterranean forays
in drone-folk-psyche-improv, all the music Kurt adored is very much alive
and being played by amazing artists he didn’t live to see, artists who
recognize Kurt as a significant and honorable muse.

     The kid who looked like him sat next to me
in the basement where we were playing and I knew he was going to ask
me about Kurt. This happens a lot. What was Kurt like? Was he a good guy?
Simple things. He asked me if I thought Kurt would’ve liked this total outsider
music we were hearing. I laughed, realizing the kid was slightly bewildered
by it all, and I answered emphatically, “Yeah, Kurt would have loved this.”

Transcript of a talk given by Brian Eno as part of the Long Now
Foundation’s series of Seminars About Long Term Thinking.

Fort Mason, San Francisco
14th November, 2003

By the mid 1970s I’d started to imagine a different kind of music
that I wanted to hear. This music really grew out of three separate threads
of interest. One of them is African music – I was listening to a lot
– particularly Fela Kuti the Nigerian bandleader. The second was the Velvet
Underground and the scene that constituted. The third was composers like
Steve Reich and Terry Riley. What I think interested me about all those
sorts of music was that they flattened out the shape of the music, the
hierarchical structure of the music was flatter. So the pop music I had
been listening to mostly had a voice sitting at the top then some rhythm
instruments, and then some drums. And the focus of the music, the shape
of the music was very pyramidal. What I found I was preferring to listen
to was music where that pyramid was squashed down, where no particular
instrument was featured as the lead instrument and instead you had a network
of interactions between lots of different sounds. In my own work this manifested
in an emphasis on making what would have been called the background more
interesting, and what would have been called the foreground, less and less
central, thus sinking foreground elements into the background.

    The other thing that I was interested in was in
losing the obvious boundaries of music, I wanted to make something that
didn’t sound like it had edges, sonic edges, or that it had a beginning
and an end. I wanted to make something that belonged to a big space and
you as the listener could hear some of that but not necessarily all of it,
and I wanted to make something that felt like it had always been going on
and would always be going on and you just happened to catch a part of it.
I guess the first piece I made which had a feeling of being a kind of eternal
present tense was a record called Discreet Music in 1975, which was a very
long record for a vinyl album. It was the longest I could possibly get on
to one side of a vinyl album – thirty minutes and thirty one seconds – and
I wanted to give the implication that this was not a piece of music in the
ordinary sense of something that had been composed with a beginning, a
middle and an end, but instead was a continuous endless place in time.
So I was developing this idea of place of music being not so much a sonic
narrative but more a sonic landscape – again with the feeling that this
was a landscape that was always in the present tense, a landscape that
was an extended present tense.
    So sometime in the late 70s a couple of things
happened to me that made a big difference to the way I thought about
music. One of them was in Germany, I was sitting in an airport, and listening
to the music that they play in airports the message of which is ‘don’t
worry you’re not going to die’ – music that is deliberately very lightweight,
with no threat, where everything’s got a nice smile and usually the most
disconcerting thing about it is that the tape player doesn’t work properly
and you think ‘if they can’t get that to work’…..

    But anyway I was listening to this music and I
thought this was exactly the wrong kind of music to play in an airport,
because it makes you really nervous, it makes you think ‘all they’re
saying to you is ‘Death? Don’t mention it! Don’t even think about it’.
So I started thinking ‘What would make you not think about death so much?’
and I started to think that what you really needed in airports was the
kind of music that would make you care less about your own life, that would
make you not be so concerned about the prospect of dying.
    So I wanted to make a kind of music that would
actually reduce your focus on this particular moment in time that you
happened to be in and make you settle into time a little bit better;
and I came up with the record Music for Airports – a record that was very
deliberately aimed at changing one’s sense of time. This was the point
where I realised that a lot of what I was thinking about musically was
to do with the experience of time.

    Shortly after making that record, I moved to New
York, I was living on 8th St and 5th Avenue. I was invited to a party
one evening, by a friend of mine, a singer, and she gave me the address.
I didn’t know New York very well, so I hailed a cab, and the cab driver
started driving south and the street lights got darker and darker and
the pot holes got bigger and bigger. The steam was coming out of the streets
and finally we ended up in a very dark gloomy medieval street at what
appeared to be the address on the card, and I thought it’s very strange
that she should live down here: this must be a joke of some kind. I rang
the bell and was buzzed in and got in the elevator and went up the stairs
to see a glitteringly expensive loft. This was in itself a surprise –
that someone had spent so much money in such a bad neighbourhood, so
I asked the hostess during the evening whether she liked living there,
and she said “oh yeah this is the best place I’ve ever lived” and I realised
that what she meant was within these four walls.
    So this was very New York to describe the ‘here’